As Roxanna was bandaging my hand with my pocket handkerchief, I looked carefully at the living stone that was exposed. It was porous, bubbly, like brown plastic foam. Foamed glass? Was the whole place an artifact? But how could that jibe with the low level of technology that I saw everywhere around me?
We passed into a market section that had bigger skylights and was better lit than elsewhere. There was a great deal of buying and selling going on, but the goods on sale were all low tech. Farther on we walked through a food market that had a lot in common with things I’d seen in peasant markets in South America. Live animals, dead fish, and crude wooden scales. They were using corn husks for packaging. Utopia, this wasn’t.
It was a two-hour walk getting to Adam’s place in Tintzin. I asked Roxanna about why we were put so far apart, and she said that there were only two suitable positions available. This made no sense at all to me, but we suddenly had to walk in single file to get past a particularly busy stall, and the topic of conversation was forgotten for the time being.
ELEVEN
Adam was living in a mansion that was much like the one I was using, except that it might have been bigger than mine. At least, he had seven servants to my six. He was propped up in bed, with his left leg and right arm in heavy plaster casts. Two attractive, well-dressed ladies attended him. They looked like they might be sisters, or possibly a mother and daughter.
Introductions were made. The ladies were Maria and Agnes Pelitier. I was about to ask about their relationship when Adam started talking to me in English.
“So you finally got your Errol Flynn outfit together. Only, it needs a sword, boss.”
It was pleasant to hear someone speaking and to understand them without having to go through the mental struggle of translating it. Adam’s Hamtramck accent was still there, but he had toned it way down. I had the feeling that he was no longer interested in playing the fool or the clown.
“I tried to get a rapier, but nobody here ever heard of one.”
“At least you got the beard. ‘Course here, everybody’s got one. The guys, anyway. No razors.”
“I noticed. Look, are they treating you okay?”
He put his good arm around the older of the two women, who smiled at the attention she received.
“Does it look like durance vile, boss?” Then he switched to Westronese and said, “Why don’t you girls go someplace and talk nice to this other lady. Me and my friend got a lot of catching up to do.”
His Westronese was far better than mine, but I swear that he was somehow able to speak it with that damned Hamtramck accent. The ladies left, leaving the maid behind in case we should want anything.
I sat down on a spindly, straight-backed chair and said, “Adam, just what in the hell happened?”
“What happened was that you are damn lucky to be alive. The real world is not like in the detective stories, you know. It takes a serious skull concussion to put a man out cold, and you was knocked out twice in one day. That’s enough to kill most guys.
“You remember coming to help me bail? Well, you started down just after the ladder got carried away by all that junk that was floating around belowdecks. The water was sloshing back and forth a lot, and you managed to catch it right in the middle of a trough. You hit the lower deck when there was only about two feet of water down there to break your fall. You was out cold, but you was still breathing. I managed to get you propped up so your head stayed out of the water, but then I had to get back to the pumps, you know?
“Before I got there, we hit something big. The bow of the boat stayed up high, so I figured we was stuck on that island that couldn’t be there. I got us both out the front hatch, since the back ones was both under water.
“There we was, propped way high up on some kind of a rocky beach. A lot of people was running towards us, and they looked friendly. I put you down and broke out that rope ladder to help them get aboard. About then, another big wave hit the boat in the rump, and I went straight off the end of the nose, like two stories down to the rocks and stuff down below. That’s when I got busted up.
“Well, they took me and you into a cave, somebody’s house by the look of it, and this old girl has six of them hold me down while they set my leg without any anesthetics! It hurt like hell, and to make it worse, they couldn’t understand that in the boat, not a hundred feet away, there was a medical kit with morphine, Novocain, and all kinds of wonderful things in it! And when they got finished with my leg, they started it all up again, this time on my arm!
“When they was finally done, they left me alone for a bit, and I got a look out a window. They must of had three hundred people lined up, getting everything out of the boat and into some kind of warehouse. I felt better about that, since even if they was maybe robbing us, well, if it went to the bottom, it’d be gone forever, but as long as it was safe, we might get it back, some of it anyhow. I shouldn’t have worried, though, since now that I can talk to them real good, they tell me that all of our stuff is safe and waiting for us. What’s more, if we want to sell, they’re real eager to buy.”
I said, “I’m surprised that you were worrying about our property when our lives had just been saved.”
“Hey, being broke in a strange country where you don’t even speak the language is something to be scared about! You should of heard the stories my grandfather used to tell about how he got to America. Anyway, I had everything I owned on that boat. My coin collection, f’rinstance.”
“I never knew that you collected coins.”
“I never much told anybody about it, but, see, my grandfather went broke a second time during the Depression when his bank folded. Since then, us Kulczyinskis keep our savings in gold. That coin collection is mostly uncirculated Krugerrands. About forty-six pounds of them. That and I got a few hundred pounds of old-style silver quarters.”
“Shit on a shingle! I was paying you too much!”
“Nah, I could of got paid the same money anywhere. But, see, some of that gold was dad’s, and a lot of it I got back when gold was thirty-five bucks an ounce. Shoulda sold it all when it hit eight hundred, but that’s life, and anyway, I woulda had to pay taxes on it.”
“I’m glad your fortune is safe, Adam. But what happened after they patched you up?”
“Well, your back was still bleeding a bit here and there, and the older women was fixing you up, still without anesthetics, but at least you was still out cold.
“Then these three guys in long capes come up riding on horses, waving their arms and yelling at each other. Everybody that wasn’t working bows real low to them, but the three guys ignore the crowd and keep on arguing among themselves. This goes on for the longest time, and everybody sort of got tired, or maybe embarrassed about bowing to somebody who didn’t seem to notice them, so one by one they stood back up and tried to look busy.
“Eventually, the biggest one seemed to win whatever it was they were yelling about. With the other two horsemen finally sitting quiet, he starts talking to the crowd on the beach. This guy can talk so loud they could all hear him above the noise of the storm. He points around and starts giving orders, and everybody starts moving a lot faster. I was picked up by eight hefty guys and taken off in one direction, and two of them took you in another. After that, you probably know as much as me. I been treated real good by the two fine ladies that live here, and everybody lives rich and dresses rich while in fact they’re all absolutely dirt poor!”
“How do you figure that?” I asked. “I mean, their technology is pretty much nonexistent, but everybody lives well enough. People back home would drool over these mansions they’ve got. From what Roxanna tells me, even the poorest people here have at least twenty or thirty thousand square feet to live in.”
“That’s because they’ve been digging these holes for at least two thousand years, boss. What’s more, they got to keep on digging them, since the rock here is all volcanic, good fertilizer. Rock, animal dung, and human shit are about the only fertilizers they got. Plus, of course, a certain amount of soil is always being washed away, and it has to be replaced.”