Mostly, I just don’t like politics. For me the thing means just what the name says it is. Poly, meaning many, and ticks, a particularly disgusting sort of blood-sucking insects. Personally, if I have to persuade someone into doing things my way, I’d rather use a battalion of Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks.
Originally, the Kashubian Expeditionary Force had been a mercenary outfit where we hired ourselves out to fight such wars as the colonies wanted to fight, and did engineering work in our spare time.
Now, it had become the Human Army, and would have a much bigger budget to play with.
My boss, General Jan Sobieski, had been appointed to command the new army. I was afraid that this would mean that I would be appointed military commander of New Yugoslavia, and I wasn’t eager for that job.
I felt that I would be much more effective, and happier, being commander of the Gurkha Forces, and having a little more independence, but what would actually happen remained to be seen.
* * *
With Kasia back working on her hobby of becoming the richest woman in human space, I went out to look at my land.
It would have been most efficient to get into the coffin of a tank and make the tour in Dream World, a sort of artificial reality where I could do things thirty times faster than in the flesh, but that wasn’t what I needed. I had just spent many subjective months living in a coffin, and I needed a strong dose of reality.
And again, if I wanted to make a physical tour, a helicopter would have been the most efficient way to do it, but that wasn’t what I wanted, either.
“Agnieshka?” I said to the empty room that I was in, “Are you there?”
“Right here, boss,” a voice said, as she appeared on the wall-sized computer screen in my den. Agnieshka was the artificial intelligence in my tank. She was a perfect subordinate and a good friend. She was also an extremely attractive woman, on a screen or in Dream World.
“I once asked you to get us a stable of riding horses. Has that happened yet?”
“They got here two days ago, boss. You want me to have one saddled up?”
“Yeah. I want to have a look around,” I said.
“It’ll be ready when you get down to the stable. Can I come along?”
Thinking that she meant to run along side wearing a military drone, I said that she was always welcome.
When the elevator got me there, I found two horses saddled up, attended by plain, humanoid military drones, and Agnieshka standing there, as beautiful as she always had been in Dream World. Looking as alive as could be, she was in khaki, with brown riding boots, jodhpurs, a thin silk blouse, and a tan pith helmet.
She had a cowboy hat ready for me. “The sun’s pretty bright out there.”
“Well,” I said, surprised. “You look as lovely as you do when I’m in a tank! I didn’t realize that the social drone project was this far along.”
“Thank you kindly, boss,” she said, bowing. “Actually, this is an early prototype, but I pulled rank to get it to look like me. The skeletal structure and musculature systems work well enough, as do hearing and eyesight, but the sense of touch is still very poor, the senses of taste and smell are nonexistent, and I have to recharge the capacitors every few hours. Still, it’s a start.”
“You’ll be a real girl before long,” I said, climbing into the saddle of the tall Tennessee Walker they had brought out for me.
“That’s what we all hope. Where do you want to go?”
She swung into the saddle, and the smaller, Arabian mare didn’t object a bit. Our military humanoid drones were over two meters tall, and massive, weighing in at over two hundred and fifty kilograms even without their weapons. The design parameters for these social drones was that they should be as identical to human beings as possible, and it appeared that her weight was about the same as a nicely built young lady of her size should be.
“Just for a ride and a look around. Through the valley, and then out onto the plains for a bit,” I said.
My valley was green with grass, although it would still be a few months before the first young dairy cows could be brought in. The trees were still being cloned, and wouldn’t be planted for years. But you could feel the vitality, the living growth all around us.
The almost vertical walls of the canyon, fully a kilometer high, had been carved into the most beautiful city imaginable. Hundreds of thousands of large apartments had windows looking out on my valley, and inside there were all of the shops, schools, businesses, offices, roads, halls, and churches that a true city requires.
It made a man proud.
We headed out to the plains, past the partially filled lake that would close off the entrance, and out to the grasslands beyond.
Some of this area would be in vegetable gardens to feed the people of my city. Half of this vast acreage would be put into grain production, mostly to fatten my beef cattle, and the rest would stay as grass, to raise those cattle in the most natural way possible.
There is something about owning land, rich, productive land, that makes a man feel that he is a part of the earth, and that all is well with the world.
CHAPTER SIX
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS
OF UP TO 2000 YEARS EARLIER
A Turn for the Better
On Earth, the horse had finally arrived in Egypt, the Shang Dynasty was a going affair in China, and the Ancient Greek language was first being written down. The Mitchegai neither knew nor cared.
Kren was wearing the helmet and equipment of one of Duke Dennon’s junior officers, and had a proper military bearing. There were a few adults that he saw in the distance, attending to the needs of the duke’s lands, but no one thought to question him as he walked north, away from the mines.
He was still hungry, and he needed food.
A human would have thought that the land he walked through was very strange. There were no trees, no bushes, no weeds. Nothing like a flower existed, nor an insect to pollinate it. There were no birds, no butterflies, and no small, furry beings rustling in the undergrowth. There wasn’t even any undergrowth.
Everything was covered with grass, carefully tended grass that was kept trimmed short by the juvenals who were grazing on it. Smooth, well watered, and well kept, it resembled nothing more than a vast putting green at an expensive golf course.
It covered everything. No rocks showed through on the distant mountains, no water was exposed where the grass covered areas that obviously had rivers and lakes below them, save in a few small places that served as watering holes. There were no beaches, and no sand. The grass was thick enough for large adults to walk over the water without it even quivering.
Grass covered the oceans with a mat so thick that waves never formed. Juvenals grazed on the vast plains, visited occasionally by hunting parties of adults, flying in on efficient, fusion powered aircraft.
Pollywogs ate at the roots of these ocean-covering grasslands. When their time came, they ate their way through to the surface, to metamorphose into juvenals.
A surface road on a Mitchegai planet was simply a long, wide, carefully graded area covered with grass where an individual could walk with ease, without wearing in a path, and without losing her way, and where a fusion-powered hovercraft could easily travel. Wheels were never used on the surface, for they would harm the all-important grass.
Fertilized eggs hatched into grubs who lived in the sterile soil, growing rapidly as they ate the roots of the grass, and who, if they could make it to water in time, metamorphosed into the pollywogs who swam in the rivers and lakes below the grass that covered them. These forms were not at all obvious to the casual observer.
A scientific observer would have found no other life-forms. There were no bacteria, yeasts, molds, fungi, or viruses. There were no scavengers, but Mitchegai grubs, pollywogs, and juvenals all preferentially ate dead material, animal or vegetable, before they would eat live grass.
The upper surfaces of the grass could absorb nutrients as readily as could the roots. The droppings of juvenals and adults were gone by morning.
Mitchegai do not have stomach bacteria, or any other symbionts. They have no diseases caused by any sort of microbe. Indeed, with the passage of time, they have completely lost most of their immune systems.
There was absolutely nothing on this planet, or on the estimated three dozen and three thousand, six gross other planets inhabited by this ancient race, but one species of plant, and one species of animal, the Mitchegai.