Kren of the Mitchegai

by Leo Frankowski

  Duke Kren then started out after the girl with great loping strides. Forgoing the repeated passes that some might think too flamboyant, he quickly overtook his prey and pinned his daughter to the ground with a precise, traditional hold. Careful not to kill the youngster too soon, he peeled open the flexible, overlapping skull plates of the screaming, struggling youth and ate her tiny brain, relishing the flavor of the bright blue cells that were already disassociating themselves in his saliva.

  The major struggling stopped, as the cheering went on. He quickly ate the rest of his daughter's quivering young body, efficiently stripping off great gobbets of flesh and swallowing them without chewing. As a gesture of generosity, he left the skin, the bones, and the intestines to be distributed to the poor.

  It was a good kill.

  Like certain African frogs and South American fishes on Earth, the Mitchegai practice faginism. The adults eat their own children. The flesh of juvenals is the only meat that these carnivores have available for food, it is the only thing that they had ever eaten as adults, and indeed it is the only thing that they can eat.

  Duke Kren went to his Place of High Honor and let the feeding stupor come over him as he watched the rest of the ceremony. Except to nod and approve, he would not be needed again until the very end.

  Two sergeants of the Body Guard brought an ancient, ornate, blood-stained throne to the center of the arena, positioned it to face Duke Kren exactly, and stood by it on either side at attention. The least of the six greatest generals stood and bowed to Duke Kren, and when her genuflection was acknowledged, the general placed her helmet and weapons belt on her chair and leaped naked into the arena, her body still vigorous and only middle-aged. As with most of those being honored this day, there was no desperate need for her to be eaten yet, but the way before the Krenbold would soon be hard, and none but the most vigorous could stand the battles and the work to be done.

  In the center of the arena, the general turned to Duke Kren, saluted and said, "Always I have served you! Always we will serve you, Duke Kren, our only leader, our once and future Duke!" She eagerly sat on the blood-stained chair, facing him.

  "Always thou hast served me well, General Kund, and always wilt thou both serve me!" Duke Kren acknowledged, as the two sergeants of the Body Guard strapped the general into the throne.

  From the left and right side of the arena, two juvenals who had just completed the metamorphosis to adult carnivores were brought forth in separate cages, each carried by six sergeants. Their new teeth were the meat slashing teeth of carnivores. Their stance was erect and their tails had slimmed down from something resembling an alligator's to something more like a monkey's. They were thin and lean with the forced starvation of the change that had come upon them, and now both were ravenously, mindlessly hungry.

  Each was carried around the sides of the arena, so those in the crowd could see the ceremonial identification marks that had been tattooed on the arms of these carefully selected youths. They stopped in front of Duke Kren, and he nodded his approval of them. Then the cages were taken to either side of the bound general, who was still sitting rigidly at attention, displaying neither fear nor anticipation of the pain she would soon have to endure, but rather the calm confidence of her belief in two better lives to come.

  At a slight hand signal from Duke Kren, the sergeants split open the general's huge brain case, using only their powerful claws. The brain before them was not convoluted and bifurcated in the Earthly fashion, but was a smooth, undifferentiated mass, much larger than its Earthly counterpart. The sergeants carefully divided the brain in half between them, and quickly fed a half to each of the small-headed youths in the cages. These dripping gobbets were eagerly eaten, to the applause of the crowd.

  Then one of the sergeants triggered a mechanism in the gory throne and a huge knife blade sprang up from the bottom of the seat, spraying the area with dark brown blood, and cutting the general's body exactly in half. These halves were unstrapped, and a half was fed to each of the still ravenous youths. The cages with their occupants were carried to the side of the arena, to wait there as the day's events went on.

  The blade was re-cocked into the throne, the blood was swept onto the grass and the least of the master builders being honored this day bowed to Duke Kren.

  He acknowledged her bow, and gestured for the ceremony to continue, though in fact it really didn't interest him. There was much else to think on.

  Adult Mitchegai had many concerns. They saw to the watering of the fields of grass, and its proper care and fertilization. They saw to the proper construction of cities and machines, and their upkeep and maintenance. They taught in the universities and managed the factories, mended the power nets, maintained the communications, and did all else that their fiercely proud civilization required.

  And they fought with their neighbors, defending their lands and taking the lands of others whenever possible. And of course there were the endless games of status, wealth and prestige, for these things could bring one the basis of all that was important.

  Yet ultimately, adult Mitchegai were totally concerned with only one thing. Land. For with land, one could eventually gain all else that was necessary for a long, prosperous, and well fed life. And not just ordinary land, but rich, arable land, that could grow their single grasslike crop, that could provide the grubs, the polliwogs and the juvenals with food. Then the young could provide the adults with food, with the sport of the kill, and with new bodies when their own were worn out, for the adults had their own form of immortality.

  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.

  Our tanks had been designed to tunnel through solid rock. They made short work out of carving out apartments, roads, and everything that a city needs into the granite walls of my valley.

  They had done a class job of it, building for a design life of five thousand years. All of the exposed surfaces had a heavy coating of what had once been precious metals, but now were fairly common. The walls were studded with jewels, and the windows were "glassed" with sheets of single crystals of diamond.

  I woke the next morning to find Kasia at my side. After a few hours, we made it to breakfast.

  "Well," I said, to break the silence. "I trust that all of the problems have been solved?"

  "Yes," Kasia said. "The Gurkhas will be moving out and building their own place."

  "Indeed? And where are they doing this?"

  "Next door. I've helped them buy the canyon to the southeast of us."

  "Quincy and Zuzanna's place?"

  "No, the box canyon in between us. It was originally purchased by a consortium of troops who couldn't agree on what to do with it. They finally made a decent profit selling it to the Gurkhas. Look, the Gurkhas have their own culture, and they are happy with it. They have no intention of being assimilated into somebody else's world if they can help it. At the same time, they like being members of our army, and they especially like our pay rates. So, their tanks are working with them, designing their own particular version of heaven."

  "Well, our metal ladies are first rate engineers, artists, and architects. They have done it before, so they won't have problems doing it again. I imagine that what with all the stone cutting, that valley will be a cloud of dust for a few months."

  "True, but in three months your troops will be able to start moving in. I think that Gurkhas are environmentalists at heart. They want natural rock, and not the gold and platinum plating that you used on this valley. They don't want all of the jewels, but they are getting the diamond windows. And their apartments and homes are only a quarter of the size of what you have built here."

  "Whatever they want, they'll get, as far as I'm concerned. After the way they fought for us in the Battle of the Solar Station, we owe them a lot."

  "That was my thought too, lover."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,

  FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.

  BUT CONCERNING EVENTS

  OF UP TO 3000 YEARS EARLIER

  The Awakening

  Duke Kren awoke slowly, sluggishly, to find himself in a locked cell. It was a combination lock, and his new body had to know the combination to get out. Otherwise, he would be left in there, forever.

  This was to keep him safe while he was in his eating stupor, and to protect his subordinates if his old brain was not properly functioning in his new body.

  The most common disaster was that the young carnivore could have a muscle spasm while it was eating your brain.

  Normally, chemicals in the brain being eaten caused a sphincter in the esophagus to close off the second and third stomachs, and another sphincter to open to the first stomach, where the brain cells could migrate through the stomach wall, through the blood stream, and eventually up to the cranium.

  If the sphincters failed to function properly, the new brain cells could instead be sent down to the third stomach, where they would be digested.

  This process was commonly known as bad luck.

  The malfunction rarely occurred, since any young carnivore who performed this atrocity was invariably and immediately killed, which promptly deleted it from the gene pool.

  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.