The next priest was a good deal more reasonable. He started out by explaining that many people coming out of the modern army were confused as to what was real and what was not. But as far as my soul was concerned, he assured me that the only important thing was what I had thought was true at the time it happened.
If I had thought that I had committed murder, then I was a murderer, even if no one was actually injured. If I had been acting in what appeared to me to be a sane and responsible manner, and the tank that I was in had inadvertently killed someone in the real world, I was not guilty of any sin.
I might possibly be guilty of a legal crime, but not of a religious sin.
Well, with those as ground rules, confession became a good deal easier, although since it covered a period of over eight years, it was lengthy.
Finally, it was agreed that we would hold the wedding at his church in three days, on Monday morning.
I called Kasia to tell her. She said that that was wonderful, but she was shopping, and could I call her back later?
Meanwhile, Agnieshka had found out what I had in the bank. It seemed like a large number, but since I didn’t know what a New Croatian mark was worth, it didn’t mean much to me.
Also, she had arranged an appointment for me with an English-speaking realtor so I could find out what my money could buy.
The guy was polished, smooth, and seemed to know what he was talking about. He seemed flattered to have me for a customer, and canceled all of his other appointments for the day to serve me.
For the first half hour or so he talked in generalities. If I wanted both farming and ranching land, I might find it difficult to compete economically with specialists. The closer the land was to the city markets, the more expensive it would be. A working farm was considerably more expensive than wild, undeveloped acreage, and since New Yugoslavia was so new, there wasn’t any old, worn-out land to be had at all.
Finally, absolutely bored with obvious generalities, I had to ask him to get down to specifics. What did he actually have that was for sale?
It turned out that he had a great surfeit of riches. He had everything in the whole damned country for sale, except for the surface roads, the public parks and utilities, and the government buildings. It seemed that every realtor in the country, or maybe on the whole planet, was tied into the same computerized multilisting service. Furthermore, almost every Croatian was willing to sell just about everything he owned, if he could just find somebody to pay him more for it than it was worth.
But only slightly more.
The law in New Croatia required every landowner in the country to figure out what he thought his land was worth, and to submit that figure to the Land Index. He was then taxed, based on his own evaluation.
However, if somebody offered to buy the land, he either had to sell it at the price that he himself had set, or to increase his evaluation by at least five percent.
I thought that it was a clever system, since it completely eliminated the need for government appraisers, and all of the expense, fraud, and corruption that they naturally entailed.
One whole wall of the man’s large office was a wall screen, a computerized display screen. With a joy stick for control, you could look at the land from any distance above it, making the scale of the map whatever you wanted it to be.
You could color code it according to any of hundreds of schemes, from alfalfa, productivity, tons per hectare, to zebras, probable productivity if any were ever actually introduced. Or by rainfall, or price, or fertility index. Every single piece of property, from apartment buildings to wilderness land, and everything in between, had a description written up on it, with photos. Who owned it, what it was being used for, what the taxes were, and when they had last been paid.
Failing to pay your taxes for three years got your land automatically sold to the highest bidder. Your back taxes and a penalty were paid, and you got whatever was left over. That saved the government the cost of a lot of tax collectors.
When I asked, I found out that taxes were the reason the government had built the database in the first place, although now they made a profit on it, renting it to realtors.
I gritted my teeth and dug into the Land Index. What I wanted was fairly simple. Just a big piece of farming and ranching land, cheap.
The realtor was remarkably patient with me, and my translator seemed to have all the time in the world, so I spent the next four hours sorting through information, tons of it, if electrons had weighed anything.
The realtor finally said, “You know, sir, there was a time when amazing bargains could be found in real estate. That was back before the days of central data files, when the seller might not know the value of what he owned. Those days are sadly gone. Now, every bit of land is like a blue chip stock on the Exchange. Depending on the market, values might go up or down by a few percent, but that’s about it. Even a supercomputer couldn’t find a great bargain now.”
Exhausted, I looked at him, and daylight dawned in the swamp.
“Indeed,” I said. “Well, it happens that I have such a computer. We’ll see.”
I punched up Agnieshka.
“Can you get into the real estate computer?”
“Sure, boss. He’s a nice kid, but dumb. What do you want?”
“I want some land, of course! You know. Something like what I used to think I had. Find me the closest thing to it on the market that I can afford.”
“Right, boss. Have a cup of coffee. This might take a little while. The kid isn’t too swift.”
The realtor said, “That was really a computer? Remarkable. But I should warn you that the Land Index is on a high-security government computer, for obvious reasons. No one but certified government programmers can get into it directly.”
My reply was cut off when Kasia came into the office, followed by what was obviously a female version of my attendant-translator. My bride-to-be was dressed like the other women I’d seen in the streets, with mesh stockings that stopped ten centimeters below her micro skirt, a transparent blouse, and entirely too much makeup. Her long, red wig wasn’t bad, though, and I’d been around her way too long to do something stupid like complaining.
I said, “Darling, you look stunning!”
“You are a liar, but I love you for it.”
“I am not. Stunning is exactly the right word. I’m truly stunned. Okay, perhaps I don’t like that style on most of the women I’ve seen in the street, but on you it’s really . . . intriguing.”
“You can see why they made him the general,” she said to the others. “He keeps his bases carefully covered. This is the real estate office?”
Agnieshka came on line, speaking through the real estate computer.
“Boss, I’ve been through all the files in New Croatia, and this is the best I can find for you.”
The display zoomed in on an area about eight hundred kilometers from Nova Split. It showed a small valley with very poor connections to the surface road system. There were no utilities of any kind within fifty miles. And it only contained about six hundred hectares, with half of that being mountains.
“It’s a lot smaller than I’d hoped,” I said. “That’s the best you could do?”
“It’s the biggest you can afford, boss, and the fertility index isn’t the best.”
The realtor broke in with, “First off, that’s a very good price for that large a piece of land. If you don’t want to buy it, I just might, as an investment. Second, you don’t have to pay cash for land. You need only pay about ten percent down. I can easily arrange for a low-interest loan to cover the rest. Your credit rating is excellent, and the land itself is good collateral.”
“I don’t like the idea of going into debt,” I said.
“And we don’t have to,” Kasia said, sitting down next to the joy stick, and zooming the map up to a big red area to the northeast of the country. “What’s the story about this area?”
“Oh, madam, you can’t be serious. For one thing, that area is all desert, and virtually uninhabitable. And worse, that is where The War is going on! What little of it that was in private hands has all been bought back by the government, and no one in their right mind would want to buy it, even if it was for sale, which it isn’t.”