"How is the book coming?" Sava asked Bronki.
"Poorly! It's way behind schedule!"
"Mine too! What's more, I'm stuck. I don't know what to do next, but at least I've got a year before it's due. Tell you what. How about if I stay here and help you out, and then if you have time, you can do the same for me?"
Bronki said, "You'd do that? You're a blessing from the duke! Yes, by all means! Help me! Help me!"
The two academicians brought their gift straight into the living room, and tied the struggling girl to a low ceramic tiled table with raised edges that was obviously made for this purpose. Several small, decorative knives were put on the table as well, and the group sat down on couches around it.
"So, Bronki, will you do the honors of the first cut?" Sava said.
"But surely, it is your gift, so you should do it."
"No, no. You know the rules. You are the hostess."
"But Kren is a special guest. He should have the honors," Bronki said.
"I am but a soldier, and unfamiliar with civilized ways," Kren said. "I would probably do something improper, and flub the whole thing."
"No, you won't," Bronki insisted. "We're all friends here. Just take a knife and cut off some small part. Actually, most party goers start with the fingers and toes, and work inwards as the night goes on. Just don't let her die too soon."
"As you wish," he said. He took a knife which was none too sharp and stretched out one of the girl's fingers. Apparently guessing what he was about to do, she struggled and screamed, such that when he cut the finger off, he didn't slice cleanly through the cartilage at the joint, but had to lean heavily on the knife and took off a bit of bone as well.
The girl screamed again, much more loudly this time, and longer.
"That was really good, Kren," Zoda said. "The pitch and timbre were wonderful! I'll have to remember that! Always take a bit of bone off on the first cut!"
The Mitchegai have very little sense of rhythm, and thus music and dance have no place in their pantheon of art works. But extracting pleasant sounds from their party food is considered to be an honored art form, and a lot of fun besides. In addition, it always put the guests in a very good mood.
"You are the computer expert here, Bronki," Zoda said, cutting off a finger for herself. When the screaming stopped, she continued, "What do you think of Kem's suggestion that it might be possible to build a computer with real intelligence?"
"I think that it is pure and utter nonsense! Computers can only do what their name implies. They can compute. The so called artificial intelligence programs are exactly what their name says they are. Artificial! They can't really think!" She stabbed the girl's forearm to emphasize her point.
"Exactly right," said Sava. "Computers have been around for millions of years, and if it were possible to make them truly intelligent, somebody would have done it by now."
The long evening was most pleasant for the four of them. Kren was quizzed at length about the military, and he asked as many questions about their lives at the university.
"So tell me, why are we so often at war?" Bronki asked the group, when the conversation hit a lull.
"That's easy," Sava said. "Because they're fun!"
"Having participated in a number of them, would you mind if I disagreed with that opinion?" Kren said, playing his role to the hilt.
"Disagree all you like. That's what makes parties fun," Sava replied.
Zoda said, "They may not be fun for those who must fight them, but they are tremendously exciting for those who don't. And it's the ones far behind the lines who start the wars, direct the wars, and profit from the wars. But from a larger perspective, wars have other advantages. They eliminate surplus populations. The grass has to be trimmed and eaten, or it will turn rank."
Bronki said, "More importantly, they eliminate the ruling class of the losing side, and their ancient brains along with them. When the brain gets too old, it often gets too set in its ways. The artisans, the academics, and the soldiers have their own ways of eliminating the inefficient among them, but warfare is the only dependable method of doing this with the aristocracy."
"I'll have to think on that," Kren said.
The conversation drifted through six dozen subjects, with several surprises and a lot of laughter.
Later, Sava asked, as she crunched on a bit of ankle bone that she had bitten off, "Tell me, Kren, how was it that you learned the language of Keno?"
"In truth, I never did learn it, in the ordinary way of speaking. During the last war, another division took so many casualties at one point that they could not give them all a proper sendoff, and my unit helped them out a bit. I'd never met the soldier that my squad ate, but the next day, I found myself speaking Keno. I never learned how our dinner happened to know it, because shortly thereafter, we were attacked, I was hospitalized, and most of my squad was killed. Then it was the other division's turn to help us out."
"You make it sound like a very adventurous life."
"Adventurous? I suppose so, but being an academic sounds much more interesting to me," he said as he flayed the skin off the girl's lower leg.
The girl moaned and cried in the most delightful fashion until they had her trimmed down to her upper body cavity and head. Then they played the finger game, a variation on the human game of scissors-paper-rock, to determine who would get the brain, and Sava won.
Lastly, they tore the rest of her apart with their claws, ate it all, and licked up the blood. Then they each went to their separate bedrooms and locked the doors, laughing all the while.
Falling asleep, Kren marveled once more at how wonderful intelligent, civilized company was.
CHAPTER NINE
A Good Party
New Kashubia, 2205 a.d.
It was a good party. The people from the Command Center had more experience with socializing than us soldiers from the sticks, and it showed. By people, I mean both humans and artificial intelligences. We considered ourselves to be equals, despite what the laws outside of the army might say. In time, we would prevail.
Dream World permitted a very wide range of human activities, since no matter what you did, you couldn't get addicted, hung over, diseased, injured, or dead. If an emergency occurred, you could go from being roaring drunk to dead sober in an instant.
A few people were experimenting with just about every drug known to man, and tobacco was making a considerable comeback, but most people stayed with alcohol and eschewed the rest.
Someone told me that the band contained only two humans, the rest being AI. I watched, but I couldn't tell one from the other. The sound level was always just right. If you wanted to dance, you could always hear the beat. If you wanted to talk, you could always hear what was being said. Dream World had a lot of advantages.
Soon, some couples were dancing on the walls and ceiling, but after my first startled glance, it seemed to be fairly normal to me. A few people had been turning this sort of thing into a real art form, though, and one couple in particular, dancing in midair under the high ceiling, got a long round of applause.
Mostly, parties are places where people get together to talk, drink, socialize, meet new people, drink, exchange ideas, argue, drink, and occasionally fight to the death. As it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be.
My crew had a fine time. Agnieshka was soon wearing a vaguely Napoleonic outfit made of tight-fitting red and white silk, knee-high boots, lots of gold braid, a very ornate sword, and about as much décolletage as the law will ordinarily allow.
She claimed that it was the official full undress uniform for Army majors. A few other metal ladies, presumably majors themselves, copied her outfit. Soon, something even more audacious was invented for captains, and then a few hundred new tanker class A's outdid them all with something that I don't feel comfortable describing.
Our metal ladies could break into well-choreographed dances at a moment's notice, and did so several times that evening, doing an impromptu fifty-gir
l Rockette High Kick at one point.
Kasia and I danced on the floor, the walls and the ceiling, but we didn't feel up to competing with those athletes working out in midair. Eva, Kasia's tank, and Timothy, Zuzanna's, were up there doing a credible job, though.
Quincy was demonstrating hand-to-hand combat techniques to someone who knew a lot less about fighting than he thought he did. Quincy killed him four times that I noticed. He was a persistent fellow. It hurts to die, even in Dream World.
Professor Cee was sitting around a table with six other identical Professor Cees, all wearing Harris tweed, all drinking single malt scotch, and all discussing something in a language that no one else had ever heard before.
A half dozen bloody duels happened in the course of the evening. Eventually, somebody circulated with a pad of note paper, taking a vote to determine who had died the most noble death of the evening. They gave the award to the guy that Quincy had repeatedly killed.
For no reason that I could discern, Conan was demonstrating how apes climb trees. Someone was sticking his tongue into Zuzanna's ear, and Maria declared that she was in love with whoever it was who was running his foot up her leg.
And Kasia ended up with a few like-minded ladies, sitting around drunk on champagne and reciting from memory the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Like I said, it was a good party. Only, I wanted to get to the business meeting. We were at war?
CHAPTER TEN
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
Bargains Kept
The next day, Sava stayed to help Bronki on her book, and Zoda, lacking anything better to do, stayed too. Bronki's retreat had two studies, each with a computer. Zoda wanted to get involved and help out, but was stymied for lack of equipment.
Frustrated, she asked Kren to walk with her back to her house and to help her to bring her computer to Bronki's place. Since he was sick of trying to comprehend even the coarse points of mathematics, he agreed.
It was a pleasant two-hour walk there, and a strenuous three-hour walk back. Zoda's computer weighed close to two gross pounds. Mitchegai computer technology was vastly inferior to that of late twentieth-century Earth, even after a million years of development.
Creativity is the domain of the young. Since Mitchegai are normally thousands of years old before they have brains enough to do anything technical, they are often very intelligent and extremely learned, but not very creative.
Electronics was also held back because over a million years before, a prominent academician had written a flawless paper absolutely proving that anything like an integrated circuit was totally impossible to make or use. Thereafter, anyone who suggested such a thing was simply regarded as being uneducated, and was treated the way that humans would treat someone who wanted to build a perpetual motion machine.
Kren and Zoda had the computer slung on the same aluminum carrying pole that had been used for bringing in last night's party snack. Zoda bounced along, carrying her end without apparent difficulty, and Kren was ashamed to admit that he was tired in front of a mere academician. He followed behind her without voicing his complaints.
They were almost back before Zoda explained that the trick of using a carrying pole was to adjust your step to the natural frequency of the weight and the pole. With just the right bounce and timing, the job became much easier.
Kren thanked her for the useful, if belated, information.
Zoda set her equipment up in the last bedroom, and Kren, interested, followed her instructions to connect the components with each other, and with the two other computers. Soon all three academics were working smoothly together, and Kren went back to trying to master elementary mathematics.
The next afternoon, frustrated with his lack of accomplishment, Kren went out and brought back another party snack, as similar as possible to the one the others had admired a couple of days before.
That night, Kren won the finger game and got to eat the brain. The day after, his studies went much better, and this got him to thinking. Perhaps to learn new things, he needed new brain cells. Perhaps the ones he had were already committed to other things.
The next day, he went out with his spear, and killed four juvenals, eating their brains on the spot, and leaving the bodies to be eaten by other juvenals. On any planet, herbivores will eagerly eat meat, if they don't have to kill it first.
His studies improved considerably.
Soon they fell into a pattern, with a party every other night, but no major meals, since time was pressing and Bronki couldn't afford to take the time off for a proper stupor. Kren always provided the party snacks.
And four times a day, he ate a juvenal brain.
Mitchegai juvenals are not herding animals, and they are not territorial. They drift and wander as individuals, constantly seeking out new and better pastures.
Nonetheless, Kren's excessive slaughter was thinning out the herbivores in the area. More were being killed than drifted in. Furthermore, the few that were left were being sated on meat rather than the much less nutritious grass. The fields around the retreat were becoming rank.
After three weeks of nonstop work, the academics went outside for a break, and they noticed it immediately.
"Just look at this mess!" Sava said.
"Kren, this is your work, isn't it," Zoda said. "Just how many juvenals have you been eating? Ten a day?"
"Only four," he admitted. "And only the brains. The rest of the bodies are eaten by other juvenals, so the biomass stays the same."
"It does no such thing," Sava said. "The conversion rate is only five dozen ten per gross. You are ruining the grass. Worse, you are breaking the duke's law. Adults are permitted to take what they need to eat. Wasting food is punished with death by fire. If they catch you, they'll burn you at the stake in some public square! And doing anything that degrades the quality of the grass carries the same penalty!"
Mitchegai criminals are not actually burned at the stake with a fire at their feet. That was just a saying left over from the distant, barbaric past. In more progressive, modern times, they use a ceramic, temperature controlled, electrically heated stake, which permits the sufferer to remain alive much longer, and thus provides more amusement for the crowd.
"I know military regulations. I am less familiar with civilian law."
"You are ignorant of a lot of things," Bronki said. "Small additions of fresh brain cells can improve your learning abilities. But the maximum that is useful for academic purposes is one juvenal every other day. Four a day is simply ignorant!"
"I apologize and stand corrected," Kren said.
"You will do more than that!" Bronki shouted. "You will cease hunting anywhere within a dozen miles of here for the next six weeks at least. Maybe enough juvenals will drift in to correct the problem here by then. With any luck, the grass will look proper again before anyone in authority notices the problem. Because if they do notice this mess, or if anybody calls it to their attention, you'll have the whole army out after you."
"I said I was sorry."
"That's not enough," Zoda said. "We're all too busy to make any extended hunting trips right now, so you have to feed the whole group."
"And if you can't bring in enough food from more than a dozen miles away, you'll go hungry before the rest of us do," Sava added. "Is that understood?"
"With the alternative of death by fire, I will comply with your requests," Kren said, thinking that they were quite serious about perhaps turning him in. Certainly, no Mitchegai would take the personal risk of attempting to protect someone else from the duke's forces.
Bronki said, "You certainly will. And after this area is back in proper shape, I will give you a list of the poor indigents in this neighborhood, starting with my housekeeper. Many of them are crippled, and have difficulty getting enough to eat. You will give the body of the child you kill every other day to one of them
. That qualifies as an act of charity, and will satisfy the duke's law."
"Yes, madam."
Two weeks later, the academics announced that they had completed Bronki's book slightly ahead of the deadline, and had E-mailed it to the publisher. The party that night was a particularly good one.
At one point, Bronki announced, "Kren, you will be pleased to learn that I have heard from the athletic director at my university. He has said that if you can repeat your spear-chucking performance for him on a regular basis, he can guarantee you a five-year athletic scholarship!"
Sava and Zoda applauded wildly, while the party snack moaned pleasantly.
"This is wonderful," Kren said. "Now I must make inquiries with my superiors to see if I can take advantage of this excellent offer."
"I'm sure that we can help you with that," Zoda said.
"Thank you, but I think it best if I handled this one on my own. The protocols of the military are much different from those of your world," Kren said, helping himself to a nice bit of tail. "Still, if I need help, I will not hesitate asking it of you."
"Next, have you had a chance to read that novel I lent you, A Soldier's Life?" Bronki asked.
"Yes, and I found it to be simply silly. The book's heroes see a dozen times as much action as any normal combat troops could possibly survive, without having any of them killed. Their use of weapons ranges from awkward through foolish and on to absolutely stupid. They all go into battle shouting patriotic slogans, they all respect all of their officers, and they all feel an unrelenting reverence for their commanding general. In short, they have absolutely nothing in common with real soldiers in a real army. Intelligent warriors might enjoy the humor of it, as a satire, but relatively few soldiers have that level of intelligence. It might be useful as enlistment propaganda, except that it would probably attract the wrong sort of recruit. In short, I can see no possible use for this book."
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