Sports Victories and Vampire Plans
When Kren got home, he found Bronki and Dol laughing and talking together in a most uncharacteristic manner.
"Is this a private party, or may I join you?" Kren asked.
"You certainly may," Dol said. "After all, you are the guest of honor!"
"Indeed?" Kren said sitting down with his tail wrapped around his waist. "And how did this come about?"
"It came about because today you won both the fencing contest and the javelin accuracy contest, sir. While you have been somewhat taciturn with me, a mere servant, it happens that while accompanying you in the course of my duties, I couldn't help noticing, first, that you were capable of hitting the smallest of targets at the greatest of distances with a spear, and also that on the very first time that you picked up an épée, you scored points on Dik, something that no one else has done in years."
"Yes. So?"
Dol said, "So, I gathered together my entire life's savings, a matter of less than six gross Ke, and bet it all on the outcome of the fencing competition. And then, having won a tremendous sum there, I went to bet all of my winnings on your next real competition, naturally eschewing the javelin tennis game. But, there was not enough time between events to bet on the distance throw and then to reinvest the winnings in a wager on the accuracy competition. Therefore, I put it all on the one with the higher odds, accuracy. This fortunate decision multiplied my winnings by a further factor of a dozen and nine. I am now the proud possessor of just under a million Ke! And I owe it all to my association with you, and to Bronki here, who introduced us, and put me to work for you!"
"Well, I congratulate you," Kren said. "Properly invested, that should earn you the independent income that you once dreamed of. I take it that you will be leaving our employ?"
"I'd considered that, but on reflection I decided that it would be foolish to do so. Consider that in my short association with you, you have led me to the way of fabulous riches! So, if you will permit it, sir, I would like to continue as your servant, willing and able to do absolutely anything that you ask of me. I will ask no payment for this, except perhaps for the privilege of occasionally sitting at your feet and learning more from you on how to progress further on my path to wealth, fame, and power."
"This is a remarkable offer. But I am staying with Bronki, and I see no incentive to moving my place of abode. Will you be her servant as well?"
Dol said, "With her permission, no. I have already made arrangements to rent her second best guest room, which is next door to your suite, and I will do such things as she desires from time to time provided that it does not conflict with my duties and obligations to you."
"Very well, on that basis, I accept. You will continue to be my servant. What about you, Bronki? While you have been thus far silent, you too seem to be in a remarkably jovial mood."
"Kren, I am very happy because this has been the most profitable single day in my entire life, all five thousand years of it! I was not quite as astute as Dol here in multiplying my resources, but my capital base was much greater to begin with. Having seen you in action, I wagered heavily on all three of your main events. And while I lost a little at the distance throw, two out of three isn't bad! I made more than three dozen million Ke today!" Bronki said.
"I am very sorry about the distance throw. You see, the Master of Javelins . . ."
"We know all about that, Kren. So does everybody else. The director of athletics will doubtless fire her on Monday morning for her abysmal choice of tactics, unless some of the irate gamblers kill her first. I think that I am safe in assuring you that from this time forward, the game plans that you work under will be made by you."
"I am not at all sure that this would be wise," Kren said. "Consider that I completely misjudged my fencing abilities and never placed a wager on the fencing match. Consider also that while I started with four dozen and six thousand Ke, and Dol here had less than six gross, she ended up winning almost as much as I did."
"I see two things happening here, Kren. In the first place, you did not have enough proper information with regards to your fencing abilities, and those of others. That will not happen again. Second, you have not stopped to think out the mathematics and the psychology of gambling. In this area, you already have the mathematical tools that you need, although you have not used them, and Dol and I can assist you with everything else. With our help, you can formulate a game plan that can optimize your winnings."
"I would welcome your help."
"And we are eager to give it, since it automatically lets us in on your game plan," Bronki said.
At this point, the door gong sounded.
"That will be the party snack I ordered," Dol said. "But in my excitement, I forgot that while I am now rich, I don't have any money. All of my wagers were in currency, and I was afraid to bring that much money home by myself. That, and I don't have anyplace safe here to put a million Ke, once I do get it home." Using Bronki's safe simply never occurred to any of them. No Mitchegai would trust another to that extent.
"Put the child on my bill," Bronki said to the delivery porters. Turning to Kren and Dol, she said, "Monday, we'll order a pair of safes, one for each of you. You can pay me for it all later, at the usual interest rates. We should discuss insurance then, as well. But for now, shall I bring out the branding irons? Or the knives? Both?"
"They said that you wanted to see me, sir?" Kren said walking into the director's office.
"Yes. You did a fine job on Saturday. For a first time freshman to win at two events is almost unheard of."
"It should have been three, sir."
"True. But that problem has been taken care of. I'll be running the javelin team personally until a replacement can be found. As I was saying, you did well. Do you realize that your accuracy score broke the planetary amateur record?"
"Yes, sir. I felt that it was necessary to do so, in case anyone following me was sandbagging."
"Fine. But you broke a planetary record, something that usually happens once in a dozen years, and then you didn't show up for the awards ceremony on Sunday. I had to accept the award for you, in your name. I had to make excuses for you, in public, and I didn't like it. But here it is," he said, throwing the large, platinum medal across his desk, followed by three smaller ones, two of gold and one of copper. "The other three are for fencing, accuracy, and distance. Don't you ever pull a stunt like that on me again! Why didn't you come?"
"Because nobody told me that I was invited?"
The director buried his face in his hands. "Kren, you are stupid."
"Our university lost the meet, sir."
"I am aware of that."
"We lost it by three points. Had you permitted me to take Bo's place, I could have defeated his opponent easily, gaining us five points. I saw the fool fight, after all. Had you done it my way, we would have won," Kren said.
"You are still stupid. You do not know how to take all of the factors into account."
"No, sir. I am ignorant, and ignorance has the advantage of being curable. Actually, I spent Sunday working out a game plan for the rest of the season. I would seem to be in a unique position in that I am sufficiently skillful so as to be able to control the outcome of three separate competitions. I can win when I want to, or let someone else do so if I feel that it is to my advantage."
"I see. And assuming that you are really that good, what do you plan to do about it?" the director asked.
"There are a dozen and eleven more games on our calendar this year, plus the championships. I intend to win typically one event at each of them, and lose the other two, to keep the odds up. Then I will win all three events at the championships. Next Saturday's games with the University of Badja will see me win the distance event, setting a new record by a few inches."
"Just make damned sure that you show up for the award ceremonies! Okay, Kren, if you can actually make this program work, I'll let you do it your way. But if you fail to meet your predictions just once, I'll take charge directly, understood? And I'll expect you to tell meprivately!which event you will win by the Tuesday before the game, at the latest."
"Very good, sir."
"Okay. Dik's waiting. Go practice with her. Then at javelin practice, you'll work on throwing exactly two inches farther than the record."
After Kren left, the director decided that he wouldn't tell anyone about Kren's predictions, but would use that information himself. The alumnae would be satisfied to know when they should bet on someone else.
From the outer office, he could soon be heard to say on the phone, "Naw, I think that the kid was just lucky! Look at the pattern. He got four golds on the first round! How could you call that anything but luck? And then by the last round he got tired and completely fell apart! Me, I'd put my money on someone else, Dala."
And on another call, "Well, the kid did real well at the fencing meet, no doubt about that, but I've done an analysis of the pattern of the opponents he went up against. Now, it was an honest draw, I'm sure of it, but strange statistical things sometimes happen! The very best players were paired up for the first three rounds! Kren only had to beat one of them! Everybody else he went up against was a third rater. I tell you that if I was fixing the draw to make sure that Kren won, I couldn't have done any better than what he got Saturday. Me, I'd put my money on someone else, next game."
After a vigorous bout, Kren said, "Coach, what actually happened to the former Master of Javelins?"
"Good question. Nobody seems to know for sure. The director didn't fire her, although I think he meant to. Trying to sandbag from a central position is really dumb. But nobody's seen the girl since Saturday night. Maybe she was smart enough to just run away. Or maybe she ran into somebody who lost a lot of money on the distance competition."
"Or maybe she ran into the director." Kren laughed.
"That is a possibility best not voiced aloud. On guard!"
After another heart thumping session in which Kren won, Dik said, "Damn, but you're good! I'll be betting another pile of money on you next Saturday."
"I wouldn't advise that, Coach. I have a feeling that I might have a bad day. I might do well in the distance competition, though."
The team flew away in three fusion-powered, jumbo jet planes on Friday afternoon, heading for the University of Badja, a few thousand miles away.
Like everything else on any Mitchegai planet, even the airport was underground. There were big doorways at the ends of all of the runways, but otherwise, grass covered everything.
Kren asked for and got a window seat.
The view was lovely. It was green.
As he predicted, he lost at both the fencing and the accuracy competitions, but set a new planetary record in the distance throw, three inches beyond the previous one. Not trying anything fancy, he just made his first throw good, and then did worse on the next two.
He was awarded three more medals, platinum, gold, and silver, which he didn't much care about, but stood patiently as they were hung around his neck. He wondered why the fans got so excited about this sort of thing.
And he increased his net worth to over eight million.
"I think that it is time that we discussed Kodo," Bronki said to Kren in her living room, on Thursday night.
"Very good. I want to know everything about Kodo."
"Telling you everything about Kodo would take years. He is old, almost as old as I am, and almost as well educated. Like me, he wears the rainbow belt. Currently, he is the director of the College of Architecture, here at the university, and has many successful business intrests around the city. Once, I considered him to be a good friend. A thousand years ago, we were partners on several ventures, but the friendship grew sour, and we drifted apart. Our mutual animosity has steadily increased, and now he has tried to have me killed. This is not permissible behavior, and he will have to die."
Kren said, "I gather that you want me to kill him for you?"
"Yes, if you would want to do the job. I have had his movements traced, and have identified an optimal time and place for his disposal. I could hire a hit team for two dozen thousand Ke, but you would be far more dependable, I think."
"If their level of competence is the same as that of the team that he sent after you, I would have to agree with your assessment. However, my recent financial success has been such that two dozen thousand Ke is no longer a significant amount of money to me."
Bronki said, "You would be permitted to keep anything he and his guards have on their persons, of course, and I suppose that I could go a bit higher."
"You would have to go much higher. It might be marginally worth while for me to do it for say, two million Ke."
"That is a huge amount of money!"
"You have it. You've made at least two gross million Ke, betting on me in the last two weeks," Kren said.
"I suppose so. And anyway, perhaps I owe you something for all of the valuable information you've given me."
"What really makes killing Kodo attractive to me is the fact that he doubtless has many skills and much information that I could use. He seems to be a competent businessman, for example, and I would find the knowledge of architecture to be attractive."
Bronki said, "You intend to eat parts of his brain?"
"Of course. I am a vampire, after all."
"This puts a whole new slant on things. Kodo is a very competent mathematician, and I have often seriously missed the mathematical abilities that you took from me. If I shared in your feast, I could recover them."
Kren said, "You would be welcome to what I have no need for, but this time, I really want to get some computer skills!"
"I know that you were promised them last summer, and that I retained them nonetheless. But Kren, I didn't try to cheat you. You must understand how the brain works. All of the trillions of cells in a normal brain are motile. They are not fixed in place the way the cells are in say, a muscle, or a bone. Each of the brain's cells sends tiny dendrites out to contact the many other cells that it needs to work with. Then it tries to optimize its physical position in order to make the total length of its dendrites as short as possible. This saves the cell energy, and tends to make the entire brain faster. All of this shuffling around tends to put certain cells in certain physical positions, eventually. The cells concerned with vision tend to collect up near the eyes, hearing near the ears, and so on."
This was probably how the Mitchegai system of immortality evolved in the first place, but with the very limited numbers of species that they have available for study, the Mitchegai understanding of evolution is very poor.
Had human brain cells ever developed the ability to move to other positions, the architecture of the human brain would doubtlessly be far more efficient than it is.
Bronki continued, "Now, Kren, the skills required for computers are usually associated with those required for mathematics, but in my case, it is possible that they are more associated with business or perhaps with history, since the history of computers is a specialty of mine. Cranial anatomy is not an exact science, no matter what the medic that you ate might have thought. She was only a technician, after all, and not a scientist."
Kren said, "You make me think that I should increase my knowledge of biology as well."
"You will have the opportunity to do that if you wish. Before Kodo switched over to architecture, two thousand years ago, he was a world-famous biologist," Bronki said.
"Then I think that we have an agreement here."
"Yes, but eating Kodo's brain will necessitate certain changes in my plan. I had planned on your killing him tomorrow, but if he is going to be partially eaten, you and I will need at least a week to recover properly. You have your studies and athletic responsibilities. I have my classes and my students. I think that we should put our attack off for two weeks, until the midterm break."