I knew that something was very wrong.
Last night I had lain in this same bed and watched the sun set out of that very same window. Only one wall had windows in it and that wall had been to the west! Now, either it was to the east or I was going insane! Or was I in a different, identical room, the victim of a fabulously expensive practical joke? Or had I died and gone to some irrational afterlife?
An unfair thought. A decent Atheist like me should not have to worry about that sort of thing!
The same lady brought breakfast, although this time she wore a pale blue dress, as richly embroidered and expensive looking as the last one, and of a similar cut. I guessed that if she had to work unnaturally long hours, she was at least well paid for it.
I slept for a few more hours, and when I awoke, my nurse was again sitting beside me. She began teaching me the language, starting with the parts of the body. The word for elbow, the word for finger. How you said that your finger was touching your elbow.
I was never much good at learning a foreign language. I’d gotten D’s in Latin in high school, and had flunked out of Russian in college. But now, with a desperate need to get some questions answered and absolutely nothing else to do, I learned. Total immersion, I think it’s called.
Her name was Roxanna. We were on the Western Isles, and the language was Westronese. She couldn’t say exactly where the Western Isles were. Indeed, she seemed to think that it was a very complicated question to answer. I gave it up until I could speak the language better.
While the medical help was always there when I wanted it, the level of medical technology seemed to be as ancient as the style of my nurse’s dress. Another, older, woman occasionally came by. She talked briefly with my nurse, changed my bandages, and checked my wounds. I never saw anything like the ordinary tools to be expected in a doctor’s office. No one checked my blood pressure. I never saw a stethoscope. I never got a shot or took a pill. Slowly, my body healed.
My mind was already well. My physical pains were such that I was actually a few days noticing it, but somehow the deep, black depression that had plagued me for over a year was simply not there, gone as if it had never been. I could no longer even imagine what it had been like to suffer from it. Perhaps the brain cells that had caused it had died in the wreck. If so, they would not be missed.
As I slowly recovered, my nurse got sick. It looked as if she had a bad case of the flu, with a running nose and a fever, but she doggedly continued to serve me, to the point where I got to feeling very guilty about it. I tried to get her to take it easier, but my Westronese wasn’t up to explaining what I meant, and my gestures were not understood.
My nurse gave me a thorough weekly sponge bath in a strictly professional manner, but never a shave. After much difficulty with my almost nonexistent Westronese and a lot of gesticulation, I found that Roxanna had never even heard of a razor. What she thought of my initially clean-shaven face remained a mystery for quite a while. As it was, the discomfort and itching of growing a full beard was added to my other physical problems, or perhaps it distracted from them.
It wouldn’t have been a good idea to scratch the itching, healing cuts on my stitched up back, even if I could reach them, but I could and did take considerable satisfaction in scratching the stubble on my cheeks. Call it a counterirritant.
It was a week before they would let me get up and walk around for a short while, and over the weeks that followed I was allowed to explore a bit, but not to leave the mansion I was in.
I say “they” because I found that I was apparently at the head of a household with six servants. Besides Roxanna, my nurse-tutor, there was a maid, a cook, and three gardeners. Two of the gardeners were married to the maid and cook, respectively. How I rated such a royal entourage was beyond me.
Strangely, every one of them had the flu. By the time I commanded enough of their language to tell them about the Contact capsules in the ship’s medical kit, I realized that there simply wouldn’t have been enough for everybody, and I let it go.
The area in front of our windows was planted in a carefully tended vegetable garden, but the two men and the woman who worked there were not the same people as the gardeners I had been introduced to. The garden and people apparently belonged to some other household, whom the people of our household didn’t talk to, or look at, or even acknowledge the existence of. I tried to get Roxanna to explain about them, and for quite a while it almost seemed as though she couldn’t even see who I was talking about. I put it down as just another mystery that would hopefully be answered someday.
After more than three weeks of convalescing, my nurse permitted me to go outside, at least up to our own roof. We went up a long spiral staircase, which, in my still weakened condition, was enough to force me to stop and sit down twice. I was a long way from being the healthy student who worked his way through college teaching Karate.
She led me finally through a small trapdoor in the ceiling and suddenly we were in the middle of a field of vegetables! Within a dozen yards of us, our household’s gardeners were working diligently at their tasks, and seemingly oblivious to our entrance onto their domain.
When I had first met Roxanna’s gardeners, I had assumed that their task was to tend the decorative gardens that I supposed our medieval castle was surrounded with. Now I learned that the roof of the incredibly spacious mansion was a carefully tended garden from which the household got all of its food, barring fish, dairy products, and the very occasional rabbit or chicken.
Looking about, I soon realized that these gardens were contiguous with those of our neighbors. Indeed, with increasing wonderment, I saw that every bit of horizontal land within sight was carefully used for growing crops. The terrain resembled pictures I had seen of the rice paddies of Bali, or of the sculpted mountain slopes in Peru. The difference was that the vertical surfaces here were covered with large windows and open doorways, which suggested that behind them there were hundreds or thousands of rooms like the one I slept in.
It soon became apparent to me that the mansion that I had been living in was not a building at all! I had been staying in a spacious cave, entirely below ground. My best guess was that originally, the mountainous countryside had been terraced to provide farmland, at what horrendous cost in labor I could barely imagine. Then the spaces below the fields had been laboriously hollowed out into huge apartments, work areas, and public spaces to free up even more land for farming.
Furthermore, as best I could see, all of this incredible amount of work must have been done by hand, for I saw not one single machine more complicated than a hammer, and even those more often than not were made of bone or wood or clay.
Farm animals were rare, and I can remember seeing only one ox-drawn plow during my first two months on the island. Even stranger, despite all these obvious indications of fabulous human industriousness, I don’t recall ever seeing anyone working overly hard. Oh, people were generally busy at one thing or another, but you never saw anyone breaking his back, either.
After a half hour in the sun, we went back down for more language lessons. I had to get some questions answered!
TEN
About the time that I was able to move about without undue pain, I was able to make simple sentences such that, with the aid of many gesticulations, I could begin to get some of my questions across. Again I asked about where in the heck were we. This time, Roxanna had an answer.
“The day before yesterday, I asked this question of a wizard for you,” she said, and then rattled off some sort of a description where we were so many hours and minutes east and so many minutes north. It had to be longitude and latitude in some manner of coordinate system, but I could make neither heads nor tails of it.
I asked how the sun could rise and set in the same place, as it had persisted in doing, but I got no answer because Roxanna could not grasp what I was asking about. No amount of gesticulating or bad Westronese could get through to her. Giving up, I asked why this island was hidden, why my people didn’t know it was here.