A truly marvelous woman. I resolved to propose marriage to her again, and this time with all the formalities.
Roxanna’s English wasn’t up to understanding the verbal byplay of most comedies, so I found a pair of old silent films, Harold Lloyd’s His Royal Slyness and then his Haunted Spooks. And by the end, I was laughing as much as the ladies, apprentices, and servants, or perhaps a bit harder.
The duke returned with his crowd as I was rewinding the tape. Adam kept the whole thing in hand, starting with giving the boys back their equipment. He put one of them in charge, and told them to get to work without us.
Adam started at the far end of the warehouse with some of the navigation equipment, displaying a laser ROM disk that contained charts of every sea, coastline, and harbor in the world. Then there was the Global Positioning System, that could locate us to within ten meters of our actual position. Combining these two, it was possible to navigate in complete darkness, without radar or sonar, through most of the channels, coral reefs, and harbors of the world. Providing, of course, that you didn’t hit something that wasn’t on the electronic charts. Another ship, for example.
He talked about how the radar and sonar worked, but couldn’t actually demonstrate them with the ship being where it was. Then there were the radios. An all-band receiver and two marine-band transceivers. The duke was familiar with shortwave. Indeed, it had been his main source of information about the outside world. The satellite phone system really surprised him, however.
“Do you mean to tell me that it is possible to contact any single person anywhere in the world? Instantly?”
“Anyone who has a telephone, Your Grace, which is most people in the civilized world. And almost instantly. There’s a half-second delay. Watch. I’ll demonstrate. It’s been too long since I called my mother, anyway. She worries about me, you know,” Adam said.
And with that, he picked up the handset, dialed up her number, and put the phone on speaker mode, so everyone could listen in.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, Ma. It’s Adam.”
“Adam! Where are you? You haven’t called in months! I was getting worried that you got shipwrecked or injured or something horrible like that.”
“I’m just fine, Ma. I’m in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We had a little trouble with our satellite phone and I couldn’t call, but we got it fixed now. The good news is that I met this girl, or rather these two girls. They’re sisters, and each of them is as good a woman as your mother was. I just might get serious about them, as soon as I can figure out which one I want.”
“Then Adam, if either one of them will take you, you should marry her right now before the poor girl comes to her senses! If you are ever going to get me any grandchildren, you’d better start soon, because you’re already almost too old.”
“Forty-six is not too old to get married, and I’ll keep you posted on the ladies. Got to run now.”
“Good. About the nice girls you’ve met, I mean. You call me every two weeks from now on, you hear?”
“Yes, Ma. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Adam.”
The line went dead.
“You see, Your Grace. It’s that easy.”
“Remarkable. Those buttons you pushed before you contacted her, they were some sort of instructions for the machine?”
“Yes, Your Grace. It’s called a phone number. They have books listing them, or if you know where a person lives, and that person has not given instructions that they wish their number to be kept a secret, an operator, a person who works for the phone company, will give you their number.”
“I see. So if a person wishes privacy, he is granted it.”
“Yes. Privacy is very important in our culture. If there had been an emergency, however, the police would be able to contact anyone who needed contacting,” Adam explained.
“So your people don’t have privacy from their government.”
“Well, yes and no, Your Grace. Sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly where to draw the line, if you get my meaning.”
“Indeed, I do. Another thing. I just observed you telling your mother a lie. Two lies. You were both shipwrecked and seriously injured. Do you often tell her lies?”
“Your Grace, had I told her that I had been in a shipwreck, that I had broken five bones, and that I nearly drowned, she would have been upset for months. There’s nothing that she can do about it, and all the danger’s over, so why should I make her worry? So to answer your question, yes, of course I lie to my mother. In fact, I do it fairly often.”
The duke thought about it a moment, then shook his head, declining comment.
The next item was a personal computer, and explaining everything it could do took a half hour. The only surprise for me was when Adam produced a CD-ROM that had the Encyclopaedia Britannica on it. I hadn’t known that we had such a thing, but then most people never use an encyclopedia anyway. It’s just important to have one.
That left the entertainment equipment. After the stereo, there was only the TV and the VCR. Some of the duke’s party wanted something religious and others wanted an adventure story, so Adam put on Ben Hur.
All four hours of it.
It was well past dark when the last tape finally started to rewind, and I was eager to get home and in bed with Roxanna.
People were actually getting up to leave when Adam said, “Your Grace, were you aware of the various news channels available to us?”
And so we watched CNN until midnight, which left not nearly enough time for properly loving Roxanna. Sometimes Adam blows it, too.
* * *
Entirely too early in the morning, five more of the warlock’s subordinates were waiting for us. Three were scholars who wanted to do research with our computerized encyclopedia, one was to watch the news channel and take notes for the bulletin boards, the local equivalent of a newspaper, and the fifth, who was to take us on the warlock’s promised tour of the islands, was Journeyman Judah ben Salomen ha-Cohen.
“A remarkable name for a Christian,” I said.
“I chose it myself,” he said. “You see, my father was a chevalier, a great-grandson of the old duke. As a great-great-grandson, I of course am a commoner. But if every descendent of the ducal line kept the family name of Alberigo, well, there wouldn’t be much left but Alberigos in the entire country. Because of this, the custom is for those in my position to chose our own names. I wanted something different.”
“You certainly got it,” Adam said.
It took only a few minutes to get the reporter and the researchers set up and familiar with the controls of their equipment. As I’ve often said, these people were all remarkably intelligent. Roxanna used the time to give instructions to her cook about making sure that the apprentices were fed lunch, since she wanted to take the tour as well.
Judah ben et cetera had brought a map with him, the first I had ever seen of the Western Islands. It was now obvious why they were sometimes referred to in the singular and sometimes in the plural. It was one single land mass, one rock, really, which naturally made it singular. This rock was irregular in shape, about seven miles long and four miles across at the widest. Most of the rock was not above the waterline. There were five separate peaks that went above the waves, so that from the surface there appeared to be five islands plus a number of smaller, mostly barren outcroppings. Hence the frequent use of the plural.
These peaks enclosed a fair sized lagoon, the Llyr, toward the center of the complex, and a number of channels going out to the ocean. Much of the islands’ local transportation went on in these protected waters, along with some fishing, aquaculture, and water sports.
With Roxanna and the Pelitier sisters along, we had a pleasant day. I won’t bore you with the whole tour, but some things we saw are worth relating.
There was a lot more depth to the culture of the islands than I had been led to expect. Besides libraries and churches, there were concert halls, dance halls, bars, inns, and restaurants. They had public beaches, small but carefully tended parks, and picnic grounds. Many people were active in sports, and they were served by gymnasiums, playing fields and arenas, most of which were underground. In fact, everything that could possibly be underground, was, including most of the beaches. At least, they usually had a massive overhang cantilevered above them, with carefully cultivated plants growing on top. There was even a five team semipro league, playing a sort of water polo.