Something similar to this was claimed by some to occur in Earthly flatworms.
Because of this, the brain of an intelligent adult Mitchegai has very little to do with the genetic structure of its body. The Darwinian forces that dominate all life forms on Earth have little effect on the Mitchegai. For millions of years, they have been carefully breeding their own bodies to their own version of perfection, but this breeding has caused few changes to their minds. The selection process there is something quite different.
When half of a large brain is eaten, and each half is still much larger than that of the youth doing the eating, much the same thing occurres, save only that the personality formed is somewhat less dominant, and the memories of the eaten are distributed between two individual eaters. Doing this is the favored method of increasing the numbers of a leader’s loyal subordinates.
It also keeps them from getting too smart for their leader’s own good.
Duke Kren would soon be needing all the loyal subordinates that he could get, and today’s ceremonies would be repeated many times in the coming months, with lower-ranking functionaries. He planned to increase the numbers of his people by one third, bringing their total number to over a gross million and also to have as many of them in new bodies as possible.
For soon, he would be losing all of his lands and all of his juvenals, save those that would be harvested and quick frozen in liquid nitrogen for food.
His chosen successor would attempt to rule in his place, but if that successor failed, Kren’s lands would be divided among his former enemies.
Kren would leave this world forever, all because he had become the most powerful individual on Planet 9847, and his planet had won the most recent great interstellar lottery.
A new planet had been found on the periphery of Mitchegai space, and it was to be his, if he could tame it!
CHAPTER THREE
The Gurkha Heaven
New Yugoslavia, 2205 a.d.
My part of New Yugoslavia had been deeded to the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces as part payment for a war we had fought for New Croatia. The local terrain consisted of a kilometer-high plateau to the southwest and a large plains area to the northeast. The plateau was deeply indented with a number of large box canyons that opened onto the plain.
It had been uninhabitable desert when we got here, but we had irrigated it using equipment from the automatic factories of our home planet, New Kashubia, and the productive capacity of the thousands of intelligent fighting machines that made up half of our army. The other half of our army was made up of the human beings who spent much of their time living inside those machines.
Our tanks had been designed to tunnel through solid rock. They made short work out of carving out apartments, roads, and everything that a city needs into the granite walls of my valley.
They had done a class job of it, building for a design life of five thousand years. All of the exposed surfaces had a heavy coating of what had once been precious metals, but now were fairly common. The walls were studded with jewels, and the windows were “glassed” with sheets of single crystals of diamond.
I woke the next morning to find Kasia at my side. After a few hours, we made it to breakfast.
“Well,” I said, to break the silence. “I trust that all of the problems have been solved?”
“Yes,” Kasia said. “The Gurkhas will be moving out and building their own place.”
“Indeed? And where are they doing this?”
“Next door. I’ve helped them buy the canyon to the southeast of us.”
“Quincy and Zuzanna’s place?”
“No, the box canyon in between us. It was originally purchased by a consortium of troops who couldn’t agree on what to do with it. They finally made a decent profit selling it to the Gurkhas. Look, the Gurkhas have their own culture, and they are happy with it. They have no intention of being assimilated into somebody else’s world if they can help it. At the same time, they like being members of our army, and they especially like our pay rates. So, their tanks are working with them, designing their own particular version of heaven.”
“Well, our metal ladies are first rate engineers, artists, and architects. They have done it before, so they won’t have problems doing it again. I imagine that what with all the stone cutting, that valley will be a cloud of dust for a few months.”
“True, but in three months your troops will be able to start moving in. I think that Gurkhas are environmentalists at heart. They want natural rock, and not the gold and platinum plating that you used on this valley. They don’t want all of the jewels, but they are getting the diamond windows. And their apartments and homes are only a quarter of the size of what you have built here.”
“Whatever they want, they’ll get, as far as I’m concerned. After the way they fought for us in the Battle of the Solar Station, we owe them a lot.”
“That was my thought too, lover.”
CHAPTER FOUR
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS
OF UP TO 3000 YEARS EARLIER
The Awakening
Duke Kren awoke slowly, sluggishly, to find himself in a locked cell. It was a combination lock, and his new body had to know the combination to get out. Otherwise, he would be left in there, forever.
This was to keep him safe while he was in his eating stupor, and to protect his subordinates if his old brain was not properly functioning in his new body.
The most common disaster was that the young carnivore could have a muscle spasm while it was eating your brain.
Normally, chemicals in the brain being eaten caused a sphincter in the esophagus to close off the second and third stomachs, and another sphincter to open to the first stomach, where the brain cells could migrate through the stomach wall, through the blood stream, and eventually up to the cranium.
If the sphincters failed to function properly, the new brain cells could instead be sent down to the third stomach, where they would be digested.
This process was commonly known as bad luck.
The malfunction rarely occurred, since any young carnivore who performed this atrocity was invariably and immediately killed, which promptly deleted it from the gene pool.
However, it was claimed to happen fairly often among the aristocracy, when your guards were not absolutely trustworthy, or when they had some reason to prefer a change in command.
Dukes soon learned to have very well-rewarded and trustworthy people around them, for just such situations as this. It was also common to leave orders that the entire guarding and welcoming party was to be slaughtered if the old duke did not arrive as expected in a new body.
He estimated that what with the torpor that always followed a major meal, and the time normally taken for the cells of his brain to reform, he had been asleep for at least a week, and quite possibly two.
He fumbled his way to the toilet and relieved himself. He took several long drinks of water. Then he went back to the cot and collapsed there.
A dull pain enveloped his head. It was not actually a pain in his brain, for Mitchegai brains, like those of humans, have no pain receptors. It was rather in the vastly expanded skull plates complaining about their newly distorted shapes and in the tightly stretched skin over them that the pain originated.
In time, it would pass.
Time.
He had to give himself time.
He had to ignore all of the pressure of the events of his world, and take the time to reorganize himself.
He stayed on the clean cot and looked up at the plain, white ceiling as a long lifetime of memories slowly formed and took their categorized places in his mind.
His academic advisor had long been pestering him to record the events of his life, and since he would now be the founder of a new Mitchegai planet, he had agreed to comply. A recording helmet was thus available next to the cot, and he put it on. Posterity perhaps had a right to know exactly who and what he was, but he would not release the tapes until long after his death.
He had no memories of being a grub, or a pollywog, or a juvenal. He had no remembrance of his transmutation to an adult, but it must have happened when he was alone, and out in the wilds. Such a thing, metamorphosing without adult supervision, would never happen on a properly managed estate, but among the Mitchegai, as with humans, accidents often bring people into the world.
His first recollection was of leading a savage, nonverbal band of carnivores in the ragged hills of the badly managed estate of Duke Lidko, three thousand years ago.