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Leviathan Chapter Thirteen

Early Memories

By Shalion

It was very hard for Leviathan to learn about anything that happened above the surface of the ocean, but a tale gradually came to her bit by bit in the form of stolen and preserved DNA along with the dim patchwork of genetic memories provided by her animal offspring.

"There is a hot, lush forest on the island." said Little Sister as she pieced together the scattered and broken essences they digested and absorbed. It was more than a little surreal to have her tail describe to her things she assumed Little Sister no longer cared about, but now she was the only one who could read and understand the genetic essences that slowly came to them with each meal. "It is not a big island, only about a two-day hike from shore to shore. Sometimes there are delicious bird's eggs hidden between the roots of the tall trees."

"Bird's eggs?" Leviathan questioned and Little Sister sent back a mental shrug.

"The essences are mostly from our daughters' perspectives." said Little Sister. "Everything is colored by what concerned them in life."

Leviathan wasn't sure what to think about that. She had already devoured more daughters than she could possibly count, yet most of them lived in or near the sea, so their lives didn't include much that she was not already aware of, nor was she particularly interested in how creatures smaller than the tip of her fin conducted their brief existences. The wolf-daughters were different, however, and not just because they were living in a place she could no longer go herself. They had a special mission, and though all of these glimpses she gained were years in the past, the daughters' lives all over and done with, the scenes playing out felt exhilarating to the mammoth sea creature.

"There is the scent of mammal left on the loamy ground. Prey. The meaning for her existence." said Little Sister, continuing. "She knows what to look for even though she's never seen the animal before. Thanks to me, of course." Little Sister amended unnecessarily. "She is only four days old. Birthing slime still clings to her short fur and itches sometimes. Other pack members have helped her clean up for the most part, however. She lets them know she found the scent. Everyone gets excited."

"How strange..." Leviathan commented since she had been a solitary beast nearly her whole life. She had some understanding of how pack creatures operated, but this was the first glimpse into the mind of one other than digested mammal essences, which were not nearly so clear as her own flesh and blood. Concepts like companionship and the need to belong to a group were strange and foreign to Leviathan and her tail equally.

"I admit, the essence is hard to understand fully. I may be getting some of this wrong." said the tail for whom puzzles gnawed like a sore tooth. "It may take a few more years and a couple hundred more specimens for a full understanding."

Leviathan shrugged mentally. Time meant little for her, and she only hoped that the Splasher problem would not take quite so long, nor so many devoted resources, to resolve itself. "What else have you put together?"

"There is a period of searching..." said Little Sister vaguely. "The less strong emotions don't imprint as well. Our daughters loved being near one another, as I intended, but the bonding feels so..." Little Sister paused for almost a full second, which was unlike her. "...so strong."

"Didn't you form their essences from regular canines?" asked Leviathan.

"I did, but..." and again she hesitated, "Could it be that they feel these strong emotions too?" The thought escaped Little Sister unguarded which again was unlike her, and Leviathan felt the uncharacteristic need to extend her presence down towards the tail despite the fact that their longer spine made Little Sister feel even farther away than ever.

"The lives of wolves are no concern of ours in the larger scope." said Leviathan. "If we learn a little more now, then so much the better, but they are still only animals. Put this information into its proper place. The only thing that matters is what we can learn from it."

Little Sister did seem less agitated after those words. "I-Indeed. I'll think about it later. Perhaps I can use these feelings to improve my designs..." After Leviathan silently assented, she went on, "It only took a couple weeks to learn the lay of the land and in that time, where the Two-legs lived."

"The Splashers walk on two legs?" asked Leviathan even as she examined the translated memory Little Sister passed her.

"Apparently." said the tail. "Such strange apes. They did not bother to hide themselves at all, and they live in..." Leviathan could sense Little Sister struggling, "Trees-that-are-not-trees, that's the best I can manage."

"Is there an image?" asked Leviathan, but immediately got a negative response.

"I can only read our daughter's understanding and memory and my best guess is that she did not understand what she was seeing herself." Leviathan did not express how unhelpful that was before Little Sister went on, "Our daughter was ready to hunt, to prey, to eat. She was hungry. But she was also cautious. There were many Two-legs in the place where they dwelled, and the entire place was not right. The forest was gone, only the trees-that-are-not-trees and the smell of food and of fire."

"Fire?!" responded Leviathan in alarm. She remembered fire, awful, dangerous stuff. She had nearly died more than once from a raging fire when she had been at her slowest while moving about on land.

"Yes fire, but not like in the past. It was not consuming everything. I can't tell anything else than that." said Little Sister, again less than usefully. "Some in the pack wanted to attack right away, this was what they were meant to do. Others were more cautious. They wanted to hide and wait a little longer..." Little Sister was quiet for a moment as she spun the essences. "Ah, I see..." she murmured, thoughts buzzing about the swirling complexities of her mind.

"What is it?" Leviathan prompted, annoyed that she had to ask.

"I had been wondering why we have been getting essences from only the most timid hunters. Now I know. The brave ones all died."

Leviathan listened in rapt and paralyzed interest and horror as she was told about a memory that wasn't hers, the scent of dark blood mixing with the bright red of mammals'. The fear that grew as a hunter watched half of her beloved pack stabbed to death. Frustration as she could not even steal the corpse of a fatally wounded Two-leg. Later, there was the scent of burning fur and flesh rising from the Two-leg place. Months of scrounging a living in the forest, playing games of hunter and prey with Two-leg parties, almost always too many to prey on without risk to themselves. The sense of victory at the first taste of blood filling her empty belly, first an unwary hunter, later a stolen child. But victories were few and far between, and so many of the pack died each week. All too soon, the huntress was old and the sea was calling. Only she and one other member of their birth pack remained when she saw the Mother climb laboriously out of the ocean for the second and last time, her welcoming jaws waiting.

This was how many of the stories went, Leviathan found as more and more essences found their way back to her, the newest information already three or four birthing seasons behind the present.

"I feel as though I am still feeding our enemies." Leviathan grumbled as she swam south once again, somewhere in the mid-Pacific. Her belly was once again too full of nearly mature daughters to eat, her uterus alone pushing the pleated folds of her abdomen apart. New sections and expansions had been added, allowing for 240 lives big and small to reside inside of her, all fully grown and frequently swollen with their own offspring already. At this stage of the journey, they all mostly needed only to put on their full adult weight. Leviathan felt bloated, but without the benefit of fullness as she nourished them all from her reserves, faintly begrudging each ton of blubber she transferred to them through hundreds of interconnected umbilical cords.

"It is more success than we had the first time we tried to get rid of the Two-legs." said Little Sister, adopting the moniker of their long-dead daughter. "We've managed to kill off a few of them."

"Children and the stupid." responded Leviathan derisively. "Perhaps we are inadvertently improving the quality of their herd!" She was in a mood, she knew, but the last month of pregnancy tended to do this to her. With her slimmed and more practical body plan, her weight was fluctuating even more each season, a real boom and bust cycle in which she nearly tripled her post-spawning weight only to lose most of it again the following year. It imposed a certain amount of stress on her, the stress that came with needing to abide by a certain schedule and relying on anticipated future meals that were still not always completely certain. Despite tackling the splasher problem head on for the past three years, still one or two daughter whales couldn't seem to be accounted for each year now that Leviathan was no longer actively feeding the Two-legs on helpless daughter meat. Only the exaggerated return on devouring this world with ten-thousand mouths kept Leviathan in the black with respect to her fattening.

"The young and the slow for now, perhaps." said Little Sister calmly. "But remember, most of our intelligence is from the first generation of hunters still. The second spawning is only now coming in, but I think I already know enough now to make some improvements."

"Improvements for next year, you mean. These spawnlings are already too far along for big changes." said Leviathan, not wanting to be pleased. She gulped sea water, hungry and fatigued as the mass of dormant life inside her belly pushed with a relentless pressure and sucked out her thinning reserves with a greater hunger than her own. "Perhaps I'll beach ourself on this Two-leg place, just crush them all and be done with it."

"That seems awfully traumatic." said Little Sister submissively, but Leviathan could feel the shape of her disapproval in her mind. "Are the Two-legs really such a big problem to do that and then have to somehow push ourself back into the water? That could take months. We might have to wait for a storm surge..." Little Sister ticked off a number of other unpleasant repercussions. "The sun would dry out our skin and I'd have to hastily convert our swim bladder into a makeshift lung, but we might not be able to breathe for our weight..."

Leviathan metaphorically shook off Little Sister's passive objections. "I wasn't being serious." she said hastily, though the idea of rising out of the ocean on her own wave had been grand. "I'm not fond of the idea of having my eyes and other sensitive areas shriveling in the sun either."

They left things at that for a few days as Leviathan's belly grew still rounder and her chest, sides, and tail waned and narrowed until some actual bone and muscle structure could be seen in places, a new trait since beginning her life as the empress of all whales.

Less than 48 hours before the contractions would start, Leviathan contacted Little Sister again, mostly in an attempt to distract herself from both her ravenous hunger and the unyielding pressure of hundreds of large daughters compressing the rest of her organs into unnatural shapes and contortions. "Have you learned anything yet from the Two-leg essences yet?"

Little Sister responded almost guiltily and more than a little evasively. "Some..." she muttered and at least did not force Leviathan to press her. "We don't have many essences yet, and I was hoping to gather some more this year."

"Well, you're an expert at theorizing and filling in blanks." said Leviathan, expressing her agitation with her pregnancy and coming labor in her mental voice. "So make the best theory you have. Who are these Two-legs really? How do they live?"

Little Sister paused, but rather than answer her question, she said, "It is... quite strange. This species." Leviathan waited for her to go on and ended up waiting several minutes, the bundle of life in her belly already beginning to wriggle and become restless, their movements jostling uncomfortably against her vital organs. "I do not mean that I find their physiology strange, Big Sister. It is quite in line with my catalogue. A great ape, surely, possibly descended from the ones we found on the big continent we used to roam. They do walk almost exclusively on their hind legs, I'm sure from the shape of the pelvis. They are unable to manufacture vitamin C..."

"Can we please move on past the minutia?" Leviathan begged her other brain as facts began to flood by her in a stream of consciousness.

"Very well." Said Little Sister, narrowing their connection. "Little of it matters anyways. The only noteworthy feature is the space devoted to the brain, but even that isn't particularly special. It is in line with what dolphins and elephants have developed."

"Then how are they different? What gives them the power to dare treat me as prey?" Leviathan growled, actually producing an audible sound that rippled through her soft body and the surrounding ocean for miles.

"That's the question, isn't it?" Little Sister said infuriatingly. "That's my puzzle, and it irks me too, for your information." She added unnecessarily. "Nothing about their physiology indicates why Two-legs would be different from your average dolphin or how they have come by their ferocious combat ability."

Leviathan rumbled a low sound of displeasure with enough force that a few fish too near her throat dropped dead from the heavy sound waves and slowly floated to the surface in her wake. "We need more essences then, clearly." She said offhandedly, not really believing that the Two-legs could accomplish so much without some sort of secret biological advantage. And if she was able to steal that secret, well... maybe all of this trouble would be worth it in the end. That thought mollified her somewhat, though she was still uncomfortable, almost hating Little Sister in the moment for having stolen her body's involuntary functions from her domain. A few minutes later, she asked, "And what of their minds? Any glimpses into their thoughts, emotions?"

"I'll need far more samples for that." Said Little Sister. "These terrestrial essences decay so, not like our own daughter flesh which I've crafted with far more grace and precision." Leviathan sighed internally. But Little Sister added suddenly, "My first impression is a heavy tangle of emotions and rational thinking, very similar to dolphins actually. It may take several years before we've eaten enough of them to know them better."

"Hopefully, they'll be extinct by then..." said Leviathan, but lacking real enthusiasm. Little Sister was trying to make their hunters better, but she herself was inexperienced with making such social animals, and Leviathan suspected that a lot of the 'improvements' were mere trial and error. In the mean time, she was stuck birthing these ineffective hunters by the ton and who knew what fraction were even managing to avoid being killed, let alone fattening and prospering themselves. But even as Leviathan ruminated over the long days of spawning ahead, stretching now into ten full days of contractions needed to maneuver the many bodies out of their ensconced horns and byways, she knew that Little Sister was leaving something unsaid. She could almost see it in her other self's mind, a place she was keeping purposefully hidden, but truly there was no way to pry that secret open now, not when their telegraph line was painfully slow with respect to the speed of thought. Little Sister had her own thoughts and Leviathan would simply have to live with that. She would speak in time... or not. At least, Leviathan was not overly concerned with Little Sister becoming unfaithful, over a century since her creation had bonded them closely, and her tail ever seemed to be looking out for her interests. Leviathan was not beyond cooperation or learning to trust, after all.Leviathan did not beach herself on the Two-leg home, but she did swim a several laps of the island. Her gestation and spawning schedule had both been extended, however, with her increased cruising speed, she actually had about two weeks of free time to do as she pleased before needing to return north. She spent a few of those days near the island, but though her belly was not quite as deep as it had once been, her growth had lead to her overall draft in the water remaining about the same. She could not get any closer to the shore or the reef and she saw nothing of particular interest other than some Two-legs fishing in their wooden craft and gathering the tiny reef fish or clams. As a party of them approached one of her pod mates with undue boldness. Leviathan demonstrated her newfound physical ability, coming at them from below. The water might have seemed deep for the Two-legs, but it was barely enough for Leviathan to achieve any real speed at all, and as a result, as her head crested the surface, she created a profound splash, but nothing potentially bone-shattering. She lashed her tail for good measure, but the Two-legs had already scattered in her wake, skating across the surface in their floundering, but agile wooden vessels. Her massive blind spots made it impossible to actually aim her tail at any particular animal as well. "Next time..." thought Leviathan even as she savored this moment of victory in protecting her precious daughter-flesh.

The daughter in question brushed lightly against Leviathan's side afterwards, quite unexpectedly. Leviathan wondered if she appreciated or even comprehended what she had done. Little Sister would say it was merely her projecting emotions onto a creature whose brain was far too small to appreciate such niceties. The whale-daughters did not actually have hunt anything after all, they were merely massive transport vessels for biomass harvested from her other kin scattered all across the vast ocean. There was no need for them to have anything like a complex inner life or even problem-solving ability. Still, Leviathan looked across the shallow sea towards the large, placid eyes of her giant daughter. She gently nuzzled the whale with a corner of her wide mouth. "I'll eat you next..." Leviathan promised silently. The whale-like daughter only stared back, looking as docile and falsely aged as ever. She would never say anything, having no voice of her own. Leviathan sighed and let herself become a giant fish once again, barely more intelligent than the livestock which swam with her until they all eventually disappeared down her insatiable gullet sometime past the 60th parallel north, and then she was by herself again.

Krill season as well as shutting off her higher brain functions helped soothe Leviathan's temperament. Food remained plentiful as she hunted the swarms in the chilly arctic water and she reached peak fatness. Her body was now sleek and plentiful with grey blubber fleshing out her sides, head, tail and belly, and she was hindered only a little in her movement for her overabundant mass. Even so, the hundreds of lives kindled inside of her were already months old and had largely finished the most complicated parts of their development. They were now in a full on growth spurt to attain their adult weights by winter spawning. The rapidly increasing metabolic demands would soon begin to strip Leviathan of her hard won prosperity even as she continued to eat as much as she possibly could. Before the end of the krill season, Leviathan's uterus would already begin crowding out her stomach, making it impossible to eat more than a small mouthful at a time (still a couple hundred pounds of fish and krill). Of course with only dull awareness of the world around her, Leviathan remained blissfully unaware of her future discomfort. There was only the Now and the exhilaration she felt when she glimpsed a cloud of pink in the distance.

Later, in warm waters, Leviathan shoved a mid-sized whale through the slit in her undercarriage, the only sort of mass the sea beast ever willingly let leave her body; the waste sac she kept inside of her containing mostly inorganic sediment and toxic hydrocarbons weighed about 50 tons itself nowadays. The freshly minted daughter was about 80 feet long and weighed 100 tons herself, her midsection bulging with the cargo which had grown along with the rest of her. She resembled something like a cross between an oversized pilot whale and a whale shark, and she did not bother Leviathan overlong with her presence, immediately striking out south and east towards a distance corner of the Pacific, or perhaps a different ocean altogether; Leviathan did not really care to remember. Her mid-sized daughter was not destined for a long life anyways, despite her size.

The carrier-daughter would not eat during her long journey either, surviving off of her reserves and photosynthesis through the dark skin of her back. After weeks or months of travel, she would deliver her cargo of daughters who ranged in size from shellfish hunters weighing only a few pounds to carnivorous tuna-like predators weighing several hundred. The smallest ones were further nested inside mammal-like swimmers who would travel down to the sea floor or reef to breed in safety. That complete, she would wallow in her homing area, written into her DNA by Little Sister, dining on the elderly members of Leviathan's brood who were, one hoped, comfortably fattened with their live's work. Finally, her own task complete, this carrier daughter was to locate the nearest whale daughter and feed herself to it. That wasn't a very hard task at all as Leviathan had her placid biomass receptacles positioned in nearly all of the waters of the planet already. Their calls made up a portion of the background whale song audible in nearly every part of the ocean. Since this particular carrier was heading towards a brand new habitat, there would not be a waiting carrier daughter for several months, not until the next one arrived some time after the following spawning season, but then afterwards, the cycle would continue, thrumming along to the ebb and flow of Leviathan's biological clock.

Since Leviathan had allowed her actual working daughters to breed themselves, their populations were relatively self-sufficient. However, only a few varieties had managed to actually outcompete the native fauna, largely owing to a certain rigidness of behavior patterns and small brain size, even among fish. Yearly replenishment from Leviathan allowed them to remain competitive and turn a small yearly profit of calories above the cost of production and transportation; Little Sister assured Leviathan that all the math worked out. However, it was the daughters who had managed to replace the native species entirely and take over a full niche that really provided Leviathan the energy and mass she craved. It had only happened a few times, but those daughters no longer needed regular replenishment. In fact, their populations grew all on their own, and Leviathan was able to skim some of the profits off for herself, like cream from a cup. It was the sweetest victory, and every so often, her continuous influx of essences would inform her that another strain of her own flesh was beating back the tide of natural selection, the treasure of Little Sister's own growing skill of genetic manipulation and design. The news would always brighten Leviathan's mood for weeks, even if most of her brain was still asleep.

Leviathan was contemplating the gradual disappearance of the Pacific Mackerel, their replacement with nearly identical daughters, and what that might mean for potential gains to her waistline when Little Sister nudged her more fully awake.

"What is it?" Protested Leviathan, who was still in labor with one more carrier and a new feeder whale still further on up her birthing channel.

"I thought you might like to know that I've finished putting together the second year of our Two-leg hunt."

Despite the heavy contractions, Leviathan said, "Tell me more." And so Little Sister did.

The newest essences, again about three years out of date already, held much more sensory information and resolution than the first set, reflecting the greater brain size and understanding of the improved, second-year wolf-daughters. At the very least, most of them managed not to die charging into Two-leg territory, but they were still operating as strangers and newcomers, having none of the information passed back to Leviathan in a cycle that would take at least four years to reach a new generation. Still, Leviathan was stuck again by the strong bond her hunters formed almost immediately as they groomed each other of their birthing fluids. There were three separate packs delivered to different end points of the island, however, these second generation wolves did not interact with each other very much outside of their own birthing litter. Leviathan was not sure that they even recognized each other as the same species and there were occasional scuffles between groups.

"I'll edit that out of the next batch." Said Little Sister quickly as a memory of fear and blood passed by after a meeting with a foreign pack of sharp-fanged, sharp-toothed predators.

When they were not getting in each others' way, though, they fared much better than the first generation. "These ones ought to have been smart enough to adapt and develop their own hunting strategies." Explained the tail, and indeed, they were much more successful, and not just in avoiding immediate death at the end of a spear for now Leviathan recognized the pointed barb for what it was, a tool. And she gained far more knowledge with the assistance of Little Sister who could put together the myriad understandings of their daughters into a whole which was greater than the sum. "Those not-trees seem to be nests of some sort, very large ones to be sure and the Two-legs appear to chop down trees sometimes."

"They destroy their own environment?" Leviathan questioned in incomprehension. Naturally she viewed her own activities not as destruction but as 'harvesting' and for a greater purpose of course.

"Apparently, though I do not think these Two-legs live in the trees or even around them. They seem to be exclusively within their cleared-out territory and within the lifetimes of our hunters, they have put up some kind of barrier."

"What?" Asked Leviathan, more confused than ever.

Little Sister passed her the reconstructed memory, of how one had once been able to sneak into the Two-legs territory at night to snatch a child or else one of the witless birds who hung around the structures and later how there had rapidly been a great pile of wood put in the way. The wooden pile wrapped all the way around the clearing, at the cost of many trees no less, and the remaining openings were always guarded by Two-legs with weapons.

"It's quite fascinating." Little Sister mused. "There is a wealth of information here. These Two-legs are a formidable foe! Always changing and far more rapidly than our hunters." She almost chuckled with her amusement. "Our hunters were capable of developing their own hunting techniques through trial and error, but as soon as one of our daughters stumbled upon a hunting trick which worked, overnight, the Two-legs will change their behavior to counter it. They no longer go into the forest to excrete their waste alone, you see, and they no longer ignore high tree branches when hunting themselves. They've taken to finding where our daughters sleep and chasing them out with spears or fire, keeping them tired. It was a hard short life for them, and half still died in two years."

"You sound almost giddy at our continued failure, or should I say your failure since you were the one who designed these wolves." Said Leviathan crossly.

Little Sister relaxed into her normal neutral tone. "Don't misunderstand me. Failure doesn't bring me joy, but I think I am getting closer to the advantage that these Two-legs have."

"Well, don't wait, tell me!" Said Leviathan excitedly, forgetting her earlier frustration instantly and actually waving her pectoral fins around.

"It must have to do with the extreme speed with which these animals are able to adapt, and not just one either. All of them change their behavior and seemingly instantaneously, as if they were flocking birds. Even with bigger brains, our daughters can't adapt nearly as quickly."

"Is that it?" Said Leviathan, genuinely unimpressed. "They can act differently quickly?"

"Not just that!" Said Little Sister, letting some of her enthusiasm slip again. "They can respond and not just quickly either, as an entire group. I've never witnessed anything like this. This sort of behavior change usually takes at least a whole generation to accomplish, and usually many with successful behaviors passed from parent to offspring."

"How do they do it, then?" Asked Leviathan.

"I have no idea." Said the tail, half in frustration, but still giddy with a new puzzle to solve.

Leviathan sighed to herself in resignation. "Lovely. I'm glad that you have a new mystery to sort out to replace the old one. Meanwhile, one of these seasons we'll likely starve."

"Try not to be so dramatic." Said Little Sister in a tone that once would have put Leviathan in a rage herself before she had a new target to focus on. "Have the Two-legs ever been such a threat?"

Rather than go down the pointless path of questioning Little Sister's loyalty, however, Leviathan said, "I haven't forgotten the reason why we first came to this wretched little island, or have you failed to notice our feeder-whale daughters who still disappear from time to time?" Little Sister said nothing and Leviathan worked her brain to its full capacity to conjure a new scenario, the inside of her skull actually felt a little too warm for the effort.

"What if these Two-legs managed to spread to another island on their little craft? Managed to spread beyond our awareness? There could already be more of them out there for all we know, killing and eating the end result of all our hard work, robbing us. It would only take one or two more daughters per year to go missing and we'd stop gaining mass, another and we'd be starving."

Leviathan sent not just her words, but also her imaginings and emotions wrapped up neatly in a psychic bundle. Little Sister absorbed it without responding at first. "I understand your concern, Big Sister." She said. "And it is a real possibility, but we can always cull a calving if we ever need to. Simple enough to reabsorb a daughter, even to near the day of her birth."

"The point is we should never have to resort to that." Huffed Leviathan not mentioning the energetic cost of the construction of a daughter would not be recouped in any case, nor would the cost of her deconstruction, if they were ever forced into such a situation.

"And I hope we won't either." Said Little Sister flatly, clearly growing tired of the argument. "And I never said that I'd stop trying to get rid of the Two-legs. But I really don't think it will be so easy."

Leviathan huffed, still feeling surly. "I am already tired of experiencing the sad lives of these hunter-daughters, even in stitched-together memories. I am beginning to feel that we should simple birth a few giant daughters to stomp these animals to death, no matter the cost. Just have it over with."

"We must have patience, Big Sister!" The hind-brain pleaded. "We have only the first two years of the effort available to us. That is not so much time at all." She paused, the signals flickering hesitantly up the spinal cord. "And even if we resorted to such a big input of flesh, I'm not sure it would work..."

"Oh?" Questioned Leviathan with a superior tone, "You think changing the way the Two-legs flock or bury their dung will help keep them from being crushed?"

Little Sister sighed, purposefully sending the head her mental frustration. "I think you underestimate the power of this communication ability the Two-legs have. It is something I myself have been tinkering with for decades on the side, and never had much luck with."

"Ah, and here is the real reason for waiting. You want to continue studying these animals." Said Leviathan with unusual sharpness for her.

Little Sister seemed caught off guard. She answered haltingly, "I... Of course I would not jeopardize our health to learn about such things!"

"Yet while you dawdle, the risk only grows." Said Leviathan.

"I am not dawdling!" Said Little Sister with uncharacteristic vigor that itself caught Leviathan off guard. "And if you want to engage in such a reckless use of our resources, I am almost positive that we will end up regretting it."

Leviathan was sure she had never heard such vehemence from Little Sister, yet the fact of her defensiveness alone seemed to add validity to her earlier hypothesis regarding her tail's true motivation. After a calming silence, Leviathan said, "And how can you be sure that they will be able to overcome such a great challenge as a herd of stampeding elephant-daughters?"

"Simple." Said Little Sister. "They've been a thorn in our side for years now, and they still aren't dead yet despite our trying. That is the power of communication, intelligence and adaptation."

Leviathan let herself be talked down. She did not want at all to fight with her other brain anyways, and it was not as though she could force Little Sister to do anything at all these days. The time when they might have waged a war against each other over control of their body was long over. In fact, Leviathan knew the truth that she existed largely at the continued will of her other brain. It was one of the reasons why she was so sensitive about their supposed hierarchy of command. In letting the matter drop, Leviathan let herself unravel and slept for another four years.