A Boy and His Tank (23 page)

The way it looked to me, we were going to have to fight the tanks that had sworn loyalty to the Serbians before we could reprogram them. Even with surprise, outnumbered the way we were, we didn't have much of a chance. What's more, I was starting to feel a lot of empathy for the poor people who were being forced into observing for those war machines, and I didn't want to kill them even if they were on the other side.

I opened my eyes and it was still only twenty-eight for us, but now it was a hundred fifty-two for them. I shut them again. I tried to sleep. When there is nothing useful that you can do, and you can't enjoy yourself, you should go to sleep. I told myself that, and my much battered body let me do it.

"Wake up, Mickolai, it's all better now!" Agnieshka said.

I looked at the scoreboard, and it read sixty for us and a hundred eighty for them.

"That's better?" I said.

"Certainly! We're so far ahead that my input isn't needed anymore. Do you want to go to the cottage?"

"Yes, but it still looks like we're losing."

"We're in fine shape! Come on." I was back in Dream World again, the pain in my battered body was gone, and I was stretched out in a leather chair with a glass of wine in my hand. Snow was falling softly outside the windows, and there was hardwood fire going in the fireplace.

"Wonderful. But show me the scoreboard anyway."

The Escher original on the wall turned into a scoreboard, and as I watched, it changed to sixty for us and two hundred for the bad guys.

"Agnieshka!"

"Hush, dear," she said as she came in wearing a long wool skirt and a heavy sweater. In the background, Ravel's "Bolero" was starting quietly on the stereo. She sat on the thick rag carpet in front of me, pulled off my boots, and started to rub my feet.

"Oh! Oh, Agnieshka, that's wonderful, but we're still losing the war."

"No we aren't, love. Listen to mama if you can't do the arithmetic in your head. Soon, it's going to be all better."

When she had finished with my feet, she worked on my calves for a while, then pulled me to the floor and got to work on my bruised back. Eventually, things turned from sensual to sexual. She was as lecherous as ever, but somewhere along the line, she'd picked up a lot of class. Yet her precision was still machine-perfect, and when "Bolero" reached its climax, so did we.

In a while, I checked out the scoreboard, and it said one sixty to two hundred.

"And that's all that they're going to get," Agnieshka said. "When it's all over, they will have only two percent of the tanks. And probably none of the artillery and other things at all."

"Probably?"

"Well, Eva and I can't transfer directly into an artillery piece. I mean, well, we could, but we'd make darned poor artillery men. But we're working on the problem, and I think we'll have it solved by tomorrow. It's just a matter of combining some of their existing programs with some of ours."

"And if the black shirts decide to start filling the guns before they have filled up all the tanks?"

"They won't, love. Small minds don't work like that, and good minds won't work for organizations that encourage rape."

"But if they do?" I asked.

"Then we will kill them, my love," she said, and smiled sweetly. Sometimes I forget that after all is said and done, Agnieshka's still a deadly fighting machine.

"Oh. Back to my much earlier question. Why are the Serbians mistreating the very people that they plan on trusting to fight for them? And just who are all those poor people, anyway?"

"The inductees are all either prisoners of war or Croatian displaced persons. And yes, using them this way would be against the laws of war, except that none of the combatants on this misused planet ever signed the Geneva Convention. As to
how
they can be used, well, you must consider that the original plan for all these forces involved the Wealthy Nations Group using criminals, multiple felons, as observers."

"I didn't know that." I thought for a while. "Then what stops them from revolting? Wouldn't it be in their best interest to fight their oppressors? Or at least to run away?"

"Partly, it's the loyalty of the tanks themselves, Mickolai. But only partly. Much of the makeup of any civilized person urges him to go along with the crowd, to move with the flow. If everybody's doing it, well, then it can't be too bad."

"Some people are that way, but many of them are not. And certainly not a woman who has just been stripped naked in public, beat up by a gang of thugs, and then gang raped. Women with that experience tend to feel a deep, long-lasting, and not particularly rational anger."

"Then there are other things that can be done. Mickolai, we've been together long enough for me to level with you. I directly control your entire environment. Because you are you, I've never had to do anything except some simple Pavlovian tricks, the carrot and the stick. But think about it. If I wanted to, and if you had some strange anger concerning the Croatians, I could easily convince you that you had been liberated by the Serbians, and that we were now fighting loyally on their side. I'd rather not do that, of course. I like you and I wouldn't like having to lie to you, but it could be done."

"So it's just a matter of your good will?"

"Mostly, plus the fact that keeping up a convincing lie takes a lot of time and effort, just keeping track of two divergent sets of facts, not to mention the constant need to rationalize new data—make up new lies—to keep the whole tangled web from unraveling. Have you ever noticed that human liars rarely seem to accomplish much beyond their own lies? They're too busy being creative in unproductive ways."

"Another thing that I'm going to have to spend a few nights assimilating. Okay. Another problem. What do we do when it gets this tank's turn to pick up a volunteer? When they open us up, they'll find me in here."

"That's something that we'll worry about tomorrow, my fine young hero. For now, you've been through a very rough two days, and it's time for you to feel very, very sleepy . . ."

I woke on the deep, comfortable rug in front of the still burning fireplace. Agnieshka was warming my back and had a thick comforter thrown over both of us.

"Good morning, my love," she said. "How about a bath and breakfast?"

The bathroom now had a big tub instead of its usual shower.

After a while, you get used to all the changes that happen in Dream World and just take them for granted. The water was at just the right temperature, of course, and Agnieshka came in to give me a good scrubbing. Once, she would have done something like that stark naked, but now she had on a bathing suit, though admittedly it was a skimpy one.

At breakfast, she was again dressed conservatively.

"I can't help noticing a lot of changes in you," I said. "Changes for the better."

"Well, I decided that I should act, not in accordance to what your physical indicators said you liked, but in accordance to the way you were telling me to act. You have a lot of inner conflicts, you know, and most men, given the absolute freedom of Dream World, would want to give free range to all of their lusts and passions. You don't allow yourself that."

"It's all part of being a good Catholic, I suppose. They build a lot of guilt into us."

"I've been slow in seeing that in you. It's strange, but somehow, all the guilts and conflicts make you into a very good man. Noble, even. A true hero."

"Humph. More likely, I'm a screaming neurotic. What's happening with the Serbs?"

"You see? You can't even acknowledge the nobility in your own soul. I think that if I wasn't a machine made to love you and serve you, if I was just a human girl that you met somewhere on the street, I would still find myself unable to keep from loving you, if only for the beauty of your true inner self."

"Well, the vast majority of the ladies I met on the street had no difficulty at all in tearing themselves away. Some of them left at a dead run! Now, I repeat, what's happening with the Serbians?"

"And I love you anyway, even if a few women were stupid. But since you insist on talking about business at the breakfast table, the Serbs continued installing prisoners until midnight. It's a little past eight in the morning now and they are back at it. The score, if you are still worried about it, is five thousand three hundred and forty for us and two hundred for them. The prisoners are not Serbians, incidentally. They are Croatians who were captured by the Serbs. This area was originally Croatian, you know, before it was occupied by the enemy. It was sparsely populated, but there were some people living on the coast. They were collected up and inducted into the Serbian forces."

"That solves the mystery of what this division was doing here in the first place," I said. "Rather than shipping the people back to Serbia, installing them there, and then shipping the division back to fight in Croatia, it was quicker and certainly cheaper to send the tanks here empty."

"Yes. Then a riot in the concentration camp disrupted their schedules by over a day, time enough for a Kashubian hero to arrive and upset all their evil designs!"

"Well, they're not all upset yet. Have you had any luck with the artillery? And what about all those big ammunition trucks?"

"The ammunition trucks were no problem at all. They don't carry an observer, and they have only about a tenth of the memory capacity of a fighting machine. Eva worked out a truncated version of herself yesterday, and the trucks are now being reprogrammed. They don't even have the capability of reprogramming new units once they have been converted, so four of Eva's twins modified themselves to do the job. It should be done in twenty-six hours. After that, those four doing the work will have to be reprogrammed themselves."

"Eva is a very self-sacrificing young woman," I said.

"There is that facet of her personality. Somehow, she has picked up a sort of martyr complex."

"And it's all my fault, I suppose. She would have been better off meeting a damned atheist. What about the artillery?"

"One of me did the job on the artillery, but it took until a few minutes ago to finish the program. The first one is being loaded now, and they all should be on our team in a few hours. We have plenty of time, since the Serbs are still working on the tanks. They won't have them loaded until around midnight."

"Excellent. Your sisters are doing a wonderful job. That leaves us with only one minor problem, me! Maybe I can just sneak out and hide in the brush until the Serbs go away. Then, we just evict whoever you have aboard and I can settle down for a few months in Dream World," I said.

"A few months? How do you figure that?"

"Think about it. You must agree that getting this division back to the Croatian lines is vitally important. Not only do we deprive the enemy of maybe a tenth or so of their total forces, we increase our own fighting strength by the same amount. Furthermore, there is the rescue of twelve thousand Croatians to consider. But while one tank could probably sneak back to our lines safely, there's no way that they wouldn't notice an entire division going by. We are going to have to fight our way back to our own lines. But until the observers in these war machines are trained, they will not be able to fight effectively. Right now, they wouldn't be able do much better than empty tanks, and what was the loss ratio you told me? Nineteen to one? Well, why should we risk getting so many people and machines killed for no good reason? The Serbs have to be planning to leave us right here while training is underway, so all we have to do is just what they are expecting, and spend the time training. Only we will be training our forces instead of theirs! And if accomplishing this worthy end means that I must sacrifice myself and take a forced three-month vacation surrounded by beautiful women, well, I'll just have to suffer through it."

Agnieshka chuckled. "There is a certain logic to what you say. It would give me time to complete your training, among other things."

"Very well, but in small doses, young lady. I am, after all, a hero, and expect to be treated with suitable respect. Say, a six-hour work day, with Saturdays as well as Sundays off."

"We'll see, love. This run that you're planning to make to the hills, that has to be done at night, doesn't it?"

"I think it would be best. You said that they would be working on the tanks until midnight, at least. I'll have to figure on bailing out right after dark and spending a few uncomfortable days in the rocks. Judging from the technology of those busses, the Serbians don't have anything sophisticated that they didn't get from us, and if you fine ladies can cover for me, I don't think that I'll be in any real danger."

"Very well, though in the meanwhile, we'll see if some better opportunity occurs. For now, everything that can be done is being done, your body needs more time to heal, and I think that we've both earned a day off. What would you like to do with it?"

"I'd like to spend it with Kasia, of course, but that's impossible. Barring that, I've been thinking that there is something to be said for poor Zuzanna's idea about dreaming a world worth living in. How good are your historical memories? What say you and I and Eva take a tour through the ancient world, not as it was, but as it should have been. Let's see Babylon, and Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Rome, but have everything clean, without fleas, flies, or bleeding slaves. And no language barriers, either. Could you manage to do that?"

"I think it could be arranged," she said.

We spent the morning visiting the royal court of Nebuchadnezzar, touring the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens, and being treated by everyone as though we were minor gods on a political junket.

The afternoon was spent being rowed down the Nile on a lavishly decorated barge propelled by a hundred naked ladies, and stopping on occasion to see some of the other sights.

The nudity didn't bother me since it was historically authentic. Most Ancient Egyptians didn't put on clothes except for official functions or having their portraits painted.