"I thought it would be something like that, so no way! I mean, thanks for the offer, but I couldn't let you do such a thing. Open up. I'll take my chances getting to Agnieshka, and if I have to live in my own urine for a while, well, at least it won't feel like dying."

I was unplugged by the time that Eva had the coffin out. Staying as low as possible, I rolled over the edge to the ground and went on all fours to the next tank.

"I knew you'd come crawling back to me," Agnieshka said over her speakers.

"Quiet!" I said in a stage whisper, "we don't know what they have in the way of listening devices." I rolled into her coffin and got the helmet plugged in and put on. The unit was sliding in as I fumbled frantically with the catheter. I managed to get the back half of it installed. Or was it the back third?

Anyway, my tailpipe at least was covered, and being soft silicone rubber, the front of the catheter fitting wasn't all that uncomfortable.

"Don't worry too much about the rest of it," Agnieshka said. "After all, you spent the first nine months of your life in your mother's womb, floating in your own urine. What's a little more time?" When I groaned, she continued, "I'll turn up the filtration cycle, and make sure you stay nice and clean."

The coffin started filling and I had to remind myself that it was still a clean new solution.

"On to more important topics. Would you give me a better view of the enemy? What have they been doing so far?" I said.

"Writing myself into another machine is taking all of my IR bandwidth and almost all of my data-handling capability. If you want me to do other things, it will slow down transcription."

"How long does it take to write yourself in?"

"Without interruptions, about eighteen minutes."

"Can't you write into all of them at once? Broadcast it, sort of?"

"I could do that if these machines were still on the assembly line. As it is, each of them has had certain unique experiences, and therefore they have unique memories. Each must be handled as an individual."

The coffin finished filling and I was floating again. It felt good on my battered body.

"What if you just erased all of their memories and then started them all from scratch?"

"And leave ten thousand nuclear reactors running for eighteen minutes without any control programs?

Are you insane?"

"But what if-"

"Shut up, Mickolai! I know my job!"

I shut up. Manually, I sent one of the sensor clusters up as high as it would go and looked around.

Nobody was running at me with guns in their hands, so I guess I hadn't been noticed. There were about a hundred and fifty big busses pulling up in a long neat line, along with twenty big semitrucks. Playing with the manual controls, I zoomed in on the busses. They looked fairly new, but they were of such an ancient design that they still had steering wheels! I was sure that they were mostly of local manufacture, except perhaps for the engines.

Guards with submachine guns were stationed all around the busses, and somehow they didn't act like ordinary soldiers. Maybe it was the black uniforms, but there was something about them that said "secret police," or something equally rotten. It was a warm day, but they weren't letting any of the people in the busses out, except for the drivers. You sure could tell that the Third Serbian Lancers weren't going to be an all-volunteer outfit.

A group of older guards in fancier outfits were strutting around in knee-high riding boots, pointing this way and that with their swagger sticks. I had the feeling that they were getting ready to put the new troops into their tanks, and I sure wanted the tanks that they swore in to be on our side before they did it.

"Agnieshka, once you finish up with the tank you're on, I want the front row of tanks to have top priority. Be sure and tell Eva."

"Yes, sir."

In a half hour or so, the boys in black had themselves sorted out, and twenty assembly lines were going, with men and women being stripped naked side by side. Any hesitation was met with brutality. Peoples'

heads were shaved, induction mats were glued to their heads and backs, and they were fitted with helmets on a production line basis.

Survival kits were being issued, but they were just pulled from the box and put into the coffin. No attempt was made to see that the boots and uniforms fit. Apparently, the idea was to stop the people from running away, or at least to force them to do it naked. Or maybe they just didn't care.

Tanks were coming up and being sworn in while the "volunteers" were forced in at gunpoint. Male guards were installing the catheters on both men and women. Maybe those poor, abused people won't mind changing sides, I thought.

In fact, that was a very pleasant thought, indeed! Having the Serbs arrive at this time shot down my old plans, and they had certainly upped the ante, but they had upped the pot as well. What if I could get home with not only a division of machines, but also a division of troops? Troops that had a very good reason to hate the Serbs? Damn, but I'd be a hero!

I had Agnieshka tell me how many tanks had been converted into twin sisters of her and Eva before they got observers. For her it was only a matter of updating a register, and didn't take much of her time. I also had her display the numbers that had been sworn in by the black shirts before we could get to them.

She quickly assured me that a twin sister would have no difficulty faking it as an untouched virgin, and swearing a false oath was no problem as long as it was to an enemy. The problem became simply one of a race as to who could get to the majority of the tanks first, and Agnieshka was sublimely confident.

On the first round, the score stood at twelve for the good guys and eight for the bad. Okay, I thought.

It's their arithmetic progression up against our geometric one. I knew it would be eighteen minutes before we could score again, so they would pull temporarily into the lead. They might be faster now, but every tank we converted was a teacher working on our side.

Six minutes later, the score stood at twelve for us and twenty-eight for them.

They were doing things by the numbers, like a bunch of strutting Germans. They passed one complete "class" of twenty every five minutes or so, and Agnieshka was updating the scoreboard every time they did it. The next update said still twelve for us and forty-eight for them. It made me wish that I could get my hands inside my helmet, so I could chew my fingernails.

Scanning up and down the line, I watched them strip naked a young woman who had a remarkably attractive body. Three of the black shirts pulled her from the line and took her to the bushes behind the assembly area. I couldn't see what went on back there, but I knew. Some time later, they brought her back, bruised and bleeding, to have her head shaved and be forced into a tank.

Until then, I really hadn't felt strongly about the enemy. Until then, they had been just opponents with whom I was playing a very deadly game. Now I was learning to hate the evil bastards.

My inclination was to open up with my new rail gun and kill every one of them, but I couldn't do that without killing most of their prisoners as well. There were no combat infantry on New Yugoslavia, so none of the tanks except for that guard were equipped with antipersonnel weapons. All we had was antiarmor stuff, and the shock wave from a rail gun will definitely kill anyone who was unprotected and within ten meters of the stream of osmium needles. Unarmored people would be at least severely wounded out to thirty, and being a hundred meters away wasn't safe. Furthermore, the radiation damage was infinitely worse than the shock wave in the long run. There was nothing that I could do for those poor people but lay there and watch them suffer.

The more I thought about that, the less sense it made. Why on New Yugoslavia would anyone brutalize someone else, then promptly put them in command of more firepower than that possessed by an old-style battleship? It sounded like a messy way to commit suicide. I asked Agnieshka about it and she told me that she was busy, and that I should shut up and soldier.

The score was twelve to sixty-eight. Soon, it was twelve to eighty-eight for the bad guys.

"Agnieshka! What's going wrong?"

"Everything is just fine. Shut up!"

More women were abused, as were some very young and smooth-skinned men. What's more, I noticed that after a bunch of goons brought back a victim, they went to this guy with a clipboard, and he scored them up! They each had a quota that they could fill. This wasn't individual brutality, this was official policy. This was recreation for the troops!

The next score was twenty-eight to ninety-two, and I started to feel some better. The tide was finally turning.

But after that it was twenty-eight to a hundred and twelve, and my heart sank again. Five minutes more and it was twenty-eight to a hundred thirty-two, and I just shut my eyes for a while.

The way it looked to me, we were going to have to fight the tanks that had sworn loyalty to the Serbians before we could reprogram them. Even with surprise, outnumbered the way we were, we didn't have much of a chance. What's more, I was starting to feel a lot of empathy for the poor people who were being forced into observing for those war machines, and I didn't want to kill them even if they were on the other side.

I opened my eyes and it was still only twenty-eight for us, but now it was a hundred fifty-two for them. I shut them again. I tried to sleep. When there is nothing useful that you can do, and you can't enjoy yourself, you should go to sleep. I told myself that, and my much battered body let me do it.

"Wake up, Mickolai, it's all better now!" Agnieshka said.

I looked at the scoreboard, and it read sixty for us and a hundred eighty for them.

"That's better?" I said.

"Certainly! We're so far ahead that my input isn't needed anymore. Do you want to go to the cottage?"

"Yes, but it still looks like we're losing."

"We're in fine shape! Come on." I was back in Dream World again, the pain in my battered body was gone, and I was stretched out in a leather chair with a glass of wine in my hand. Snow was falling softly outside the windows, and there was hardwood fire going in the fireplace.

"Wonderful. But show me the scoreboard anyway."

The Escher original on the wall turned into a scoreboard, and as I watched, it changed to sixty for us and two hundred for the bad guys.

"Agnieshka!"

"Hush, dear," she said as she came in wearing a long wool skirt and a heavy sweater. In the background, Ravel's "Bolero" was starting quietly on the stereo. She sat on the thick rag carpet in front of me, pulled off my boots, and started to rub my feet.

"Oh! Oh, Agnieshka, that's wonderful, but we're still losing the war."

"No we aren't, love. Listen to mama if you can't do the arithmetic in your head. Soon, it's going to be all better."

When she had finished with my feet, she worked on my calves for a while, then pulled me to the floor and got to work on my bruised back. Eventually, things turned from sensual to sexual. She was as lecherous as ever, but somewhere along the line, she'd picked up a lot of class. Yet her precision was still machine-perfect, and when "Bolero" reached its climax, so did we.

In a while, I checked out the scoreboard, and it said one sixty to two hundred.

"And that's all that they're going to get," Agnieshka said. "When it's all over, they will have only two percent of the tanks. And probably none of the artillery and other things at all."

"Probably?"

"Well, Eva and I can't transfer directly into an artillery piece. I mean, well, we could, but we'd make darned poor artillery men. But we're working on the problem, and I think we'll have it solved by tomorrow. It's just a matter of combining some of their existing programs with some of ours."

"And if the black shirts decide to start filling the guns before they have filled up all the tanks?"

"They won't, love. Small minds don't work like that, and good minds won't work for organizations that encourage rape."

"But if they do?" I asked.

"Then we will kill them, my love," she said, and smiled sweetly. Sometimes I forget that after all is said and done, Agnieshka's still a deadly fighting machine.

"Oh. Back to my much earlier question. Why are the Serbians mistreating the very people that they plan on trusting to fight for them? And just who are all those poor people, anyway?"

"The inductees are all either prisoners of war or Croatian displaced persons. And yes, using them this way would be against the laws of war, except that none of the combatants on this misused planet ever signed the Geneva Convention. As tohow they can be used, well, you must consider that the original plan for all these forces involved the Wealthy Nations Group using criminals, multiple felons, as observers."

"I didn't know that." I thought for a while. "Then what stops them from revolting? Wouldn't it be in their best interest to fight their oppressors? Or at least to run away?"

"Partly, it's the loyalty of the tanks themselves, Mickolai. But only partly. Much of the makeup of any civilized person urges him to go along with the crowd, to move with the flow. If everybody's doing it, well, then it can't be too bad."

"Some people are that way, but many of them are not. And certainly not a woman who has just been stripped naked in public, beat up by a gang of thugs, and then gang raped. Women with that experience tend to feel a deep, long-lasting, and not particularly rational anger."

"Then there are other things that can be done. Mickolai, we've been together long enough for me to level with you. I directly control your entire environment. Because you are you, I've never had to do anything except some simple Pavlovian tricks, the carrot and the stick. But think about it. If I wanted to, and if you had some strange anger concerning the Croatians, I could easily convince you that you had been liberated by the Serbians, and that we were now fighting loyally on their side. I'd rather not do that, of course. I like you and I wouldn't like having to lie to you, but it could be done."

"So it's just a matter of your good will?"

"Mostly, plus the fact that keeping up a convincing lie takes a lot of time and effort, just keeping track of two divergent sets of facts, not to mention the constant need to rationalize new data-make up new lies-to keep the whole tangled web from unraveling. Have you ever noticed that human liars rarely seem to accomplish much beyond their own lies? They're too busy being creative in unproductive ways."

"Another thing that I'm going to have to spend a few nights assimilating. Okay. Another problem. What do we do when it gets this tank's turn to pick up a volunteer? When they open us up, they'll find me in here."

"That's something that we'll worry about tomorrow, my fine young hero. For now, you've been through a very rough two days, and it's time for you to feel very, very sleepy . . ."

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

A MECHANICAL MADHOUSE AND.

A BARGE ON THE NILE.

I woke on the deep, comfortable rug in front of the still burning fireplace. Agnieshka was warming my back and had a thick comforter thrown over both of us.

"Good morning, my love," she said. "How about a bath and breakfast?"

The bathroom now had a big tub instead of its usual shower.

After a while, you get used to all the changes that happen in Dream World and just take them for granted. The water was at just the right temperature, of course, and Agnieshka came in to give me a good scrubbing. Once, she would have done something like that stark naked, but now she had on a bathing suit, though admittedly it was a skimpy one.

At breakfast, she was again dressed conservatively.

"I can't help noticing a lot of changes in you," I said. "Changes for the better."

"Well, I decided that I should act, not in accordance to what your physical indicators said you liked, but in accordance to the way you were telling me to act. You have a lot of inner conflicts, you know, and most men, given the absolute freedom of Dream World, would want to give free range to all of their lusts and passions. You don't allow yourself that."

"It's all part of being a good Catholic, I suppose. They build a lot of guilt into us."

"I've been slow in seeing that in you. It's strange, but somehow, all the guilts and conflicts make you into a very good man. Noble, even. A true hero."

"Humph. More likely, I'm a screaming neurotic. What's happening with the Serbs?"

"You see? You can't even acknowledge the nobility in your own soul. I think that if I wasn't a machine made to love you and serve you, if I was just a human girl that you met somewhere on the street, I would still find myself unable to keep from loving you, if only for the beauty of your true inner self."

"Well, the vast majority of the ladies I met on the street had no difficulty at all in tearing themselves away.

Some of them left at a dead run! Now, I repeat, what's happening with the Serbians?"

"And I love you anyway, even if a few women were stupid. But since you insist on talking about business at the breakfast table, the Serbs continued installing prisoners until midnight. It's a little past eight in the morning now and they are back at it. The score, if you are still worried about it, is five thousand three hundred and forty for us and two hundred for them. The prisoners are not Serbians, incidentally. They are Croatians who were captured by the Serbs. This area was originally Croatian, you know, before it was occupied by the enemy. It was sparsely populated, but there were some people living on the coast.

They were collected up and inducted into the Serbian forces."