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CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

They Are Coming
New Yugoslavia, 2218 a.d. 

My lands were now dotted with magnificent fountains.

Early on, we had installed simple, utilitarian drinking troughs for the cattle. Then, the AI people had discovered that the controls on the Disappearing Guns they had been issued were sufficiently fine to sculpture with. The beam width could be turned down to less than a millimeter, and the depth of cut could be controlled even finer.

And since we were cutting out all of these rooms in the granite anyway, they got to slicing out huge blocks of the stuff, and getting artistic with them.

Once the city started to have really too many statues, the electronic ladies hit on the idea of making fountains in their off hours, and putting them out here. I suppose that you'd have to call it a hobby.

Out riding my land, I'd stopped to water my horse at a Renaissance-looking thing that was at least fifty feet across. It had hundreds of naked sea nymphs and gods in a two-story pile in the middle, all squirting water out of various orifices. The dozen cows and two camels drinking around it didn't seem to mind, and neither did my horse.

My communicator buzzed.

"Boss, they're coming! Stay where you are. I've sent a helicopter to pick you up," Agnieshka said.

"The DEW Sphere found them?" I asked.

"Yes, they're more than two years out."

"Then what's the rush?" I said, trying to act cool, "Why the helicopter? When the Spanish Armada was sighted, they let Sir Walter Raleigh finish his bowling game."

"Because if I didn't, you'd probably kill your horse racing back. Sir Walter Raleigh you ain't."

I took the helicopter back.

When I got to my CCC, my colonels, including my wife, were already inside.

"There are a lot of them," Kasia said. "And they are very big."

 

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Framed