"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, Iwould 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 the beginning of time Nature has labored arduously toward the consummation of this purpose.At the very beginning things existed with life, but with no brain.Gradually rudimentary nervous systems and minute brains evolved.Evolution proceeded.The brains became larger and more powerful.In us you see the highest development; but there are those of us who believe that there is yet another step--that some time in the far future our race shall develop into the super-thing--just brain.The incubus of legs and chelae and vital organs will be removed.The future kaldane will be nothing but a great brain.Deaf, dumb, and blind it will lie sealed in its buried vault far beneath the surface of Barsoom--just a great, wonderful, beautiful brain with nothing to distract it from eternal thought.""You mean it will just lie there and think?" cried Tara of Helium.
"Just that!" he exclaimed."Could aught be more wonderful?""Yes," replied the girl, "I can think of a number of things that would be infinitely more wonderful."
