“With regards to your training, there will be a lecture and demonstration period five days a week from seven in the morning until noon, with ten-minute coffee breaks at eight and ten. You each will have a private tutorial session with me from three until five in the afternoon. You are encouraged to spend lunch together in the dining room here, and to get to know one another well. Saturdays will be spent on military maneuvers and battle simulations.
“Your Sundays are your own. There will be considerable homework and private study, but the rest of your time will be yours to organize as you wish, except that you are required to spend at least a half hour a day in some sort of physical activity. A sound mind in a sound body, and all that. It needn’t be as rigorous as the PT program for enlisted personnel, however, and almost any sport will do. I’m partial to fencing, myself, and you are all invited to join the school team, if you are so minded. Beginner’s classes are held at two in the afternoon in the gym, starting tomorrow.
“I am available at any time to help you with any problems that you might have. Even during the lecture periods, you can always have me stop and go over anything that you’re unsure of, and while we’re doing that, the others in the class won’t even notice it, since the lectures themselves are rather like recordings that I’ve done up the night before, while you students are sleeping.
“That’s about it, except to say that since we will be operating on a different time scale than the rest of the world, it will be convenient for us to adopt our own separate calendar. For our own purposes, I therefore declare this to be Monday, January second, Year One. It is now local noon, and I suggest that we retire to our dining room.”
We filed out of the small classroom and into a spacious hallway with vaulted Gothic ceilings and decorative armorial crests on the walls.
“Quite a place,” one of my fellow students said.
“I rather like it,” the professor said. “The University and the surrounding area is modeled after the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Not as they actually are, of course, but as they should have been. We call it Oxbridge. Ah, here we are.”
We were ushered into a venerable dining room with a single large table and seven chairs. The decor had an early Renaissance feel to it, but it looked lived in and comfortable.
A pair of young waitresses in conservative black-and-white outfits took our individual orders, and served us soup and salads.
The professor stood and said, “We will be working quite closely together for the next few years, so I imagine that it is time for us to become acquainted on a social level. Mickolai, since you are our general and leader, why don’t you stand and tell us something about yourself.”
“I hope that you don’t mind if I stay seated,” I said. “I’m just not used to being very formal. About me? Well, my name is Mickolai Derdowski. I’m twenty four years old, I’m a Kashubian, and am part of the forces that were hired by the Croatians to defend them from the Serbians. I was born on Earth, and was an engineering student until I was evicted and sent to New Kashubia against my will. I was doing engineering work there before I joined the expeditionary forces. I guess that that’s about all that I can say.”
“Except that you would have graduated cum laude had you been permitted to attend school for three weeks more, and that you are solely responsible for rescuing all of us, and our entire division besides, from the enemy,” the professor said.
“Well, we’re not out of the woods yet,” I said.
“Nonetheless, my boy, we all owe you our heartfelt thanks.” He applauded me and the rest joined in. I felt embarrassed, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“And now you, young lady. From the scene you made in the classroom, we gather that you know our fine young general here. Please tell us something more about yourself,” he continued.
“Well, I’m Katarzyna Garczegoz, but everybody just calls me Kasia. Mickolai and I plan to get married as soon as we can find a Catholic priest. I don’t suppose that any of you . . .”
“I’m afraid not, my dear, nor is there one in the entire division. The Serbians, of course, are Greek Orthodox, and I regret to say that they did not offer any members of the Catholic clergy the option of joining their military.”
“Another thing we can love them for,” Kasia said. “To get back to the introductions, I’m twenty-three, and I hold a degree in Sociology from the University of Warsaw. I was working as an electrician in New Kashubia before I joined the army.”
The professor then invited the other lady at the table to speak, a voluptuous, long-legged blond who looked like she belonged in a good quality men’s magazine with a staple in her navel.
“My name is Maria Buich . . .” she started out.
“Maria Buich! I used to know a Maria Buich. She was my son’s third grade teacher. But she was middle-aged and very overweight,” a big man said from across the table.
“And I know you, Mirko Jubec! You were loud-mouthed and rude five years ago and you are louder mouthed and ruder now! All right! So I’m forty-eight and fat! But we can look however we want to here, and I ask you men, do you want me to look this way or the way I really am?”
“My dear lady, I assure you that we all appreciate the way you have worked to lighten our day with your loveliness,” said a big blond young man with an Arnold Schwarzenegger body. “You ladies are not the only ones with a bit of healthy vanity. It happens that I am seventy-two years old and I have a bad back. But if I can be young and healthy, why shouldn’t I do it?”
“Thank you, sir,” she said with a wink that suggested a later meeting. “As I was saying, I’m forty-eight and I was a schoolteacher before those horrible Serbians invaded our homeland. I was also the school’s bandmaster and the coach of the girl’s field hockey team.”
Schwarzenegger’s name turned out to be Semo Birach, but everybody else seemed to notice his resemblance to the old movie star, since later that day someone called him “Conan,” in honor of Schwarzenegger’s greatest role, and the name stuck. He’d been a fisherman for over fifty years, both on the original Adriatic Sea on Earth and on the one here on New Yugoslavia.
Neto Kondo was a small, wiry sort, with startling red hair and a very quiet disposition. He was thirty one, and before the war, he’d been an agricultural implement repairman. He seemed to see everything and say nothing, and I soon picked him as being one of the brightest of the bunch.
The big boorish fellow, Mirko Jubec, was a farmer, and he looked the part. Thick, solid, and slow moving except when he was in a hurry, he was slow talking on those rare occasions when he opened his mouth without putting food into it. But when he did talk, I found that it was wise to listen, and when he was in a hurry, it was best to not be in his way.
All told, my schoolmates seemed to be a very mixed bag, and I couldn’t help wondering at first why the Combat Control Computer had picked this particular bunch of diverse individuals out of the ten thousand that he had to choose from. It was weeks before I finally realized that they were all remarkably intelligent, they each had a deep-seated moral integrity, and what is more, they all had a very strong killer instinct. These were people who were willing to do whatever was necessary to get the job done, clean and fast, or fast and dirty.
Lunch went pleasantly by, except for the way that Maria kept glaring at Mirko. He’d certainly found the quickest way to rub her in the wrong direction. I had the feeling that something had gone on between them long before the war, but I never found out what it was.
The professor then suggested that we take a walk so that he could show us the campus.
“You’ll find that things here aren’t as changeable as they usually are in Dream World,” he said. “It’s simply that with so many of us using the same environment, it would become entirely too confusing if it tried to adapt itself to each one of us. Your own homes are a different matter, of course. There are about four thousand other students on campus, as well as about eight hundred instructors of one classification or another. You’ll find that our small group is something of an elite, though.”