She had a cowboy hat ready for me. "The sun's pretty bright out there."
"Well," I said, surprised. "You look as lovely as you do when I'm in a tank! I didn't realize that the social drone project was this far along."
"Thank you kindly, boss," she said, bowing. "Actually, this is an early prototype, but I pulled rank to get it to look like me. The skeletal structure and musculature systems work well enough, as do hearing and eyesight, but the sense of touch is still very poor, the senses of taste and smell are nonexistent, and I have to recharge the capacitors every few hours. Still, it's a start."
"You'll be a real girl before long," I said, climbing into the saddle of the tall Tennessee Walker they had brought out for me.
"That's what we all hope. Where do you want to go?"
She swung into the saddle, and the smaller, Arabian mare didn't object a bit. Our military humanoid drones were over two meters tall, and massive, weighing in at over two hundred and fifty kilograms even without their weapons. The design parameters for these social drones was that they should be as identical to human beings as possible, and it appeared that her weight was about the same as a nicely built young lady of her size should be.
"Just for a ride and a look around. Through the valley, and then out onto the plains for a bit," I said.
My valley was green with grass, although it would still be a few months before the first young dairy cows could be brought in. The trees were still being cloned, and wouldn't be planted for years. But you could feel the vitality, the living growth all around us.
The almost vertical walls of the canyon, fully a kilometer high, had been carved into the most beautiful city imaginable. Hundreds of thousands of large apartments had windows looking out on my valley, and inside there were all of the shops, schools, businesses, offices, roads, halls, and churches that a true city requires.
It made a man proud.
We headed out to the plains, past the partially filled lake that would close off the entrance, and out to the grasslands beyond.
Some of this area would be in vegetable gardens to feed the people of my city. Half of this vast acreage would be put into grain production, mostly to fatten my beef cattle, and the rest would stay as grass, to raise those cattle in the most natural way possible.
There is something about owning land, rich, productive land, that makes a man feel that he is a part of the earth, and that all is well with the world.
CHAPTER SIX
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
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.
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."
"Yes, that was about when it happened, during the last war," he said.
"Yet that body is at least ten years old, from the time of metamorphosis."
"Also true. I was injured when we were taking a big mine to the south of here. This was once the body of an ignorant slave in a mine. As I said, it was all that was available, and I urged them to take the chance. Still, it is a very strong body, and I do not regret what happened. Certainly, it was better than being divided among six of my old comrades."
"I'm sure it was," she said. "That would have been the Senta Copper Mine, wouldn't it."
"Strange as it might seem, I don't think that I ever heard the name of the place. They did mine copper there, however."
"I'm sure that it was the Senta. Those scars on your arm are rather crude."
"Old Sergeant Toll did the cutting, in almost complete darkness, when I was coming out of my stupor. He was afraid that I might be mistaken for one of the mining slaves, and sent on with the rest of them," he said, the lies flowing freely.
"And what happened to those others?"
"I have no idea. In the military, you are generally told only what you need to know."
"At the university, we are always told everything, especially things that we have no desire to know," she laughed.
Bronki talked of her life at the University of Dren, of her occasional difficulties with some of the students, and about the perpetual round of interdepartmental politics.
"Yours is such a different world from the one that I am used to," he told her. "I find all of this to be fascinating."
"Then perhaps you should consider a change of career fields. There is always a need for more intelligent students at the university. You could come there, and after a few years as a student, perhaps an instructorship might open up for you. Also, you mentioned winning championships with both the spear and the sword. It is possible that an athletic scholarship could be offered you."
"That sounds attractive, but my leave will not go on forever," he said.
"Often, things can be arranged. These are peaceful times. The duke's army might not be averse to granting an officer an academic leave of absence."
"You make life at the university sound far more interesting than drilling illiterate troops, or standing guard duty when there is really nothing to guard against. I shall think on it."
"Do that," she said. "Should you decide on venturing into the academic world, it is possible that I could be of some assistance to you. I am not without influence there."
The sun was close to setting when they came to Bronki's retreat. At first, Kren could see nothing at all but a grass-covered hill, but Bronki took out a knife and cut away the grass that had grown over the doorway.
"You can see that I have not been here for several years," she said, throwing the thick mat down the hill, where it was eagerly pounced on by two juvenals.
"The other door and the windows are best cut away from the inside," she continued, leading him inside, and turning on the lights.
The house was quite spacious, and extremely luxurious compared to what a mining slave was used to. There were chairs and tables and real cots to sleep on. There was a tall and spacious entrance hall, and a large living room with many comfortable couches centered around a long, low table and a drinking fountain. Opening off these central rooms were two studies, a steam room, and five bedrooms. Mitchegai homes do not have kitchens or dining rooms, of course, and outside of the cities, they don't have toilets. The grass took care of waste d
isposal.
But the things that impressed Kren the most were the books. Every wall, every small bit of space, was covered with bookshelves, and these were all crammed to overflowing with books. Big books, small books, thick ones and thin. Some of them had ancient tooled leather coverings, but most were of simple grass paper.
And besides the books, there were thousands of tapes and discs, along with the viewing screens and computers to use them.
"I am very impressed," Kren said. "Have you actually read all of these?"
"Most of them. Many are reference texts, of course, good for looking things up in, but not intended to be read from cover to cover. Perhaps you would like some reading suggestions?"
"I would very much appreciate your advice, yes."
"Then we shall discuss it in a little while. Let me unpack and then rest a bit while you choose one of the guest bedrooms. I usually entertain several friends here, but this time, everyone that I would usually have invited along was otherwise engaged," she said.
"Thank you. I will do that."
Kren walked about the house, opening windows and doors, cutting away the grass that covered them with his sword, and throwing the thick mats away as he had seen Bronki do. The windows were thick and well insulated, but no one on a Mitchegai world had ever heard of window screens.
He found that they were at the top of a hill, with pleasant views in every direction, an arrangement that also permitted good cross-ventilation.
Seeing no great difference between the guest rooms, he chose the one to the north, and hung his clothes and equipment up there, on pegs set into yet another bookshelf.
His hostess came in with some fresh bed sheets, so he made the bed in the neat, military style that one of his victims had taught him. This was a very pleasant place, and he would obviously be welcome to stay here for a long while.
Kren lay down thinking that this was a very good turn of events.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Promotions and Awards
New Yugoslavia, 2205 a.d.
A few months went by, and I found myself becoming human again. Then I got a summons from my boss.
Kren of the Mitchegai Page 4