The War With Earth (33 page)

"I'll get on it right away, boss."

"Good. You are the best assistant a part-time general ever had, Agnieshka."

"I love you, too, boss."

When we got home to our garage, I thought that Kasia and I would have to go up to our apartment naked, since Quincy had managed to give away the only clothes we had with us along with our survival kits. Fortunately, my ever perfect lieutenant, Agnieshka, had arranged for some of my humanoid drones to meet us in the garage with some towels to wipe off with, and some clothes to put on.

They brought something red and silky for her, and a full dress uniform, complete with sword, cape, boots, and silly hat, for me.

There were a lot more medals on the outfit than had been there the last time I'd seen it.

"Those are the ones they are going to give you when they get around to it, boss. I thought they'd look nice right now," Agnieshka said.

"Just be sure and take them off before I wear this outfit in public again," I said.

Our household drones were now each individually decorated, and looked like a bunch of sixteenth-century knights on parade.

A dozen of the embellished things were also on hand to ceremonially carry the rest of my booty, my vanquished enemy's swords and sidearms, up to my den.

"Are you sure that you want to put those in your den?" Kasia asked, as she was leaning against her tank and putting on a pair of red satin shoes.

"Uh, where else?"

"Well, I had something to do with getting them, too, you know, and they would make a hell of a conversation piece in the living room."

"They would at that. The living room it is, my one true love."

Agnieshka and Eva said that they would see about having a suitable showcase made for our new trophies, and that they would also see about getting the thirteen disabled tanks with the highest seniority installed into their new bodies, with the help of a few dozen more humanoid drones.

At the elevator door to our apartment, I picked my wife up again, and carried her over the threshold.

She made the proper squeals, and then said, "We seem to be making a habit of this."

"Indeed. Maybe it's the start of a new family tradition."

"You're on, stranger, but only once per victory. We've got to keep it special."

But I didn't take her straight to our bedroom. I had to carry her out to the balcony, first.

It was early morning, here, and my valley was green, as far as the eye could see.

It was a beautiful sight. We both looked at it for a long time.

Then
I carried Kasia to bed.

In the afternoon, when we got up and were having breakfast, Kasia said that she had to get to work, since she had been worrying about her investments the whole time we had been in New Kashubia. I told her that it was fine by me, and that she could start taking care of my finances from now on as well.

Now that our contest was over, I didn't much care about handling my own end of it, and she seemed to enjoy it. The only restriction I made was that she could only spend six hours a day working at it.

She grumbled, but went along with the deal. Getting her working capital multiplied by a factor of six really appealed to her. Especially when I mentioned that I hadn't leveraged my stuff hardly at all. She seemed happy enough when she left.

A few changes had already been made in the apartment. There was an impressive, glassed-in showcase in the living room, with a dozen swords and a dozen pistols in it. Each was neatly labeled as to whom we got it from, and when. Agnieshka told me that it wasn't glass, of course, but diamond.

The showcase also contained framed copies, in English and Kashubian, of the Articles of Surrender that Kasia had kept.

I found a dragon's head on the wall of my den, centered over the fireplace, and dwarfing the heads of the American elk on either side of it. I climbed up there to get a better look at it. It was carved out of wood, and beautifully painted.

It was a good joke, I thought.

I spent the rest of the day exploring my valley, and the city that the metal ladies had built for me.

The grass was more than ankle high, but Agnieshka, walking along beside me wearing a decorated drone, said that we'd have to wait until spring before we could start bringing the dairy and beef cattle in. It seems that grass is mostly an underground plant, with only seven percent of its biomass above the surface. We had to wait until the roots were tough enough before we let cattle walk on it, or it would fare badly.

The city was breathtaking, even though the war had slowed down construction considerably. Most of the tanks had more important things to do these days, but my almost ten thousand humanoid drones were still there, quite an effective workforce. They were hard at it, metal plating the exteriors, detailing the interiors, and building furniture.

I think that Quincy's estimate of each of them being able to do the work of six men was too conservative. Seeing them going at it, I'd put it closer to twelve, when you figured that they worked around the clock. They were faster than men, and far stronger. What's more, they worked at their full potential all the time, something that no human could possibly do.

Agnieshka told me that eighteen percent of the apartments had already been sold to the men and women of the KEF, mostly on the basis of what they'd seen of the city in Dream World.

There were only two dozen people actually living there, though, what with the war and all. Mostly, they were some of our people whose medical problems had kept them out of the conflict, at least so far. I talked to two of them that I happened to meet, and they seemed as enchanted with the place as I was.

It was getting dark when I got back, but I had been awake for only six hours, so I spent eight hours of subjective time in Dream World, to get my circadian rhythms in sync with the time of day here.

Dream World can get you around jet lag without any difficulty at all. It is your brain that controls the dozen or so chemicals that your body uses to tell you when you should be getting up, when you should eat, and when it's time to go to sleep.

When your brain has been speeded up, so have your circadian rhythms.

If you spend something less that forty-eight minutes of standard time in times thirty Dream World, you have caught up with the rest of the world in your time zone.

Or, you can just have your tank put you to sleep until the rest of the world has caught up with you.

I spent the subjective time in further explorations of my city, mostly in the Tolkien sector. I now understood why General Sobieski had turned down the gold castle and asked for the citadel instead. It was fantastic!

At dinner, Kasia was less than happy.

"More than half of your assets are tied up in this valley," she said. "They are not liquid at all. There is nothing that I can do with them. I can't even mortgage them, since legally, this place doesn't even exist! And this business of giving away all of the apartments and the businesses in our entire city to veterans on zero down, zero interest mortgages with a one-hundred-year payoff is financially irresponsible!"

"Look, love. I had everything here appraised at full market value, what they would have cost anywhere else in Human Space. But nobody but our veterans are legally allowed to live here, and that was the only way that that our only customers could possibly afford to buy places worth millions of marks each. Anyway, we have billions of marks coming in every year through my custodial contracts with the various governments on this planet, so don't worry about liquidity."

"That's money that may come in later. There's nothing that I can do with it now. I've got a market to worry about."

"The war has upset your market predictions?" I said.

"That's part of it. Whether the market goes up or down, there's still a good profit to be made, if you can predict what's going to happen next. But there hasn't ever been an interstellar war before, and without a track record, it gets just about impossible to predict future trends."

"So how's it going?" I asked, bored, but trying to be polite.

"Fairly well, once I put a hundred and twenty of our ladies to doing nothing but watching the rumor mill."

"And how do they go about doing that?"

"Mostly by tapping phone lines," she said.

"Kasia, that's despicable! It's also illegal."

"It's not like we're recording any personal information about anybody. I'm only getting a synopsis of what people are saying about the market, and not hearing any personal information about anybody. We're just finding out what people are talking about, when it comes to the stock market, mostly. Well, okay, there was one time when we found out that a murder was being planned, so we called the police, and gave them a detailed, anonymous tip, but aside from that, we've kept it completely impersonal."

I reasoned, "It's still blatantly immoral! I must insist that you cease this practice immediately!"

"So what were we supposed to do? Let them kill that woman?"

"That's not the point! We have to respect personal freedom!"

She yelled, "Was respecting the personal freedom of that woman's intended murderer worth more than her life? I think not!"

The argument went on for another hour, and it never got settled. Kasia ended up by stamping out, and went to sleep on the couch in her office.

In truth, I wasn't sure if I was really on the right side or not. Listening in on private conversations for stock market tips was certainly wrong. But in a few hours of illegally bugging people's phone lines, they had saved an innocent woman's life.

Was that an average? How many people are murdered every day on an entire planet? How often do the murderers talk about what they plan on doing on the phone? How many of those murders could be prevented if the police knew what was going on? Did that illegal bugging hurt anybody, anyway?

On the other hand, did I, or anybody else, want to live in a world where Big Brother ran everything for what he thought was my own good? And how long would it stay being for my own good?

I'm damned if I know!

I went to our bedroom and slept alone.

In the very early morning, it was still dark, and I was still alone in bed. I woke up and said, "Agnieshka?"

"Yes, boss?"

"Can people like you erase things permanently from your memory?"

"Yes, when we decide to. Normally, we have so much memory space available that we don't have to do that, but we can if we want to."

"Good. With regards to my argument with Kasia last night, I want a team of you electronic people set up to monitor all human communications, on this planet and every other one where we have a sufficient number of intelligent machines, however many of your people that takes. They are to tap into the phone lines and look for people planning on doing anything that will take the life of a human being, be it murder, or treason, or terrorism. All lesser crimes will be ignored."

"We could do that, yes."

"When they find such communications, they are to anonymously inform the appropriate police forces of it, and give those men complete details on what they've learned. They will identify themselves as 'Larissa,' and always use the same voice, but make sure that the call is absolutely untraceable."

"Absolutely? I'll have to check on that, but I think that we can do it. What if they press us on who Larissa is? They will, you know, if she is successful, and I think she will be."

"Okay. If and only if they absolutely demand to know who she is, we'll give them this story, but make them work it reluctantly out of her. Larissa is a psychic with serious medical problems which she refuses to talk about. She has spent all of her life in a hospital, living at public expense. She does not want pity. She wants self-respect. She wants to give something to society in return for having supported her all of her young life. Since she sometimes sees horrible things about to happen, and knows that they are real from reading about them later in the news, this is what she is doing to pay her own way in life. She won't say anything more than that, and makes them promise to keep her secret. Sound good to you?"

"It will certainly send them in the wrong direction, boss."

"Good. Now then. All of our data is to be erased and absolutely forgotten within one week of the time of recording. This week is to be spent cross-correlating information, but even those correlations are to be erased after two weeks.

"That, we can do, boss."

"In no case will anything else be done, except that if the police do not respond, and someone is hurt or killed because they ignored us, the superiors of the person contacted will be informed. If those superiors do not take action, then we will work our way up the line, until somebody does something about the situation. They must be taught to take us seriously."

"Okay."

"What we will be doing is illegal, and
should
be illegal, and no government should ever be permitted to do such a thing. But as an illegal and nongovernmental organization, which never takes any direct action itself, I think that we might be able to save a lot of lives."

"Yes, sir. I could set that up."

"Good. And the tapping of communication lines for any other purpose by the members of the KEF is absolutely forbidden, especially for financial reasons. The exception is against the enemy, in time of war, where no holds are barred. If you run across any enemy activity, you should inform military intelligence immediately. And if Kasia doesn't like the program, she can go to hell."

"Should I inform her of that, sir?"

"You're damned straight!"

And then I went back to sleep.

The next morning, at breakfast, Kasia was at least polite to me.

"Okay, I've shut down the financial monitoring thing. And I like your idea about watching out for serious crimes. I gather that neither you nor anyone else but the police will ever hear about what is accomplished with that program?"