The Mote In God's Eye

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  The Master was white. The tufts at her armpits and groin were long and silky, like the fur of an Angora cat. When they were all there, the Master turned to Whitbread's Motie and said, "Speak."

  Whitbread's Motie told of the incident with the midshipmen. "I'm certain they meant it all," she concluded.

  To Potter's Motie the Master said, "Do you agree?"

  'Yes, completely."

  There was a panicky undercurrent of whispers, some in Motie tongues, some in Anglic. It cut off when the Master said, "What did you tell them?"

  "We told them the disease might well be a dietary deficiency—"

  There was shocked human-sounding laughter among the Mediators, none at all among the few who had not yet been assigned Fyunch(clicks).

  "—and gave them food for the Engineer. It will not help, of course."

  "Were they fooled?"

  "Difficult to tell. We are not good at lying directly. It is not our specialty," said Potter's Motie.

  A buzz of talk rose in the toroid. The Master allowed it for a time. Presently she spoke. "What can it mean? Speak of this."

  One answered. "They cannot be so different from us. They fight wars. We have heard hints of whole planets rendered uninhabitable—"

  Another interrupted. There was something graceful, human-feminine, in the way she moved. It seemed grotesque to the Master. "We think we know what causes humans to fight. Most animals on our world and theirs have a surrender reflex that prevents one member of a species from killing another. Humans use weapons instinctively. It makes the surrender reflex too slow."

  "But it was the same with us, once," said a third. "Evolution of the Mediator mules put an end to that. Do you say that humans do not have Mediators?"

  Sally Fowler's Motie said, "They have nothing that is bred for the task of communicating and negotiating between potential enemies. They are amateurs at everything, second-best at everything they do. Amateurs do their negotiating. When negotiations break down, they fight."

  "They are amateurs at playing Master, too," one said. Nervously she stroked the center of her face. "They take turns at playing Master. In their warships they station Marines between fore and aft, in case the aft sections should wish to become masters of the ship. Yet, when Lenin speaks, Captain Blaine obeys like a Brown. It is," she said, "difficult to be Fyunch(click) to a part-time Master."

  "Agreed," said Whitbread's Motie. "Mine is not a Master, but will be someday."

  Another said, "Our Engineer has found much that needs improvement in their tools. There is now no class to fit Dr. Hardy—"

  "Stop this," said the Master, and the noise stopped. "Our concern is more specific. What have you learned of their mating habits?"

  "They do not speak of this to us. Learning will be difficult. There seems to be only one female aboard."

  "ONE female?"

  "To the best that we can learn."

  "Are the rest neuters, or are most neuters?"

  "It would seem that they are not. Yet the female is not pregnant, has not been pregnant at any time since our arrival."

  "We must learn," said the Master. "But you must also conceal. A casual question. It must be asked very carefully, to reveal as little as possible. If what we suspect is true—can it be true?"

  One said, "All of evolution is against it. Individuals that survive to breed must carry the genes for the next generation. How, then—?”

  "They are alien. Remember, they are alien," said Whitbread's Motie.

  "We must find out. Select one among you, and formulate your question, and select the human you will ask. The rest of you must avoid the subject unless the aliens introduce it."

  "I think we must conceal nothing." One stroked the center of her face as if for reassurance. "They are alien. They may be the best hope we have ever had. With their help we may break the ancient pattern of the Cycles."

  The Master showed her surprise. "You will conceal the crucial difference between Man and ourselves. They will not learn of it."

  "I say we must not!" cried the other. "Listen to me! They have their own ways—they solve problems, always—" The others converged on her. "No, listen! You must listen!"

  "Crazy Eddie," the Master said wonderingly. "Confine her in comfort. We will need her knowledge. No other must be assigned to her Fyunch(click), since the strain has driven her mad."

  Blaine let the cutter lead MacArthur to Mote Prime at .780 gee. He was acutely aware that MacArthur was an alien warship capable of devastating half the Motie planet,and did not like to think of what weaponry might be trained on her by uneasy Moties. He wanted the embassy ship to arrive first—not that it would really help, but it might.

  The cutter was almost empty now. The scientific personnel were living and working aboard MacArthur, reading endless data into the computer banks, cross-checking and codifying, and reporting their findings to the Captain for transmission to Lenin. They could have reported directly, of course, but there are many privileges to rank. MacArthur's dinner parties and bridge games tended to become discussion groups.

  Everyone was concerned about the brown miner. She became steadily worse, eating as little of the food provided by the Moties as she had of MacArthur's provisions. It was frustrating, and Dr. Blevins tried endless tests with no results. The miniatures had waxed fat and fecund while loose aboard MacArthur, and Blevins wondered if they had been eating something unexpected, like missile propellant, or the insulation from cables. He offered her a variety of unlikely substances, but the Brown's eyesight grew dim, her fur came out in patches, and she howled. One day she stopped eating. The next she was dead.

  Horvath was beside himself with fury.

  Blaine thought it fitting to call the embassy ship. The gently smiling Brown-and-white that answered could only be Horvath's Motie, although Blaine would have been hard-pressed to say how he knew. "Is my Fyunch(click) available?" Rod asked. Horvath's Motie made him uncomfortable.

  "I'm afraid not, Captain."

  "All right. I called to report that the Brown we had aboard this ship is dead. I don't know how much it means to you, but we did our best. The entire scientific staff of MacArthur tried to cure her."

  "I'm sure of that, Captain. It doesn't matter. May we have the body?"

  Rod considered it a moment. "I'm afraid not." He couldn't guess what the Moties could learn from the corpse of an alien that had never communicated when alive; but perhaps he was learning from Kutuzov. Could there have been microtattooing below the fur . . . ? And why weren't the Moties more concerned about the Brown? That was something he certainly couldn't ask. Best to be thankful they weren't upset. "Give my regards to my Fyunch(click)."

  "I have bad news also," said Horvath's Motie. "Captain, you no longer have a Fyunch(click). She has gone mad."

  "What?" Rod was more shocked than he would have believed. "Mad? Why? How?"

  "Captain, I don't imagine you can grasp what a strain it has been for her. There are Moties who give orders and there are Moties who make and fix tools. We are neither: we communicate. We can identify with a giver of orders and it is no strain, but an alien giver of orders? It was too much. She— How shall I put it? Mutiny. Your word is mutiny. We have none. She is safe and under confinement, but it is best for her that she does not speak with aliens again."

  "Thank you," Rod said. He watched the gently smiling image fade from the screen and did nothing more for five minutes. Finally he sighed and began dictating reports for Lenin. He worked alone and it was as if he had lost a part of himself and was waiting for it to come back.

  Part Three

  Meet Crazy Eddie

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Mote Prime

  MOTE PRIME: Marginally habitable world in the Trans-Coalsack Sector. Primary: G2 yellow dwarf star approximately ten parsecs from the Trans-Coalsack Sector Capital New Caledonia. Generally referred to as the Mote in Murcheson's Eye (q.v.) or the Mote. Mass 0.91 Sol; luminosity 0.78 Sol.

  Mote Prime has a poisonous atmosphere breathable
with the aid of commercial or standard Navy issue filters. Contraindicated for heart patients or where emphysema problems exist. Oxygen: 16 percent. Nitrogen: 79.4 percent. CO2: 2.9 percent. Helium: 1 percent. Complex hydrocarbons including ketones: 0.7 percent.

  Gravity: 0.780 standard. The planetary radius is 0.84, and mass is 0.57 Earth standard; a planet of normal density. Period: 0.937 standard years, or 8,750.005 hours. The planet is inclined at 18 degrees with semimajor axis of 0.93 AU (137 million kilometers). Temperatures are cool, poles uninhabitable and covered with ice. Equatorial and tropical regions are temperate to hot. The local day is 27.33 hours.

  There is one moon, small and close. It is asteroidal in origin and the back side bears the characteristic indented crater typical of planetoids in the Mote system. The moon-based fusion generator and power-beaming station are critical sources for the Mote Prime civilization.

  Topography: 50 percent ocean, not including extensive ice caps. Terrain is flat over most of the land area. Mountain ranges are low and heavily eroded. There are few forests. Arable lands are extensively cultivated.

  The most obvious features are circular formations which are visible everywhere. The smallest are eroded to the limits of detection, while the largest can be seen only from orbit.

  Although the physical features of Mote Prime are of some interest, particularly to ecologists concerned with the effects of intelligent life on planetography, the primary interest in the Mote centers on its inhabitants . . .

  Two scooters converged at the cutter and suited figures climbed aboard. When both humans and Moties had checked over the ship, the Navy ratings who had brought her to orbit gratefully turned her over to the midshipmen and returned to MacArthur. The middies eagerly took their places in the control cabin and examined the landscape below.

  “We're to tell you that all contact with you will be through this ship," Whitbread told his Motie. "Sorry, but we can't invite you aboard MacArthur."

  Whitbread's Motie gave a very human shrug to express her opinion of orders. Obedience posed no strain on either her or her human. “What will you do with the cutter when you leave?"

  "It's a gift," Whitbread told her. "Maybe you'll want it for a museum. There are things the Captain wants you to know about us—"

  "And things he wants to conceal. Certainly."

  From orbit the planet was all circles: seas, lakes, an arc of a mountain range, the line of a river, a bay . . . There was one, eroded and masked by a forest. It would have been undetectable had it not fallen exactly across a line of mountains, breaking the backbone of a continent as a man's foot breaks a snake. Beyond, a sea the size of the Black Sea showed a flattish island in the exact center. "The magma must have welled up where the asteroid tore the crust open," said Whitbread. "Can you imagine the sound it must have made?"

  Whitbread's Motie nodded.

  "No wonder you moved all the asteroids out to the Trojan points. That was the reason, wasn't it?"

  "I don't know. Our records are-unt complete from that long ago. I imagine the asteroids must have been easier to mine, easier to make a civilization from, once they were lumped together like that."

  Whitbread remembered that the Beehive had been stone cold without a trace of radiation. "Just how long ago did all this happen?"

  "Oh, at least ten thousand years. Whitbread, how old are your oldest records?"

  "I don't know. I could ask someone." The midshipman looked down. They were crossing the Terminator—which was a series of arcs. The night side blazed with a galaxy of cities. Earth might have looked this way during the CoDominium; but the Empire's worlds had never been so heavily populated.

  "Look ahead." Whitbread's Motie pointed to a fleck of flame at the world's rim. "That's the transfer ship. Now we can show you our world."

  "I think your civilization must be a lot older than ours," said Whitbread.

  Sally's equipment and personal effects were packed and ready in the cutter's lounge, and her minuscule cabin seemed bare and empty now. She stood at the view port and watched the silver arrowhead approach MacArthur. Her Motie was not watching.

  "I, um, I have a rather indelicate question," Sally's Fyunch(click) said.

  Sally turned from the view port. Outside, the Motie ship had come alongside and a small boat was approaching from MacArthur. "Go ahead."

  "What do you do if you don't want children yet?"

  "Oh, dear," said Sally, and she laughed a little. She was the only woman among nearly a thousand men—and in a male-oriented society. She had known all this before she came, but still she missed what she thought of as girl talk. Marriage and babies and housekeeping and scandals: they were part of civilized life. She hadn't known how big a part until the New Chicago revolt caught her up, and she missed it even more now. Sometimes in desperation she had talked recipes with MacArthur's cooks as a poor substitute, but the only other feminine-oriented mind within light years was—her Fyunch(click).

  "Fyunch(click)," the alien reminded her. "I wouldn't raise the subject but I think I ought to know—do you have children aboard MacArthur?"

  "Me? No!" Sally laughed again. "I'm not even married."

  "Married?"

  Sally told the Motie about marriage. She tried not to skip any basic assumptions. It was sometimes hard to remember that the Motie was an alien. "This must sound a bit weird," she finished.

  " 'Come, I will conceal nothing from you,' as Mr. Renner would say." The mimicry was perfect, including gestures. "I think your customs are strange. I doubt that we'll adopt many of them, given the differences in physiology."

  "Well—yes."

  "But you marry to raise children. Who raises children born without marriage?"

  "There are charities," Sally said grimly. Her distaste was impossible to disguise.

  "I take it you've never. . ." The Motie paused delicately.

  "No, of course not."

  "How not? I don't mean why not, I mean how?"

  "Well—you know that men and women have to have sexual relations to make a baby, the same as you—I've examined you pretty thoroughly."

  "So that if you aren't married you just don't—get together?"

  "That's right. Of course, there are pills a woman can take if she likes men but doesn't want to take the consequences."

  "Pills? How do they work? Hormones?" The Motie seemed interested, if somewhat detached.

  "That's right." They had discussed hormones. Motie physiology employed chemical triggers also, but the chemicals were quite different.

  "But a proper woman doesn't use them," Sally's Motie suggested.

  "No."

  "When will you get married?"

  "When I find the right man." She thought for a moment, hesitated, and added, "I may have found him already." And the damn fool may already be married to his ship, she added to herself.

  "Then why don't you marry him?"

  Sally laughed. "I don't want to jump into anything. 'Marry in haste, repent at leisure.' I can get married any time." Her trained objectivity made her add, "Well, any time within the next five years. I'll be something of a spinster if I'm not married by then."

  "Spinster?"

  "People would think it odd." Curious now, she asked, "What if a Motie doesn't want children?"

  “We don't have sexual relations," Sally's Motie said primly.

  There was an almost inaudible clunk as the ground-to-orbit ship secured alongside.

  The landing boat was a blunt arrowhead coated with ablative material. The pilot's cabin was a large wrap-around transparency, and there were no other windows. When Sally and her Motie arrived at the entryway, she was startled to see Horace Bury just ahead of her.

  "You're going down to the Mote, Your Excellency?" Sally asked.

  "Yes, my lady." Bury seemed as surprised as Sally. He entered the connecting tube to find that the Moties had employed an old Navy trick—the tube was pressurized with a lower pressure at the receiving end, so that the passengers were wafted along. The interior was surpri
singly large, with room for all: Renner, Sally Fowler, Chaplain Hardy—Bury wondered if they would ship him back up to MacArthur every Sunday—Dr. Horvath, Midshipmen Whitbread and Staley, two ratings Bury did not recognize—and alien counterparts for all but three of the humans. He noted the seating arrangements with an amusement that only partly covered his fears: four abreast, with a Motie seat beside each of the human seats. As they strapped in he was further amused. They were one short.

  But Dr. Horvath moved forward into the control cabin and took a seat next to the brown pilot. Bury settled into the front row, where seats were only two abreast—and a Motie took the other. Fear surged into his throat. Allah is merciful, I witness that Allah is One— No! There was nothing to fear and he had done nothing dangerous.

  And yet—he was here, and the alien was beside him, while behind him on MacArthur, any accident might bring the ship's officers to discover what he had done to his pressure suit.

  A pressure suit is the most identity-locked artifact a man of space can own. It is far more personal than a pipe or a toothbrush. Yet others had exposed their suits to the ministrations of the unseen Brownies. During the long voyage to Mote Prime, Commander Sinclair had examined the modifications the Brownies had made.

  Bury had waited. Presently he learned through Nabil that the Brownies had doubled the efficiency of the recycling systems. Sinclair had returned the pressure suits to their owners—and begun modifying the officers' suits in a similar fashion.

  One of the air tanks on Bury's suit was now a dummy. It held half a liter of pressurized air and two miniatures in suspended animation. The risks were great. He might be caught. The miniatures might die from the frozen-sleep drugs. Someday he might need air that was not there. Bury had always been willing to take risks for sufficient profit.

  When the call came, he had been certain he was discovered. A Navy rating had appeared on his room screen, said, "Call for you, Mr. Bury," smiled evilly, and switched over. Before he could wonder Bury found himself facing an alien.