A Boy and His Tank (16 page)

I didn't know what this nonsense was about, but I don't like seeing a woman abused. I rode to the side of the knight and the still struggling Zuzanna.

"Look, buster! I don't know what your game is, but I don't like it! Let her go!" I said.

"Varlet!" He shouted. He let her slip to the ground and drew his sword. "Ride on or die!"

Then, without waiting to see which of the above I would select, he swung his sword at me!

I was startled, but had wits enough to draw my own sword and block his in time. I didn't know the first thing about sword fighting, but it soon became obvious that he didn't either.

We hacked and bashed for a while, but what with his armor, there wasn't much that I could do to him. Then I noticed the eyeslit in his helmet, and the first chance I got, I stuck my sword in there.

He gushed about six liters of blood and gore, like something from an ancient Monty Python movie, and then fell over dead at my horse's feet.

Before I could get my sword back into its sheath, Zuzanna had put her foot on top of my stirrup and had pulled herself close to my side.

"Most noble lord! The knight thou hast valiantly slain was the evil warlock Sir Mordick! Thou hast saved my honor and my very soul from the most dire of fates! Take me, my lord! My love and my body are yours forever!"

"Uh, right," I said. "Look, you're very attractive and all that, but my girlfriend and your husband would both object to what you have in mind."

"That is no way to treat a lady, my lord!"

"That's exactly the way one should treat a
married
lady. Zuzanna, what's all this nonsense about?"

She took a breath and looked at me, disappointed. Then she said, "My lord, if we must live in a Dream World, it is only fitting and proper that we should dream up a world that is worth living in. Why settle for a mundane existence, when all the possibilities of adventure and fantasy lie available and waiting for us?"

"Lady, I just got all the adventure I wanted during that last artillery barrage. I'm afraid that killing an inept knight didn't do much for me."

"As thou wilt, my lord. Wouldst thou repair to my castle and refresh thineself? And thine lady too, of course."

"We'd be delighted," I said.

Around the next bend in the trail, we came to a castle that was probably patterned on something that Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria had come up with. Or maybe it was from Disneyland.

The drawbridge came down for us and three handsome young boys in page outfits marched out to take care of our horses.

More pretty boys escorted us to a dining chamber that was a lot like the nave of a Gothic church, except that the polychromed statues and the stained glass windows were all on secular, sexual, and even pornographic subjects rather than religious ones.

Zuzanna looked around the room, gestured in a magical sort of way, and the room shrank until it was of a proper size for three people to dine in.

"I am a mighty sorceress, of course, but then so is anyone else who wants to be in my world," she said. "Wouldst thou be a warlock, my lord?"

I was saved from answering by a dozen more adolescent boys who brought in a lavish meal on as many platters.

The food looked tempting, except for the boar's head, where the roasted lips had pulled back, leaving the ghastly teeth pointing skyward. The thick liquid that dribbled from the mostly empty eye sockets added considerably to the general effect. I didn't feel right about the two dishes where the birds still had their feathers on, either.

"So you prefer to live in a medieval fantasy world," I said.

"Why not? It's my world and I can do with it as I please, except when I have to go out and fight the Serbians."

"I suppose so. I gather that you have a thing about young boys."

"Doesn't every old woman? At least here, I can't go to jail for it. In all events, a person's private world is her own private business."

I passed on that one, but soon I was able to get the conversation on my own level.

I found that Zuzanna had been a college professor on Earth, teaching history. She was perfectly aware of the anachronisms about her, but she preferred to live not as things actually had been, but rather as she felt that they
should have been
.

"I can get along quite nicely without the Black Death, the Thirty Years War, and the Spanish Inquisition, thank you. Modern bathrooms, electric lights, and a regular supply of fresh meats and vegetables greatly improve the quality of life. But somewhere in the course of building the modern world, much that was of great value was somehow left behind, to our great loss both as separate humans and as a culture. We have lost our roots, our extended families, and our childhood friends. Without these things, our lives have lost much of their meaning. Constantly traveling around the world, we became atomized individuals, flecks of dust blowing in the winds of time, molecules of a thin gas when we yearned to be part of a solid whole. Our feelings of impermanence have become so strong that some of our sadder cases have taken to tattooing, piercing, and actually branding their bodies, painfully putting permanent marks on their skins, just to have
something
about themselves that will last a while."

"Yes," I said, "I sometimes feel that way myself. But what does that have to do with the castles and the horses and the embroidered velvet clothes?"

"Our loss of connectedness with the living world about us naturally resulted in a corresponding loss of appreciation for art and beauty. Our buildings and clothes became simplified, standardized, and ugly. Make a factory to make a billion identical shirts for a billion identical people! Never mind if none of them suits anyone's taste, or fits anyone exactly. If people are too tall or too short or too fat or too skinny, why, it must be
their
fault! They must be evil! Let them go on a diet, or get some kind of medical help, or just go away!

"No. If I can do anything about it, I'll make it a world where every single item, every shoe, every chair, and every device is individually considered for its form and function, and individually crafted to be of the best quality that can be managed."

"A nice thought, Zuzanna, but mass production happened not because of some dark conspiracy, but because it's a lot cheaper to do things that way. Make those shirts on a spinning wheel and hand loom and sew them together with a needle and thimble, and they would cost more than a week's pay per shirt. Without mass production, most people would have only one set of clothes, live on a hovel with dirt floors, and be hungry much of the time. Except for a very small elite, life would again become nasty, brutal, and short."

"True, and I am not advocating the reintroduction of slavery. You technical sorts have done a magnificent job at providing the material wherewithal that has done so much for humanity over the last eight hundred years. But I want you to understand that what you have built is merely the foundation of a great society. The actual edifice that is erected on that wonderful, machine-oriented foundation is going to be the work of all kinds of people. Including old history teachers."

"A very interesting thought, Zuzanna. I think that I am going to have to sleep on it before it's digested properly."

The same could probably be said for the food, assuming that it could be digested at all. Apparently, it was authentic, and authentic medieval food is wretched stuff! I dawdled with it, trying to look as though I was actually eating some of it.

She smiled politely and gestured for her serving boys to bring in dessert, three amusingly anachronistic hot fudge sundaes. Conversation went back to lighter topics.

While Quincy was in the marines, she had earned her doctorate while raising their seven children.

"One for every time he came home on leave," was the way she put it.

After he retired from the service, he had joined her at the University of Europe, and they lived for forty pleasant years in academia, until they were forced to emigrate to the horrors of New Kashubia.

She was a charming lady, once you overlooked her eccentricities.

Agnieshka and I went home, and we spent the next eight hours in the sack.

About an hour before his shift was to begin, Radek came over. He was a small, thin person, with greasy hair and quick, nervous gesticulations. He was dressed in the loud, flashy clothes that had been popular with the young hoodlum set on Earth three or four years ago. I was impressed, but not favorably.

"We ain't never had no chance to talk," he said. "Since we'll be fighting together, you know, I thought that we maybe oughta to take the time to get to know each other some, first."

"I quite agree. We visited Zuzanna a little while ago."

"Yeah. Me too. She's not a bad lady for a witch."

"I thought she was a sorceress."

"She told me she was a witch. When we were getting into it, I asked her why she didn't wear no underpanties. She said the reason was that it gave her a better grip on her broom. You got anything good to eat around here?"

"Sure. Good idea. I haven't had dinner yet. Will you join me?" I said, even though I hadn't even had breakfast. Shift work screws up your circadian rhythms. Anyway, he looked like he needed dinner, and he was a guest.

"Yeah. Good idea. I'm starved."

Agnieshka set the table and served us an entire roast lamb, with all the extras. But she did it wearing high-heeled shoes, fishnet panty hose, and nothing else. I felt embarrassed about it at first, but Radek took it all in his stride.

I eventually figured that Agnieshka must know him better than I did. Thinking about it, she
had
stood guard duty with him.

Radek needed no encouragement to dig into the meal, which he did, literally, using his hands rather than any of the proper utensils.

"So how did you come to join the army?" I asked, trying to get the conversation going.

"Same as you, I guess. They said I'd join or they'd kill me, and I figured, shit, better later than sooner, you know?" He ripped one entire leg off of the lamb and started chewing on it, with grease all over his face.

I winced. "What got you into trouble?"

"Food, mostly. See, it's my nerves, I guess, but I need to eat a lot more than other people, and they never would let me have enough. You know what it's like, tending crops all day long and never being allowed to put none of it in your mouth?"

Radek's table manners were abominable. Not only was he holding the roast in his hands while he ate, he was using the table cloth for a napkin, and when he had picked a bone clean, he casually threw it over his shoulder! Now, I realized that this was all just a simulation, that I really didn't have a dining room floor littered with bits and scraps of half eaten food, but even so I didn't like it one bit.

If he observed my displeasure, and cared, he made no note of it.

"Well, I was mostly in engineering. Of course, we were hungry all the time too, but I can imagine how rough it would be," I said.

"Maybe you can, but maybe you can't. Anyway, about the fourth time my foreman, she chews me out right in public for eating a potato while we was harvesting, I pops her a few in the fucking face, and I guess we wrecked a bunch of plants before it was over. And for that, they was going to kill me! Four lousy potatoes!"

It looked as though he was getting more food on the floor than into his mouth.

I gritted my teeth and reminded myself that it all wasn't real.

Even then, I wondered if he was as messy in reality. The thought of food paste dribbling out of his mouth, filling up his helmet, and polluting the liquid that his body was floating in wasn't very pleasant either.

"Well, you seem to be well enough fed now, at any rate, so the problem has solved itself. All I'm concerned about is that you do your job and guard my flank."

"Hey, no worry about that, boss. I'm good at my job! Ask Boom-Boom. I only wish that I could get that damn foreman and the fucking judge in my sights, instead of these shitfaced Serbians. I mean for real. I don't know how many times I killed them bitches in Dream World. Burned 'em, mostly, like at the stake!" He said with his eyes blazing.

"I see your point, but just now it's the Serbians who are trying to kill us, for even less reason than your judge had. Look, it's getting late, and I wanted to talk to Quincy and Zuzanna before we saddle up," I said.

"Yeah, I'm through here anyway," he said as he wiped his greasy hands on his shirt. "Say, that girl of yours is a looker. Maybe I shoulda brought Boom-Boom along, so's you could see her. What say we get together sometime and party down? Boom-Boom's a boss fuck!"

"Sometime. Sometime later."

"Yeah. Later." And he blinked out.

"Sometime
very much
later," I said. "Agnieshka, have you ever met such a disgusting person before?"

"Well, I've met Boom-Boom."

"They're two of a kind, are they?"

"She naturally adapted her persona to suit his personality, if that's what you mean. She wears an incredible amount of makeup, her hair looks like an antenna array, she has a dozen sexually suggestive tattoos, there are large black iron rings in her nipples and—"

"Enough! Suffice it to say that I don't want to meet Boom-Boom under any but business circumstances. Or Radek, either, for that matter."

"Yes boss. You wanted to see Quincy and Zuzanna?"

"No, I was just making excuses to get rid of that annoying person. Anyway, Zuzanna is on duty, and I don't feel like having Quincy kill me today. I'm going to lay down for a while. Get me to the war on time."

"You really should get some PT in, you know."

"No, I don't know. The Combat Control Computer gave us specific orders to get plenty of rest, and an obedient young soldier like me wouldn't think of disobeying a direct order."

"Boss, you are a lazy bum. Okay, let's go to bed," she said.

"Perhaps I'm lazy, but you are still a lecherous young lady."

Later, I was just starting to drift off to sleep when there was a knock at the door. Agnieshka got up to answer it, and let in a small and slender young woman with very pale skin.