“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.
Agnieshka said that the rowers weren’t entirely her doing, since a lot of the girls in the surrounding tanks had nothing to do and were dropping in for the fun of it. We were receiving an invitation to attend a banquet at the palace of the High Priest of Sekhmet when I suddenly found myself back in the tank.
“What’s happening?” I said. All around me, thousands of tanks were milling around at breakneck speed, charging this way and that with no apparent purpose or general direction. It was like being in a madhouse filled with mechanical monsters!
“Ha! They did it!” Agnieshka laughed. “You see, unsworn tanks don’t really have much in the way of personalities, or even common sense. They tend to take instructions very literally. A situation happened when one of the guards told one of us in the line to wait a moment, and then was distracted by another guard who came over to talk to him. My sister felt it was completely in character to wait, to stop right there and do nothing for a while. Then the colonel, their highest-ranking man present, noticed the snag in the line and shouted, `Get moving! All of you tanks get moving right now!’ He meant that all of those in the line should go forward, but that wasn’t what he said! He told us all to get moving, so we are all moving, and his order cannot be countermanded by a lesser officer!”
“Then what’s this colonel doing now?”
“Oh, he ran for cover when it all started!”
“But why are you doing this?”
“Watch! You’re not going to have to spend tonight sleeping on a rock, my love.”
I watched. It was a while before someone had the nerve to inform the colonel of what his orders had done, at which time he shamefacedly ordered the tanks to stop where they were.
Then he ordered all of them to return to their original positions, and most of them did. Except now, Agnieshka was in the ranks of the filled tanks, and the filled tank whose place we took was in the assembly area with some confused Serbians around her. The officers were in no mood to listen to anybody, and the filled tank was sent to line up with the others.
All told, it was a lovely, madcap maneuver!
We were all laughing about it when we went back to Ancient Egypt for the priest’s banquet.
Priests back then lived pretty good, and what started out as a formal affair got fairly wild toward the end. The fellow kept a harem of about fifty girls, and while some of them were slaves, quite a few were volunteers.
They spent most of the evening dancing, playing in the band and otherwise entertaining the guests, while he spent his time ignoring them and lecturing to an increasingly small group of people on maat, which has something to do with righteousness, order, and justice, as best as I could tell.
Anyway, it was a good party, with everybody drinking out of huge beer crocks with meter-long straws. One big difference between it and a good Kashubian wedding, except for the costumes, or more often the complete lack of them, were these cones of perfumed jello that you wore on your head. They melted as the night went on and dribbled down your neck and shoulders.
The other major change was in the choice of refreshments. Besides the thigh-high crocks of beer, naked girls brought around trays filled with wines, and most of them were fortified with various extracts.
“This one has been steeped in the buds of the lotus flower,” Agnieshka said. “It’s a mild hallucinogen. The blue cup contains nicotine, an extract of the tobacco plant, a mild stimulant.”
“They drink tobacco? And where do they get it from? I thought that tobacco came from the New World.”
“The idea of inhaling smoke has never occurred to our hosts. Tobacco is a New World product, which is what makes it so expensive. Ancient Egypt’s trading network was much more extensive than you seem to think. The cocaine in the red cup is imported as well, although the cannabis in the brown one is grown locally. Would you like to try any of them?”
I had to think about that one. Drinking nicotine held no attraction for me at all. As to the others, well, I had never tried drugs of any kind, even though they had been available enough around the university, back on Earth. Mostly, I think, I had been afraid of becoming addicted, and of risking my health. But in Dream World, neither of these reasons held water. My real body was actually lying secure in a metal coffin, and couldn’t be harmed by anything short of modern weaponry.
Then why was I afraid of trying something new? Was it simple habit? Fear of psychological addiction? Surely, I was stable enough to not have to worry about that!
Fear of sinning? Drugs were not forbidden in the Bible, any more than was alcohol. And if the Ancient Egyptians knew about all these substances, the Jews of the Old Testament had to have known about them as well.
I couldn’t seem to find a decent rationalization for my hesitancy, but nonetheless, it was there. I went with it. I could always change my mind later.
“No, Agnieshka, I think I’ll pass on this one.”
I stayed with the beer, the unadorned wine, and the naked ladies. Pleasures enough for any man.
We got back to the cottage, and I was just falling to sleep when I was suddenly back in the tank. In Dream World, you can have a buzz on and then be sober in a flash.
“What’s up, Agnieshka?” I said.
“Another change in plans. One of the ammunition trucks isn’t an ammunition truck. It’s a complete Combat Control Computer.”
“A Combat Control Computer? Here? But those things are handed out one to a country! You mean that this is the Combat Control Computer controlling the whole Serbian army?”
“No, it’s a virgin. It might be here by mistake, or maybe the Serbians thought that they needed a backup. But it’s here, and my sisters can’t begin to crack into something that powerful.”
“Is it doing anything? Are the Serbians doing anything? And what time is it, anyway?”
“It’s just sitting there, it’s two in the morning, and the Serbs are mostly asleep, except for a few guards,” she said.
This required some thought.
If the Combat Control Computer was there by mistake, the Serbs might not know about it, and maybe it could be ignored, except that they might swear it in like the rest of the trucks.
If they were planning to use it, they would be putting some of their own people in it, that was certain.
Certainly, a general would have to be trained, just as an observer was. And with the bad guys running the Combat Control Computer, our little game here would be discovered in no time.
There were only two ways about it, then. We either had to get the Combat Control Computer on our side, or we had to destroy it.
“Agnieshka, why couldn’t you get through to the Combat Control Computer? Was it because you didn’t have the right combat codes, or something?”
“No. We have all the codes.”
“You what? I thought that each army had its own secret code!”
“Ordinarily, they do. The original factory programming of a war machine contains all one hundred thousand codes, but the swearing in ceremony erases all of them but the one used by the army doing the swearing in. Then the memory space once used for code storage is available to flesh out the tank’s personality as it develops. But here, well, the virgins naturally had all the codes in them, and it seemed a shame to waste the data. It might come in handy someday. So each of us now has the Croatian code, the Serbian code, and ten of the others, just in case. Between us, the tanks in this division have all of the possible codes. It seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time.”