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.
The Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, lasted for another thousand years, except for falling temporarily in the thirteenth century to the French during the Fourth Crusade (where it was felt to be more profitable to sack a rich Christian city rather than to bother with some poor heathen hovels in the Mideastern desert). Not until the fifteenth century, when the Islamic Turks took Constantinople permanently, did the long saga of Rome come to an end.
So about the time that the Roman Pope was making converts in the north of Yugoslavia, the Metropolitan of Constantinople was doing equally good works in the West, among the Serbians.
The big problem was that in the intervening centuries since the fall of the City of Rome, the two largest branches of Christianity had grown apart in ceremony, in language, and in doctrine. Worse, they disagreed as to who was boss, with both the Pope and the Metropolitan firmly convinced that he was the rightful head of the one true Church. Neither side was about to buckle under to some foreign upstart.