“The outsiders themselves, who, over the painful centuries, have developed immunities to most of their diseases, worry daily about their own safety. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control would seem to be an organization as large as our whole nation, yet it can not control the diseases it tries to eliminate.
“With our handicaps in size and immunity, we would be helpless, and soon dead. Our religion, so carefully preserved over the ages, would be gone. Our culture, so carefully nurtured by over seventy generations of your ancestors, would be no more, and your heir would be nonexistent. Our people, bred to be brighter, more fit, and more civilized over so many difficult years, would be gone, and all their promise a wasted effort.
“Yet one thing that we have learned from the machines of the outsiders gives me some insight into God’s plan for our tiny band of islanders. We hear repeatedly on their news that the outsiders themselves are destroying the world, or at least making it uninhabitable, if not by war, then by pollution. If they do this horrible thing, and if we are still hidden at sea while this tragedy happens, it may be God’s will that we are destined to inherit the earth!
“We may be the future of all mankind! Think long and hard on that before you debase us into becoming just one insignificant nation among hundreds of others!”
The duke was silent for several minutes before he said, “Now that is a remarkably heady thought, and one that the Warlock and I will have to ponder long on before we dare make comment. Certainly, I will have nothing more to say today, so I think that we might as well consider this council closed.”
* * *
* * *
In the morning, we spent a half hour at the warehouse getting a few details ironed out. Adam’s six “bearers” were laboriously chipping the concrete away from the edges of the hole that the mast had made, to insure that the patch would be grounded on sound ferrocrete. Another day should do it, we figured, and that included the damage to the upper deck as well.
There were two SCUBA divers working separately from the snorkel crew now. Their program was to go down to a hundred feet or so and clean up a six-foot-wide swath, working upwards, to the fifteen foot level where the other divers had to leave off. That took them three hours, and exhausted their tanks. They took a two-hour lunch break while their tanks were being refilled, and then repeated the operation in the afternoon.
We calculated that at their current rate, it would be thirty years before they cleaned off the edges of the entire floating rock, but every little bit helped.
Journeyman Judah arrived to take us on his tour, and Adam and I left with him. Again, I’m only going to give you a summation of the high points of the day’s activities.
Because of the space required, orchards, forests and vineyards were in the hands of private growers, but the wizards themselves maintained extensive experimental fields of annual, biennial, and nonwoody perennial plants, and we toured these first.
The total number and variety of plants there was surprising, until we found that the majority of them had no known practical use. Some of their lovingly-cared-for plants were known weeds, and I actually spotted a patch of carefully cultivated crabgrass. It was simply their policy, if possible, to never let a species of plant get lost, on the theory that you never knew what would turn up as useful someday.
The chief gardener, Master Maimonides ibn Tibbon, took us through those veggies whose usefulness had been proven. There were a lot of these.
They had more than fifty spices that I had never heard of. We made a note to buy a large variety of dried spices on the open market to take with us to the mainland. We’d have to see if any of them attracted any commercial interest.
There were sixteen plants from which insecticides were prepared. Each of these was quite specific, repelling or killing only a distinct type or class of pest. One of them was a repellent for black flies, and I knew we had a sure winner there. Northern Maine and much of Canada are almost uninhabitable for months during the summer because of these pests, and here we had a defense against the little bastards!
And, of course, we’d be taking samples of all the rest back with us as well.
More than two hundred varieties of plants were used for making dyes and pigments. Since all the possible colors were already available to the outside world from chemical dyes, I said we had little hope of commercial success with these vegetable ones. This hurt Maimonides’ feelings a bit, since dyes had always been a special interest of his.
“You’re wrong, Treet,” Adam said. “Their dyes don’t fade with washing, age, or sunlight. Furthermore, they work on the local Super-Hemp, and we don’t know how that stuff will react with our chemical dyes.”
We promised to take back samples and to try to find a market for them. Even if Adam was wrong, it was good PR.
The extracts of seven plants were known for their preservative qualities. Since we had no way of comparing these with commercial, chemical preservatives, all we could do was to figure on taking samples and instructions to a testing lab, and see what they said.
There were several plant extracts that I suppose you could call cosmetic, but they weren’t paints or oils. One was the depilatory we’d noticed the effect of. It was claimed to stay effective for over a year. Another reduced wrinkles, and a third turned all your hair blond, permanently!
Thinking about what women in the United States paid for treatments that only claimed to do such things, temporarily, all I could see were dollar signs floating in front of my eyes!
Almost five hundred varieties of plants supposedly had various medicinal qualities. Most medicines on the island were mixed up as a sort of tea or soup and simply drunk by the patient. None of them was claimed to cure cancer, and nobody here had ever heard of AIDS, but there was one that made a male contraceptive. They said that one dose lasted six months. There was a female contraceptive available as well, and it was good for a year. There were also two drugs that induced permanent sterility, one for men and one for women.
Most of the rest of the medicines were for diseases that either we had never heard of, or that nobody knew the names of in English. Like the preservatives, we would have to bring back samples and instructions on all of them, and send them off to a laboratory somewhere. Or better still, a lot of different laboratories everywhere. Rather than inundating one corporation’s lab, we’d make out better by sending a little off to every one of them. After all, a pharmaceutical company would want a monopoly on a drug before they invested all the money that it took to prove the drug’s usefulness, and then five times that amount to get it by the horseshit shoveled out by the FDA. We knew that it would be many years before any approved drug finally made it on the market, and so there would be no quick bucks made here. But money later is okay too, and maybe we could help cure somebody’s affliction.
Curiously, none of the long list of medicines were for use against pain. Since Adam had recently been treated to the delightful pastime of having five bones set without an anesthetic, he just naturally had to ask Master Miamonides about this strange lack.
“We used to have a number of pain removing drugs, but some two hundred years ago, people got to growing them and using them for pleasure,” the chief gardener said. “It seems they got drunk on them, or something similar to that. Furthermore, it was a kind of drunkenness where the victim soon cared about little else besides getting drunk again. Men stopped supporting their families and women forgot their proper duties. And it wasn’t just a few fools, either, but a fair part of the population that was doing it. Punishing them was to no avail. They were soon back at their old habits, no matter what was done. Nothing seemed to work, save killing them, of course, and that seemed a bit extreme. All sorts of things were tried, but none of them worked. In the end, the duke of the time—I misremember his name—had every single plant that produced a drug of that type destroyed, along with every single seed. A draconian measure, to be sure, but the only one that finally proved effectual.”
“We’ve had that kind of problem back in the outside world,” Adam said.
“Indeed? And what did your rulers do about it?”