“I’m glad that you didn’t! But the gross billion Ke you paid me for my land barely covered my debts. The additional money I made on that wager has given me financial security and permitted me to make some very needed repairs to my estate. Who is your friend?”
“Your Grace, this is Dol. She’s nominally my servant, but she’s also on my board of directors, and she has been acting as my chief engineer, so I suppose that makes her my friend as well.”
“Your friends are always welcome,” the duke said.
They had been speaking in Meno, the military language, which Dol was completely ignorant of, but the duke’s smile was all that she really needed to go on.
Mitchegai do smile to express pleasure. Like humans, they do this by looking at the person they are addressing and exposing their fangs.
“I thank you, Your Grace,” Dol said in Deno, the common language.
“I am almost completely ignorant of Reno, the engineering language, so I guess Deno it is,” the duke said in fluent Deno. “It is difficult to express anything but the simplest things in the common tongue, though. I’m sure that you’d be far more comfortable talking with my chief engineer, Dako. In fact, I want you to meet her. Among other things, I am now the owner of a huge supply of mining machinery that is completely useless to me. It occurs to me that a conveyor belt designed to haul ore might prove useful in hauling grass clippings. I could give Kren here a very good price on it.”
“That is a very interesting idea, Your Grace. Yes, Dol, by all means, find out what they have available,” Kren said.
A servant was assigned to escort Dol to Dako’s office.
“Just be sure and come to the party tonight,” the duke said as they left. Turning to Kren, he said, “Now then, have you been thinking more about your fascinating plans for your new lands?”
“More than thinking, Your Grace. We’ve already started doing. For a week now, I’ve had a crew putting up fences around my land.”
“First, you have now used up your allotment of ‘Your Graces’ for the entire weekend. Just call me Dennon. Second, you have been putting up your fences on the boundary with my lands, and the reports I’ve been getting are strange. You are building these curving things that have to be costing you half again more than a straight fence would. Your workers have told my men that you are doing this for aesthetic reasons, but that does not fit with my judgment of your character. Please explain this to me.”
Kren said, “Very well, but you must agree to keep this a secret.”
The Mitchegai never had anything remotely like a patent office. The only way they had to make a profit off of an idea was to keep it secret. This could be another reason for their general lack of creativity.
Kren then explained his new idea, the fish weir, drawing sketches on a pad of paper that the duke provided.
“And this strange device actually works?” the duke asked.
“In fact, it does. Dol found a standard industrial product, a long armed mechanical switch that operates a mechanical counter when something goes by in one direction. Putting two of them on one of the openings gave us the ratio of juvenals going one way as opposed to those going the other. More of them are going in the wrong direction than I thought they would, but it is still much better than a gross to one. My fence is an effective valve. I also intend to use something similar to make collection paths, where juvenals in the fields are collected up and sent to my packaging facility. They’ll come to us, we’ll select the ones we want and send the rest back out to the fields,” Kren said.
“Remarkable. But all of this means that you will be denuding my lands of the juvenals that my subjects need to survive.”
“That remains to be seen. Many will be entering my lands, but many more will be drifting into yours from the other directions. I do, however, promise that none of your subjects will starve because of what I am doing.”
“I’ll take your word on that, and hold you to it,” Duke Dennon said. “Now, what of your other thoughts?”
Kren explained about how grass only absorbed red light, and how any artificial lights should be monochromatic.
“Now that is odd,” Dennon said. “Somehow, I’d always thought of grass as being the perfect energy converter, changing sunlight into food for the children.”
“If it was a perfect converter, it would absorb all of the light and look black. Grass is green because it doesn’t need the green light, and reflects it back to our eyes.”
“Interesting. But can you buy monochromatic lights?”
“I was surprised to find out that they are the only sort that you can buy,” Kren said. “The white lighting panels that are used everywhere are made up of seven different sorts of tiny light emitting diodes, each of which is monochromatic, but of a different color. The numbers of each sort is such that together they appear to us as being white. Making a panel with only a single sort of LED actually cuts the cost in half, assuming that you are buying in large quantities, which of course I will be.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Neither did I until Dol did some research on it.”
“And what about that business of breeding more efficient juvenals?” the duke asked.
“That will be a long-term project, of course. I have designed a research building with three dozen large complexes that will let us test three dozen types of juvenals simultaneously, keeping each type separate from the grub stage, through the pollywog stage, and then as juvenals and even a few brainless adults to make more eggs. We can have three dozen selective breeding projects going at the same time. Also, I will have a complete genetics laboratory, so that we can know exactly what we are dealing with in every experiment.”
“But I thought that the DNA experiments had wound down, well, many millennia ago, when everything that could be learned had been learned.”
“You are right, they did,” Kren said. “The equipment I’m buying has been in storage for over twelve thousand years. I’ve put a clause in the contract whereby I won’t have to pay for it if it doesn’t work, but I’m more than a little worried about it. Having to build all new equipment from ancient plans would be expensive! Also, I’ve got seven biochemists on the payroll trying to learn what the ancients knew about DNA analysis.”
“I wish you well! But now, it’s Friday Night and Party Time! Come with me to the great hall, and we’ll get the festivities started!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Politics and My Boys
New Yugoslavia, 2212 a.d.
The Tellefontu normally carried an organic version of the Disappearing Gun in one of their front claws. This was necessary, since they lived in an ocean filled with large, small-brained carnivores like bluefinned tuna, who sometimes mistook them for a tasty treat. But while killing your attacker eliminated the immediate problem, it didn’t teach him anything. It only killed him, leaving the others with no change in their behavior. Therefore, the Tellefontu had developed a weapon that caused intense pain, but no physical damage. It was a beam that really rattled the pain centers of the brain.
The pain-generating weapon had proved ineffective against the Earthly lobsters the early inhabitants had tried to grow in New Yugoslavia’s oceans, as these crustaceans lacked enough of a brain to feel pain, apparently. And since the lobsters had developed a taste for young Tellefontu, our new allies had made a point of eradicating them.
I had been unaware of this, but with demand and no supply, it looked to be profitable to grow lobsters in tanks on my land, especially since as carnivores, they would give me something to do with that half of a cow (eyeballs, lungs, etc.) that people didn’t want to eat.
The first eating-sized lobsters were finally coming out of the tanks, and Kasia and I ate the first two with gusto!
Bellor declined to join us.
* * *
My annoying uncle, Wlodzimierz Derdowski, the President of New Kashubia, was now lording it over the Interplanetary Council of the Union of Human Planets. The new constitution was still being haggled over, and we still didn’t have anything like a single individual in charge, but my uncle was currently the closest thing we had to it.
He’d written me that my “discovery” of the Tellefontu had been tremendously important, politically. The fact that I hadn’t discovered anything, and that they had come to me didn’t faze him in the least. Politicians are never very concerned with actual facts.
While the governments of the various planets were still behind the huge defense budgets that were required to prepare us to face the Mitchegai, the people were getting increasingly restless about the taxation and the dearth of civilian goods available.