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

However, it was claimed to happen fairly often among the aristocracy, when your guards were not absolutely trustworthy, or when they had some reason to prefer a change in command.

Dukes soon learned to have very well-rewarded and trustworthy people around them, for just such situations as this. It was also common to leave orders that the entire guarding and welcoming party was to be slaughtered if the old duke did not arrive as expected in a new body.

He estimated that what with the torpor that always followed a major meal, and the time normally taken for the cells of his brain to reform, he had been asleep for at least a week, and quite possibly two.

He fumbled his way to the toilet and relieved himself. He took several long drinks of water. Then he went back to the cot and collapsed there.

A dull pain enveloped his head. It was not actually a pain in his brain, for Mitchegai brains, like those of humans, have no pain receptors. It was rather in the vastly expanded skull plates complaining about their newly distorted shapes and in the tightly stretched skin over them that the pain originated.

In time, it would pass.

Time.

He had to give himself time.

He had to ignore all of the pressure of the events of his world, and take the time to reorganize himself.

He stayed on the clean cot and looked up at the plain, white ceiling as a long lifetime of memories slowly formed and took their categorized places in his mind.

His academic advisor had long been pestering him to record the events of his life, and since he would now be the founder of a new Mitchegai planet, he had agreed to comply. A recording helmet was thus available next to the cot, and he put it on. Posterity perhaps had a right to know exactly who and what he was, but he would not release the tapes until long after his death.

He had no memories of being a grub, or a pollywog, or a juvenal. He had no remembrance of his transmutation to an adult, but it must have happened when he was alone, and out in the wilds. Such a thing, metamorphosing without adult supervision, would never happen on a properly managed estate, but among the Mitchegai, as with humans, accidents often bring people into the world.

His first recollection was of leading a savage, nonverbal band of carnivores in the ragged hills of the badly managed estate of Duke Lidko, three thousand years ago.

On Earth at this time, the Sumerians were inventing a primitive form of cuneiform writing, and the Egyptians had yet to found the Old Kingdom. The pyramids had not yet even been designed.

Kren and his band had been captured shortly after the estate of Duke Lidko had been conquered by his neighbor, Duke Molon.

Wild carnivores were usually killed out of hand, as they were considered too stupid to do useful work, too dangerous to be left as they were, and risky for use as new body donors, since you couldn't be absolutely sure as to just how dominant their brains had become.

But Duke Molon had taken heavy casualties in the war, and was in sore need of manpower. Kren and his band were put to work in the vast, ancient, underground mines on the duke's new lands.

Open pit mines would have been an abomination to the Mitchegai. Every square foot of the surface was needed for their grass, to feed the children on whom the adults fed. Their mines delved deeply, and the tailings were ground fine, to be spread thinly over a vast area, when they weren't dumped into an ocean trench.

The rules in the mine were very simple. If you disobeyed, you were beaten. If you didn't work, you weren't fed. If you continued to not work, your brain was ripped out and thrown into the fire, while your body was left on the floor to be eaten by your ravenous former coworkers.

Kren learned to work.

He was fed, but rarely were slaves permitted to eat the brains of their prey. His superiors got that delicacy, as did, occasionally, the guards. They didn't want the lowest classes to become too intelligent.

After a lifetime of brutal labor below ground, when his stooped, worn-out body was no longer capable of going on, he was judged to be worthy of a new body—and another lifetime of work in the mines. When this happened, his brain cells were added to those of the youth who was eating him.

After eight such resurrections, his brain had grown to the point where he could speak a bit. He understood the mines, and how they worked. But still, he dug. Still, he hauled the copper ore to the surface. And sometimes they had him help to shore up the ceilings with reinforced concrete beams as they delved ever deeper. But now, at least, he was a valued slave.

The Mitchegai were very advanced, technologically. This planet had been colonized by spaceships over a gross thousand years before, and they had never lost that technology. Their use of slavery in the mine was a matter of using their version of appropriate technology.

They could have automated the mine, but that would have cost money. Slaves were free. Feeding them gave the duke something to do with the temporary surplus of juvenals on his lands, and if food ever became scarce, he could always slaughter some of the slaves and feed them to the others.