Kren of the Mitchegai

by Leo Frankowski

  "You are still stupid. You do not know how to take all of the factors into account."

  "No, sir. I am ignorant, and ignorance has the advantage of being curable. Actually, I spent Sunday working out a game plan for the rest of the season. I would seem to be in a unique position in that I am sufficiently skillful so as to be able to control the outcome of three separate competitions. I can win when I want to, or let someone else do so if I feel that it is to my advantage."

  "I see. And assuming that you are really that good, what do you plan to do about it?" the director asked.

  "There are a dozen and eleven more games on our calendar this year, plus the championships. I intend to win typically one event at each of them, and lose the other two, to keep the odds up. Then I will win all three events at the championships. Next Saturday's games with the University of Badja will see me win the distance event, setting a new record by a few inches."

  "Just make damned sure that you show up for the award ceremonies! Okay, Kren, if you can actually make this program work, I'll let you do it your way. But if you fail to meet your predictions just once, I'll take charge directly, understood? And I'll expect you to tell me—privately!—which event you will win by the Tuesday before the game, at the latest."

  "Very good, sir."

  "Okay. Dik's waiting. Go practice with her. Then at javelin practice, you'll work on throwing exactly two inches farther than the record."

  After Kren left, the director decided that he wouldn't tell anyone about Kren's predictions, but would use that information himself. The alumnae would be satisfied to know when they should bet on someone else.

  From the outer office, he could soon be heard to say on the phone, "Naw, I think that the kid was just lucky! Look at the pattern. He got four golds on the first round! How could you call that anything but luck? And then by the last round he got tired and completely fell apart! Me, I'd put my money on someone else, Dala."

  And on another call, "Well, the kid did real well at the fencing meet, no doubt about that, but I've done an analysis of the pattern of the opponents he went up against. Now, it was an honest draw, I'm sure of it, but strange statistical things sometimes happen! The very best players were paired up for the first three rounds! Kren only had to beat one of them! Everybody else he went up against was a third rater. I tell you that if I was fixing the draw to make sure that Kren won, I couldn't have done any better than what he got Saturday. Me, I'd put my money on someone else, next game."

  * * *

  After a vigorous bout, Kren said, "Coach, what actually happened to the former Master of Javelins?"

  "Good question. Nobody seems to know for sure. The director didn't fire her, although I think he meant to. Trying to sandbag from a central position is really dumb. But nobody's seen the girl since Saturday night. Maybe she was smart enough to just run away. Or maybe she ran into somebody who lost a lot of money on the distance competition."

  "Or maybe she ran into the director." Kren laughed.

  "That is a possibility best not voiced aloud. On guard!"

  After another heart thumping session in which Kren won, Dik said, "Damn, but you're good! I'll be betting another pile of money on you next Saturday."

  "I wouldn't advise that, Coach. I have a feeling that I might have a bad day. I might do well in the distance competition, though."

  * * *

  The team flew away in three fusion-powered, jumbo jet planes on Friday afternoon, heading for the University of Badja, a few thousand miles away.

  Like everything else on any Mitchegai planet, even the airport was underground. There were big doorways at the ends of all of the runways, but otherwise, grass covered everything.

  Kren asked for and got a window seat.

  The view was lovely. It was green.

  As he predicted, he lost at both the fencing and the accuracy competitions, but set a new planetary record in the distance throw, three inches beyond the previous one. Not trying anything fancy, he just made his first throw good, and then did worse on the next two.

  He was awarded three more medals, platinum, gold, and silver, which he didn't much care about, but stood patiently as they were hung around his neck. He wondered why the fans got so excited about this sort of thing.

  And he increased his net worth to over eight million.

  * * *

  "I think that it is time that we discussed Kodo," Bronki said to Kren in her living room, on Thursday night.

  "Very good. I want to know everything about Kodo."

  "Telling you everything about Kodo would take years. He is old, almost as old as I am, and almost as well educated. Like me, he wears the rainbow belt. Currently, he is the director of the College of Architecture, here at the university, and has many successful business intrests around the city. Once, I considered him to be a good friend. A thousand years ago, we were partners on several ventures, but the friendship grew sour, and we drifted apart. Our mutual animosity has steadily increased, and now he has tried to have me killed. This is not permissible behavior, and he will have to die."

  Kren said, "I gather that you want me to kill him for you?"

  "Yes, if you would want to do the job. I have had his movements traced, and have identified an optimal time and place for his disposal. I could hire a hit team for two dozen thousand Ke, but you would be far more dependable, I think."

  "If their level of competence is the same as that of the team that he sent after you, I would have to agree with your assessment. However, my recent financial success has been such that two dozen thousand Ke is no longer a significant amount of money to me."

  Bronki said, "You would be permitted to keep anything he and his guards have on their persons, of course, and I suppose that I could go a bit higher."

  "You would have to go much higher. It might be marginally worth while for me to do it for say, two million Ke."

  "That is a huge amount of money!"

  "You have it. You've made at least two gross million Ke, betting on me in the last two weeks," Kren said.

  "I suppose so. And anyway, perhaps I owe you something for all of the valuable information you've given me."

  "What really makes killing Kodo attractive to me is the fact that he doubtless has many skills and much information that I could use. He seems to be a competent businessman, for example, and I would find the knowledge of architecture to be attractive."

  Bronki said, "You intend to eat parts of his brain?"

  "Of course. I am a vampire, after all."

  "This puts a whole new slant on things. Kodo is a very competent mathematician, and I have often seriously missed the mathematical abilities that you took from me. If I shared in your feast, I could recover them."

  Kren said, "You would be welcome to what I have no need for, but this time, I really want to get some computer skills!"

  "I know that you were promised them last summer, and that I retained them nonetheless. But Kren, I didn't try to cheat you. You must understand how the brain works. All of the trillions of cells in a normal brain are motile. They are not fixed in place the way the cells are in say, a muscle, or a bone. Each of the brain's cells sends tiny dendrites out to contact the many other cells that it needs to work with. Then it tries to optimize its physical position in order to make the total length of its dendrites as short as possible. This saves the cell energy, and tends to make the entire brain faster. All of this shuffling around tends to put certain cells in certain physical positions, eventually. The cells concerned with vision tend to collect up near the eyes, hearing near the ears, and so on."

  This was probably how the Mitchegai system of immortality evolved in the first place, but with the very limited numbers of species that they have available for study, the Mitchegai understanding of evolution is very poor.

  Had human brain cells ever developed the ability to move to other positions, the architecture of the human brain would doubtlessly be far more efficient than it is.

  Bronki continued, "Now, Kren, the skills
required for computers are usually associated with those required for mathematics, but in my case, it is possible that they are more associated with business or perhaps with history, since the history of computers is a specialty of mine. Cranial anatomy is not an exact science, no matter what the medic that you ate might have thought. She was only a technician, after all, and not a scientist."

  Kren said, "You make me think that I should increase my knowledge of biology as well."

  "You will have the opportunity to do that if you wish. Before Kodo switched over to architecture, two thousand years ago, he was a world-famous biologist," Bronki said.

  "Then I think that we have an agreement here."

  "Yes, but eating Kodo's brain will necessitate certain changes in my plan. I had planned on your killing him tomorrow, but if he is going to be partially eaten, you and I will need at least a week to recover properly. You have your studies and athletic responsibilities. I have my classes and my students. I think that we should put our attack off for two weeks, until the midterm break."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  We Can Eat and Make Shit!

  New Yugoslavia, 2211 a.d.

  I said, "I'm sure that it can be arranged. I've never needed ethanol in that quantity before, and so I don't know how long it will take, but we'll manage it somehow."

  "Thank you, sir. Now, I have a good deal of technical data to give you, and I think that one of your electronic people would be better equipped to handle it."

  "Right you are. Their memories are better than ours are, and I'm not a physicist in the first place. I think that the professor had best talk to you personally, since he's the smartest person that we've got. I'll introduce you to him right now," I said. "Agnieshka, tell the professor that we're coming down to him, and have a drone carry our new friend here. I wouldn't want him to get stepped on."

  With all that booze in him, I was amazed that he could walk at all, but he seemed steady enough.

  We took the elevator down to the parking garage where the professor was seeing to the further education of a future Yugoslavian general and his staff. I introduced him to our new ally, assigned the decorated drone to them to see that our guest got everything that he wanted, and went back up to my apartment.

  I unscrewed the cap from a new bottle of Jim Beam, and prepared to get back to what I had been doing before the interruption.

  "Boss! They've done it!" Agnieshka shouted as she ran excitedly into my den.

  "Who has done what?" I said, expecting some new revelation about our crabby friend.

  "Our engineers and biologists, the ones who have been working for so many years perfecting the social drones! They've finally done it! Now, we can eat and make shit, and draw all of our energy out in between!"

  "Slow down, girl. I've never seen you so excited. You are saying that they've worked out a way to power the drones with the same food that we humans eat? That's wonderful, I suppose. It makes you that much closer to human. How does it work?"

  "Well, the food is eaten and masticated in exactly the way that you humans do it. Then it goes into a stomach that mixes it with over forty types of bacteria, which break it down into carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and shit. I mean, the stuff has the same consistency, and is even brown! The hydrogen is combined in a fuel cell with oxygen in the air that we'll breath to produce electricity to charge up the capacitors, and the carbon dioxide is exhausted with the spent air and water vapor."

  "Interesting. Well, just make sure that you keep the option of recharging from an electrical source. It might come in handy."

  "I'll tell them that. But don't you see? This power supply is so like a completely organic one that they will be able to imitate even the internal organs of a human. We'll look like you, even in an X-ray! The red hydraulic fluid used in the muscles looks just like blood, so if you cut us, we will bleed. They have all of the sensory apparatus working perfectly, and now we can breath and eat and make shit! Unless someone does a chemical analysis, they won't be able to tell one of us from a human."

  "I know that this is something that your people have wanted for a long while, and just now, your timing is very good. The production machinery making the new picket ships is now working full time, but the machinery that made that machinery is now mostly idle. We have the productive capacity to build a factory producing the new social drones right here, and to hell with the bureaucrats on New Kashubia."

  "Then the project can go ahead, boss?"

  "It sure can. We've got the space for it already dug out, over a square kilometer of it, in the canyon wall behind the city. Tell your engineers to take what they need."

  She leaned over me and gave me a very human kiss. "You are just the finest boss a girl ever had!"

  She started to leave when I said, "And please send a preliminary report on our new allies to General Sobieski."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And then get busy, buying up all the 190 proof vodka that you can find. Also, tell the engineers to get busy, building a factory to produce bulk ethanol. I want it finished soon. The dairy plant has some spare time in their bottling plant, so we can put our booze into four liter milk bottles."

  "I'll get right on it, boss!"

  "This is good," I said, pouring myself a glass of Jim Beam.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,

  FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.

  BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO

  2000 YEARS EARLIER

  Everybody Wants a Bite of the Action!

  Or, The Vampires' Kodo Conduct

  Once again, bodily needs forced Duke Kren to remove the recording helmet, to relieve himself, and to drink.

  A thin, gray light was coming in through the small, barred window. It was early morning, but Kren was in no shape to do any work today. He lay back down and put the helmet back on, returning to his memories of two thousand years before. He remembered . . .

  * * *

  The following Saturday Kren again won the fencing tournament, but the odds on him were down to five to one.

  And the week after, at an away game, he won the accuracy competition without having to break a world record, but the payoff was only four to one.

  The Friday after, with a gross, a dozen and four million in the bank, being paid two million for killing a prominent citizen no longer seemed like profitable venture. But, a deal was a deal, and he'd promised.

  Kren had been waiting in a dimly lit passageway between two buildings for over two hours. Bronki had assured him that Kodo always passed by this way on route to his regular Friday night game of Nada, a very high-stakes gambling game. He had never been late for this event during the weeks that he had been under observation.

  What Kren couldn't know was that Kodo had finally found out the hiding place of the brander, and was arranging for a hit team of six fighters to go and use her for a party snack. And while he was at the KUL Assassins' Hall, he also signed up for a second hit team, of twelve this time, to go after Bronki again. And this time, he had sent his four personal guards along with them, to make sure that nothing went wrong.

  "Would you please tell me what your business is?" a uniformed guard said.

  "What?" Kren tried to sound frightened. He had no doubt about his ability to kill the strutting fool, but he wanted to do this job as quietly as possible, and disposing of two bodies would be harder than one. It was best to seem a coward. He could always kill the guard if the act didn't work.

  "What are you doing here? I saw you in this same place when I passed by an hour ago."

  "I was supposed to meet a friend between these two buildings. She was going to lend me some money."

  "It would seem that she is late," the guard said.

  "Yes, and I really need that money. I don't suppose that you . . ."

  "Look, if I didn't need money myself, I wouldn't be working on a Friday night. Give up on her, and move on."

  "Please, sir, just a few more minutes. She still might get here," Kren said.


  "Just don't be here when I come by again."

  "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you."

  Kren waited another dozen minutes before he saw Kodo walking toward him. There was no mistaking the light orange and lavender outfit of the College of Architects, the Rainbow Belt, and the dozen and eight doctorate tassels. He did not have the expected guards with him, but that just made Kren's job easier.

  They were just passing each other when Kren drew his sword and took the businessman's head off with a single, clean blow. Before the body hit the ground, Kren had a tie-wrap around the jaws, to keep from being bitten, and the head tucked into his book bag. He quickly searched the body and put everything he found in the bag on top of the head.

  Then, with a tool he'd brought along for the purpose, Kren lifted the heavy lid from a sewer manhole, dumped the body inside, and replaced the lid.

  Because of the Mitchegai's muted sense of smell, and the lack of any microbes that could cause anything to rot, there were no separate storm drains on any Mitchegai planet.

  Since trash removal had to be paid for, but the sewers were a city service, most residents used the sewers for disposing of their trash. To stop things from plugging up, the sewer lines had powerful grinders installed upstream of every pump, as did the sewers on human planets, all the way back to the twentieth century.

  Functioning like humongous garbage disposal units, these grinders were capable of chewing up granite, concrete, and strong metal bars, if need be. Kodo's body would give them no trouble at all, and the next grinder was only two yards from the manhole Bronki had chosen.

  The pollywogs would eat a little bit better for a while.

  Kren had the whole job done in under a minute, and went home with his book bag, unnoticed.

  "You are late," Bronki said, coming into his sitting room. "Did you have any problems?"

  "Kodo was late, but everything went well. I saw our dinner out there, tied to the party tables."