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.”
“Yet it is well liked by many intellectuals,” Bronki said.
“Then that is its apparent purpose. To fulfill the aggressive fantasies of intellectual armchair soldiers. Treated as such, it might have merit. As a description of military life, it is fraudulent.”
This left a lull in the conversation that was soon filled by everyone having another bite to eat, with suitable verbal accompaniment by the party snack.
“I notice that the grass is recovering nicely, much faster than I thought it would,” Sava said.
Kren said, “Besides providing all of the party snacks, I have also hauled in over a dozen juvenals from points over a dozen miles from here, and released them around the house. The program seems to be working.”
“Then I think that we can cease worrying about intervention by the authorities,” Zoda said. “Now all we have to worry about is Sava’s book.”
“We’ll start on that in the morning,” Bronki said. “We work very well together as a team, much more productively than we do as individuals. Perhaps we should consider some sort of a partnership.”
“I like that idea,” Zoda said. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen my name on anything.”
“Then see what you can do about getting yourself a suitable book contract, and we’ll work on it next summer. I’ll have to go back to the university in a few weeks, and there are some course outlines I have to do, besides getting Sava’s book back on track, but I’ll be free all next summer.”
“It’s settled, then. We’re a three-way partnership,” Sava said.
They all ate to that, tapping their meat together over their snack in the time honored fashion.
The next day, while the others worked at their computers, Kren decided to give up on mathematics, and to start on the sciences. Things progressed well for a while, but he soon found that his progress was slowed by his deficiencies in math. Grumbling, he went hunting the day after.
He found that if he tied six large juvenals by the neck and connected all of the ropes to a central knot, he could get them home without too much difficulty. Since they all tended to run in random directions, they averaged each other out, and holding on to the knot, he could control them, and keep them moving in the desired direction.
If they had all pulled together in the same direction at the same time, he might have been in trouble, but they weren’t smart enough to do that.