The War With Earth (6 page)

Finally, absolutely bored with obvious generalities, I had to ask him to get down to specifics. What did he actually have that was for sale?

It turned out that he had a great surfeit of riches. He had everything in the whole damned country for sale, except for the surface roads, the public parks and utilities, and the government buildings. It seemed that every realtor in the country, or maybe on the whole planet, was tied into the same computerized multilisting service. Furthermore, almost every Croatian was willing to sell just about everything he owned, if he could just find somebody to pay him more for it than it was worth.

But only slightly more.

The law in New Croatia required every landowner in the country to figure out what he thought his land was worth, and to submit that figure to the Land Index. He was then taxed, based on his own evaluation.

However, if somebody offered to buy the land, he either had to sell it at the price that he himself had set, or to increase his evaluation by at least five percent.

I thought that it was a clever system, since it completely eliminated the need for government appraisers, and all of the expense, fraud, and corruption that they naturally entailed.

One whole wall of the man's large office was a wall screen, a computerized display screen. With a joy stick for control, you could look at the land from any distance above it, making the scale of the map whatever you wanted it to be.

You could color code it according to any of hundreds of schemes, from alfalfa, productivity, tons per hectare, to zebras, probable productivity if any were ever actually introduced. Or by rainfall, or price, or fertility index. Every single piece of property, from apartment buildings to wilderness land, and everything in between, had a description written up on it, with photos. Who owned it, what it was being used for, what the taxes were, and when they had last been paid.

Failing to pay your taxes for three years got your land automatically sold to the highest bidder. Your back taxes and a penalty were paid, and you got whatever was left over. That saved the government the cost of a lot of tax collectors.

When I asked, I found out that taxes were the reason the government had built the database in the first place, although now they made a profit on it, renting it to realtors.

I gritted my teeth and dug into the Land Index. What I wanted was fairly simple. Just a big piece of farming and ranching land, cheap.

The realtor was remarkably patient with me, and my translator seemed to have all the time in the world, so I spent the next four hours sorting through information, tons of it, if electrons had weighed anything.

The realtor finally said, "You know, sir, there was a time when amazing bargains could be found in real estate. That was back before the days of central data files, when the seller might not know the value of what he owned. Those days are sadly gone. Now, every bit of land is like a blue chip stock on the Exchange. Depending on the market, values might go up or down by a few percent, but that's about it. Even a supercomputer couldn't find a great bargain now."

Exhausted, I looked at him, and daylight dawned in the swamp.

"Indeed," I said. "Well, it happens that I have such a computer. We'll see."

I punched up Agnieshka.

"Can you get into the real estate computer?"

"Sure, boss. He's a nice kid, but dumb. What do you want?"

"I want some land, of course! You know. Something like what I used to think I had. Find me the closest thing to it on the market that I can afford."

"Right, boss. Have a cup of coffee. This might take a little while. The kid isn't too swift."

The realtor said, "That was really a computer? Remarkable. But I should warn you that the Land Index is on a high-security government computer, for obvious reasons. No one but certified government programmers can get into it directly."

My reply was cut off when Kasia came into the office, followed by what was obviously a female version of my attendant-translator. My bride-to-be was dressed like the other women I'd seen in the streets, with mesh stockings that stopped ten centimeters below her micro skirt, a transparent blouse, and entirely too much makeup. Her long, red wig wasn't bad, though, and I'd been around her way too long to do something stupid like complaining.

I said, "Darling, you look stunning!"

"You are a liar, but I love you for it."

"I am not. Stunning is exactly the right word. I'm truly stunned. Okay, perhaps I don't like that style on most of the women I've seen in the street, but on you it's really . . .  intriguing."

"You can see why they made him the general," she said to the others. "He keeps his bases carefully covered. This is the real estate office?"

Agnieshka came on line, speaking through the real estate computer.

"Boss, I've been through all the files in New Croatia, and this is the best I can find for you."

The display zoomed in on an area about eight hundred kilometers from Nova Split. It showed a small valley with very poor connections to the surface road system. There were no utilities of any kind within fifty miles. And it only contained about six hundred hectares, with half of that being mountains.

"It's a lot smaller than I'd hoped," I said. "That's the best you could do?"

"It's the biggest you can afford, boss, and the fertility index isn't the best."

The realtor broke in with, "First off, that's a very good price for that large a piece of land. If you don't want to buy it, I just might, as an investment. Second, you don't have to pay cash for land. You need only pay about ten percent down. I can easily arrange for a low-interest loan to cover the rest. Your credit rating is excellent, and the land itself is good collateral."

"I don't like the idea of going into debt," I said.

"And we don't have to," Kasia said, sitting down next to the joy stick, and zooming the map up to a big red area to the northeast of the country. "What's the story about this area?"

"Oh, madam, you can't be serious. For one thing, that area is all desert, and virtually uninhabitable. And worse, that is where The War is going on! What little of it that was in private hands has all been bought back by the government, and no one in their right mind would want to buy it, even if it was for sale, which it isn't."

"I see," she said. "Would the rest of you mind leaving my future husband and me alone for a few minutes? We have some private business to discuss."

The three of them were most cordial, and filed immediately out.

"Wouldn't it be nicer if all our neighbors spoke Kashubian rather than Croatian, darling?" Kasia asked.

"I suppose that it would be, my true love, but you are talking about worthless desert land that isn't for sale, anyway."

"I'm talking about land that has the finest roads and utilities in the universe! We just built them, remember? It may be dry now, but a hundred meters below the surface it is criss-crossed with high-pressure water lines, six meters in diameter! Properly irrigated desert land is more than twice as productive as ordinary farm land, since the sun is shining every day. And there are sewage lines down there that will be filled with stuff that can be processed into first-rate fertilizer! That's if we ever need it. Desert land is usually pretty fertile as it is."

"Fine. But it isn't for sale!"

"Not to Croatatians, or anybody else from New Yugoslavia. The New Croatian government deeded it to New Kashubia, as a small part of what they owe us for putting on their 'war.' After all, once the war is over, they can't let anybody find out what really happened, can they? The plan is that toward the end of the war, we will start slinging theoretical nukes at each other, and the battlefields will become permanently radioactive. That's in addition to all the land mines, vaporized osmium, and other bad things that wars leave lying around. The whole territory will be permanently off limits to everyone, except to us Kashubian veterans, who will, in theory, be guarding it for reasons of public safety."

"Why can't somebody just use one of our new highways, and drive in there?" I asked. "We might be able to maintain a perimeter, but we could never cover every square kilometer of that large a territory."

"Because all of those new, underground 'Loways' are computer controlled, and we own the computers. We're calling them that, now, since we can hardly call something forty meters below ground a 'Highway,' can we?"

"But, if we turn all that area into irrigated farm land, they'll be able to see it from space."

"When they started this 'war,' they really did shoot down every satellite in orbit, to keep the wrong people from spying on what was really going on. Nobody goes into space any more, except for the military, which is us. Everybody else uses transporters from one planet surface to another."

"After the war is over, surely they'll be putting satellites up again, for communications, if nothing else."

"Why? Our underground communications net is cheaper, faster, more secure, and will have ten times more carrying capacity than they will ever need, even if every person on the planet is in Dream World."

"Weather satellites?"

"They've been getting along just fine for four and a half years using ground stations. The weather on New Yugoslavia is very predictable, anyway."

"Then they can fly over it."

"That's forbidden because of the radiation danger. If their plane isn't computer controlled, we'll have to scramble some of our own aircraft and force them down, for their own good, of course."

"And this will go on forever?" I asked.

"Yep. Meanwhile, we get to buy the land, tax free and cheap."

"How cheap?"

"You wanted the six thousand hectare ranch you thought you had in Dream World? Well, with half of your back pay, and none of mine, I've found a nice plot that covers fifteen thousand hectares! That's probably more that we'll ever get under cultivation, but our grandchildren will appreciate the gesture."

"That much! A tanker's pay must be pretty good!"

"It is, but I got us a better deal, yet. That's one of the other things I did yesterday. I explained to the Powers That Be that if they wanted us to go around pretending to be officers, they had to pay us full officer's wages, or it just wouldn't work. We are each getting a year and a half of back pay as tankers in various grades, and then three years back pay as a general and a colonel, like the movie showed us to be, and we will continue drawing it for the next six months, while we're on leave. Then, we both go back into the service as Tanker Firsts, but become officers again on all of our future leaves. That's the best deal I could wrangle."

"It's better than anything that I could have ever pulled off. I'm marrying one sharp little girl! So show me this land."

I guess Agnieshka had been talking to Kasia's tank, Eva, because the viewpoint of the screen zoomed up over the map, and then down, showing a major hunk of land, over twelve kilometers north to south, and fifteen east to west. Then the screen turned into what looked like a movie taken from a low-flying aircraft. Doubtless, it was a Dream World creation translated into television by one of our tanks. It showed a large valley, almost completely surrounded by granite cliffs, over a kilometer high. There were a half-dozen kilometer-tall, flat-topped prominences scattered about the plain, some of them quite slender. It vaguely reminded me of Monument Valley, in the United States, back on Earth.

"It looks lovely, if a bit dry," I said. "But, you know, it looks as if there might once have been a river running through it."

"There was, and there will be again. Proper irrigation requires drainage," Kasia said. "You like?"

"I love! Where do you want me to build the house?"

"Right here."

Our view flew over to one side of the valley, and hovered, looking at the cliff face.

"You want me to build you something hanging on to the side of a cliff?"

"Not hanging on. Cut in. That's solid granite, which has ten times the compressive strength of concrete. Deep radar scans show that it's flawless. I want you to carve us a beautiful house right into the side of this cliff. It will give us a marvelous view of our land, and it's directly above a high-speed Loway interchange."

The view rotated to show a magnificent view from perhaps a kilometer above the valley floor. A small portion of the screen showed a map of the property with colored overlays of the road and utility systems. She had definitely picked the right spot.

"Baby, you want it? You got it! With a couple of Mark XIX tanks, and the right attachments, I can carve you out a castle if that would please you."

"I'd been thinking of leaving it as natural looking as possible, with just some big windows and a few balconies showing from the outside. But maybe a castle would be nice, too. We'll have to talk it over. But do you want the land?"

"Definitely!"

"Good, since I've already put a deposit on it."

"Uh, okay. What else have you been doing with all of your spare time?"

"Mostly the important things, like getting the wedding organized! Darling, we are going to have to push the date back four days, to give everybody time to get here from New Kashubia. This is shaping up to be the major social event of the year!"

Well, if you marry a smart girl, you have to expect things like that. I figured that I'd survive.

I had the computers swooping us over my new land, showing what it would look like once we got the irrigation system in, once the grass was growing, and once we got the trees growing in some areas.

The realtor came in, politely asked if he might have his office back, and said that his office computer had never done things like that before. Agnieshka told him that it would from now on, and if he ever needed another search done, she had left her number in his machine. This was a sort of consolation prize for him, since we wouldn't be buying any land through him.

"My wife-to-be has already put a deposit on another bit of land," I told him.

He said that that was fine, since it left him free to buy for himself the land our computer had found. He said that he considered it to have been a very profitable afternoon.