“I see,” she said. “Would the rest of you mind leaving my future husband and me alone for a few minutes? We have some private business to discuss.”
The three of them were most cordial, and filed immediately out.
“Wouldn’t it be nicer if all our neighbors spoke Kashubian rather than Croatian, darling?” Kasia asked.
“I suppose that it would be, my true love, but you are talking about worthless desert land that isn’t for sale, anyway.”
“I’m talking about land that has the finest roads and utilities in the universe! We just built them, remember? It may be dry now, but a hundred meters below the surface it is criss-crossed with high-pressure water lines, six meters in diameter! Properly irrigated desert land is more than twice as productive as ordinary farm land, since the sun is shining every day. And there are sewage lines down there that will be filled with stuff that can be processed into first-rate fertilizer! That’s if we ever need it. Desert land is usually pretty fertile as it is.”
“Fine. But it isn’t for sale!”
“Not to Croatatians, or anybody else from New Yugoslavia. The New Croatian government deeded it to New Kashubia, as a small part of what they owe us for putting on their ‘war.’ After all, once the war is over, they can’t let anybody find out what really happened, can they? The plan is that toward the end of the war, we will start slinging theoretical nukes at each other, and the battlefields will become permanently radioactive. That’s in addition to all the land mines, vaporized osmium, and other bad things that wars leave lying around. The whole territory will be permanently off limits to everyone, except to us Kashubian veterans, who will, in theory, be guarding it for reasons of public safety.”
“Why can’t somebody just use one of our new highways, and drive in there?” I asked. “We might be able to maintain a perimeter, but we could never cover every square kilometer of that large a territory.”
“Because all of those new, underground ‘Loways’ are computer controlled, and we own the computers. We’re calling them that, now, since we can hardly call something forty meters below ground a ‘Highway,’ can we?”
“But, if we turn all that area into irrigated farm land, they’ll be able to see it from space.”
“When they started this ‘war,’ they really did shoot down every satellite in orbit, to keep the wrong people from spying on what was really going on. Nobody goes into space any more, except for the military, which is us. Everybody else uses transporters from one planet surface to another.”
“After the war is over, surely they’ll be putting satellites up again, for communications, if nothing else.”
“Why? Our underground communications net is cheaper, faster, more secure, and will have ten times more carrying capacity than they will ever need, even if every person on the planet is in Dream World.”
“Weather satellites?”
“They’ve been getting along just fine for four and a half years using ground stations. The weather on New Yugoslavia is very predictable, anyway.”
“Then they can fly over it.”
“That’s forbidden because of the radiation danger. If their plane isn’t computer controlled, we’ll have to scramble some of our own aircraft and force them down, for their own good, of course.”
“And this will go on forever?” I asked.
“Yep. Meanwhile, we get to buy the land, tax free and cheap.”
“How cheap?”
“You wanted the six thousand hectare ranch you thought you had in Dream World? Well, with half of your back pay, and none of mine, I’ve found a nice plot that covers fifteen thousand hectares! That’s probably more that we’ll ever get under cultivation, but our grandchildren will appreciate the gesture.”
“That much! A tanker’s pay must be pretty good!”
“It is, but I got us a better deal, yet. That’s one of the other things I did yesterday. I explained to the Powers That Be that if they wanted us to go around pretending to be officers, they had to pay us full officer’s wages, or it just wouldn’t work. We are each getting a year and a half of back pay as tankers in various grades, and then three years back pay as a general and a colonel, like the movie showed us to be, and we will continue drawing it for the next six months, while we’re on leave. Then, we both go back into the service as Tanker Firsts, but become officers again on all of our future leaves. That’s the best deal I could wrangle.”
“It’s better than anything that I could have ever pulled off. I’m marrying one sharp little girl! So show me this land.”
I guess Agnieshka had been talking to Kasia’s tank, Eva, because the viewpoint of the screen zoomed up over the map, and then down, showing a major hunk of land, over twelve kilometers north to south, and fifteen east to west. Then the screen turned into what looked like a movie taken from a low-flying aircraft. Doubtless, it was a Dream World creation translated into television by one of our tanks. It showed a large valley, almost completely surrounded by granite cliffs, over a kilometer high. There were a half-dozen kilometer-tall, flat-topped prominences scattered about the plain, some of them quite slender. It vaguely reminded me of Monument Valley, in the United States, back on Earth.
“It looks lovely, if a bit dry,” I said. “But, you know, it looks as if there might once have been a river running through it.”
“There was, and there will be again. Proper irrigation requires drainage,” Kasia said. “You like?”
“I love! Where do you want me to build the house?”
“Right here.”
Our view flew over to one side of the valley, and hovered, looking at the cliff face.
“You want me to build you something hanging on to the side of a cliff?”
“Not hanging on. Cut in. That’s solid granite, which has ten times the compressive strength of concrete. Deep radar scans show that it’s flawless. I want you to carve us a beautiful house right into the side of this cliff. It will give us a marvelous view of our land, and it’s directly above a high-speed Loway interchange.”
The view rotated to show a magnificent view from perhaps a kilometer above the valley floor. A small portion of the screen showed a map of the property with colored overlays of the road and utility systems. She had definitely picked the right spot.
“Baby, you want it? You got it! With a couple of Mark XIX tanks, and the right attachments, I can carve you out a castle if that would please you.”
“I’d been thinking of leaving it as natural looking as possible, with just some big windows and a few balconies showing from the outside. But maybe a castle would be nice, too. We’ll have to talk it over. But do you want the land?”
“Definitely!”
“Good, since I’ve already put a deposit on it.”
“Uh, okay. What else have you been doing with all of your spare time?”
“Mostly the important things, like getting the wedding organized! Darling, we are going to have to push the date back four days, to give everybody time to get here from New Kashubia. This is shaping up to be the major social event of the year!”
Well, if you marry a smart girl, you have to expect things like that. I figured that I’d survive.
CHAPTER FIVE
Planning a Ranch
I had the computers swooping us over my new land, showing what it would look like once we got the irrigation system in, once the grass was growing, and once we got the trees growing in some areas.
The realtor came in, politely asked if he might have his office back, and said that his office computer had never done things like that before. Agnieshka told him that it would from now on, and if he ever needed another search done, she had left her number in his machine. This was a sort of consolation prize for him, since we wouldn’t be buying any land through him.
“My wife-to-be has already put a deposit on another bit of land,” I told him.
He said that that was fine, since it left him free to buy for himself the land our computer had found. He said that he considered it to have been a very profitable afternoon.
He was probably right, more right than he imagined. Once the underground road and utilities system was announced to the public, wilderness land would be very much in demand. With the high-speed underground Loways, a man could live fifteen hundred kilometers away from his office, and commute to work in half an hour.
And since the roads were computer controlled, he could eat his breakfast on the way to work, and have a drink on the way home.
On the way to the hotel, Kasia told me that she intended to buy, through a corporation that she planned on setting up, as much scenic wilderness land as she could get, and to leverage the financing as far as they would let her get away with it.