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

BUT CONCERNING EVENTS
OF UP TO 2000 YEARS EARLIER
A Turn for the Better

On Earth, the horse had finally arrived in Egypt, the Shang Dynasty was a going affair in China, and the Ancient Greek language was first being written down. The Mitchegai neither knew nor cared.

Kren was wearing the helmet and equipment of one of Duke Dennon's junior officers, and had a proper military bearing. There were a few adults that he saw in the distance, attending to the needs of the duke's lands, but no one thought to question him as he walked north, away from the mines.

He was still hungry, and he needed food.

A human would have thought that the land he walked through was very strange. There were no trees, no bushes, no weeds. Nothing like a flower existed, nor an insect to pollinate it. There were no birds, no butterflies, and no small, furry beings rustling in the undergrowth. There wasn't even any undergrowth.

Everything was covered with grass, carefully tended grass that was kept trimmed short by the juvenals who were grazing on it. Smooth, well watered, and well kept, it resembled nothing more than a vast putting green at an expensive golf course.

It covered everything. No rocks showed through on the distant mountains, no water was exposed where the grass covered areas that obviously had rivers and lakes below them, save in a few small places that served as watering holes. There were no beaches, and no sand. The grass was thick enough for large adults to walk over the water without it even quivering.

Grass covered the oceans with a mat so thick that waves never formed. Juvenals grazed on the vast plains, visited occasionally by hunting parties of adults, flying in on efficient, fusion powered aircraft.

Pollywogs ate at the roots of these ocean-covering grasslands. When their time came, they ate their way through to the surface, to metamorphose into juvenals.

A surface road on a Mitchegai planet was simply a long, wide, carefully graded area covered with grass where an individual could walk with ease, without wearing in a path, and without losing her way, and where a fusion-powered hovercraft could easily travel. Wheels were never used on the surface, for they would harm the all-important grass.

Fertilized eggs hatched into grubs who lived in the sterile soil, growing rapidly as they ate the roots of the grass, and who, if they could make it to water in time, metamorphosed into the pollywogs who swam in the rivers and lakes below the grass that covered them. These forms were not at all obvious to the casual observer.

A scientific observer would have found no other life-forms. There were no bacteria, yeasts, molds, fungi, or viruses. There were no scavengers, but Mitchegai grubs, pollywogs, and juvenals all preferentially ate dead material, animal or vegetable, before they would eat live grass.

The upper surfaces of the grass could absorb nutrients as readily as could the roots. The droppings of juvenals and adults were gone by morning.

Mitchegai do not have stomach bacteria, or any other symbionts. They have no diseases caused by any sort of microbe. Indeed, with the passage of time, they have completely lost most of their immune systems.

There was absolutely nothing on this planet, or on the estimated three dozen and three thousand, six gross other planets inhabited by this ancient race, but one species of plant, and one species of animal, the Mitchegai.

It was an ecology taken to the absolute limit of what human civilization has always been heading toward. Ever since humans worked their way to the top of the food chain, their earliest actions were to kill off the large mammals who were their predators, their competitors, and often even those who were their source of food.

The agricultural revolution quickened this process, as vast fields were carefully planted and maintained to contain only a single species of plant. As animal husbandry was developed, people, who once ate thousands of animal life-forms, became contented with many fewer, and eventually only three or four of them. Usually, cows, pigs, and chickens.

Anything that might actually harm them, be it a microbe, a mosquito, or a predator, was actively exterminated. All other species that were not immediately useful were brushed aside and allowed to die, mostly because they were simply in the way.

The Mitchegai, who had been at this program for millions of years longer than humanity had been around, had taken it as far as it could possibly go. It was absolute, efficient simplification, with all of the other competing species long since eradicated.

If anything else appeared, or if any mutation occurred, it was ruthlessly stamped out. There were immutable laws that required Mitchegai to fight their wars only with weapons that were powered by their own muscles, but these laws did not apply to ecological threats. Fusion weapons were used when nothing else sufficed.

Kren passed buildings containing the homes, the offices, and the factories where the adults lived and worked, but these seemed to be little more than windows and doors set into the side of green hills. Every square foot of surface area that could possibly support grass, did.

The longer Kren walked from the mines, the more difficult it would be to take a fresh kill back to them. He would need a place to hide while he went into the stupor that followed a major meal, and he had found no such place. Under the last two dukes, this land had become much more civilized than it had been in his youth. No longer were there wild adults ranging in the hills.

Eventually, as the sun was setting, he came upon a small, secluded valley with a small, knee-high juvenal grazing in it.

She would suffice.