Primal Estate: The Candidate Species by Samuel Franklin Page B

surgeons. Yootu wore his light hair long and preferred his beard short. His alert, bright blue eyes, unique among humans from his time, seemed to challenge the Provenger males and delight their females.
Provenger males would take him to the rings where they would fight him. This was the only reason they kept him. When he was abducted, he had been fighting Layrd, a powerful Provenger, and had very nearly gotten the best of him, with the help of his father. Since that time, the stories of him had circulated aboard the ship. Since Provenger males loved to fight, they kept him as an alternative to their usual methods of sparring. He provided them with something different.

Slowly, over his ten years of captivity, Yootu had accumulated a vast knowledge of the Provenger merely from listening to their conversation. When he first started learning their secrets, he imagined that one day, when the time was right, he would blurt out, in their own language, what he knew and lay out for them their stupidity and arrogance in allowing him to become so informed. But the more he learned, the more he began to realize that he may have a purpose.
It had been a similar situation with his tribe. As he’d grown from a boy, he noticed that he was different. He eventually realized his purpose. It had been to free his people from the Provenger. When this same process of realization had happened after his abduction during the rebellion, he recognized the pattern.

It was now his purpose to remain the idiot in the eyes of the Provenger, allow them to speak of all their activities, their science, and their abilities. He would accumulate as much of their knowledge as possible and wait for the day he would be given the opportunity to destroy them. He would take his final revenge for his father, his mother, his entire tribe, and the life he could never have. This was his sole focus.
It was remarkable, he thought, what Provenger would reveal in his presence when they thought he couldn’t understand them. The males were not his only source of information. The Provenger females were a passionate group, he learned. Apparently a small percentage of their many millions were deviant enough that they obtained great satisfaction from sleeping with him. Sex with a “sub-Provenger” seemed to offer them a sexual charge and psychological boost they couldn’t get otherwise. He’d even figured out ways to maximize the information he could get from them. Since many Provenger had learned his tribal language for the introduction Contact Protocol and never forgotten it, speaking with him was merely a mental exercise for them to maintain these skills. For Yootu, it was a free flow of information that he took full advantage of. They loved to impress him with their knowledge and enjoyed sounding smart. And he would give them every opportunity. He grew adept at acting dumb, but then it was easy to give someone what they expected.

He was known among the Provenger as the good-fighting imbecile. But they really had no idea who he was. If they had bothered to inform themselves, they would have found he was considered almost a god among his people.
Yootu spent ten years fighting the males and almost as many laying the women. In a strange way, he realized he was already getting his revenge, but he yearned for their total destruction. Perhaps, he felt, their arrival at this planet called “Earth”, which he knew to be his own, would bring him an opportunity. Since they were learning many of Earth’s new languages, they often spoke them in his presence. So far he’d identified and started to learn three of them, understanding they were called English, Arabic, and Mandarin. But he had not heard his own language, and this caused him great concern.

Yootu was worried. Despite all his company, he was getting lonely. He didn’t know how much longer he could last. The Provenger, masters of physiology, had recognized this and were interested in the effects it had on his health. They