It was an ecology taken to the absolute limit of what human civilization has always been heading toward. Ever since humans worked their way to the top of the food chain, their earliest actions were to kill off the large mammals who were their predators, their competitors, and often even those who were their source of food.
The agricultural revolution quickened this process, as vast fields were carefully planted and maintained to contain only a single species of plant. As animal husbandry was developed, people, who once ate thousands of animal life-forms, became contented with many fewer, and eventually only three or four of them. Usually, cows, pigs, and chickens.
Anything that might actually harm them, be it a microbe, a mosquito, or a predator, was actively exterminated. All other species that were not immediately useful were brushed aside and allowed to die, mostly because they were simply in the way.
The Mitchegai, who had been at this program for millions of years longer than humanity had been around, had taken it as far as it could possibly go. It was absolute, efficient simplification, with all of the other competing species long since eradicated.
If anything else appeared, or if any mutation occurred, it was ruthlessly stamped out. There were immutable laws that required Mitchegai to fight their wars only with weapons that were powered by their own muscles, but these laws did not apply to ecological threats. Fusion weapons were used when nothing else sufficed.
Kren passed buildings containing the homes, the offices, and the factories where the adults lived and worked, but these seemed to be little more than windows and doors set into the side of green hills. Every square foot of surface area that could possibly support grass, did.
The longer Kren walked from the mines, the more difficult it would be to take a fresh kill back to them. He would need a place to hide while he went into the stupor that followed a major meal, and he had found no such place. Under the last two dukes, this land had become much more civilized than it had been in his youth. No longer were there wild adults ranging in the hills.
Eventually, as the sun was setting, he came upon a small, secluded valley with a small, knee-high juvenal grazing in it.
She would suffice.
He walked up to the little creature and simply swatted her on the head. She fell over, and he ate her.
Her small size was not sufficient to put him into a major stupor, but he slept well that night, wrapped in his heavy red and lavender military cloak, lying in the small valley.
He woke to find an old Mitchegai with a very large head standing over him. She wore a bulky, gaudy academic cloak with bright stripes in many colors. Around her shoulders were many tassels, each of a different shape and of a different color. Around her waist was a belt of all seven colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and kran.
Kran is a color in the ultraviolet that is visible to the Mitchegai. They see the spectrum as being linear. The color wheel is an artifact of the human brain, and the fact that humans have only three different color receptors in their eyes. The Mitchegai have seven, and perceive colors much more richly.
“Are you injured?” she asked in the ancient academic language of Keno.
With adult and juvenal Mitchegai, breathing is normally in through the nose, which also cools the blood going to the brain, and out through four vents at the belt line. These permit a better air flow, and allow for the regular drainage of the lungs. Coughing is unknown in their species. When swimming, a Mitchegai blows bubbles about her waist, and they can breath while eating or drinking.
When speaking, these lower vents are closed, and air is forced up past four sets of vocal cords, one for each lung, and out through the mouth. Mitchegai are thus capable of making four different tones simultaneously, and could actually sing chords, except that lacking all sense of rhythm, they have no musical art forms.
“No, I am quite well, thank you,” Kren said in the same language as he got up.
“It is unusual to find a soldier lying in the field in these peaceful times, and even more so to find one who speaks Keno.”
“I was tired, and there was no place else available. As to the language, well, a soldier gets around.”
“Apparently. I am traveling to my academic retreat, a day’s walk to the north of here. Could it be that you are going in the same direction?”
Private transportation had been experimented with several times in Mitchegai history, but it had always resulted in severely reduced levels of physical fitness, and had eventually been outlawed. Long distance public transportation was always available, of course, as were emergency and cargo vehicles.
“Indeed, I am. I thought to spend my leave in my homeland to the north,” Kren said.
“Then let us walk together. I would welcome some company,” she said. “My name is Bronki.”
“And mine is Kren.”
They walked and they talked. Kren found the conversation to be delightful. In his thousand years of life, this was the first intelligent person that he had ever had an opportunity to talk to. The world that she described was rich and complex, with infinite possibilities and permutations.
Their conversation drifted to the problems of maintaining the proper number of grubs that evolved into pollywogs, and then juvenals and eventually, sometimes, into adults. Too many grubs, and the health of the grass would suffer. Too few, and in a few years there would be a dangerous shortage of juvenals to eat.
Teams of adults working out of the university monitored the grub population, and adjustments were made, most frequently by taking the eggs that fell to the floors of offices, factories, and homes, and either destroying them, or scattering them over the fields.
This was all new to Kren. The slaves in the mine were not considered to be good breeding stock, and their eggs were never saved. If any eggs hatched in that environment, the grubs were left to starve.
Even if they had been able to find enough to eat, they still all would have died. Grubs instinctively go downward in their search for water in which to metamorphose into pollywogs. But in a mine, going downward only leads to death.
A more long-term technique to restrict the numbers of grubs was to restrict the number of males who were used to rejuvenate the elders. Currently, less than two per gross of the adults in the duchy were male.
“How is it that you are male?” Bronki asked. “Most males are the highly selected bodies of the aristocracy.”
“I was severely injured in battle. This body was the only one available.” Kren’s new-found intelligence made it easy for him to lie.
She nodded, accepting this.
“And the identification scars on your arms, they look barely a year old.”
“Yes, that was about when it happened, during the last war,” he said.
“Yet that body is at least ten years old, from the time of metamorphosis.”
“Also true. I was injured when we were taking a big mine to the south of here. This was once the body of an ignorant slave in a mine. As I said, it was all that was available, and I urged them to take the chance. Still, it is a very strong body, and I do not regret what happened. Certainly, it was better than being divided among six of my old comrades.”
“I’m sure it was,” she said. “That would have been the Senta Copper Mine, wouldn’t it.”
“Strange as it might seem, I don’t think that I ever heard the name of the place. They did mine copper there, however.”
“I’m sure that it was the Senta. Those scars on your arm are rather crude.”
“Old Sergeant Toll did the cutting, in almost complete darkness, when I was coming out of my stupor. He was afraid that I might be mistaken for one of the mining slaves, and sent on with the rest of them,” he said, the lies flowing freely.
“And what happened to those others?”
“I have no idea. In the military, you are generally told only what you need to know.”
“At the university, we are always told everything, especially things that we have no desire to know,” she laughed.
Bronki talked of her life at the University of Dren, of her occasional difficulties with some of the students, and about the perpetual round of interdepartmental politics.
“Yours is such a different world from the one that I am used to,” he told her. “I find all of this to be fascinating.”
“Then perhaps you should consider a change of career fields. There is always a need for more intelligent students at the university. You could come there, and after a few years as a student, perhaps an instructorship might open up for you. Also, you mentioned winning championships with both the spear and the sword. It is possible that an athletic scholarship could be offered you.”