"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