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

He walked up to the little creature and simply swatted her on the head. She fell over, and he ate her.

Her small size was not sufficient to put him into a major stupor, but he slept well that night, wrapped in his heavy red and lavender military cloak, lying in the small valley.

He woke to find an old Mitchegai with a very large head standing over him. She wore a bulky, gaudy academic cloak with bright stripes in many colors. Around her shoulders were many tassels, each of a different shape and of a different color. Around her waist was a belt of all seven colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and kran.

Kran is a color in the ultraviolet that is visible to the Mitchegai. They see the spectrum as being linear. The color wheel is an artifact of the human brain, and the fact that humans have only three different color receptors in their eyes. The Mitchegai have seven, and perceive colors much more richly.

"Are you injured?" she asked in the ancient academic language of Keno.

With adult and juvenal Mitchegai, breathing is normally in through the nose, which also cools the blood going to the brain, and out through four vents at the belt line. These permit a better air flow, and allow for the regular drainage of the lungs. Coughing is unknown in their species. When swimming, a Mitchegai blows bubbles about her waist, and they can breath while eating or drinking.

When speaking, these lower vents are closed, and air is forced up past four sets of vocal cords, one for each lung, and out through the mouth. Mitchegai are thus capable of making four different tones simultaneously, and could actually sing chords, except that lacking all sense of rhythm, they have no musical art forms.

"No, I am quite well, thank you," Kren said in the same language as he got up.

"It is unusual to find a soldier lying in the field in these peaceful times, and even more so to find one who speaks Keno."

"I was tired, and there was no place else available. As to the language, well, a soldier gets around."

"Apparently. I am traveling to my academic retreat, a day's walk to the north of here. Could it be that you are going in the same direction?"

Private transportation had been experimented with several times in Mitchegai history, but it had always resulted in severely reduced levels of physical fitness, and had eventually been outlawed. Long distance public transportation was always available, of course, as were emergency and cargo vehicles.

"Indeed, I am. I thought to spend my leave in my homeland to the north," Kren said.

"Then let us walk together. I would welcome some company," she said. "My name is Bronki."

"And mine is Kren."

They walked and they talked. Kren found the conversation to be delightful. In his thousand years of life, this was the first intelligent person that he had ever had an opportunity to talk to. The world that she described was rich and complex, with infinite possibilities and permutations.

Their conversation drifted to the problems of maintaining the proper number of grubs that evolved into pollywogs, and then juvenals and eventually, sometimes, into adults. Too many grubs, and the health of the grass would suffer. Too few, and in a few years there would be a dangerous shortage of juvenals to eat.

Teams of adults working out of the university monitored the grub population, and adjustments were made, most frequently by taking the eggs that fell to the floors of offices, factories, and homes, and either destroying them, or scattering them over the fields.

This was all new to Kren. The slaves in the mine were not considered to be good breeding stock, and their eggs were never saved. If any eggs hatched in that environment, the grubs were left to starve.

Even if they had been able to find enough to eat, they still all would have died. Grubs instinctively go downward in their search for water in which to metamorphose into pollywogs. But in a mine, going downward only leads to death.

A more long-term technique to restrict the numbers of grubs was to restrict the number of males who were used to rejuvenate the elders. Currently, less than two per gross of the adults in the duchy were male.

"How is it that you are male?" Bronki asked. "Most males are the highly selected bodies of the aristocracy."

"I was severely injured in battle. This body was the only one available." Kren's new-found intelligence made it easy for him to lie.

She nodded, accepting this.

"And the identification scars on your arms, they look barely a year old."