"You men never like to see the furniture rearranged! My mother told me that. Okay, we'll leave these the way they are and build a bigger living room and dining room where the front yard is. Then we'll move the whole place back thirty or forty meters to set it off nicely from the road."

"Love, that will put the house in the middle of the lake!"

"So we'll move the lake back fifty meters. We'll call the old dining room the breakfast room, and the old living room the family room."

"How can we have a family room without a family? You know, that's another thing we can't do in Dream World."

"Then you only have to think up two more before breakfast." She saw my expression and came over into my arms. "Oh, Mickolai, I didn't mean to be flippant. I mean, you don't really want children right now, do you?"

"Oh, not right now, in Dream World, but eventually, well, of course!"

"And so do I, eventually. But even if we were living in the real world, I think that I would want to wait a while, until the war was over, you know."

"So we'll call the old living room the rumpus room, and we might as well start rumpussing in it right now."

I picked her up and carried her to the couch.

And that started our eight-year long career as college students.

The course was challenging, and it took everything we had to keep up. While the arts and sciences were not totally neglected, our schooling was heavy on strategy, tactics, military history, and military engineering. There was a major emphasis on quickly solving unusual problems. Yet it was interesting, and looking back, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

At the time, though, it was often hurried, hectic, and hairy!

Kasia had hit it off quite well with Eva while they were an observer and tank team, and in time she began to like Agnieshka as well.

Agnieshka and Eva fell into the role of servants without any difficulty, and since I am a monogamist by nature, there weren't any of the explosions that might usually be caused by a situation where one man was living with three beautiful women.

Agnieshka still gave the best backrubs, though, and all three of them made a habit of dressing, around the house at least, entirely too scantily.

I tried to correct this exhibitionism of theirs, but to no avail. Women all say that they dress to please men, but it is a lie. Women dress as part of a status game they play with other women.

The opposite is also true. Men do not dress to please women. They dress solely to establish their status with other men, although most of them are not conscious of it. And a man who has been dressed "nicely"

by a woman, be she his mother, wife, or girlfriend, is regarded by other men as a wimp, someone who can't be trusted.

In the same way, in the very rare case of a woman who was dressed by a man, be it her father, her husband, or her boyfriend, other women will think of her as either a slut or a klutz, depending on which extreme he had dressed her in.

Men generally notice a woman's clothing and hairdo simply to be polite to them. They really don't give a damn what a woman wears, so long as it doesn't arouse him at a time when he doesn't want to be aroused, and it doesn't embarrass them in front of other men.

Men don't like to see a woman change her hair any more than they like her to rearrange the furniture. A lack of change in unimportant things gives the typical man a sense of security.

When women force a man, kicking and screaming, into going shopping with them, they do not really want his advice. At most, they want him to simply agree with them, to establish their dominance over him, and to get him to pay the bill.

And no man everreally wanted a woman to go shopping with him.

But be that as it may, before too long both of our servants started developing outside interests among the boys at the college. At least they appeared to. What they did, if indeed they did anything, when they were out of my sight wasn't any of my business, and I never pried. Yet I wonder, could it be that they were in Dream World as much as I was? Were theyreal , as Kasia and I were real, or were they simply convenient background props?

In truth, I am no longer sure just whatreal is.

Saturdays were often like being back in a tank again with a war going on, but now I knew that we wouldn't really die, and it was usually fun.

We started out with small unit tactics, with the six of us fighting some other group under the professor's tutelage. Later on, we got to commanding larger and larger units in battles, and I won far more often than not.

And it wasn't all fighting with modern equipment. Our first Saturday was spent in a tropical jungle doing in another naked tribe with Stone Age weapons. We even had to chip out our own flint spearheads!

Then, a few weeks later, we were all in period costumes, fighting the Battle of Zama between Hannibal and Scipio Africanus during the Second Punic War. Onlythis time, the Carthaginians hadme commanding their armies, and we won.

Sundays were anything that anyone thought might be interesting, from mountain climbing to visiting museums, and since my fellow "real" students were all fairly clean-cut, we often did things together.

Maria and "Conan" hit it off fairly well with each other, and soon became as inseparable as Kasia and I were. Before long they moved in together, and one of the houses in our row simply vanished.

Quiet, polished Neto turned out to be quite a ladies man, and he cut a major streak through the girls of both town and gown. He rarely showed up with the same one twice.

Mirko was more of a loner, though, and only rarely participated in group entertainments. Even then, he usually came alone. As a hobby, he converted a few hectares of wilderness into a small farm, and worked it in the old-fashioned way, doing the plowing with horses. He claimed that food he grew himself tasted better, Dream World or no Dream World. His servant started out as a version of Eva, but soon was metamorphosed into a big, stoic farmer's wife. It takes all kinds, I suppose.

But the five of us who were sociable generally did something together on our Sunday afternoons, along with such other "people" as were invited along any by one of us. Things ranged from skydiving to jousting to ballroom dancing, depending on whose turn it was to plan the entertainment.

It was an interesting life, with plenty of things happening, but it wasn't the sort of thing that anyone else would want to hear about in detail. The best I can say is that it was always springtime, and that the years went smoothly by.

One thing worth mentioning, since it touched so strongly on what we were doing on the planet, was a lecture the professor gave us on the history of Yugoslavia, along with the root causes of the war we were presently fighting.

The problem started off during the time of ancient Rome, when the area that would later be called Yugoslavia was called Dalmatia. This mountainous, rugged country was populated by a number of somewhat Christianized Germanic tribes, who looked enviously across the Adriatic. They attacked the empire, not so much to destroy Rome, but to become Romans themselves. When the City of Rome fell, along with the western half of the empire, it was taken by German tribesmen, many of whom came from Dalmatia.

For the Germans, living was good in the newly conquered lands that later became France, Italy, Spain, and north Africa. The climate was wonderful, the land was bountiful, and the peasants welcomed their new masters, since German taxes were usually much less than the old Roman taxes had been.

Soon, Dalmatia and the other formerly German lands were almost completely depopulated, sitting there totally empty. The world abhors a vacuum, especially when, in the Slavic areas that later became Bohemia and Slovakia, there was considerable population pressure.

There followed a basically peaceful migration of South Slavs south into empty Dalmatia. Whole towns and villages would come to the consensus that they should move south, and they would do it, traveling all winter so as to be able to get at least some crops planted in the spring. At other times, towns, either alone or in partnership with other villages, would send out half of their people as colonists, many of them younger sons and daughters. They came in groups, or more rarely as individuals, and continued in their ancient lifestyles, mostly as pagan subsistence farmers. Centuries went by in relative peace.

By the eighth century, Rome had recovered, not as a political power, but as a religious one. Missionaries were sent out to convert the heathen, and the nearest of these unfortunates lived in the northern part of Dalmatia, known as Croatia.

At about the same time, the Roman Church held a major council in which it was decided that women were indeed human. The issue won by one vote.

In the east, the Roman Empire never fell, since a century before the city of Rome was conquered, the Roman Empire divided itself into two halves. This was supposed to be purely for administrative purposes, but when Rome the city was sacked, the Eastern emperors tried to pretend that it hadn't happened.

The Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, lasted for another thousand years, except for falling temporarily in the thirteenth century to the French during the Fourth Crusade (where it was felt to be more profitable to sack a rich Christian city rather than to bother with some poor heathen hovels in the Mideastern desert). Not until the fifteenth century, when the Islamic Turks took Constantinople permanently, did the long saga of Rome come to an end.

So about the time that the Roman Pope was making converts in the north of Yugoslavia, the Metropolitan of Constantinople was doing equally good works in the West, among the Serbians.

The big problem was that in the intervening centuries since the fall of the City of Rome, the two largest branches of Christianity had grown apart in ceremony, in language, and in doctrine. Worse, they disagreed as to who was boss, with both the Pope and the Metropolitan firmly convinced thathe was the rightful head of the one true Church. Neither side was about to buckle under to some foreign upstart.

The two bands of missionaries met in an area that would later be called Bosnia-Hercegovina, and they immediately started fighting. Like the engineer who became so involved with fighting alligators that he forgot that his mission was to drain the swamp, these pious clerics spent so much of their effort bad-mouthing the opposition that their potential converts became disgusted with both groups of them.

"A pox on both their houses!" was the general public feeling.

When someone found out that there was yet a third flavor of Christianity available, the Bogomils, the Bosnians quickly joined. As it turned out, this particular cult proved to be short-lived, but then these people were never very good at picking winners.

Not that the Bosnians really had any desire to become good Christians, mind you, but simply that it had become a political necessity. A pagan at the time could be safe only when he was surrounded by other pagans. Surrounded by followers of thePrince of Peace , they could easily be murdered by Christians who wanted to a good deed, or by some warrior out doing penance for his sins.

So things went calmly for another few centuries. Oh, the Bulgarians invaded and conquered for a while, as did other peoples riding in off the sea of grass, and there were always little fights going on over one thing or another, but for the bulk of the population, living in small, inaccessible mountain valleys, things were often pleasantly peaceful.

Then the Balkans were rather brutally invaded and conquered by the Ottoman Turks. But once having conquered, it was not the policy of the Turks to be needlessly brutal or to directly force anyone into joining Islam, since what they wanted mostly was to have a steady flow of booty coming in the form of taxes. To this end, they usually set up a convenient local puppet as king, provided him with Islamic advisers, and within certain limits actually allowed him a small amount of freedom, provided the taxes were delivered on time.

Under the Turks, a Moslem lived under Islamic law, a Christian under Christian law, and a Jew under Jewish law. Each group had its own set of courts and judges, and were expected to handle things in such manner that the Ottoman Empire wasn't disturbed.

When a person of one religion disagreed with someone of another, there were special courts to handle it, but these courts inevitably had an Islamic judge and were often conducted in Arabic. Everyone was equal, but some were more equal than others.

Soon, all of the tax collectors were Islamic, as were most of the policemen and other officials. Taxes were low to nonexistent for a well-connected Moslem.

A follower of Islam had many civil rights that were denied to Christians. For example, it was absolutely forbidden to kidnap a Moslem child and sell him or her into slavery, whereas doing so to a Christian child was a misdemeanor, if the courts and police bothered with it at all.

The price of ordinary slave girls in Constantinople dropped to that of ordinary horses-on a kilo for kilo basis. That is to say, a horse was worth about six slave girls, since horses were harder to steal.

Superlative horses and slaves always brought premium prices, of course, and could be worth hundreds of times what an ordinary one would fetch, but an old or crippled one wasn't worth feeding.

Suffice it to say that there were a lot of incentives for changing religions.

A Christian could always convert to Islam, and among the Bosnians, who had rarely been fervent believers in Christ in the first place, conversion soon became commonplace. Soon, they were working their way up in the civil service, as tax collectors, judges, and other annoying officials.

Those peoples who had voluntarily become Christians in the first place, the Croatians and the Serbians, among others, were more devout in the faith of their fathers' religion and far less likely to convert to Islam. But seeing another, who is racially and linguistically identical to yourself, lording it over you solely because he has renounced the old, true religion breeds a special sort of hate.

While the Serbs maintained their Greek Orthodoxy, they were soon willing to serve loyally in the army.

This estranged them from the Croatians, since the army was occasionally used against the Croats themselves when they were in revolt.

The South Slavs stayed under the thumb of the Turks for many centuries, and mutual hate grew.

When the Turks were finally driven out, the Yugoslavs were soon inducted into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their condition was somewhat better than before. But it still wasn't freedom, and a bomb thrown by a South Slav in Bosnia proved to be the spark that touched off the first World War.

This bloody affair was followed by a short period of internal disorder, and after that the Russian Communists exercised overt control, through World War II (where the Croatians fought on the side of the Germans, until the Serbs eventually threw the Nazis out). They stayed under the Communist thumb until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' state withered away (although not quite in the manner that Karl Marx had predicted).

And after another short, bloody interval, the Europeans under NATO invaded Yugoslavia, for their own good, of course.

Time and time again, throughout history, with never a chance to decently recover, they were invaded, plundered, and conquered. And every time, one or more of their subgroups went to the side of the conquerors for status, for safety, and for profit.

And with equal regularity, every time over the ages they had a bit of freedom, they used it to fight, not so much their former oppressors, but rather those of their own people who had supported their last invader.

It ended for a while with the War of Serbian Reunification, which pretty much obliterated the Islamic portion of their population, and drastically decimated the others. Cleansing, they called it.

Perhaps, outsiders thought, perhaps they had finally learned. But all that they had learned was that they no longer needed an outside conqueror. Over the centuries, they had learned to do it all for themselves.

Not a good ending, but it seemed to be an ending, nonetheless.

Or everyone hoped the sad tale would end there, but trouble was starting to bubble up yet again when the Wealthy Nations Group gave them their very own planet, far, far away.

Which was where we poor Kashubians came into the bloody picture.

All told, it was a depressing history, and one that didn't seem to have a resolution, except perhaps for the total obliteration of everyone concerned.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE.

SPACE WARS AND SHEEPSKINS.

With regards to our stay at Oxbridge, about the only thing that happened that was really weird started one Saturday in our third year.

I was in a loincloth and avery deep suntan, playing the Zulu King Cetshwayo at the Battle of Isandhlwana. Neto was playing Chelmsford, my British opponent, and the other staff members were acting as officers on one side or the another.

It was beginning to look like the Zulus would win this time when suddenly we were fighting in a totally different battle!

We were blasting off at twenty gees from the surface of a planet in modern tanks equipped with rocket thrusters of the sort that had a Hassan-Smith transporter connecting back to a fuel supply dump on the planet, which was New Yugoslavia, from the look of it.

Agnieshka was my tank again instead of being my servant, I only had command of five subordinates, a small squad, and the battle wasn't over in a day or so the way they usually were. The damned thing went on for three weeks straight!

Agnieshka couldn't tell me a thing about why the study program had been so disrupted, the professor couldn't be reached, and I was operating under the command of an uncommunicative Combat Control Computer that I hadn't met before.

The battle went on and on until we eventually got scattered out over so much sky that I had trouble communicating with my own people. Not only were there problems like radio static and poor signal-to-noise ratios on our lasers, but the time lag caused by the speed of light often got to be over two and a half hours! What's more, they kept it realistic to the point that we couldn't even meet together in Dream World. I got to missing Kasiareal bad , although not quite to the point of making love with Agnieshka.

The good guys finally won, but in doing so we had exhausted the fuel stores in the supply dumps, and such fuel that was being manufactured had to go to bringing in the rest of the army from the far reaches of the local solar system.

For my squad, the final act of the battle involved a dead stick landing from orbit that burned the rockets and most of our weapons right off us. We splashed down without parachutes into a shallow ocean and had to crawl our way underwater to the shore.

Hairy!

Eventually, the exercise was over, with our squad losing only Neto.

He had had the bad luck to ram an enemy tank early in the battle. I meanreally ram it. He was in an equatorial orbit around a moon of the gas giant Woden while his unfortunate opponent was in a polar one. Not even a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank could withstandthat kind of a collision!

When we were back in class again, we found somebody new sitting behind Neto's desk. The professor sadly announced that he had been forced to wash Neto out for psychological reasons.

We were all at first shocked and then furious about this!

Neto was as stable as a man could be and his grades were the best in the class, next to mine. He was a good friend and a member of the team, and now we weren't even permitted to wish him good-bye!

But the professor was adamant and wouldn't budge a centimeter. The Combat Control Computer was in complete charge until our training was completed, Neto was out, and that was that. I was so mad that I stormed out of class and the rest followed me, except for the new kid.

It wasn't until the next day that somebody asked about the purpose of the long training battle.