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

There was much else to think on, and what Kren thought of was land. If his coming mission was successful, Kren's lands would be expanded to include an entire new planet.

After all dozen and five of the generals and master builders had been ritualistically eaten, the throne was removed, to be replaced by one even larger, older and more ornate. This was placed in front of Duke Kren, facing the crowd, for the main event of this day's festivities was about to take place, the only truly important event of the day.

The stupor of his earlier kill was still on him, and that was good. It lessened the pain, and it wouldn't do to show any distress or emotion in front of his highest subordinates. He watched as a particularly fine specimen of recently metamorphosed youth was brought caged to him, and he nodded his approval at both the creature and his tattoos. He had, of course, along with his medical people, carefully examined the youth the day before, and knew him to be perfect. The face was pleasing, the body lovely and the ritual tattoos were all properly shaped and colored. He gestured his readiness to proceed.

As the noise of the crowd hushed, he stood, removed his Helmet of Command, his Weapons Belt of Power, and his Cloak of Authority. He crossed over to and mounted the great ancient throne naked. The cage with the selected youth was placed behind him in the proper manner, as he ritually refused the binding straps. He knew that he would not disgrace himself in this final act. He never had before.

A second cage was placed around him, abutting the first. It encased his body, but left his limbs outside. It was locked in place.

He signaled his readiness with a slight flick of his claws, and the sergeants removed the wall of the cage that separated him from the lean and screaming youngster. The famished creature leaped at his immobile form, instinctively tore open his brain cage, and devoured his brain as he held himself motionless against the pain. Even after the brain was gone, still the body rigidly obeyed its final command. It sat frozen as the youngster ate the rest of the head, the trunk and the tail. The arms and legs, which had been positioned outside the cage, were then removed by the sergeants, to be cut into thousands of tiny slices and distributed to the greatest of his faithful subjects.

The crowd cheered wildly. A noble death!

The most astounding biological peculiarity of the Mitchegai is their motile brain cells. The small cells of the gray matter in their brains, which are in fact bright blue to human eyes, are not digested when eaten alive. Instead, they migrate through the walls of the first stomach. They are picked up by the blood stream and taken into the cranium. This skull has flexible, overlapping plates, and can expand rapidly if the brain recently eaten is inordinately large, as was the case with Duke Kren's.

If the brain eaten was the small one of a juvenal, the cells would be absorbed into the larger mass of those of the adult. They replace those cells that have worn out and died, and add subtly to the creatures' capabilities, but no observable personality change occurs.

But when the huge brain of a mature adult is eaten by a recently metamorphosed youth, the influx of cells completely swamps the few that the youth originally had. The newly reformed brain that emerges has the knowledge and personality of the adult who has been eaten, and this, among the Mitchegai, is immortality. Duke Kren remembers events that happened to him over three thousand years before, and he is not an elder of his race.

Something similar to this was claimed by some to occur in Earthly flatworms.

Because of this, the brain of an intelligent adult Mitchegai has very little to do with the genetic structure of its body. The Darwinian forces that dominate all life forms on Earth have little effect on the Mitchegai. For millions of years, they have been carefully breeding their own bodies to their own version of perfection, but this breeding has caused few changes to their minds. The selection process there is something quite different.

When half of a large brain is eaten, and each half is still much larger than that of the youth doing the eating, much the same thing occurres, save only that the personality formed is somewhat less dominant, and the memories of the eaten are distributed between two individual eaters. Doing this is the favored method of increasing the numbers of a leader's loyal subordinates.

It also keeps them from getting too smart for their leader's own good.

Duke Kren would soon be needing all the loyal subordinates that he could get, and today's ceremonies would be repeated many times in the coming months, with lower-ranking functionaries. He planned to increase the numbers of his people by one third, bringing their total number to over a gross million and also to have as many of them in new bodies as possible.

For soon, he would be losing all of his lands and all of his juvenals, save those that would be harvested and quick frozen in liquid nitrogen for food.

His chosen successor would attempt to rule in his place, but if that successor failed, Kren's lands would be divided among his former enemies.

Kren would leave this world forever, all because he had become the most powerful individual on Planet 9847, and his planet had won the most recent great interstellar lottery.

A new planet had been found on the periphery of Mitchegai space, and it was to be his, if he could tame it!





CHAPTER THREE
The Gurkha Heaven
New Yugoslavia, 2205 a.d.

My part of New Yugoslavia had been deeded to the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces as part payment for a war we had fought for New Croatia. The local terrain consisted of a kilometer-high plateau to the southwest and a large plains area to the northeast. The plateau was deeply indented with a number of large box canyons that opened onto the plain.

It had been uninhabitable desert when we got here, but we had irrigated it using equipment from the automatic factories of our home planet, New Kashubia, and the productive capacity of the thousands of intelligent fighting machines that made up half of our army. The other half of our army was made up of the human beings who spent much of their time living inside those machines.