The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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 the
support of a complicated system of nerves, muscles, flesh and
bone. We have no lungs, for we do not require air. Far below the
levels to which we can take the rykors is a vast network of
burrows where the real life of the kaldane is lived. There the
air-breathing rykor would perish as you would perish. There we
have stored vast quantities of food in hermetically sealed
chambers. It will last forever. Far beneath the surface is water
that will flow for countless ages after the surface water is
exhausted. We are preparing for the time we know must come—the
time when the last vestige of the Barsoomian atmosphere is
spent—when the waters and the food are gone. For this purpose
were we created, that there might not perish from the planet
Nature's divinest creation—the perfect brain."
    "But what purpose can you serve when that time comes?" asked the
girl.
    "You do not understand," he said. "It is too big for you to
grasp, but I will try to explain it. Barsoom, the moons, the sun,
the stars, were created for a single purpose. From the beginning
of time Nature has labored arduously toward the consummation of
this purpose. At the very beginning things existed with life, but
with no brain. Gradually rudimentary nervous systems and minute
brains evolved. Evolution proceeded. The brains became larger and
more powerful. In us you see the highest development; but there
are those of us who believe that there is yet another step—that
some time in the far future our race shall develop into the
super-thing—just brain. The incubus of legs and chelae and vital
organs will be removed. The future kaldane will be nothing but a
great brain. Deaf, dumb, and blind it will lie sealed in its
buried vault far beneath the surface of Barsoom—just a great,
wonderful, beautiful brain with nothing to distract it from
eternal thought."
    "You mean it will