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Leviathan

Return on Investment

By Shalion

The second calving was far easier. Little sister let the flesh of our duct expand, and it complied much more willingly after having been stretched out by the first birth. The second and third daughters emerged within minutes of each other, slipping out from under the mammoth saurian along with a small amount of grey discharge. Underneath her bulk, the daughters had to swim a fair distance to even clear Leviathan's underbelly before the smooth skin climbed steeply into her wide, engorged flanks. The eye of Leviathan was able to see their relatively tiny bodies clearing her undercarriage to come more even with the vast wall of curved flesh at her side. Leviathan's tail propelled the huge mass with slow strokes from side to side, no more than once every five minutes, and it was so long that the end faded into the green murk before the tips of the long fins could be detected.

The two daughters swam about each other, seeming to rejoice in their new liberty from the tight, warm confines of Leviathan's belly. Largely, they ignored the body of their mother, which they regarded more as a landmass than anything else. 'And perhaps indeed, that is what they see me as. As little sister put it, they must be perpetually dim even as I am most of the time.' thought Leviathan as she observed one of the daughters suddenly loop around the body of the other, to dart in among the entourage of fish surrounding Leviathan's body. It was now so dense, it was like a living cloak of fish and other sea life. The meat eating sister fed on the fish swimming in Leviathan's wake until they were largely scattered except for the boldest of them. Quickly after that, the carnivore fled in search of greater prey. The other daughter lingered for a while longer, however there shortly came a day Leviathan spied a large school of tasty looking fish.

Leviathan dived as was the routine and began blowing bubbles from her small store of air to entrap and confuse the fish. Leviathan then began to rise from the depths, her mouth opening wider than usual to swallow the school. She was unaware, however, of her daughter attempting to capitalize on the same school. Her daughter was almost amongst the fish as her mouth encompassed the bulk of them, so her own large body caught on the side of Leviathan's mouth. The mass of her daughter compressed the skin between her jaws drawing around the fish, letting a great many of them escape through the side of her mouth. Her daughter also did not seem to enjoy being caught half in and half out of her our her mouth and struggled against the closing jaws pinning her. Leviathan, however was unwilling to forsake the fish she was able to get and proceeded to close her mouth, releasing her daughter only at the end, spitting her out along with a couple dozen fish. Leviathan had considered simply eating her daughter there, but little sister had urged against the impulse, stating that she had not yet grown very much since her birth and would be a caloric net loss if eaten now. The daughter did not linger nearby after that, quickly swimming away, not to be seen again for a long time. Not for the first time Leviathan wondered what had been going through the daughter's mind. _'She seemed very much to not desire being eaten.' _ the head observed.

'Of course not.' intruded little sister into the head's thoughts. 'She had not yet grown fat enough. The compulsion to be eaten will not trigger itself until she has grown fatter. Until then, she has the same self preservation instinct as any other creature.'

'I see.' said Leviathan and she peered into the distance where the daughter had swam off long past the time she was visible. 'I assume that you've already quickened us with yet more daughters, little sister?'

The tail answered sheepishly. 'Yes, I have. And it must be so from now on to ensure a new source of calories for us. To continue to grow into the future, we must rely on the many mouths of our daughters to sustain us rather than our own. You will be grateful once our daughters begin to return to us in a few years and we can begin to increase in size once more.'

_'I suppose I must consider each daughter to be an investment of resources.' _ the head resigned.

'Exactly so.' said the tail in agreement. 'In fact, in time, I expect we will rely entirely on our daughters to keep us fed.'

'If that is the case, I think I might miss the taste of fish and krill.' the head sent down to the tail. She felt good natured humor from her, but no response followed.

So a new cycle yearly cycle was formed. Leviathan continued to follow the old route through the currents of the oceans, to swallow the bountiful blooms of krill and algae and swallow schools of migrating fish whenever opportunity presented itself. In the winter, Leviathan spawned in the south with the whales and in the summer, she enjoyed plentiful food in the north to replenish her reserves. Leviathan soon produced another three daughters, then five, then eight and twelve. Little Sister expanded the brooding organ until it was a great hollow sac inside of Leviathan and her belly would grow even more distended when the time neared for spawning. Naturally, Little Sister increased the demands on their body until Leviathan's 2% excess was cut in half, and then in half again, and half again.

Little sister would have filled the belly with brood such that no matter how much Leviathan ate, they would have had to tap into their vast fat stores to survive. But the head would not have it. 'Enough, little sister. You have robbed us with how much energy we devote to spawning. We add fat to our body at a pitiful rate. I can almost feel myself growing thinner as winter nears and I swim into warmer waters.'

'You feel no such thing, big sister. We lose a tiny fraction of our weight on the lean season, only to gain it back and more during summer.' little sister replied, somewhat irritated. 'And it has always been that way.'

_'Only now that fraction I gain back more is almost gone and you still want to increase our rate of reproduction. You wish to brood until we begin to waste away.' _ replied the head hotly.

'Every kilogram of flesh we spend on a daughter will return a thousand, big sister. Please think of the long term. It does not matter if we lose a little fatty tissue today if we may feast on an incredible return a few years from now. And besides, we are three fifths pure fat already. It matters little if we lose some.' said the tail, as always, all logic.

'I see you still do not understand me, and I fear you never will. But I must draw the line between us here. Our first daughter has still not returned to us. For all we know, this entire enterprise might be for naught. I must see evidence that we can be as profitable off of our spawn as you claim, and even then... I cannot abide us squandering away our treasure like this.'

'Our treasure...' said the tail in mock sympathy. 'Perhaps I will never understand you, even as you say. But I will not cross the line you set, though I think it will slow our growth in the future. You will come to your senses in time, I think as our daughters prove faithful. I hope only that this irrational distrust will lessen in time as we grow accustomed to a new, and hopefully permanent routine.'

The head smugly calmed down, already quieting down the higher processing regions of her brain. 'I may change my mind later, at that. It is my right. But you stay true, little sister. We shall tear our body apart if we ever go to war.'

'I would never desire such a thing, big sister.' said the tail and then she was quiet once more.

Leviathan thus managed to spawn a dozen daughters each winter near the equator, each about the size of a large whale and each specialized for a different feeding method. Little sister was both rigorous and conservative in her design, often designing a daughter to make use of only one or two species of prey be they plant or animal. To the best of her ability, she gave each daughter a set of biological tools with which she hoped they might be successful. 'In time I will see the results of each daughter as they return to us and I will know which fatten easiest and most quickly.' little sister had said

'And if they return not at all?' inquired the head.

'Then they will have somehow perished, surely.' the tail replied 'I admit, I cannot control for accidents, but I've gathered much information from our own prey and I at least do not think any will starve to death.'

'We'll see.' the head had said. And then, finally, after another decade, and after having spawned a total of 189 daughters, the first daughter returned to Leviathan.Leviathan was in arctic waters, feeding on the abundant, tasty krill. She had just captured a swarm and the remnants that had not found their way into her mouth were darting around her broad face even as her throat bulged hugely with enveloped sea water. Leviathan did not filter out the krill with bristles as the whales did, instead, she slowly swallowed the sea water, passing it through her gills. As the water decreased the krill became more cramped inside her mouth and began to dance delightfully on her broad, flat tongue. Leviathan's first daughter came into view in the distance a while before Leviathan actually noticed her, so concentrated on her meal and the feel of eating was she. However she did eventually see her, though her green and white markings did indeed do a lot to disguise her shape in the distance. Leviathan turned her head and tail in her direction and began to swim.

They met, now for only the second time, in open clear waters. Leviathan spent a great deal of time looking at her, and watching as her body came into view, for she was much changed from when Leviathan had seen her last. The daughter was more than three times as long as she had been as a newborn and was greater than even the largest whale. Her belly was round and bulging with fat, so much so that by ratio, this daughter was much fatter than Leviathan herself, at least if her own smooth contours were as deep with blubber as Leviathan's. The fat was so deep on her that it bulged around the bases of her pectoral fins, burying them in thickened, slime coated folds. She was swimming with her mouth closed and had her own, smaller entourage of fish escorting her. The daughter swam with stiff strokes of her own long tail, thick and bulging with fat also and her beady eyes were red streaked and crusty. Barnacles grew sporadically on her throat and underside.

'She seems tired.' Leviathan remarked to her hind brain as mother and daughter swam about each other in a wide circle, one massive, the other massive beyond belief.

'She is old, even as the animals around us grow old and tired.' remarked the tail amiably. 'I told you there would be no risk of rebellious daughters.'

The more Leviathan looked at her vagabond child, the more she noticed the marks of age beyond the stiff movement and the tired eyes. She saw the sores on her skin and then the missing teeth when she opened her mouth to pass water over her gills. She saw also long, ropey scars, including a massive, old looking one that extended from the withers on the side of her body down the length of her tail. Though only about two decades had passed from her birth, her daughter looked as if she had endured a full life. 'Our daughter lacks our full regenerative ability and clearly loses her vitality towards the end of her life. This seems risky to me. What if our daughters become so enfeebled they are not able to return to us?' asked the head, feeling something not quite like sympathy, but a little more like pragmatic empathy for her fading, though apparently incredibly prosperous daughter.

_'Trust me, she is not as feeble as she appears and her body is more durable than even she knows. The look of age is mostly cosmetic. It is the impetus that forces each daughter to come back to us. She feels and thinks she is old, but the tissues are actually still robust. I would not actually hamper our daughter's ability to make her way back to us.' _ the tail said and the satisfaction of her own brilliance filled the head's mind.

'Well, indeed, she is incredibly obese and looks delicious.' _ said the head, who had almost emptied her mouth of enough sea water to swallow the few tons of wriggling, frantic krill on her tongue. They tasted salty and succulent, but the huge mass of meat waiting just before her preoccupied Leviathan's thoughts. It would be the biggest meal she had ever ingested at once. _'Are our insides prepared for our daughter's vastness?' asked the head as the excitement mounted in her mind.

'I've added extra folds and volume to our first stomach, though it may prove insufficient. But I don't doubt that we can at least swallow her. I'll work on the rest.' said little sister and already the head could feel her bowels becoming more energetic.

Leviathan swallowed the mass on her tongue, sending the tiny, mindless krill on their way to fulfill a greater destiny. She opened her mouth again wide and across the near distance, her daughter mimicked the action. Despite just swallowing a couple tons of krill, it seemed to Leviathan that her belly yawned empty and aching inside of her. She swam faster to catch up with her daughter in their slow, circular dance.

As the distance between them closed and Leviathan approached open mouthed behind her smaller, plumper daughter, it seemed that the smaller one began to move her tail more vigorously. Her daughter put on a momentary burst of speed, but almost as soon as she did, she then relaxed completely. Leviathan noted how she closed her bloodshot eyes, and then the greater sea beast was on her, jaws wide.

Given their size difference, it was trivial to get this first daughter into her mouth. However, this daughter was so long that her tail fins began to reach down the back of her throat as her lips began to close about the head. It was an odd sensation for sure and Leviathan had to suppress a vestigial gag reflex. The fattened body of her daughter sat well on her tongue, Leviathan thought and she was an incredible mass for sure, far more massive than any swarm. In fact, her daughter nearly occupied the volume of a free floating swarm, but instead of being mostly composed of sea water which had to be filtered, this daughter was full of thick, heavy fat. Leviathan's jowels tightened around the still body of her first daughter, squeezing out the last of the sea water. The fat flanks of the fattened, whale-like daughter filled Leviathan's cheeks as the greater sea-beast began to close her lips down on the broad, shovel shaped head. Leviathan began to swallow. The tail at first was easy, but it quickly thickened, stretching the tube leading down into her gut. The way her muscles and membranes were forced to stretch tight around the corpulent body of the daughter felt exotic and Leviathan lavished in the sensation, drawing it out for as long as possible. The pressure continued to mount until it became actual discomfort, but Leviathan did not mind at all as the incredible bulk of biomass dropped little by little into her waiting belly. Slowly, eventually, Leviathan's lips closed over her daughter's eyes and then finally over her own mouth. The daughter, whose tail was now extending into Leviathan's stomach, took one last gulp of sea water before she was sealed in.

'This daughter's torso is very wide. I need a few hours to stretch out our esophagus.' intruded little sister.

'Take your time.' replied the head amiably for she was in a state of bliss at the moment.

The first daughter proved to be the best meal that Leviathan had ever had and the best part was how long and drawn out the process of lodging her vast bulk into her stomach was. For the longest time, the round bodied sea creature had distended Leviathan's neck and throat and then, after she was swallowed down into a great sac which enveloped her as her womb had originally - though now to deconstruct rather than construct - she visibly distended even the great belly of Leviathan. The largest creature on earth felt incredibly stuffed afterwards. 'She did not struggle at all.' observed Leviathan.

'Of course not.' said the tail, 'I pre-programed her brain at this stage of life to feel incredible pleasure during the process of devouring her. She could not be any happier now that she is inside of us. That is why she does not struggle.'

Leviathan swam slowly, hardly moving her tail at all, and with her mouth mostly closed, only partly opened to admit fresh sea water and oxygen. She felt as though her stomach would not admit so much as a single krill more. Her belly bulged out in a new odd shape below her ribs as well, changing the way the water flowed around her body. 'Will she not feel pain as we begin to digest her?' inquired the head lazily. She did not care so much about her daughter's plight, her flesh was, after all, only borrowed. But she did care if the great saurian inside of her began to twist or trash in pain.

'I know what you fear, big sister, but I doubt she will thrash now or at any point in the near future. There is little oxygen in our stomach, so her body will automatically begin to go into hibernation. Also, I have added anesthetic to the juices now breaking down her skin and tissues, so she cannot feel any pain from that. Perhaps later, as the muscles are digested, they might spasm randomly as they are broken down, but by then, our daughter should have expired from her fluids leaking out long before.' the tail showed no hint of emotion as she described the process. The head did feel something, but it was hard to nail down, and her emotions drifted back and forth between the pleasure of her full belly and the situation of the mind whose body was now being digested inside of her.

'Mmm...' Mulled the head in contentment, then she signaled down to the hind brain, 'We will never know now what experiences our daughter had in the two decades since she was born.'

'She found a lot of biomass.' said the tail in a soothing way. 'I can tell from how fat she has gotten. I did not even intend for her to become so corpulent before finding us.'

'I enjoyed her appearance.' said the head. 'I wish for all our children to be as obese, or even more so, when they return to us. Not only do I think it means that they fulfilled their purpose and brought extra biomass back to us, but I enjoy seeing the excess flesh on them also.'

'I'm not sure I understand your meaning, but very well, as long as you are pleased.' said the tail, brushing off the earlier comment slightly, 'But I will be able to tell you more about our daughter's life as well as we digest her tissues. And of course you are right. Much information of her past experiences must be lost for we cannot form a neural connection with any of our daughters.'

'Perhaps in time, we will address that issue...' thought the head as she allowed some of her processes to slip into sleep, but not so many that she was not aware of the pleasure the full belly brought. She was thinking of course about the symbolic language they might develop, if they had the inclination.

The tail answered skeptically, 'If ever there is a need for it.'

It took over a week to digest the body of the first daughter and for a time, Little Sister described for her how thick their blood was with the fat of their daughter, though the head herself could hardly feel any difference. She did, however, notice a sharp increase in their weight and for the first time, Little Sister informed her that they had increased their frame also, fully two additional feet from nose to tail and everything in their body scaled up likewise. 'It is a small step.' Little Sister conceded, 'But as more daughters begin to return to us and provide heavy meals like we just had, we can grow faster.'

The head had to admit that she felt excited. For a long time, she had shelved the idea of growth in favor of increasing their fatness, but now that she was actually larger now, even if by a barely noticeable amount, the idea came back into the forefront of her mind. By the time that Leviathan's belly was empty of daughter flesh aside from some mushy remnants of bones and liquid sinew, she was already hungering for another obese daughter, just like the first one.

When the time came to spawn, Leviathan again released her usual dozen daughters, each to their own specialization according to little sister's whims. The process was no longer painful in the slightest, but losing so much mass in such a short time, merely four hours from the first to the last, felt disconcerting and left Leviathan hungry to refill the space the many daughters had once occupied in her abdomen. The daughters were still either scattering almost immediately or lingering for just a few days, but Leviathan hardly noticed anymore. A large, fattened daughter was what she wanted to see most of all, and she craved it now. However, Little Sister now wanted to quicken them with two dozen daughters now that the brooding sac was empty.

'Only fourteen.' the head insisted.

'I thought you enjoyed the taste of daughter flesh?' asked the tail beseechingly.

At this, the head became angry. 'I am not so easily manipulated, Little Sister!' she exclaimed down the spinal path between them. She signaled the rest with a calmer demeanor. 'One success does not prove anything. I will not sacrifice a kilogram of our flesh without further proof. Our 62% fat content feels pleasant to me and I will not let you take us backwards.'

'As you wish, big sister.' said the tail in defeat. It was quite some time before the head heard a signal from the hind brain after that exchange.

That winter, Leviathan expected to meet with one or both of the daughters born during the second spawning, but she met neither, even as her abdomen grew distended from the daughters lodged within and she was forced to migrate back south. Leviathan knew that she must expect some irregularity with this sort of cycle, especially since the numbers were so few, but the disappointment wore heavily on her. Her belly seemed always to be empty, even after feeding heavily on a school of large fish for now Leviathan knew what it was to truly be satisfied with so massive a body as hers.

Leviathan was swimming again in warm waters, her belly heavy and pregnant with daughters only days from emergence. She swam slowly, her brain again lapsed into animal mode. Leviathan still usually shut down her higher processes unless she needed to think or communicate with Little Sister despite the fact that the hind brain no longer benefited from the redirection of mental resources. Leviathan found it easier to process the world without higher functions. Feeding and swimming were much less tedious with fewer processes going on inside her mind. Besides, everything she saw or sensed passed into an excellent short term memory. Leviathan found it sufficient to spin out that memory whenever the need arose to process something new or unusual rather than always be thinking critically.

Leviathan woke up to find that she had seen a dark green and white figure not far away, however. She collected herself from the nether and proceeded to turn her massive figure towards the shape in the distance, swimming with long, broad strokes of her tail. It was indeed a daughter, another filter feeder and though she was not as obese as the first one, she was still adoringly corpulent. Quickly they began to swim about each other and again Leviathan noticed the signs of age and of past injuries on the vast hide of the daughter. _'She looks delicious!' _ thought Leviathan even as she began to close the circle. The daughter ahead of her relaxed and stopped swimming, just as the last.

'Big sister,' chimed in the tail, 'I recommend that we wait until after spawning to devour our daughter. The new brood are taking up a lot of space in our abdominal cavity.'

'I don't care. I've been waiting too long for this.' replied the head and she ignored subsequent communications from her hind tail as she opened her mouth wide to take in her deliciously fat and huge daughter.

The act of swallowing her did not go on for as long, unfortunately, the membranes already stretched out from the girth of the daughter over a year ago. However the body was still delightfully heavy and vast, weighing more than the combined mass of the fourteen currently filling her brooding pouch. This daughter slid into Leviathan's belly like a great stone, the mass visibly passing down the thick neck and further distending the already wide, bulging belly. From a distance, it appeared that Leviathan had swallowed an enormous round mass, like a bowling ball weighing 50,000 tons. That sense of pleasant fullness was interrupted however by horrid contractions from her lower bowels. 'Why are you doing this now, little sister? The brood is not due for a few days yet, can you not let me enjoy this meal?' said the head who suspected the tail of punishing her for not abiding by her wishes.

'I am not doing anything, big sister!' _ the tail cried. _'Our daughters are compressed by the mass in our belly. They must interpret it as danger and are trying to escape. They are all secreting hormones to initiate our contractions.'

'Why are they even able to do that?' asked Leviathan. She had wondered after the fact after the first birth, but had not bothered to question the tail about it until now.

Little sister spoke with an air of exasperation. 'They are our daughters. Though I've limited some of their abilities, the retain the vast majority in some form or another and either consciously or unconsciously. I'm not entirely sure why they have this ability in particular, though. It only came up the first time and not since. I had thought it a non factor since then.'

Leviathan found it more than a little disturbing that Little Sister was not fully aware of everything having to do with their daughters. However, the production of the brood a couple days early did not seem like a large enough issue to start a fight with her over. 'Just get them out of us as quickly as possible. Their movements are disturbing my dinner.'

'Among other things...' said a disgruntled Little Sister before disappearing. They gave birth that day, in a little over three hours. Leviathan continued to swim slowly, hardly moving as she digested and most of the daughters lost interest in the landmass sized organism that had birthed them and swam away. Though it had been disturbed, Leviathan felt gratified in the huge mass swelling her torso and let herself slide into a haze of dim awareness of both her meal and her own enormous girth.

Over the next couple years, daughters continued to rendezvous with Leviathan either in the arctic or her spawning grounds. It was only natural. These were the only two places where Leviathan spent a good deal of time in a relatively confined space. They added tremendously to her annual intake, even when averaged over the span of several years and Leviathan observed her frame expand foot by foot, even as Little Sister dutifully retained their excellent fat stores. In time, Leviathan was convinced of the soundness of their strategy and allowed Little Sister to brood as many daughters as she saw fit and the hind brain did indeed rapidly increase their reproductivity. It was not long at all until Leviathan was bulging as if she had devoured an especially fat daughter as she approached her spawning grounds and it would take days to pass the multitude of bodies which had been crammed inside of her belly, each one by one down the narrow tract leading out of her one and only slit. Leviathan was left feeling drained and exhausted for the whole affair now and her mood tended to sour as the birthing day came each year. The loss of so much mass each year left Leviathan looking more akin to the mammals who spent so much of their energies on their own birthing rituals. The great round belly would vanish entirely until Leviathan's abdomen was smoothed in line with the rest of her wide girth. And Leviathan not only lost a great deal of mass at this time each year, but her fat reserves were at their lowest point during the yearly cycle.

Leviathan now cycled through her weight much more heavily than before, her expenditures and her gains both high. In order to brood so heavily now, Leviathan lost nearly 10% of her total body weight and she either recovered after spawning by eating a waiting daughter or that summer in the arctic. There were a couple years where there seemed to be no daughter waiting to be eaten, however, and then Leviathan lost even more of her precious stores. At her lowest point, Leviathan's lipid percentage dropped to a mere 35%. The head raged savagely at the tail that year at conception against the same number of daughters, but in the end, she let Little Sister have her way. She could not rebuff her sound arguments. This lean time was merely a fluctuation and one they had both anticipated, hard as it was to suffer through it. Still, Leviathan's fat layers were more than adequate to repel the cold of the arctic waters, which was their only real function on her body, aside from aesthetics. The year following had twice as many daughters returning as the year before, however, and Leviathan found that she quickly replenished her fat stores and added to them charitably as well.

Leviathan found that her broods were taking on multivariate shapes and sizes now. Not all of them were the size of whales. Several varieties, Leviathan saw, where only as large as dolphins, though they were released by the dozens from under Leviathan's tail and she hardly felt as they moved through the cavernous tract engulfing them. _'What good are these minuscule daughters, Little Sister?' _ inquired the head as she watched them swim away at blinding speed, all traveling together in a single pod once the last had emerged.

'I am experimenting with different niches in the ecosystem, big sister. It is the same reason why I created the meat eating daughters. We compete for food with our filter feeding offspring. To be most effective, we ought to try to capitalize on as many sources of food as possible.'

'I can see that.' said the head, who had already begun to meet and pass by immature daughters during her migrations. They were not overly friendly towards their massive mother and likely did not desire in the slightest to be eaten, not until their brains began to tell them they were old and that their time was over. As well, there already seemed to be slightly fewer whales around, not only because daughters were competing for their food, but the carnivorous daughters fed on any sized whale too. After watching the last of the new brood go, the head spoke to Little Sister again, mostly to take her mind off of the empty, loose feeling inside her abdomen where the great emptied pouch that had held them was contracting. 'If we want to exploit as many niches as possible, we ought to send daughters back onto the land as well.'

'I have thought of that eventuality too, big sister.' said the tail and showing her enthusiasm for the subject again, 'It would require a good deal of forethought even in the way and place we spawn, however. I must think over it before I could even consider such an option. But for the time being, I think the oceans are vast enough to keep expanding into for now.'

_'For now, yes the oceans are vast... for now.' _ thought Leviathan who continued to swim around her spawning grounds hoping to meet a wandering daughter. After a couple weeks had past, however, she turned her head north and began her migration once more.

As Leviathan traveled north, Little Sister began to describe the smaller new daughters which had been released as a large pod. 'They communicate with each other using a symbolic language like the one you spoke of in the animals called dolphins. I wanted you to know that we can make the same sort of vocalizations now that they can using our set of lungs and a fluid filled sac located under the skin on the brow of our head.'

'Thanks, little sister.' said the head, genuinely appreciative. Being able to do something more than wave her fins around and open and close her jaws felt suddenly enticing. 'I wonder if our daughters will have anything interesting to say...'

'I doubt it." said little sister ambivalently. 'They're not designed to do anything more complex than hunt in a group. I suspect they will only develop symbol speech for going here or doing that.'

The head was not sure what to think. Little Sister was seldom wrong, but she had made errors in calculation before. Leviathan simply decided to be grateful for the new ability and to file it away in her mind if the need arose. Until now, their daughters had been left completely to their own devices and none had had any difficulty in returning. Leviathan saw no need to upset the status quo as long as her belly was periodically filled to bursting with rich daughter-flesh.