Still, the two years covered were his formative years, when most of his basic plans had been well laid down. For the rest, Bronki would have to be satisfied with a summary. He remembered . . .
* * *
Kren had resorted to vampirism only one more time in his long life. He had been forced to kill a scholar with doctorates in over three dozen different languages, the circumstances were such that he could not permit the academician to be resurrected, and it was just too tempting to pass up. Now, he could talk with almost everybody who might be important to him, including the Space Mitchegai, who had many languages of their own, quite different from those used by the Planetary Mitchegai, although everyone spoke Deno, the common tongue.
In sports, Kren had continued to perform at collegiate events until he was forced to graduate, and was no longer qualified to play. He declined to get involved with professional sports, since he found the whole thing to be profitable, but boring. The cheers of the crowds meant nothing to him. In fact, he was never sure why they did this strange thing.
Business was far more interesting, especially when it was spiced up with the occasional battle, assisting in Duke Dennon's conquests.
Kren liked fighting in battles. Here was something that he could understand, the joy of pitting himself against another warrior in the ultimate contest, and the fierce pleasure of taking her head off when he won!
He and the duke had indeed become very good friends, learning over the years to trust each other implicitly. For over a thousand years, Dennon built his army, and periodically conquered another duchy until most of the Southern Continent was under his command. He spent most of his time working with his army, and taming each new duchy until it was loyal to him, and to his partner, Kren.
Kren spent his time making sure that they both always had a surplus of money.
Each newly conquered duchy was soon converted to the efficient production of children for food. Watering troughs, sprinklers, and the use of chemical fertilizers spread across the land. The grass above the wintering centers was mowed weekly, but additional mowing machines were not installed, as they were not cost effective.
The small tunneler stayed busy, connecting wintering centers to the train stations, providing children for winter meals.
In time, Kren's corporation bought an additional three dozen large tunneling machines, and kept them all working constantly. The ground under the land of the entire continent was eventually filled with a layer of twelve-yard tunnels, as was the land under the surface of the uninhabited South Polar Continent, which Kren bought for a relatively small price.
The South Polar Continent already had a complete, but unused, MagFloat rail system, built thousands of years before to satisfy the MagFloat Corporation's original political mandate. This corporation was delighted to finally have something to ship out of the South Polar Continent, and gave Kren very attractive shipping rates.
Vast tracts of North Polar lands on the two northern continents were purchased as well, and put to use. The advantage of polar lands was that the dirt from the tunneling machines did not have to be shipped by rail to the nearest ocean trench, but could be simply piled on the grassless snow above. Keeping the tunnels warm when they were beneath many yards of dirt and snow was not a problem.
* * *
Each underground tunnel system was vast, but most Mitchegai did not know that they existed. The system was largely automated, and Kren's fanatically loyal workers lived apart from the rest of the population, with neither group really being aware of the other.
Kren's workers were all vampires of a sort, though they didn't know it. Their knowledge was taken from others, the old nobility of the continent, and criminals who ran afoul of Kren's justice.
Their personalities were formed in the rigid, authoritarian schools that Kren and Bronki had set up. These workers did as they were told, and took an almost religious joy in performing their duty. Those few who did not were soon reprocessed, with most of their brains being fed to a new young carnivore. This was followed by another careful education. But, three times and you were out.
* * *
It was eventually found that the most profitable method of food production was to use carefully selected stock, raised to the midsized juvenal stage indoors on artificially grown grass. Then they were taken outside for a year, to toughen them up, and to develop a proper amount of muscle tissue, meat. This was followed by a dozen weeks of heavy, indoor feeding, to soften the meat and build up the right amount of body fat.
By Mitchegai standards, they were delicious!
Soon, eating natural children was something for those primitives in the countryside to do. Civilized individuals ate the fine products of the Superior Food Corporation. The prices of food rose, slowly, by a factor of six.
Many companies were formed to compete with them, but without the SFC's vast industrial plant, they could compete in neither price nor quality. All of them eventually dropped by the wayside.
Over the years, the planetary population had tripled. Most of them chose to live in the cities, where there were jobs, entertainments, and interesting things to do. Kren's construction teams enlarged many cities, and built dozens of huge, new ones.
Building new cities became a particular interest for Kren, and he played with dozens of innovative designs. With Bronki's influence, and some help from Brandee, beauty became more important than economic efficiency. Surprisingly, the most beautiful cities soon became the most profitable, since citizens were willing to pay more to live in them.
In order to make the towers taller and more slender, Kren passed a law stating that buildings on his lands more than a dozen stories tall were permitted to have elevators. The Planetary Council, fearing to offend him, made no objection.
Each new city became more beautiful than the last. Some boasted buildings with spires over a mile high, and with more than three gross stories. Many spires had great, arching bridges connecting them. Some were built entirely of structural glass, and not covered with grass at all, to the scandal of the critics.
Kren didn't care about critics. His cities were beautiful, and the apartments and commercial spaces were often purchased before they were even built.
Each new city had a university, often founded as an offshoot of the University of Dren. Kren simply thought that a city should be built around a university. Anything else seemed unnatural to him.
The cities that Kren owned had efficient police departments, staffed by absolutely honest officers, the products of his authoritarian schools. The criminal classes never got a foothold in them. Murder became a rare event, and the population grew.
* * *
When it came time for Brandee to get a new body, she branded it in a manner similar to what Kren had done to her, although she had done the branding herself weeks before she was eaten by the young carnivore. She had no desire to suffer the pain, personally, however pleasant it might be to force another to endure it.
In time, full body branding became the standard for professional artists, so that they could display their talents wherever they went.
* * *
The certainty of Duke Dennon's conquests eventually got to the point that he was able to send a letter to a fellow duke, saying that he had decided to conquer that duke's lands, but that if Dennon were to promptly receive a notarized deed for the property, he would spare his opponent's life, provided that the former duke left the planet within one week, along with his nobles.
And most dukes took him up on his offer!
Those who didn't, died.
* * *
Unfortunately, Dennon had long ago developed a habit of using his sword as a pointer, and gesticulating with it when talking. While touring one of Kren's factories, he asked a question about a high-tension electrical cable while his helmet happened to be touching a grounded metal surface. Death was instantaneous and permanent.
By Mitchegai law, when a stockholder like Duke Dennon died, his stock ceased to exist, and his share of ownershi
p was effectively distributed to the other stockholders. To those of their race, inheritance was a null concept.
Kren actually had nothing to do with the duke's death, although many didn't believe it. He had been very pleased with his arrangement with Duke Dennon as it stood. He had actually liked Dennon, at least as much as a Mitchegai can like anybody.
Such had become their partnership, that when Duke Dennon died, there was no question in anyone's mind but that Kren should succeed him.
Oh, there were a few minor rebellions at the start of his reign, but Kren put them down without difficulty. He was more brutal than Dennon had been in his conquests, since it was necessary to establish himself as a leader, and not just a business man.
At one point, he burned over eleven thousand rebels at the stake over a two-week period, with planet-wide news cameras recording the whole thing.
The show increased Kren's popularity immensely. It went into reruns, and was used for filler material for a thousand years.
There were no further rebellions.
Kren retained the red and lavender uniforms that Dennon had used, and adopted Dennon's use of a military uniform for his everyday wear. He felt that continuity was important, and he intended no changes in policy, anyway.
After that, Kren completed Dennon's plan of conquering the entire southern continent, but further conquest did not appeal to him. He could always buy whatever he wanted, and nobody wanted to fight him anymore, anyway.
* * *
Biologically, the grass resisted all attempts to genetically improve it.
Kren's scientists determined the precise conditions for optimal productivity under controlled, underground conditions, with the result that a square yard of grass in the tunnel system produced just under two dozen times as much food per year as the average square yard of uncontrolled surface grass. With the tunnel system, there were eventually six times as many square yards below that surface as on it.
With an optimal watering and fertilizing schedule for surface grass, productivity was typically doubled.
However, the basic genome of grass remained unchanged. It was already as good as it could get.
This was not true of the Mitchegai themselves. After two thousand years of careful, selective breeding, and a bit of genetic engineering, children were now normally raised from the egg to eating size in under five years, and they required only half of the food to accomplish this that they had before.
For adult bodies, Kren's physical descendants had largely taken over the planet, to his considerable regret. Once everyone had a superior body, Kren lost his huge advantage on both the playing field and the battle field.
For almost a thousand years, he had been able to keep his descendants "in house," making his soldiers astoundingly effective in combat, his workers efficient, and his athletes amazingly profitable.
The Mitchegai spend more on gambling than they do on food and housing combined. After a thousand years of being able to occasionally predict the winners of sporting events, more than half of the wealth of the entire planet was in Kren's hands. Mostly because he enjoyed doing it, he continued to gouge his bookie, usually twice a year, forcing her to buy more stock that still didn't pay any dividends.
At one point, he had so much of the planet's wealth that he was forced to loan money to banks at excellent rates, just to keep the planetary economy going. Later, when they could not repay him, he simply foreclosed. He then bought out the entire banking system, added it to his vast holdings, and increased the rates.
* * *
Once Kren's personal breeding program bore fruit, for the first gross years only males could be bred that had Kren's athletic prowess, to the dismay of anyone who had to walk into a locker room or barracks. Dol and Bronki were particularly unhappy about this, but finally became males for a while.
Eventually, the biochemists were able to transfer the requisite genes to other chromosomes than those that specified sex, so that females could again be as physically fit as males, and the Mitchegai world returned to normal.
Kren remained male.
But such a thing as a superior body could not be kept under wraps forever. Adults had to occasionally go out into the fields. Natural breeding took place, and each Mitchegai normally sought the best possible body for her next resurrection. The secret was out, but oddly, it was considered to be an entirely natural development. No one attributed the advance to Kren, or his scientists.
This was just as well, since there was a very conservative streak in many Mitchegai. Very long life does that to you. There was even some talk of sterilizing the entire planet, as would be done with any new world about to be colonized, just to preserve the "Purity of the Mitchegai Genome."
After many years, messages were received at light speed from the nearer inhabited planets, through the huge, interstellar lasers and telescopes, requesting that ships be sent to them with fertilized eggs of these new Mitchegai. This interstellar approval was sufficient to make the new bodies socially acceptable, and in a gross years, everybody had one.
Usually, they paid considerably extra, and bought the very best bodies from the Superior Food Corporation. When the price of an eating child had gone up to over a gross Ke, the price of a purebred young carnivore, guaranteed to be genetically perfect, had gone up to over twelve thousand, and there was a waiting list.
* * *
Bronki was very successful as head of the Department of Chaos Theory at the College of Mathematics. Her department was soon the most profitable one at her college, and remained so for the next dozen years. Bronki herself became very popular among the other department heads, doing many personal favors, and often providing the very best party snacks.
Then, the director of the college had a fatal accident, falling from the balcony of his apartment late one winter night, and freezing solid before anyone noticed his body. Freezing destroyed the cells of the brain, and made resurrection impossible.
It was soon found that he had large doses of recreational drugs in his system, and the university hushed the whole thing up.
Kren was sure that Bronki had arranged the affair, but didn't think that it would be polite to ask about it.
The other department heads elected Bronki to be their next director, and within a few years, the College of Mathematics was the most profitable academic college in the university, not counting athletics and drama, of course.
This continued for five dozen years, at which time the chancellor of the University of Dren simply went missing. Eight weeks went by while a massive, planet-wide search went on for him, but nothing was found. There wasn't a clue as to his whereabouts, or his fate.
A joke went around suggesting that Director Kodo had eaten him.
The other directors elected Bronki to the chancellorship of the University of Dren on the first ballot. This cost her well over a billion Ke in bribes, a great deal of money for most, but a trivial amount for her.
Bronki was pleased.
One of her first actions was to invite Kren to come into her city and to clean out the criminal elements. For a modest fee, he agreed to do this, and over a one-year period, the job was done. With Bronki cracking into their computers, and providing him with times, names, and places, the population of the city fell by one sixth. Only half of these were killed by Kren and his warriors, who by now had bodies genetically identical to his own. The rest were criminals who were smart enough to get out of town.
The director of athletics was among those quietly eliminated, and Kren performed this task personally, for vengeance and the pure fun of it.
Dik, Kren's old fencing instructor, was elected to take his place. The university's athletic program prospered.
There were over a dozen pitched battles between Kren's professional soldiers and the various criminal gangs that had infested the city. Kren's troops won every one of them, despite their use of legal weapons while the criminals used everything from guns to poison gas.
The fighting spirit is always more important th
an the weapon used. Numbers help, too.
Once the heavy battles were over with, the underground corridors and the surface walkways were well patrolled by honest policemen, and the independent trash were slowly swept up. Citizens could walk late at night without fear, shopkeepers no longer had to pay out most of their profits for protection money, and very few individuals paid to have new, three-inch-thick steel doors put on their apartments.
Now they could spend their money on better quality food, happily provided by the Superior Food Corporation.
Bronki became a very popular politician, and let her academic career slide.
She had many disagreements with Kren over the years, but both of them were very pragmatic. They both knew that the profits were much better when the other was around. Their "friendship" continued.
* * *
Mostly because Kren enjoyed a good battle, and because, eventually, very few dukes were willing to fight him, Kren took on many more, not very profitable, contracts to clean the criminal elements out of other cities. He and his men became very proficient at it, and the planetary drug trade dwindled to nothing.
Eventually, with success, even that source of fun began to run dry.
The population, and the profits on selling them food and housing, increased. But Kren felt that things were getting dull.
* * *
Kren's wealth and power were such that he had an automatic place on the Planetary Council. He spent a week there and left, totally bored. To him, the council was nothing but a gross of fools who thought that they could solve all of their problems by talking about them!
Finally, he said to one idiot, "Very well, then. We will put the question to the scientific method. When next it happens that you and I have a disagreement, you will resort to talk and what you are pleased to call reason. I will bring in my army and we will attack. We shall see who has the superior technique!"
Kren's opponent left the room and wasn't seen again.
Kren offered his chair to Bronki, but she declined it. It wasn't because it bored her, but because she felt that it was too dangerous. The number of political assassinations was large.
Kren of the Mitchegai Page 33