On Earth at this time, the Sumerians were inventing a primitive form of cuneiform writing, and the Egyptians had yet to found the Old Kingdom. The pyramids had not yet even been designed.
Kren and his band had been captured shortly after the estate of Duke Lidko had been conquered by his neighbor, Duke Molon.
Wild carnivores were usually killed out of hand, as they were considered too stupid to do useful work, too dangerous to be left as they were, and risky for use as new body donors, since you couldn’t be absolutely sure as to just how dominant their brains had become.
But Duke Molon had taken heavy casualties in the war, and was in sore need of manpower. Kren and his band were put to work in the vast, ancient, underground mines on the duke’s new lands.
Open pit mines would have been an abomination to the Mitchegai. Every square foot of the surface was needed for their grass, to feed the children on whom the adults fed. Their mines delved deeply, and the tailings were ground fine, to be spread thinly over a vast area, when they weren’t dumped into an ocean trench.
The rules in the mine were very simple. If you disobeyed, you were beaten. If you didn’t work, you weren’t fed. If you continued to not work, your brain was ripped out and thrown into the fire, while your body was left on the floor to be eaten by your ravenous former coworkers.
Kren learned to work.
He was fed, but rarely were slaves permitted to eat the brains of their prey. His superiors got that delicacy, as did, occasionally, the guards. They didn’t want the lowest classes to become too intelligent.
After a lifetime of brutal labor below ground, when his stooped, worn-out body was no longer capable of going on, he was judged to be worthy of a new body—and another lifetime of work in the mines. When this happened, his brain cells were added to those of the youth who was eating him.
After eight such resurrections, his brain had grown to the point where he could speak a bit. He understood the mines, and how they worked. But still, he dug. Still, he hauled the copper ore to the surface. And sometimes they had him help to shore up the ceilings with reinforced concrete beams as they delved ever deeper. But now, at least, he was a valued slave.
The Mitchegai were very advanced, technologically. This planet had been colonized by spaceships over a gross thousand years before, and they had never lost that technology. Their use of slavery in the mine was a matter of using their version of appropriate technology.
They could have automated the mine, but that would have cost money. Slaves were free. Feeding them gave the duke something to do with the temporary surplus of juvenals on his lands, and if food ever became scarce, he could always slaughter some of the slaves and feed them to the others.
And guarding them gave his soldiers something to do during times of peace.
Kren was near the surface when the forces of Duke Dennon captured the mines from Duke Molon. He hid in a small side tunnel for several days while the battle raged on below ground. In time, Duke Molon’s guards were all killed by the more professional troops of Duke Dennon. All of the other slaves were brought to the surface, for what purpose Kren did not know, leaving him alone down below.
But not quite alone. In a small side tunnel he found one of his old guards who was severely wounded, with one foot and both hands cut off, but still alive. She was a guard who had taken pleasure in beating him many times, and Kren felt no remorse in killing her.
In truth, he wouldn’t have felt any remorse if the guard had been kind to him, remorse being an emotion that the Mitchegai rarely felt, and then only for a missed opportunity for personal gain.
And anyway, he was hungry.
Instinctively, he ripped open the brain case, but then he stopped. This brain was vastly bigger than any that he had ever seen before, and some feeling told him that he should not eat it. Yet he knew it would be delicious, and he was starving. He yielded to temptation, and took a single small bite, but then yelled NO to himself, and threw the rest into the fire pit still smoldering below.
He ate the rest of the guard, threw the scraps of bone and equipment into the fire pit that ventilated the mine, and crawled back to his small side tunnel to rest.
When he awoke, he found strange echoes in his mind, but no real memories. Yet he found new words flooding into his brain, words describing things that he had never seen, words like “city” and “road,” but which he somehow now knew the meaning of.
He stayed alone in the small tunnel for many weeks, going out only to find water, trying to absorb these new thoughts.
Eventually, he got hungry again.
He started for the surface.
The mines seemed to be completely empty. The tools and weapons were gone, and there were no bodies in evidence. In the wars among the Mitchegai, the dead from both sides were eaten by the victors. Among their species, warfare was often a matter of conquer or starve.
The brains of the enemy were burned when there was a surplus of food, or else eaten roasted when there wasn’t.
Since there usually wasn’t a recently metamorphosed youth handy, the brains of your own fallen troops were shared out among their comrades, and ceremonially eaten with honor. Divided between six friends, what the brains were was preserved, although they normally did not become dominant. After the Meal of Battle, the victors would sit and talk about all of the things that they now remembered of what their comrades had done.
Eating the whole brain of an intellectual equal could result in losing your own personality, or, worse still, in a deadly form of schizophrenia, one of the few diseases known to the Mitchegai.
Moving quietly to the surface, with the silence that every slave soon learns, Kren found a single guard at the tunnel mouth. A warrior in a heavy military cloak was leaning on her spear, looking outwards into the night, half dozing in the manner of every cold-blooded animal.
With no great skill, but with the strength and stealth learned in eight lifetimes of being a mining slave, he came up behind the soldier and broke her neck with a single, powerful blow of his claws. He grabbed the spear before it fell, and took the body and weapon below as fast as possible.
As before, he tore open the braincase, but again, he took only a single bite, albeit a larger one, this time. It had not hurt him before, so he thought himself safe to do it again. The rest of the body he ate, even the skin and the bones. But he kept the spear, the cloak, the belt with the sword, and the helmet, and hid them away before the stupor came upon him again.
The captain of the guard assigned by Duke Dennon to protect the mine sent squads to search for his missing soldier, a remarkably good athlete thought to be an up-and-coming young officer, but these mines were thousands of years old. They were of vast extent, and incredibly convoluted. They never found the small tunnel where Kren lay in a stupor.
Again, he slept with strange dreams, but when he awoke, he knew what to do with the weapons he had captured. He knew how to throw the spear, and how to block with it. He knew the Twelve-Pointed Way of the Sword.
His victim had been a master with both the sword and the spear, and had won many championships with them. Had she lived, she would have been mortified to learn that she had been defeated by an unarmed slave. Luckily, Kren had eaten those parts of her brain where these skills resided, and now they were his.
The small electric lights in the main corridors had been turned off when Kren awoke, and the fires had long since burned out. This did not trouble him, for he had spent much of his life in total darkness, and could move in it almost as easily as in the light.
Many weeks went by as, fascinated with his new knowledge, so different from his dull life in the mines, he absorbed it all.
While the upper classes of the Mitchegai used identifying tattoos, the military used ceremonial scarring for the same purpose. Kren carefully cut marks on his upper arms to match those of the officer he had just eaten. Someday, he knew, he would have to leave this mine, and it wouldn’t do to go as a naked slave.