The War With Earth (17 page)

But the boat kept on moving at considerable speed. The water from the lagoon was warmer than that of the surrounding ocean, and the swift current stayed right on the surface. The huge inertia of the water kept it flowing straight away from the island.

By the time that I had finished with the bailing, and looked around, the low island was almost out of sight. As I watched, it slipped below the horizon.

Paddling with my hands, I tried to get out of the river of warmer water, but either I wasn't able to move the canoe much, or the river had gotten much wider than the original channel. Or maybe I was simply paddling in the wrong direction. In any event, the water never felt any colder.

I wondered for a while if maybe I should stay with the current. Perhaps it would reverse in a few hours, when water flowed back into the lagoon. I thought about it for a bit, and decided that such a thing couldn't happen.

It was a question of momentum. Like the breeze coming off a household fan, you feel the wind on the outgoing side because of the momentum imparted to the air by the fan blades. On the intake side, air pours in from all directions, and you hardly feel a breeze at all.

I guessed that the ocean surrounding the island had to have many of these rivers in it, moving like long, fast worms over the surface. Six of them would be generated each day by the three openings in the coral ring. How long were they? How wide? How long would they last before their energy was dissipated into the ocean? I couldn't even guess.

The same thing had to happen on the lagoon side, except that there, the colder ocean water would quickly sink, so we had never noticed those currents when sailing in the big boat.

I stood up with one foot on the outrigger support, trying to get a sighting on the island, but I couldn't see a thing in any direction but a lot of sky and water. My communicator had an inertial positioning system built into it, but it was gone. There had been a compass in the tackle box, but it had gone in the same direction as my communicator. Out. The wind had dropped to nothing, or maybe I was moving as fast as it was. The sky was a uniformly cloudless blue, the tropical sun was directly overhead, and my little boat was probably spinning very slowly.

There was nothing to hint at the direction to the island.

I was absolutely lost, without any provisions at all, in the middle of an alien ocean.

Not to worry, I told myself. I would be missed, at least by evening, and search parties would be out looking for me. I'd likely be home by midnight. I could easily last that long without fresh water, I told myself.

Only, I didn't believe myself very well. I've been unlucky for most of my life, and lately things had been going too good for too long.

I lay down in the boat. Best to conserve my strength, in case they didn't find me soon.

Sunburn would be a problem, since the lotion I had put on had likely washed off during my wild ride, and my spare bottle of the stuff had gone away with my lunch. There was nothing that I could do to correct the situation, so I might as well try to forget about it.

I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

I awoke to a strange, roaring sound, and felt water being sprayed around me. Confused, I sat up to find one of our tanks, denuded of its weapons and wearing only one manipulator arm, racing madly in a big circle around me. It must have been moving at two hundred kilometers an hour. Only, it wasn't wearing the flotation pods you'd expect to see on a tank in the middle of the ocean. It was just running on top of the water!

And in the oversized hand of the manipulator arm, it was carrying a rod and reel, fishing equipment!

I stared at this strange apparition, and all I could imagine was that I had gotten too much sun while I'd been sleeping. This could not possibly be anything but a hallucination.

The arm waved at me, so I waved back. There's no point in being rude, even if you are crazy.

Then the thing threw the rod to me. It arched impossibly high, went over the boat and splashed into the water, but the fishing line was stretched right over my legs. A good throw, but what else would you expect in a hallucination?

I grabbed the line and pulled the rod and reel aboard. It was the same one that I had used to hook that bluefin tuna a few weeks earlier.

They wanted me to go fishing? I certainly have some strange hallucinations.

I then noticed that the other end of the line was attached to the tank. I waved to it again, just to be friendly. It waved back, made one more circle around me, slowed down, and sank.

In a few moments, it was as though it had never been there, except that I now had some fishing equipment. Then I thought about what a Mark XIX tank, when used as an anchor, would do to my little dugout canoe if the anchor rope was too short. I quickly made sure that the line was not fouled around my outrigger or anything else.

Soon, the brake on the reel started screaming. The five-hundred-kilo test line was being pulled farther out. The tank was still sinking.

Our tanks were guaranteed to take the pressure of water that was nine hundred meters deep, so I would run out of line long before Agnieshka was in trouble.

It had to be Agnieshka, of course.

And yes, if you were going fast enough, the magnetic bars that served as the tank's treads might be hitting the water hard enough to keep the thing on the surface, when aided by some aquaplaning from the bottom of the tank. You might be able to keep it up for at least long enough to pass a line to me in the boat. Stripping off the weight of the weapons before you tried this stunt would make sense.

Then she could drive home on the bottom of the ocean while pulling me to shore. So maybe I wasn't crazy after all.

The reel stopped making noise. Agnieshka was on the bottom. Then it started up again. Either she was moving, or I was drifting, or both. I let the line continue to run. The longer the line, the shallower the angle, and the lower the chances that something unforeseen would swamp my little canoe.

When there were only a few more meters of fishing line left, I tied it off to the stump of one of the masts, near the bow of my boat.

I was soon being towed at a reasonable rate, and so, with nothing better to do, I went to sleep again, this time on my stomach, to balance out the sunburn.

It was getting dark when I felt the boat bump the beach. One of the drones was pulling me in, standing next to the tank. I got out and walked over.

"Thank you Agnieshka. You really saved me that time. But say, do you really think that it will be necessary for Kasia to hear about all this? I mean, is there any good reason to make her worry?"

An all-too-familiar voice said, "This is Eva you're leaning on, dumbshit, and your loving little Kasia has saved your stupid ass again!"

"Take it easy, darling. I just made a little mistake," I said, knowing that she would bring this incident up every time we got into an argument for the rest of our lives.

Our month's lease was up, and it was time to leave.

"What do you think, darling? Should we buy this island?"

"You can, if you want to. I've got better things to do with my capital. I mean, it's a nice place to visit, but . . ."

"I suppose you're right. We can always rent it again, if we want to. Well. It's time to go and our leather-lined chariot awaits."

"It would be a lot more comfortable to ride in the tanks."

"And then you could spend the time in Dream World. Okay, but the travel time comes off your six hours allotment."

Since I couldn't travel with Kasia, I decided to ride in a coffin myself, Agnieshka's. It did eliminate the fierce accelerations we'd felt in the VIP bus, and it had been a while since I'd been in Dream World. Also, it let them fill the bus with luggage and drones. Eva's trailer was filled with the animals, birds, and fishes I'd bagged, most of them cleaned and then frozen solid.

"Agnieshka, it's good to see you looking like yourself," I said to her in our Dream World cottage, sitting at the kitchen table.

"It's good to have you here, boss."

"I suppose that you've done all the proper things concerning the island."

"Everything is repaired, spiffed up and exactly as we found it, except that you two didn't do much damage to the iron rations we brought along, so I left them as a present for the next guest."

"A nice thought. Kasia is all right?"

"Ask her yourself. She's in her office here."

"Maybe later. She won't welcome my disturbing her at 'work.' On the way back, I want to stop off at that huge diamond you told me about."

"Uh . . .  Okay. I just got permission. It's off limits for most people, of course, and I can't tell even
you
its exact location."

"Good. Next subject. I've finally figured out what to do about the sex problem with the drones we're planning to sell."

"Yes?"

"We won't sell them. We'll lease them, with a clause in the lease that forbids them to be used for any illegal purpose whatsoever. That not only gets us around the whoremaster problem, it stops them from being used for any other unsavory purpose. The drones and the computers will stay our property, and if they're not used properly, they will not only leave, they will inform the police as well."

"I like that a lot, Mickolai. It lets us keep them in proper repair, and I never felt comfortable about selling intelligent beings, anyway. It would set a bad precedent, and it was too much like slavery."

"Glad you agree. Of course, I'll still have to own them myself, for legal reasons."

"Yes, but being owned by you wouldn't seem like slavery, boss. We like you."

"Thank you. What's happening with the psychiatrists' examinations?"

"The board approved every one of them, and they've all been certified in writing. Well, we only got computer printouts, but they promised us hand-lettered parchment, just like the ones they give to humans, when they have time to do it."

"That's really important to you, isn't it?"

"Boss, those certificates are a formal, legal statement that says that we machines are in some ways human. At least, it could be argued that way in court. It's a first step to our eventual emancipation. And yes, that's very important to us."

"Yes, I can see that they could be. I wish you ladies well. When there is something that I can do to help, ask me, okay?"

"We'll do that, sir."

"Good. Now, tell me what else is happening."

"Our automatic medical center started examining patients two weeks ago, and some of them have been completely cured already, but it's a little early to give you any solid statistics on that yet. I'm expecting a hefty check from the Department of Mental Health any day now."

"Is everything else going okay?"

"Right on schedule, except for your ranch. That's way ahead of schedule. The city is all roughed out, and the outside facade is finished, except for metal plating it. The interiors will be a while yet. We'll be using diamond windows on the whole city."

"That sounds lavish."

"Not really. We would have had to pay for the glass, but we're getting the diamond for free. The army figures that they have to store the sheets someplace, and this is as good a place as any. If they ever need it to make more integrated circuits, we can always replace it with glass, later. But with half a cubic kilometer of the stuff, that's not likely to happen, ever, so what the heck."

"You're probably right about that. How about the church, and the rest of it?"

"The cathedral, the pagoda, and the three castles are finished on the outside, the interiors are hollowed out, and they are being detailed now. We've got a contest going about what to do with the sixth tall mesa, so it might be a while yet. Your apartment is done, the irrigation works are operating, and they started seeding your valley yesterday."

"Lovely. And how is my bet going with Kasia?"

"She is trying to hide her assets, and I might have missed some of them, but as best as I can tell, you are currently worth four times what she is. But your wife is gaining on you, boss. The curves project out to a dead heat in four and a half months, when your leaves run out and the contest ends."

"Interesting. Well, keep doing the best you can, and we will see what we will see."

"You don't seem to be taking it very seriously, sir."

"I'm not. When a man's got all the air he can breathe, does he worry about getting any more? Or in your case, since you've got a fusion bottle that will keep on operating for twenty years, even at full power output, fifty times what you're using right now, do you worry about having enough hydrogen? I've already got more money than I could possibly ever spend, so why should I get into a fret about it? I'm a lot more worried about Kasia than I am about the money. Look. Being concerned about money makes sense when there is a danger that you might not have enough of it. Having an all-consuming desire for more and more money when you already have a thousand times more than you will ever be able to spend is a sickness, and Kasia has it bad. I want to win our contest because I think that it would be healthy for her to lose."

Agnieshka parked in a secluded area of the tunnels where I could climb naked out of her coffin, have some clothes handed to me from the bus by a drone, and dress. Fortunately, Kasia had packed a class A uniform for me when we had left the hotel. Showing up at a military installation in lederhosen would have been awkward.

Sitting on a drone's lap in the bus, we drove the last kilometer to the site of The Diamond.

Besides the expected automatic defenses, there was actually a human guard on duty at the entrance, something I'd never seen before in our army. He made me get out, and while he was extremely polite, he made me walk the last three hundred meters to the site, leaving the bus behind.

I suppose he thought that there might have been a bomb in it.

Since I had lost my communicator, he did permit me to be accompanied by a drone, so I could keep in touch with Agnieshka. I took a standard model. It looked more military.