Their reaction to the auxiliary diesel engine was less impressive. An hour’s discussion on the theory and practice of internal combustion engines went right over their heads. We fired it up for a few seconds, the most we dared on dry land, without water in the cooling jacket, and they just got scared. Finally, Adam and I were reduced to teaching them by rote the names of the parts, had them chant through a litany on how you started a small diesel engine, and let it go at that.
Personally, I doubted if they would ever actually use the engine, no matter how far away from the island they were when they got becalmed. They’d been sailing all their lives without the safety of a backup engine, and anyway, there were always the oars.
It was late in the afternoon when we got all the men (including the guards) together and hauled The Concrete Canoe out to the water. It was quite a job, without machinery, or even rollers, and we barely had the manpower available to do it. Much later, it struck me as curious that none of the men, including Adam and me, ever even suggested that the women there should lend a hand, and that none of the six ladies present, even the servants, thought to volunteer.
The fishermen sailed around Avalon Bay for a while, until we could see that they were competent seamen who had the feel of The Concrete Canoe. We waved good-bye to them so they could get in a few hours of deepwater fishing before nightfall.
* * *
It was getting dark by the time Adam and I had settled on our work schedules for repairing the ship. We would use the bearers he’d hired as laborers, since otherwise they’d spend the time just standing around anyway.
We probably wouldn’t need more men until we were ready to launch her, since more would be just that much harder to supervise. But come launch time, we’d need as many men to put her back as it took to haul her out, three hundred, at least. All of which meant that sneaking out “between two days” was out of the question, even if we wanted to.
At about the same time that we had things settled, the ladies had their task done and the fishermen were coming back as well. They had been lucky, and had brought back two dozen large Pacific salmon and a freshly killed bottle-nosed dolphin.
Roxanna was delighted with this first proof of her business acumen, but I was taken aback at the thought of deliberately killing a dolphin. In fact, I was about to raise a stink about it when Adam called me over to him in English.
“Dammit, we can’t let them go on killing dolphins,” I said in a stage whisper.
“And dammit, boss, you can’t go blowing your top every time you run into a local custom that you don’t approve of. We are strangers here in a strange land. These people have gone way out of their way to be nice to us, but they can change their minds about us any time they feel like it. If they want to eat large sea mammals like whales and dolphins, it’s their business and not yours,” Adam said, his nose inches from mine.
“But you’re talking about some very intelligent animals! It isn’t right to eat them!”
“What makes you think that those critters are so smart? They don’t act smart. Whales would just bask around on the surface while those old-time whalers rowed up and speared them dead by the hundreds, and that’s got to be acting about as stupid as you can get,” he shouted.
“Those `critters’ have got huge brains,” I yelled. We were both shouting in English, and the ladies, servants, and workers were staring at us, but what the heck. I had my dander up.
“Proves nothing. Maybe they need huge brains to control their huge bodies. Then again, monotremes all have abnormally large brains, and they’re all dumber than your average empty beer can. They say that they don’t have REM sleep, and the brains that they have aren’t organized very well. Well, maybe cetaceans don’t have REM sleep, either. Nobody’s ever tried to find out, you know. Maybe they don’t sleep at all, what with having to live under water and breathe at the surface or something. The fact is that we don’t know. What we do know is that our dolphin was stupid enough to bite down on an unbaited hook, and that it was dead before we ever saw it,” he said.
“Making a mistake doesn’t prove stupidity. There is a definite correlation between brain size and intelligence, and eating an intelligent animal is wrong.”
“Bullshit. A pig is a very intelligent animal, probably smarter than a dog and much smarter than any cat. Yet I’ve seen you order pork five nights a week and bacon every morning. Anyway, where do you get off telling another people what they should or should not eat? Hell, some of your countrymen eat monkey brains! And as for that fish juice you’re so fond of, hell, I got sick when they told me how they make it!”
“Now that takes the cake! A Polack criticizing somebody else’s eating habits! You people eat duck’s blood soup with prunes in it, for God’s sake, and I’ve read the ingredients on a package of kishka!”
I could see Roxanna wondering if she should intervene, and then deciding that she was afraid to.
Adam said, “It is flat ignorant to read the ingredients label on anybody’s kind of sausage, stupid, and tchanina is the Food of the Gods! All of which goes to prove that if the islanders want to eat dead cetaceans, it’s their damn business!”
“Well, I’m not going to eat any!”
“Done!” Adam switched to Westronese, and was suddenly speaking quietly and politely. “Lady Roxanna, we’ve just decided. He would prefer not to eat any of the dolphin, so don’t fix him any of it.”
I smiled and nodded to her in affirmation.
Astounded to see us agreeing, when she had been expecting us to get violent, Roxanna meekly nodded yes.
“Glad that’s settled,” I said.
“Good. Now you get to invite my whole crowd over for the night, ’cause it’s getting too dark for us to take a two-hour walk home.”
“Oh. All right. Roxanna, please make arrangements so that our guests here can spend the night with us.”
She nodded yes again, and sent three servants scurrying off somewhere to do something.
SEVENTEEN
I said, “Adam, I’m sorry I called you a Polack.”
“Why should you be sorry about that? I mean, it’s what us Polacks all call each other.”
“I know that, but I’m not one of your people. You know. One Black Man can call another one a Nigger, but that doesn’t mean that anybody else can get away with it.”
“Well, niger is Latin for black, and it means nothing but the color, or rather the lack of one. To the ancient Romans, who spoke Latin, black didn’t have the connotations of evil that it has for Northern Europeans. The Romans themselves were not the least bit racist. I mean, they’d enslave you no matter what color your skin was.
“Usually, when you want to say something that might offend somebody, it’s safer to say it in a foreign language. If you’re embarrassed about saying the Anglo-Saxon word `shit,’ it’s generally okay to say `defecate,’ which is `shit’ from the Latin. Or to a baby, most mothers say `kaka,’ which was `shit’ in ancient Greek. Ditto with `piss’ and `urinate.’ So when `Black’ is a polite enough word, `Niger’ or `Nigger’ really shouldn’t be considered derogatory when said by anybody.”
“Well, they certainly seem to think it’s derogatory, and if you have any doubts, just go yell it for a while in some of the darker areas of Detroit,” I said. “I wouldn’t shout `Nigger,’ and I shouldn’t have shouted `Polack.’ ”
“But it’s not like that. Polack means `man’ in Polish. Or maybe it means `a gentleman of Polish persuasion.’ Why should I get offended if you should take the trouble to speak my ancestral language? Now, I could see a Polish girl maybe getting ticked at being called a Polack, since properly, she’s a Polka.”
“Polka? Like in the dots?”
“Right. `Polka dots’ means like `lady dots,’ and `dancing the Polka’ means `dancing the woman,’ ” Adam said. “You know, maybe the reason why the Blacks don’t like the word `Nigger’ is because Latin isn’t one of their languages. Maybe if we could find out how to say it in Swahili or Ibu or some such, we could find something to call them that they would be willing to use for more than three weeks.”
“I doubt it. I think that they just do it for kicks. Every time the Blacks change their minds about what they want to be called, every liberal wimp in the country gets flustered and feels obligated to line up, kneel, and kiss every Black foot available, reciting the litany of the newly approved word. Some people like having their feet kissed,” I said. “And anyway, I’ve seen a lot of Poles get fighting mad about being called `Polacks.’ “