Chapter 16: Steady as She Goes

I slowly became a clearinghouse of sorts, for the other Heros who took missions in my corner of the world. Sir Tony dropped by a couple of times to let me know what he, King Tom, and their friend Lord Paul were doing. They were all friends where they lived in London, so it was easy enough for the three of them to talk over a glass in the evenings.

Tony was an engineer, back on Earth. He was full of ideas on how things could be done, and I got a lot of value from his discussions. He also brought me two more sets of lenses once, so that we could make more good telescopes. We were making our own lenses by then, but they weren’t anywhere near as good as my originals. His two sets were far better than the ones I had brought.

King Tom dropped by once, just to meet me before he took off on some mission. That man had three wives. On Earth, where he was a bus driver for the London Transit Authority, he had his original wife and by all accounts he was a devoted husband.

Then, on Crossroads, he had Eve as his Caretaker. I had to admit to him that Eve was the only thing I had against him, but it was enough. He was safe here, as I had no intention of ever going through one of those portals again. However, if I was ever forced to go back to Earth the first thing I was going to do when I got to Earth was go to London and kill him so that when I got to Crossroads I could have Eve as my Caretaker. I didn’t really hate him, and I thought he deserved to know why I was going to kill him if I ever got sent back to Earth.

Last, here on Chaos he was King of Hunter Island with Eleanor as his Queen. I suspected that he may have even more women on the side, but that was none of my business. I’d dealt with the Queen and her assistant Philipmina several times, and they both seemed to think that Tom was the best thing ever, but it was none of my business. Didn’t I have three wives of my own, here?

I even met Lord Paul once. On Earth he was a paramedic, an ambulance guy. He was more of an organizer than a fighter, and he was the one who started the “Angel” movement. That was a group of healers who put together the best of the local herb-based medicine with everything Paul could teach the locals about first aid, emergency surgery, and patient care. The Angels were becoming a force for good here on the Island, and even on the mainland. Certainly, their teachings about hygiene led to ever-more demand for Ol’ Widder Ellis’s magic cleaning compound.

He set me straight about the farming equipment. It was common knowledge that he had invented the better plows, the planters, and the harvesters that had made it so easy to sow and reap a crop for the last several years. Paul told me that it was all old Earth designs that Sir Tony, who was an engineer and understood machinery, had converted to local materials. It was just that since Sir Tony was so famous as a warrior and he himself was famous as a healer, everyone assumed that the farming equipment came from him.

We all talked about Chaos, where the society was going, and what we could do to push it where we wanted it to go. We all liked to compare Hunter Island with Britain. While it had often been horribly mis-managed, Britain had mostly been left alone for the last millennium due to its position. It was close enough to Europe for trade and ideas to pass back and forth, but it was isolated enough to be secure as long as it had a Navy.

And, it was large enough to stand on its own. It had the population to fight off small-scale raids, and it had the resources to keep large armies away from it. Neither Napoleon nor Hitler had been able to get their armies across ‘the moat’, the English Channel. Caesar had, and William had, but both times the islanders had been too busy fighting among themselves to defend the island from an invader.

Even the Germanic migrations that had taken over most of England during the Dark Ages had only happened because the islanders had started by welcoming the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes as starving refugees who would work for food. There were probably other tribes, too, but my history books had only mentioned those three. Once on the island, the refugees had invited their families in and expanded until they took over. They had done such a good job of taking over that the modern name “England” was a corruption of “Angle-Land”, the people in England were referred to as “Anglo-Saxons”, and even today the Scots referred to the people to their south as “the Saxons”, usually with a curse or two added in.

King Tom in particular saw eye to eye with me about the Island. Hunter Island was eighty or so miles away from the mainland at its closest point. If we could avoid any tribal migrations and all the mis-rule and all the religious strife that England had gone through, Hunter Island could be shepherded through a rise to stability, wealth, security, and power. All we needed to provide was decent rule at home, giving the inhabitants internal stability, plus control of the sea which would give them external security. The Islanders would do everything else themselves.

The problem was going to be what would happen after we were gone. Eleanor’s son Thomas would be King after Tom died. Thomas was still just a baby, but he would grow up knowing that he was the crown prince. What if he became King when he was only twelve or thirteen? No matter what Tom and Eleanor and his teachers did, he was sure to be an idiot and a jackass.

And what of his son? King Tom might well be remembered as ‘the wise’ or ‘the great’ or ‘the kind’, but unless Tom lived to raise his son to adulthood, King Thomas was likely to be remembered as ‘the fool’. And Thomas’s son, if raised by ‘the fool’ instead of Tom and Eleanor to set his moral compass, was likely to be remembered as ‘the monster’.

My kids would be the same way. I was up to six, now, by the way. Millie seemed determined to pump the babies out as fast as she could, and she’d given me a daughter and another son after little Jay-Jay.

Ceecee had given me two, and then gone back on the herbs that prevented pregnancy. If THESE people could do that with simple herbs, why couldn’t Earth? Something to ask Paul about, the next time I saw him.

Gina had been several years before she got pregnant. She’d been on that herb since she’d come to live with us, as Millie had expected me to start using her for my pleasure immediately. Now, though, she had a little girl who was helping Millie keep the milk spigots going. Come back in a couple more years and I’d probably have another two, from Millie and Gina again.

Regardless of whether Tom and I were allied or opposed, my children would probably be okay with me, Millie, and Ceecee raising them. Surely at least one of them would grow up to be someone the locals could trust. But, what happened when we were gone, and our children or their children had to raise their own kids without us?

We needed some kind of system that would ensure our descendants were good people no matter how many generations they went.

We were stuck with a feudal society for generations to come, but Tom and I both worked to make the leaders’ power consensual rather than absolute. If nothing else, the absence of religion here was a blessing. No one was running around claiming that the King was appointed by God and therefore was incapable of wrong; his atrocities were actually acts of good and kindness if looked at the right way.

Tom was King of Hunter Island because everyone thought they were better off with him as King. I was Lord of most of the south-western corner of the Island because everyone who could see farther than the end of their furrow thought that they were better off with me in control. Our children would inherit our positions, but only if they were worthy of them.

No one had a God-guaranteed right to rule. If our children weren’t good leaders, they would be replaced. There would probably be blood involved, but it wouldn’t mean large-scale warfare that devastated the whole Island like the War of the Roses had done to England. Hopefully, it would be resolved on a smaller scale. Unfortunately, setting that up as a possibility meant that our children had to worry about their own necks just as much as they worried about doing their jobs.

Hey, if oversight made them better people, so be it. I didn’t want my children or grandchildren to be remembered as ‘the monster’. They weren’t owners so much as caretakers.

The people needed as much of a push as we could give them, though. Most of them lived from day to day and had no thought for the future or how it could be better.

I’d lived with people like that. My wife on Earth, the one who died in that accident with our son, was a kind and wonderful wife and mother. However, she just didn’t think about improving things. She could deal with an issue for years and just accept it.

I could deal with a problem once, decide I didn’t like it, think about it, and try something else. “Honey, look at this. If I do it this way, it comes out like that and it’s not as difficult to clean up. Why don’t you try it?”

And forever after, she’d do it the new way and it would be easier. She could see it, after someone else figured it out, but she’d never figure it out on her own. It was just easier to continue doing it the same way as before and always deal with the mess.

That was the sort of mindset that took Homo Sapiens a million years to advance from hand-held rocks for hammering to rocks held in sticks for greater power. Part of it was economics; if you are starving you don’t waste much time thinking about anything beyond your next meal, but even when people had plenty to eat most of them wouldn’t bother trying to improve their homes, their clothes, or their tools.

The people on Chaos had a sort of fatalism, a belief that things were always like this and they always would be. Maybe there had been some Russian peasants mixed in when the planet was first settled. We needed to counter that mindset somehow.

Modern ‘first world’ countries had the mindset that problems could be solved. So had ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia. Somehow, though, that mindset had been lost for the thousand years or so between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. Throughout the western world, the ‘Dark Ages’ were a time when people didn’t see any way to improve their lives.

Personally, I blamed religion. Once a religion has control of a society, the priests will do everything they can to ensure they remain in control. Whatever the religion’s original teachings were, they will get changed to teach the masses that everything is being done according to God’s plan. He wants you to be a serf. It’s all part of God’s plan for your children to die of malnutrition because you aren’t allowed to hunt the King’s forests.

Aside from thanking God for not giving these people religion, all we could think of to do about that problem was twofold: First, we would do everything we could to assure the Island’s food supply so that no one was trapped into a starvation scenario. Second, we would continue to be good examples of how thinking about things could lead to improvements.

One thing we talked about was how our changes would affect the Great Game, the quest for Cassandran Damsels in Distress who needed rescuing. I just couldn’t see it. With the technology available to both Cassandra and Crossroads, there was no need for humanity to die out on Cassandra. If that was a real possibility, it was only because they chose it.

If the Powers That Be could transport people from Cassandra to Crossroads and back, and from Earth to Crossroads and back, and from Crossroads to Chaos and back, they could just as easily transport an Earth Hero to Cassandra where his semen was collected and used to artificially inseminate as many Cassandran women as wanted a baby. If they were really faced with extinction, they would have done that long ago.

Or, if the problem was caused by something endemic to Cassandra, the survivors could emigrate to another planet. Earth, Chaos, or even Crossroads. The technology was clearly there.

No, this rescue thing had to be a sort of adventure reality show where the participants had a chance to die or be lost in slavery. And, no matter what we did here, we would still have situations where the Cassandran Damsels could get into trouble for centuries to come. Nothing we were doing would disrupt that.

I met several other Heros, too. Gottfried came back once, but this time all he wanted was a ride to a particular shore somewhere up north on the mainland. It was well away from any town large enough for a bank. Sure, we can do that. I made sure he was outfitted as well as possible and had one of our ships take him there and drop him off.

We also offered to pick him and his Damsel up again if he wanted. He said that if all went well he’d go elsewhere for a bank, but if things went wrong he may well be looking for his own rescue in a week or so. Our ship hung around the coast for two weeks, but they never saw Gottfried again. I hope he made it.