The Chessmen of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs (best thriller novels of all time txt) 📗

“Oh!” exclaimed Tara of Helium understandingly; “you mean that Luud has many wives and that you are the offspring of one of them.”

“No, not that at all,” replied Ghek. “Luud has no wife. He lays the eggs himself. You do not understand.”

Tara of Helium admitted that she did not.

“I will try to explain, then,” said Ghek, “if you will promise to sing to me later.”

“I promise,” she said.

“We are not like the rykors,” he began. “They are creatures of a low order, like yourself and the banths and such things. We have no sex⁠—not one of us except our king, who is bisexual. He produces many eggs from which we, the workers and the warriors, are hatched; and one in every thousand eggs is another king egg, from which a king is hatched. Did you notice the sealed openings in the room where you saw Luud? Sealed in each of those is another king. If one of them escaped he would fall upon Luud and try to kill him and if he succeeded we should have a new king; but there would be no difference. His name would be Luud and all would go on as before, for are we not all alike? Luud has lived a long time and has produced many kings, so he lets only a few live that there may be a successor to him when he dies. The others he kills.”

“Why does he keep more than one?” queried the girl.

“Sometimes accidents occur,” replied Ghek, “and all the kings that a swarm has saved are killed. When this happens the swarm comes and obtains another king from a neighboring swarm.”

“Are all of you the children of Luud?” she asked.

“All but a few, who are from the eggs of the preceding king, as was Luud; but Luud has lived a long time and not many of the others are left.”

“You live a long time, or short?” Tara asked.

“A very long time.”

“And the rykors, too; they live a long time?”

“No; the rykors live for ten years, perhaps,” he said, “if they remain strong and useful. When they can no longer be of service to us, either through age or sickness, we leave them in the fields and the banths come at night and get them.”

“How horrible!” she exclaimed.

“Horrible?” he repeated. “I see nothing horrible about that. The rykors are but brainless flesh. They neither see, nor feel, nor hear. They can scarce move but for us. If we did not bring them food they would starve to death. They are less deserving of thought than our leather. All that they can do for themselves is to take food from a trough and put it in their mouths, but with us⁠—look at them!” and he proudly exhibited the noble figure that he surmounted, palpitant with life and energy and feeling.

“How do you do it?” asked Tara of Helium. “I do not understand it at all.”

“I will show you,” he said, and lay down upon the floor. Then he detached himself from the body, which lay as a thing dead. On his spider legs he walked toward the girl. “Now look,” he admonished her. “Do you see this thing?” and he extended what appeared to be a bundle of tentacles from the posterior part of his head. “There is an aperture just back of the rykor’s mouth and directly over the upper end of his spinal column. Into this aperture I insert my tentacles and seize the spinal cord. Immediately I control every muscle of the rykor’s body⁠—it becomes my own, just as you direct the movement of the muscles of your body. I feel what the rykor would feel if he had a head and brain. If he is hurt, I would suffer if I remained connected with him; but the instant one of them is injured or becomes sick we desert it for another. As we would suffer the pains of their physical injuries, similarly do we enjoy the physical pleasures of the rykors. When your body becomes fatigued you are comparatively useless; it is sick, you are sick; if it is killed, you die. You are the slave of a mass of stupid flesh and bone and blood. There is nothing more wonderful about your carcass than there is about the carcass of a banth. It is only your brain that makes you superior to the banth, but your brain is bound by the limitations of your body. Not so, ours. With us brain is everything. Ninety per centum of our volume is brain. We have only the simplest of vital organs and they are very small for they do not have to assist in the support of a complicated system of nerves, muscles, flesh and bone. We have no lungs, for we do not require air. Far below the levels to which we can take the rykors is a vast network of burrows where the real life of the kaldane is lived. There the air-breathing rykor would perish as you would perish. There we have stored vast quantities of food in hermetically sealed chambers. It will last forever. Far beneath the surface is water that will flow for countless ages after the surface water is exhausted. We are preparing for the time we know must come⁠—the time when the last vestige of the Barsoomian atmosphere is spent⁠—when the waters and the food are gone. For this purpose were we created, that there might not perish from the planet Nature’s divinest creation⁠—the perfect brain.”

“But what purpose can you serve when that time comes?” asked the girl.

“You do not understand,” he said. “It is too big for you to grasp, but I will try to explain it. Barsoom, the moons, the sun, the stars, were created for a single purpose. From