“You’re probably right, but then, different cultures do things different. Anyway, we don’t really need any of the electronics. It’s handy stuff, but we could sail out of here without it. And in a pinch, we could even do without the maps. I mean, if we just sail east, we’ll come to the American coast, eventually.”
“You’re so eager to leave? I had the feeling that you were thinking about getting domestic on this weird little island,” I said.
“You know, maybe I am. The girls here are so different from the ones back in America. I don’t know quite how to put it, but it’s like they’re real women. The girls back home spend all their time playing games with your head, or trying to, anyway, since most of them don’t have the brains to know that any man with a positive IQ can see right through it. They want to be respected, they say, and they want you to treat them like an equal. But if you try to do just that, to make like they’re one of the guys, they get all pissed off ’cause they say you’re talking vulgar in front of them. They say they want to be respected for their minds, but not one in a hundred has ever done anything to make her mind worth respecting. I mean, if they’ve read anything since they left school, it wasn’t any more challenging than a teenage romance. They say they want to talk with you, but what they really mean is that they want to talk at you. Then they don’t have anything better to talk about than what the other mindless broads had to say at work. Give them a chance, and they will recite to you, verbatim, every single word that every silly twit muttered from her first coffee break to her rush for the door at quitting time. And they’ll get mad if you don’t act interested in every stupid word of it!”
“Most women are not that bad, Adam. There are a lot of sensible, intelligent women in the States.”
“Yeah, maybe a few. But by the time they get their heads squared away, odds are that their bodies have gone to shit. It’s all the fault of the lousy training they get at home and in school. They all grow up believing every word of what those dykes who run the National Organization of Women tell them.”
“Well, I know that most of their leaders have admitted to being lesbians, but that doesn’t make all of them sick that way,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, I figure that if every libber in the United States was laid end to end, they’d all be a lot happier. Anyway, they’ve got the women of our country believing that they have to be both men and women. Trying a stunt like that, they just naturally do a piss-poor job of it and end up being neither.”
“I’ve sometimes felt a little that way. Personally, I think that a lot of the fault rests with the news media.”
“By media, you mean television, since most of them never read a newspaper beyond the comics and their horoscope. And yeah, TV news has a lot to answer for, when it comes to wrecking the whole damn country. One person gets a bad headache tablet and they hype it up until they have every twit in the country afraid to take an aspirin. Some kid eats a bad hamburger in Oregon, and they get a hundred million housewives to pass up the ground beef in the supermarkets. Do they ever think about what they’re doing to the whole drug business? Or the thousands of people who depend on it for their livelihood? About how many cattlemen went belly-up because they couldn’t get half of what they expected for their stock? But even so, it isn’t all the media’s fault. They’re just out there trying to sell advertising time. It’s the silly twits who believe every word of it who cause the real damage. These modern women lack perspective, they lack the discrimination to see the difference between a random incident and a real threat. Hell, they’ve even tried to make `discrimination’ a dirty word!”
“Come on, Adam. There are as many male twits as there are female ones.”
“I don’t believe that. For one thing, men have bigger brains than women, about twenty-five percent bigger. Women average nineteen billion brain cells up against our twenty-four billion. The male American is far more likely to take a rational view of things than the female. Women feel perfectly free to emote about things rather than considering them intellectually, whereas a man would be properly embarrassed if he let most of his emotions hang out in public. And this difference is not entirely caused by culture and environment. I tell you it’s right in the wiring, and in the genes that programed that wiring. An intelligent man and an intelligent woman can take exactly the same input data, process it, and come to the same conclusion, yet I swear to God that their brains each took a separate path getting there.”
“On that one, you’re right, Adam. PET scans of brain energy consumption during problem solving show different patterns in men than in women. But that doesn’t mean that one way is necessarily better than the other.”
“I always knew it. And I’m not saying that the women of the world are playing with half a deck. What I’m saying is that us men are using a poker deck and all the girls back there are using tarot cards.”
I shook my head. “I take it that you find the fine ladies here to be an improvement over the ones you left behind.”
“Yeah, they are, somehow. It’s like they know they’re women, and they know that’s nothing to be ashamed of. They don’t try to be what they’re not, and they don’t try to make you into something that you’re not, either. They know that men are different from women, and that there’s nothing wrong with that difference. That men and women can and should complement each other, in the mathematical sense of the term. Like nuts and bolts that work together, with neither being the most important, and with each being pretty much useless without the other.”
“So which one are you going to marry, and can I be your best man?”
“Hey, there’s no hurry, boss. Marriage here is more of a contract for having children. Until we’re ready for that, there’s no point to it. Anyway, maybe we ought to make it a double wedding. That was a real keeper you brought by here a few days ago.”
“You too, huh? I’ve got a gardener who’s trying to get me to marry his boss.”
“Well, like I said, there’s no big hurry. Maybe I’ll really settle down here, but before I do there are a few hundred questions I got about this place. And if I don’t like some of the answers that they give me, well, I’d feel a lot better if The Brick Royal was ready to sail at a minute’s notice.”
I said that I had questions of my own, and we spent an hour updating each other on what we’d learned. He just nodded when I explained the testing they put their kids through, and the forced marriages and all. He’d suspected something of the sort.
For his part, he had found at least six strange vegetable products that had to be unique to this weird little island.
“There’s this `hemp’ they grow which produces a fiber that I swear is stronger than Kevlar! Do you realize that they can’t even cut the thread they use? They have to burn it through, and they do the same with the cloth they make! When the time comes to harvest their hemp, they have to pull it up by the roots. Then they just throw it into a tank, wet it down, and wait until it rots. What’s left over is made into rope and cloth!
“They make their shoes out of leather that’s generally made from the hide of a whale, but the soles are covered with this rubbery substance they get from another plant. It’s as thin as paint, yet it lasts for over a year, usually. Then they just give the bottoms another coat and they’re good till next Christmas!
“I think that they must have more and better medicinal plants than we do. We was both cut up pretty bad, but we healed up quick, with no infections and darn little scarring. And they tell me that these casts are coming off in a week. Can you beat that? A month and a half to heal five compound fractures, and me pushing forty-six from the wrong side?
“All of their dyes are vegetable, and they got as many bright colors as we do. What’s more, those colors don’t fade! They last hundreds of years, just like the cloth they’re used on.