A Boy and His Tank (27 page)

I said, "I see. All we can learn here is what you, the Combat Control Computer, already know."

"Yes, although to what extent
I
am the Combat Control Computer is a rather philosophical question. I assure you that I don't feel like a computer. It seems to me that I am as normal a human being as any of the rest of you. Or perhaps I have simply been programmed to respond that way. I don't let it bother me and neither should you. Simply take things as they appear to be, and you'll get along fine."

"What other things can't we do here?" Maria asked.

"I think that I'll leave that as an exercise for the student. Listen up, class. You are each to think up three impossible things before breakfast tomorrow."

The professor was like that. Questions were often answered with bigger questions and had an assignment thrown in. But we all learned that if you didn't ask questions, you were in bigger trouble yet.

The north half of the campus was surrounded by a wilderness of woods, meadows, and streams, cut through with walking paths and bridle trails. The south half was taken up by the Town, a city of perhaps five thousand people who didn't seem to do much but supply goods and services to the University. I mean, there wasn't any industry or even farming going on. But then, you really don't know what most of the people do in most of the cities you pass through. They all seem to be going about their own private errands.

There were a lot of book shops, clothiers, restaurants, and taverns about, and the professor admitted to being partial to one of them in particular.

"Should any of you ever need a drinking companion, I can generally be found in the tap room of the Old Phoenix. They brew quite a nice porter there."

Our own homes were in a line just west of the campus, with the town to the south and the forests starting immediately north.

"My own home is in line with yours, and I should like to extend a permanent invitation to each one of you. Just drop by any time the mood strikes you. For now, though, it's time for your tutorial sessions, so we'd best return to my offices on campus."

He had six offices, and was waiting in all of them for us. I looked into three of them before I noticed that my name was on one of the doors.

"Confusing, isn't it?" Said the second Professor Cee as he pointed me to the next room over.

I sat down at a desk that was identical to the one I used in the classroom. Even the pencils were in the same position.

"It actually is the same desk," he said. "It also magically appears in your den at home whenever you are there. The purpose is simply to save you the bother of hauling your study materials about. Pretend that there is a secret crew of furniture movers, if you wish."

"That doesn't trouble me, sir, but how can you possibly talk to all six of us at once?"

"I really don't know, my boy. To me, it seems that I give each of you a tutorial in turn, but the electronics and the programming of it all are quite beyond me. I could have one of the mathematics professors talk to you about it if you wish."

"You mean that you yourself don't know how you're programmed, or how your circuits work?"

"Why on earth should I? Can you tell me about the precise chemical reactions presently going on in your own hypothalamus? Or which of your brain's neurons are presently firing and to what purpose? Why should an individual be bothered with such trivia?"

"I don't know, but shouldn't
somebody
know what's going on?"

"There are subroutines that are presently taking care of all the internal maintenance that is required by the Combat Control Computer. Some other personality is currently monitoring what is going on in the outside world, and will notify us if our attention is required. But certainly none of this is important to the task at hand, and we shouldn't be bothered with it any more that you should be bothered with keeping your own heart beating. It is sufficient that you be notified if it should cease doing so."

"Uh, I suppose so."

"Good. Now, first I want to ascertain your current knowledge of world history. . . ."

Kasia was already home when I got back to our cottage, and she'd been busy. The place was bigger now, with one wing that held two study dens as well as a considerable library and another that held rooms for Agnieshka and Eva, our "servants." I noticed that the servants' rooms each had a door to the outside, so that they could come and go without bothering us. Why this was needed when anyone could flick in or out without bothering with doors was beyond me, but all three of my ladies seemed to be satisfied with the arrangements. Before long, Eva and Agnieshka had decorated their own rooms to suit themselves. Was this just more window-dressing, or did their programs really have an esthetic sense? They
said
they did, but that too could be just more of the same window-dressing.

"It looks like we'll be doing a fair amount of entertaining, so I think that the living room and the dining room should be enlarged, don't you think, dear?"

"Whatever makes you happy, but, you know, I sort of like it the way it is."

"You men never like to see the furniture rearranged! My mother told me that. Okay, we'll leave these the way they are and build a bigger living room and dining room where the front yard is. Then we'll move the whole place back thirty or forty meters to set it off nicely from the road."

"Love, that will put the house in the middle of the lake!"

"So we'll move the lake back fifty meters. We'll call the old dining room the breakfast room, and the old living room the family room."

"How can we have a family room without a family? You know, that's another thing we can't do in Dream World."

"Then you only have to think up two more before breakfast." She saw my expression and came over into my arms. "Oh, Mickolai, I didn't mean to be flippant. I mean, you don't really want children right now, do you?"

"Oh, not right now, in Dream World, but eventually, well, of course!"

"And so do I, eventually. But even if we were living in the real world, I think that I would want to wait a while, until the war was over, you know."

"So we'll call the old living room the rumpus room, and we might as well start rumpussing in it right now." I picked her up and carried her to the couch.

And that started our eight-year long career as college students.

The course was challenging, and it took everything we had to keep up. While the arts and sciences were not totally neglected, our schooling was heavy on strategy, tactics, military history, and military engineering. There was a major emphasis on quickly solving unusual problems. Yet it was interesting, and looking back, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

At the time, though, it was often hurried, hectic, and hairy!

Kasia had hit it off quite well with Eva while they were an observer and tank team, and in time she began to like Agnieshka as well.

Agnieshka and Eva fell into the role of servants without any difficulty, and since I am a monogamist by nature, there weren't any of the explosions that might usually be caused by a situation where one man was living with three beautiful women.

Agnieshka still gave the best backrubs, though, and all three of them made a habit of dressing, around the house at least, entirely too scantily.

I tried to correct this exhibitionism of theirs, but to no avail. Women all say that they dress to please men, but it is a lie. Women dress as part of a status game they play with other women.

The opposite is also true. Men do not dress to please women. They dress solely to establish their status with other men, although most of them are not conscious of it. And a man who has been dressed "nicely" by a woman, be she his mother, wife, or girlfriend, is regarded by other men as a wimp, someone who can't be trusted.

In the same way, in the very rare case of a woman who was dressed by a man, be it her father, her husband, or her boyfriend, other women will think of her as either a slut or a klutz, depending on which extreme he had dressed her in.

Men generally notice a woman's clothing and hairdo simply to be polite to them. They really don't give a damn what a woman wears, so long as it doesn't arouse him at a time when he doesn't want to be aroused, and it doesn't embarrass them in front of other men.

Men don't like to see a woman change her hair any more than they like her to rearrange the furniture. A lack of change in unimportant things gives the typical man a sense of security.

When women force a man, kicking and screaming, into going shopping with them, they do not really want his advice. At most, they want him to simply agree with them, to establish their dominance over him, and to get him to pay the bill.

And no man ever
really
wanted a woman to go shopping with him.

But be that as it may, before too long both of our servants started developing outside interests among the boys at the college. At least they appeared to. What they did, if indeed they did anything, when they were out of my sight wasn't any of my business, and I never pried. Yet I wonder, could it be that they were in Dream World as much as I was? Were they
real
, as Kasia and I were real, or were they simply convenient background props?

In truth, I am no longer sure just what
real
is.

Saturdays were often like being back in a tank again with a war going on, but now I knew that we wouldn't really die, and it was usually fun.

We started out with small unit tactics, with the six of us fighting some other group under the professor's tutelage. Later on, we got to commanding larger and larger units in battles, and I won far more often than not.

And it wasn't all fighting with modern equipment. Our first Saturday was spent in a tropical jungle doing in another naked tribe with Stone Age weapons. We even had to chip out our own flint spearheads!

Then, a few weeks later, we were all in period costumes, fighting the Battle of Zama between Hannibal and Scipio Africanus during the Second Punic War. Only
this
time, the Carthaginians had
me
commanding their armies, and we won.

Sundays were anything that anyone thought might be interesting, from mountain climbing to visiting museums, and since my fellow "real" students were all fairly clean-cut, we often did things together.

Maria and "Conan" hit it off fairly well with each other, and soon became as inseparable as Kasia and I were. Before long they moved in together, and one of the houses in our row simply vanished.

Quiet, polished Neto turned out to be quite a ladies man, and he cut a major streak through the girls of both town and gown. He rarely showed up with the same one twice.

Mirko was more of a loner, though, and only rarely participated in group entertainments. Even then, he usually came alone. As a hobby, he converted a few hectares of wilderness into a small farm, and worked it in the old-fashioned way, doing the plowing with horses. He claimed that food he grew himself tasted better, Dream World or no Dream World. His servant started out as a version of Eva, but soon was metamorphosed into a big, stoic farmer's wife. It takes all kinds, I suppose.

But the five of us who were sociable generally did something together on our Sunday afternoons, along with such other "people" as were invited along any by one of us. Things ranged from skydiving to jousting to ballroom dancing, depending on whose turn it was to plan the entertainment.

It was an interesting life, with plenty of things happening, but it wasn't the sort of thing that anyone else would want to hear about in detail. The best I can say is that it was always springtime, and that the years went smoothly by.

One thing worth mentioning, since it touched so strongly on what we were doing on the planet, was a lecture the professor gave us on the history of Yugoslavia, along with the root causes of the war we were presently fighting.

The problem started off during the time of ancient Rome, when the area that would later be called Yugoslavia was called Dalmatia. This mountainous, rugged country was populated by a number of somewhat Christianized Germanic tribes, who looked enviously across the Adriatic. They attacked the empire, not so much to destroy Rome, but to become Romans themselves. When the City of Rome fell, along with the western half of the empire, it was taken by German tribesmen, many of whom came from Dalmatia.

For the Germans, living was good in the newly conquered lands that later became France, Italy, Spain, and north Africa. The climate was wonderful, the land was bountiful, and the peasants welcomed their new masters, since German taxes were usually much less than the old Roman taxes had been.

Soon, Dalmatia and the other formerly German lands were almost completely depopulated, sitting there totally empty. The world abhors a vacuum, especially when, in the Slavic areas that later became Bohemia and Slovakia, there was considerable population pressure.

There followed a basically peaceful migration of South Slavs south into empty Dalmatia. Whole towns and villages would come to the consensus that they should move south, and they would do it, traveling all winter so as to be able to get at least some crops planted in the spring. At other times, towns, either alone or in partnership with other villages, would send out half of their people as colonists, many of them younger sons and daughters. They came in groups, or more rarely as individuals, and continued in their ancient lifestyles, mostly as pagan subsistence farmers. Centuries went by in relative peace.

By the eighth century, Rome had recovered, not as a political power, but as a religious one. Missionaries were sent out to convert the heathen, and the nearest of these unfortunates lived in the northern part of Dalmatia, known as Croatia.

At about the same time, the Roman Church held a major council in which it was decided that women were indeed human. The issue won by one vote.

In the east, the Roman Empire never fell, since a century before the city of Rome was conquered, the Roman Empire divided itself into two halves. This was supposed to be purely for administrative purposes, but when Rome the city was sacked, the Eastern emperors tried to pretend that it hadn't happened.