“Having participated in a number of them, would you mind if I disagreed with that opinion?” Kren said, playing his role to the hilt.
“Disagree all you like. That’s what makes parties fun,” Sava replied.
Zoda said, “They may not be fun for those who must fight them, but they are tremendously exciting for those who don’t. And it’s the ones far behind the lines who start the wars, direct the wars, and profit from the wars. But from a larger perspective, wars have other advantages. They eliminate surplus populations. The grass has to be trimmed and eaten, or it will turn rank.”
Bronki said, “More importantly, they eliminate the ruling class of the losing side, and their ancient brains along with them. When the brain gets too old, it often gets too set in its ways. The artisans, the academics, and the soldiers have their own ways of eliminating the inefficient among them, but warfare is the only dependable method of doing this with the aristocracy.”
“I’ll have to think on that,” Kren said.
The conversation drifted through six dozen subjects, with several surprises and a lot of laughter.
Later, Sava asked, as she crunched on a bit of ankle bone that she had bitten off, “Tell me, Kren, how was it that you learned the language of Keno?”
“In truth, I never did learn it, in the ordinary way of speaking. During the last war, another division took so many casualties at one point that they could not give them all a proper sendoff, and my unit helped them out a bit. I’d never met the soldier that my squad ate, but the next day, I found myself speaking Keno. I never learned how our dinner happened to know it, because shortly thereafter, we were attacked, I was hospitalized, and most of my squad was killed. Then it was the other division’s turn to help us out.”
“You make it sound like a very adventurous life.”
“Adventurous? I suppose so, but being an academic sounds much more interesting to me,” he said as he flayed the skin off the girl’s lower leg.
The girl moaned and cried in the most delightful fashion until they had her trimmed down to her upper body cavity and head. Then they played the finger game, a variation on the human game of scissors-paper-rock, to determine who would get the brain, and Sava won.
Lastly, they tore the rest of her apart with their claws, ate it all, and licked up the blood. Then they each went to their separate bedrooms and locked the doors, laughing all the while.
Falling asleep, Kren marveled once more at how wonderful intelligent, civilized company was.
CHAPTER NINE
A Good Party
New Kashubia, 2205 a.d.
It was a good party. The people from the Command Center had more experience with socializing than us soldiers from the sticks, and it showed. By people, I mean both humans and artificial intelligences. We considered ourselves to be equals, despite what the laws outside of the army might say. In time, we would prevail.
Dream World permitted a very wide range of human activities, since no matter what you did, you couldn’t get addicted, hung over, diseased, injured, or dead. If an emergency occurred, you could go from being roaring drunk to dead sober in an instant.
A few people were experimenting with just about every drug known to man, and tobacco was making a considerable comeback, but most people stayed with alcohol and eschewed the rest.
Someone told me that the band contained only two humans, the rest being AI. I watched, but I couldn’t tell one from the other. The sound level was always just right. If you wanted to dance, you could always hear the beat. If you wanted to talk, you could always hear what was being said. Dream World had a lot of advantages.
Soon, some couples were dancing on the walls and ceiling, but after my first startled glance, it seemed to be fairly normal to me. A few people had been turning this sort of thing into a real art form, though, and one couple in particular, dancing in midair under the high ceiling, got a long round of applause.
Mostly, parties are places where people get together to talk, drink, socialize, meet new people, drink, exchange ideas, argue, drink, and occasionally fight to the death. As it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be.
My crew had a fine time. Agnieshka was soon wearing a vaguely Napoleonic outfit made of tight-fitting red and white silk, knee-high boots, lots of gold braid, a very ornate sword, and about as much décolletage as the law will ordinarily allow.
She claimed that it was the official full undress uniform for Army majors. A few other metal ladies, presumably majors themselves, copied her outfit. Soon, something even more audacious was invented for captains, and then a few hundred new tanker class A’s outdid them all with something that I don’t feel comfortable describing.
Our metal ladies could break into well-choreographed dances at a moment’s notice, and did so several times that evening, doing an impromptu fifty-girl Rockette High Kick at one point.
Kasia and I danced on the floor, the walls and the ceiling, but we didn’t feel up to competing with those athletes working out in midair. Eva, Kasia’s tank, and Timothy, Zuzanna’s, were up there doing a credible job, though.
Quincy was demonstrating hand-to-hand combat techniques to someone who knew a lot less about fighting than he thought he did. Quincy killed him four times that I noticed. He was a persistent fellow. It hurts to die, even in Dream World.
Professor Cee was sitting around a table with six other identical Professor Cees, all wearing Harris tweed, all drinking single malt scotch, and all discussing something in a language that no one else had ever heard before.
A half dozen bloody duels happened in the course of the evening. Eventually, somebody circulated with a pad of note paper, taking a vote to determine who had died the most noble death of the evening. They gave the award to the guy that Quincy had repeatedly killed.
For no reason that I could discern, Conan was demonstrating how apes climb trees. Someone was sticking his tongue into Zuzanna’s ear, and Maria declared that she was in love with whoever it was who was running his foot up her leg.
And Kasia ended up with a few like-minded ladies, sitting around drunk on champagne and reciting from memory the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Like I said, it was a good party. Only, I wanted to get to the business meeting. We were at war?
CHAPTER TEN
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
Bargains Kept
The next day, Sava stayed to help Bronki on her book, and Zoda, lacking anything better to do, stayed too. Bronki’s retreat had two studies, each with a computer. Zoda wanted to get involved and help out, but was stymied for lack of equipment.
Frustrated, she asked Kren to walk with her back to her house and to help her to bring her computer to Bronki’s place. Since he was sick of trying to comprehend even the coarse points of mathematics, he agreed.
It was a pleasant two-hour walk there, and a strenuous three-hour walk back. Zoda’s computer weighed close to two gross pounds. Mitchegai computer technology was vastly inferior to that of late twentieth-century Earth, even after a million years of development.
Creativity is the domain of the young. Since Mitchegai are normally thousands of years old before they have brains enough to do anything technical, they are often very intelligent and extremely learned, but not very creative.
Electronics was also held back because over a million years before, a prominent academician had written a flawless paper absolutely proving that anything like an integrated circuit was totally impossible to make or use. Thereafter, anyone who suggested such a thing was simply regarded as being uneducated, and was treated the way that humans would treat someone who wanted to build a perpetual motion machine.
Kren and Zoda had the computer slung on the same aluminum carrying pole that had been used for bringing in last night’s party snack. Zoda bounced along, carrying her end without apparent difficulty, and Kren was ashamed to admit that he was tired in front of a mere academician. He followed behind her without voicing his complaints.
They were almost back before Zoda explained that the trick of using a carrying pole was to adjust your step to the natural frequency of the weight and the pole. With just the right bounce and timing, the job became much easier.
Kren thanked her for the useful, if belated, information.
Zoda set her equipment up in the last bedroom, and Kren, interested, followed her instructions to connect the components with each other, and with the two other computers. Soon all three academics were working smoothly together, and Kren went back to trying to master elementary mathematics.