Kren of the Mitchegai

by Leo Frankowski

  Bronki said, "Most of that sounds very good. But about using your own daughters, well, there might be some genetic problems with double recessives, and so on."

  "True, but we will be carefully testing all of the offspring, and culling anything inferior. We'll just sell the substandard ones for food. That will clean the gene pool in a few generations."

  "Or we could always eat them ourselves."

  "Yes, that might be best, in case someone finds out what we're doing. We wouldn't want anything superior to get into someone else's army," Kren said.

  "Kren, to come up with so much, all at once, well, it's simply unprecedented. I've never heard of anything else like this ever happening before. There's nothing like it in the literature. But, you know, the literature on vampires is very limited, for obvious reasons. Those who do this sort of thing aren't likely to write scholarly reports about it."

  "No, but you have had flashes of creativity, too, and if our experience is common among vampires, then it is probable that many of the rich and powerful are secretly like ourselves. Which leads me to another thought. Perhaps the reason why vampirism is so frowned upon is that those in power don't want the competition."

  Bronki said, "And if that is true, then you and I are treading on very dangerous ground."

  "The world is a very dangerous place. But if we wish to climb to the top of it, we must be prepared to take some risks."

  "Very well, then. I wish you the very best of luck in your endeavor."

  Kren was not about to let Bronki bow out and leave him without her expertise and advice.

  "We will, of course, be very cautious and very secretive until we are very powerful. You have called yourself my partner. If that is so, I will be expecting some help from you," Kren said. "First off, I want to form a corporation to own and develop the land that we have bought this day. Since you have formed many corporations in the past, I want you to handle this one for us. You will issue shares with a par value of one million Ke each to me for my contribution of a gross billion Ke, and to you for the billion Ke that you have earned as a commission for putting this deal together, and for the billion Ke paid by you to your friend Sala in the form of a bribe."

  "There was also the twelve million Ke I paid as your half of the fee to the Bonding Authority."

  "That seems excessive!"

  "They are guaranteeing the performance of both parties to the agreement. That means that if Duke Dennon reneges, then the Bonding Authority might have to go to war with him to ensure compliance," Bronki said. "Considering the quality of Dennon's army and the cost of wars, two dozen million seems very reasonable."

  "Oh, very well. Anyway, it has already been paid. Set us up with a corporate bank account, as well. Two signatures will be required on every check, one of which must be mine."

  "I will file the paperwork for the corporation this evening, and take care of the bank in the morning. What would you like to call it?"

  "I think that something very ordinary sounding would be best," Kren said. "We'll call it the Superior Food Corporation. And voting by the board of directors will be in proportion to the number of shares that they own, not one person, one vote."

  "Kren, that's so undemocratic!"

  "When did I ever claim to be a democrat?"

  Bronki had only paid to Sala the half billion Ke that the accountant had requested. Duke Dennon had an outstanding credit rating, despite his current financial problems, since for thousands of years, he had honored all of his contracts and paid all of his debts. Because of this, the total fees required by the Bonding Authority had been only twelve million. Bronki thought that the stock that she would be issued would be quite acceptable. Anyway, it looked like an interesting operation, and being a world leader might be fun.

  When they got home, Kren called Dol to his sitting room and explained everything that happened, and all of his thoughts for the future.

  "So you see, we are going to need your engineering expertise on a number of projects." Kren said, "We are going to need a large grass-mowing and collecting machine. We are going to need several large experimental buildings. We are going to need an efficient system of sedating and boxing up juvenals for shipment. But the first thing that we are going to need is a fence that goes around the entire property, one that lets juvenals enter, but stops them from leaving."

  Dol had listened, fascinated by everything that Kren had told her, but now she had to say, "Kren, we can't do that. Planetary law is very specific about the building of fences. It is illegal to inhibit the free motion of juvenals. Except for fields licensed for the growing of long grass, all fences must have an ungated opening wide enough for an adult to pass easily through, at least once every two gross yards."

  "I know that, and our fences will have those openings. Here, look."

  Kren took a sheet of grass paper and drew a vertical line of half circles on it, with the concave sides to the left and the convex to the right, and with the wingtips almost but not quite touching.

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  "Kodo once read a study on the migration patterns of juvenals," he said. "When they come to an obstacle, like a fence, and they want to get to the other side, they follow along it. When the fence ends, they just keep on walking in the direction that they have been going, having apparently forgotten why they were following it in the first place. Now, when a juvenal comes to the convex side of one of these semicircles, she will follow along the fence until she comes to one of the openings, and then she will go through. But if she comes to the concave side of a semicircle, she will follow it around until it turns her back in the direction that she was coming from, and she will walk right back into the middle of our field. Since there are two gross yards between the openings, and the openings are only a yard wide, only once in two gross times will she happen to come directly to the opening without hitting the fence first."

  A human would have recognized Kren's invention immediately as a fish weir. But for someone living on a planet without any fishes, Kren had come up with a brilliant innovation.

  "It seems to satisfy the letter of the law, if not the spirit of it," Dol said. "Are you absolutely positive that this will work?"

  "Absolutely? No, but I think that it would be worthwhile to build a few dozen miles of it, and see."

  "Well then, I will see about getting your property surveyed, and I'll get some prices together on various kinds of fencing. I consider this sort of work to come under our agreement, so I won't be charging you anything for my time. But tell me, this Superior Food Corporation of yours. Can anybody buy stock in it? Me, for example?"

  "We will need all the capital we can get, and your funds are certainly welcome," Kren said. "Our long-range plans must remain a secret, however."

  "This is reasonable. How do I go about making a purchase?"

  "See Bronki about it. She's setting up the corporation right now."

  "Very well. I wonder what sort of a commission she's going to charge me," Dol said.

  "You will tell her that I said that the price was a million Ke a share, and that's what you will be paying. I know that Bronki loves to snatch every Ke she can get her claws on, but the fact is that it is generally more profitable to do business with her than without her."

  "I didn't realize that you were aware of what she was doing."

  "I'm not a complete fool," Kren said. "Sometimes it's amusing to watch her operate. She just stole more than a half billion Ke from me today, but since she is getting it in stock, and I don't plan to declare a dividend for a very long time, if ever, then it really doesn't make much of a difference, does it?"

  Dol decided that if dividends would not be forthcoming in the foreseeable future, buying one share would be sufficient. That would get her on the board of directors, since it wasn't likely that anyone else would buy shares in a secret corporation at a million Ke each.

  Kren went to talk to Bronki.

  "H
ave the corporate papers been filed?" he asked.

  "Yes, and here's a printout of them. We should get approval on them by tomorrow afternoon."

  "Very good. The next thing that we must think about is the sales organization. Dren is the closest major city to my lands, so we should start selling here. We will need a factory outlet near the train station, and it must be on the underground walkway system, because of the large volumes of juvenals we will be handling. On the walkways, we can use electric wheeled trucks, for delivery to the store, and manual wheeled carts for delivery to our customers, rather than having to carry them.

  "At the store, we will need a front desk for walk-in business, an office to handle the phone-in business, a large storage area for our merchandise, and I think a display area for those who wish to pick a particularly pretty child for a special party. These will be at a premium price, of course.

  "It might be profitable to sell accessories as well. Knives, branding irons, party tables, and so on. Then we must think about advertising, what our budget should be, which media we will use, and who will handle it for us. Or we might try doing that ourselves, since it will be a while getting our production volume up, and we don't want more customers than we have product to sell.

  "Eventually, we might think about franchising our sales outlets, where each store is owned by a semi-independent operator."

  "That sounds all fine and good, but just how much space do you think that this first outlet will require?" Bronki asked.

  "I don't know. Probably not much at first, but with expanding sales, it could eventually be quite large."

  "That's not much to go on. But look, the entire bottom floor of this building is on the level of the walkway system, and we aren't all that far from the train station. The nearest commercial outlet is only four dozen yards away, and the entire floor is currently being used for storage. If you were willing to pay commercial rates, I could have a door and window cut out to the walkway, and we could put in a small store. Then, as business expanded, you could rent more space, and I would again have it refurbished, but again at commercial rates."

  "Why couldn't I just rent the storage space, and fix it up on my own?" Kren asked.

  "You could, and you are welcome to. You can deal with the architects and the construction contractors yourself, in your copious spare time, and you can get all of the city permits on your own. There will be more than four dozen of them required. Then, of course, there will be the electrical company, the waste disposal company, the water company, and the phone company to deal with. If you wish to hire employees, there are nine different branches of the city government that you must make arrangements with. And there are probably at least a dozen other things that I am forgetting about just now."

  "Okay, Bronki. What are you suggesting?"

  "If you can bring them in to the train station, and sell them to me on the dock for two dozen Ke each, I'll take care of everything else. I'm talking about first-quality merchandise, you understand. Deal?" Bronki said.

  "You'll take everything that we can send you?"

  "Within reason. Say, increases of no more that three parts per gross per week, unless mutually agreed upon."

  "Well, okay, but only for the City of Dren, and only for a twelve-year period. Anything more will have to be negotiated," Kren said.

  "When can I get my first shipment?"

  "Tentatively, in about four weeks. Shall we say a thousand children the first week?"

  "That will do for starters. I'm not sure, but the total market in this city might be a thousand times that. You've got yourself a deal, partner. I'll write up the arrangement for your signature and have it ready for you tomorrow."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Perpetual Motion, Type Two

  New Yugoslavia, 2212 a.d.

  Our designers and architects had the preliminary designs done for a system of fallout shelters three kilometers down, and big enough to hold the entire population of the planet of New Yugoslavia.

  To get the people down there in the simplest, fastest and most foolproof way, they had settled on cutting spiraling tubes down into the bedrock and lining them with polished metal. The faster you went down, the harder that centrifugal force pushed you against the outer wall. The added friction slowed you down, some. It was a blindingly simple speed control device, the kind of engineering I like. Also, a penetrating bit of radiation couldn't follow the curve, so it helped there, too.

  It was a super amusement park ride, and we might have a few heart attacks on the way down, but there was nothing mechanical to fail at the wrong moment, so I approved it.

  Actually, the plans had been done two weeks ago, but then my wife, a lovely mother of four fine sons, intelligent, caring and ungodly greedy, got into the act. Now, in addition to barrack space for everybody, with public latrines, communal chow halls and food that might satisfy a chinese coolie, there were two more, deeper sets of shelters.

  One was for the moderately wealthy, and included private apartments, separate bedrooms, private bathrooms, private kitchens, and lots of storage space that you could stock with your favorite items.

  The one below it was for the filthy rich, and was really very nice, if you could afford it. Kasia's plan was to sell these two posh layers for enough to pay for the entire installation. Then, she planned to talk the local governments into paying for the barracks, latrines, and chow halls, anyway.

  That's my wife.

  We had done other engineering projects on the planet that had required a lot of digging, like putting in a planet-wide underground highway system. In the past, we had simply flushed the dirt and pulverized granite into the oceans. It hadn't caused any ecological damage last time, but now we had a major ally living in those oceans, and I felt that it was politically advisable to check with them before we did it again.

  With rolls of plans under my arm, I met Bellor floating in his swimming pool in my garage.

  "Mickolai! It is so delightful to see you again. What can I do for you, my old benefactor?"

  "Well, you can look over these plans for the planet-wide system of shelters to protect our people from the Mitchegai, and see if there is anything about them that would offend your people. Also, we'd like to know what we could do to protect the Tellefontu in case of attack."

  "This is most courteous of you, Mickolai, but as to my own people, well, we have already made our own arrangements. When it comes to hiding, it is perhaps wise to keep your plans as secret as possible, yes?"

  "Perhaps, but it is also wise not to offend your only ally. If you want to keep your own system secret, that's fine by me. But I'd like you to look over this stuff, to be sure that we do not offend you. Among other things, it involves dumping an awful lot of pulverized granite into the oceans that your people live in, and we don't want to cause you problems."

  "Indeed? Let me look."

  But instead of crawling out of the swimming pool and looking at the drawings that I was unrolling on the garage floor, he just sort of leaned back and floated for a bit.

  "Yes, I see," he said. "Well, with your permission, I have a number of suggestions to make."

  "I'd like to hear them, but before that, please tell me what you just did."

  "I simply queried the good professor, and he downloaded the plans to me. I found it convenient to grow a data link to him, similar in some ways to the inductive mat that you wear under your scalp."

  "Mine had to be surgically implanted," I said. "You just grew yours?"

  "My people have developed that ability, yes. We know how to make and use machines, of course, but for many things, it is convenient to modify our body structure to do these things more easily. Please don't be offended, Mickolai, but yours is a very young race. In a few million years, it is quite possible that you will develop such abilities.

  "Now then," he continued. "There is no need to transport the powdered granite to the oceans and dump it there. You may use our 'Disappearing Gun' to simply make the granite disappear. Oh. I see that
your engineering group has not gotten the plans that I sent to New Kashubia. Well, there. They have them now. Next, I see that you have a very extensive system of power generators and electrical conductors going all over the place. It would be far simpler to simply generate the power where it is needed. In a closed system like this, you already have plenty of thermal power. Indeed, at three kilometers down, you will have a vast surplus of it, and I see that you were planning on an extensive air-conditioning system. That would involve a heat plume that the Mitchegai would undoubtedly notice."

  "Wait a minute!" I said, "You are talking about using ambient thermal energy to generate power? Surely, that's impossible!"

  "And why should that be so? Even with your primitive physics, you realize that heat is not a separate form of energy. It is simply mechanical energy on a very small scale. The individual atoms and molecules are vibrating and sometimes spinning. Their average speed is what you call heat. By slowing them down, one can extract useful energy. Surely, this is obvious. There are several practical methods of doing this, but I have just sent your engineers the plans for a simple light that gets its power from ambient heat. They will also need some larger systems to cool the housing units you propose, and I have just sent plans for those as well. They will have to put some resistive units in the oceans, to get rid of the surplus energy, but there are several volcanoes under the sea that will hide the heat quite nicely from our enemies. The rest of your plans seem workable enough, and I wouldn't want to upset your excellent engineers too much in one day.