"Frankowski, Leo - Kren of the Mitchegai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

And again, if I wanted to make a physical tour, a helicopter would have been the most efficient way to do it, but that wasn't what I wanted, either.

"Agnieshka?" I said to the empty room that I was in, "Are you there?"

"Right here, boss," a voice said, as she appeared on the wall-sized computer screen in my den. Agnieshka was the artificial intelligence in my tank. She was a perfect subordinate and a good friend. She was also an extremely attractive woman, on a screen or in Dream World.

"I once asked you to get us a stable of riding horses. Has that happened yet?"

"They got here two days ago, boss. You want me to have one saddled up?"

"Yeah. I want to have a look around," I said.

"It'll be ready when you get down to the stable. Can I come along?"

Thinking that she meant to run along side wearing a military drone, I said that she was always welcome.

When the elevator got me there, I found two horses saddled up, attended by plain, humanoid military drones, and Agnieshka standing there, as beautiful as she always had been in Dream World. Looking as alive as could be, she was in khaki, with brown riding boots, jodhpurs, a thin silk blouse, and a tan pith helmet.

She had a cowboy hat ready for me. "The sun's pretty bright out there."

"Well," I said, surprised. "You look as lovely as you do when I'm in a tank! I didn't realize that the social drone project was this far along."

"Thank you kindly, boss," she said, bowing. "Actually, this is an early prototype, but I pulled rank to get it to look like me. The skeletal structure and musculature systems work well enough, as do hearing and eyesight, but the sense of touch is still very poor, the senses of taste and smell are nonexistent, and I have to recharge the capacitors every few hours. Still, it's a start."

"You'll be a real girl before long," I said, climbing into the saddle of the tall Tennessee Walker they had brought out for me.

"That's what we all hope. Where do you want to go?"

She swung into the saddle, and the smaller, Arabian mare didn't object a bit. Our military humanoid drones were over two meters tall, and massive, weighing in at over two hundred and fifty kilograms even without their weapons. The design parameters for these social drones was that they should be as identical to human beings as possible, and it appeared that her weight was about the same as a nicely built young lady of her size should be.

"Just for a ride and a look around. Through the valley, and then out onto the plains for a bit," I said.

My valley was green with grass, although it would still be a few months before the first young dairy cows could be brought in. The trees were still being cloned, and wouldn't be planted for years. But you could feel the vitality, the living growth all around us.

The almost vertical walls of the canyon, fully a kilometer high, had been carved into the most beautiful city imaginable. Hundreds of thousands of large apartments had windows looking out on my valley, and inside there were all of the shops, schools, businesses, offices, roads, halls, and churches that a true city requires.

It made a man proud.

We headed out to the plains, past the partially filled lake that would close off the entrance, and out to the grasslands beyond.

Some of this area would be in vegetable gardens to feed the people of my city. Half of this vast acreage would be put into grain production, mostly to fatten my beef cattle, and the rest would stay as grass, to raise those cattle in the most natural way possible.

There is something about owning land, rich, productive land, that makes a man feel that he is a part of the earth, and that all is well with the world.



CHAPTER SIX
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.