The Mote In God's Eye

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  "But who are they?" Staley demanded. He kept his grip on the pistol. The odds looked impossible—the Warriors were poised and ready, and they looked deadly and efficient.

  "I told you," Whitbread's Motie said. "They're a bodyguard. All Masters have them. Nearly all, anyway. Now get out, slowly, and keep your hands off your weapons. Don't make them think you might try to attack their Master. If they get that idea, we're all dead."

  Staley estimated his chances. Not good. If he had Kelley and another Marine instead of Whitbread and Potter— "OK," he said. "Do as she says." He climbed slowly out of the van.

  They were in a luggage-handling area. The Warriors stood in easy postures, leaning slightly forward on the balls of their wide, horned feet. It looked, Staley thought, like a karate stance. He caught a glimpse of motion near the wall. There were at least two more Warriors over there, under cover. Good thing he hadn't tried to fight.

  The Warriors watched them carefully, falling in behind the strange procession of a Mediator, three humans, another Mediator, and a Brown. Their weapons were held at the ready, not quite pointing at anyone, and they fanned out, never bunching up.

  “Will nae yon decision maker call your Master when we are gone?" Potter asked.

  The Moties twittered together. The Warriors seemed to pay no attention at all. "Charlie says yes. She'll notify both my Master and King Peter. But it gets us an airplane, doesn't it?"

  The decision maker's personal aircraft was a streamlined wedge attended by several Browns. Charlie twittered at them and they began removing seats, bending metal, working at almost blinding speed. Several miniatures darted through the plane. Staley saw them and cursed, but softly, hoping the Moties wouldn't know why. They stood waiting near the plane, and the Warriors watched them the whole time.

  "I find this slightly unbelievable," said Whitbread. "Doesn't the owner know we're fugitives?"

  Whitbread's Motie nodded. "But not his fugitives. He only runs the (Bird Whistle) airport baggage section. He wouldn't assume the prerogatives of my Master. He's also talked to the (Bird Whistle) airport manager, and they both agree they don't want my Master and King Peter fighting here. Best to have us all out of here, fast."

  "Ye're the strangest creatures I hae ever imagined," Potter said. "I can no see why such anarchy does nae end in—" he stopped, embarrassed.

  "It does," Whitbread's Motie said. "Given our special characteristics, it has to. But industrial feudalism works better than some things we've tried."

  The Browns beckoned. When they entered the airplane there was a single Motie-shaped couch starboard aft. Charlie's Brown went to it. Forward of that were a pair of human seats, then a human seat next to a Motie seat. Charlie and another Brown went through the cargo compartment to the pilot's section. Potter and Staley sat together without conversation, leaving Whitbread and his Motie side by side. It reminded the midshipman of a more pleasant trip that had not been very long ago.

  The plane unfolded an unbelievable area of wing surface. It took off slowly, straight up. Acres of city dwindled beneath them, square kilometers of more city lights rose above the horizon. They flew over the lights, endless city stretching on and on with the great dark sweep of farm land falling far behind. Staley peered through the view port and thought he could see, away to the left, the edge of the city: beyond it was nothing, darkness, but level. More farm lands.

  "You say every Master has Warriors," Whitbread said. "Why didn't we ever see any before?"

  "There aren't any Warriors in Castle City," the Motie said with obvious pride.

  "None?"

  "None at all. Everywhere else, any holder of territory or important manager goes about with a bodyguard. Even the immature decision maker is guarded by his mother's troops. But the Warriors are too obviously what they are. My Master and the decision makers concerned with you and this Crazy Eddie idea got the others in Castle City to agree, so that you wouldn't know just how warlike we are."

  Whitbread laughed. "I was thinking of Dr. Horvath."

  His Motie chuckled. "He had the same idea, didn't he? Hide your paltry few wars from the peaceful Moties. They might be shocked. Did I tell you the Crazy Eddie probe started a war all by itself?"

  "No. You haven't told us about any of your wars—"

  "It was worse than that, actually. You can see the problem. Who gets put in charge of the launching lasers? Any Master or coalition of them will eventually use the lasers to take over more territory for his clan. If Mediators run the installation, some decision maker will take it away from them."

  "You'd just give it up to the first Master who ordered you to?" Whitbread asked incredulously.

  "For God's sake, Jonathan! Of course not. She'd have been ordered not to, to begin with. But Mediators aren't good at tactics. We can't handle battalions of Warriors."

  "Yet you govern the planet. . ."

  "For the Masters. We have to. If the Masters meet to negotiate for themselves, it always ends up in a fight. Anyway. What finally happened was that a coalition of Whites was given command of the lasers and their children held as hostages on Mote Prime. They were all pretty old and had an adequate number of children. The Mediators lied to them about how much thrust the Crazy Eddie probe would need. From the Masters' point of view the Mediators blew up the lasers five years early. Clever, huh? Even so. . ."

  "Even so, what?"

  "The coalition managed to salvage a couple of lasers. They had Browns with them. They had to. Potter, you're from the system the probe was aimed at, aren't you? Your ancestors must have records of just how powerful those launching lasers were."

  "Enough to outshine Murcheson's Eye. There was even a new religion started about them. We had our own wars, then—"

  “They were powerful enough to take over civilization, too. What it amounts to is that the collapse came early that time, and we didn't fall all the way back to savagery. The Mediators must have planned it that way from the beginning."

  "God's teeth," Whitbread muttered. "Do you always work that way?"

  "What way, Jonathon?"

  "Expecting everything to fall apart at any minute. Using the fact."

  "Intelligent people do. Everyone but the Crazy Eddies. I think the classic case of the Crazy Eddie syndrome was that time machine. You saw it in one of the sculptures."

  "Right."

  "Some historian decided that a great turning point in history had come about two hundred years earlier. If he could interfere with that turning point, all of Motie history from that point on would be peaceful and idyllic. Can you believe it? And he could prove it, too. He had dates, old memoranda, secret treaties . . ."

  "What was the event?"

  "There was an—Emperor, a very powerful Master. All of her siblings had been killed and she inherited jurisdiction over an enormous territory. Her mother had persuaded the Doctors and Mediators to produce a hormone that must have been something like your birth control pills. It would stimulate a Master's body into thinking she was pregnant. Massive shots, and after that she would turn male. A sterile male. When her mother died, the Mediators had the hormone used on the Emperor."

  "But you do have birth control pills then!" Whitbread said. "You can use them to control the population—"

  "That's what this Crazy Eddie thought. Well, they used the hormone for something like three generations in the Empire. Stabilized the populations, all right. Not very many Masters there. Everything peaceful. Meanwhile, of course, the population explosion was happening on the other continents. The other Masters got together and invaded the Emperor's territory. They had plenty of Warriors—and plenty of Masters to control them. End of Empire. Our time machine builder had the idea she could set things up so that the Empire would control all of Mote Prime." Whitbread's Motie snorted in disgust. "It never works. How are you going to get the Masters to become sterile males? Sometimes it happens anyway, but who'd want to before having children? That's the only time the hormone can work."

  "Oh."

  "Right.
Even if the Emperor had conquered all of Mote Prime and stabilized the population—and think about it, Jonathon, the only way to do that would be for the rulers to pass control on to breeders while never having any children themselves—even if they did, they'd have been attacked by the asteroid civilizations."

  "But man, it's a start!" said Whitbread. "There's got to be a way—"

  "I am not a man, and there doesn't got to be a way. And that's another reason I don't want contact between your species and mine. You're all Crazy Eddies. You think every problem has a solution."

  "All human problems hae at least one final solution," Gavin Potter said softly from the seat behind them.

  "Human, perhaps," the alien said. "But do Moties have souls?"

  " ‘Tis nae for me to say," Potter answered. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I am no a spokesman for the Lord."

  "It isn't for your chaplain to say either. How can you expect to find out? It would take revealed knowledge—a divine inspiration, wouldn't it? I doubt if you'll get it."

  "Hae ye nae religion at all, then?" Potter asked incredulously.

  "We've had thousands, Gavin. The Browns and other semisentient classes don't change theirs much, but every civilization of Masters produces something else. Mostly they're variants of transmigration of souls, with emphasis on survival through children. You can see why."

  "You didn't mention Mediators," Whitbread said.

  "I told you—we don't have children. There are Mediators who accept the transmigration idea. Reincarnation as Masters. That sort of thing. The closest thing to ours I've heard of in human religions is Lesser-Way Buddhism. I talked to Chaplain Hardy about this. He says Buddhists believe they can someday escape from what they call the Wheel of Life. That sounds an awful lot like the Cycles. I don't know, Jonathon. I used to think I accepted reincarnation, but—there's no knowing, is there?"

  "And you hae nothing like Christianity?" Potter demanded.

  "No. We've had prophecies of a Savior who'd end the Cycles, but we've had everything, Gavin. It's for damn sure there's been no Savior yet."

  The endless city unrolled beneath them. Presently Potter leaned back in his chair and began to snore softly. Whitbread watched in amazement.

  "You should sleep too," said the Motie. "You've been up too long."

  "I'm too scared. You tire easier than we do—you ought to sleep."

  "I'm too scared."

  "Brother, now I'm really scared." Did I really call him brother? No, I called her brother. Hell with it. "There was more to your museum of art than we understood, wasn't there?"

  "Yeah. Things we didn't want to go into detail about. Like the massacre of the Doctors. A very old event, almost legend now. Another Emperor, sort of, decided to wipe the entire Doctor breed off the planet.

  Damn near succeeded, too." The Motie stretched. "It's good to talk to you without having to lie. We weren't made to lie, Jonathon."

  "Why kill off the Doctors?"

  "To keep the population down, you idiot! Of course it didn't work. Some Masters kept secret stables, and after the next collapse they—"

  "—were worth their weight in iridium."

  "It's thought that they actually became the foundation of commerce. Like cattle on Tabletop."

  The city fell behind at last, and the plane moved over oceans dark beneath the red light of Murcheson's Eye. The red star was setting, glowing balefully near the horizon, and other stars rose in the east below the inky edge of the Coal Sack.

  "If they're going to shoot us down, this is the place," Staley said. “Where the crash won't hit anything. Are you sure you know where we're going?"

  Whitbread's Motie shrugged. "To King Peter's jurisdiction. If we can get there." She looked back at Potter. The midshipman was curled into his seat, his mouth slightly open, gently snoring. The lights in the plane were dim and everything was peaceful, the only jarring note the rocket launcher that Staley clutched across his lap. "You ought to get some sleep too."

  "Yeah." Horst leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. His hands never relaxed their tight grip on the weapon.

  "He even sleeps at attention," Whitbread said. "Or tries to. I guess Horst is as scared as we are."

  "I keep wondering if any of this does any good," the alien said. "We're damned close to falling apart anyway. You missed a couple of other things in that zoo, you know. Like the food beast. A Motie variant, almost armless, unable to defend itself against us but pretty good at surviving. Another of our relatives, bred for meat in a shameful age, a long time ago. . ."

  "My God." Whitbread took a deep breath. "But you wouldn't do anything like that now."

  "Oh, no."

  "Then why bring it up?"

  "A mere statistical matter, a coincidence you may find interesting. There isn't a zoo on the planet that doesn't have breeding stock of Meats. And the herds are getting larger. . ."

  "God's teeth! Don't you ever stop thinking about the next collapse?"

  "No."

  Murcheson's Eye had long since vanished. Now the east was blood-red in a sunrise that still startled Whitbread. Red sunrises were rare on inhabitable worlds. They passed over a chain of islands. Ahead to the west lights glowed where it was still dark. There was a cityscape like a thousand Spartas set edge to edge, crisscrossed everywhere by dark strips of cultivated land. On man's worlds they would be parks. Here they were forbidden territory, guarded by twisted demons.

  Whitbread yawned and looked at the alien beside him. "I think I called you brother, sometime last night."

  "I know. You meant sister. Gender is important to us, too. A matter of life and death."

  "I'm not sure I mean that either. I meant friend," Whitbread said with some awkwardness.

  "Fyunch(click) is a closer relationship. But I am glad to be your friend," said the Motie. "I wouldn't have given up the experience of knowing you."

  The silence was embarrassing. "I better wake up the others," Whitbread said softly.

  The plane banked sharply and turned northwards. Whitbread's Motie looked out at the city below, across to the other side to be sure of the location of the sun, then down again. She got up and went forward into the pilot's compartment, and twittered. Charlie answered and they twittered again.

  "Horst," Whitbread said. "Mr. Staley. Wake up."

  Horst Staley had forced himself to sleep. He was still as rigid as a statue, the rocket launcher across his lap, his hands gripping it tightly. "Yeah?"

  "I don't know. We changed course, and now—listen," Whitbread said. The Moties were still chattering. Their voices grew louder.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Final Solution

  Whitbread's Motie came back to her seat. "It's started," she said. She didn't sound like Whitbread now. She sounded like an alien. "War."

  "Who?" Staley demanded.

  "My Master and King Peter. The others haven't joined in yet, but they will."

  "War over us?" Whitbread asked incredulously. He was ready to cry. The transformation in his Fyunch(click) was too much to bear.

  "Over jurisdiction over you," the Motie corrected. She shivered, relaxed, and suddenly Whitbread's voice spoke to them from the half-smiling alien lips. "It's not too bad yet. Just Warriors, and raids. Each one wants to show the other what she could do, without destroying anything really valuable. There'll be a lot of pressure from the other decision makers to keep it that way. They don't want to be in a fallout pattern."

  "God's teeth," said Whitbread. He gulped. "But—welcome back, brother."

  "Where does that leave us?" Staley demanded. "Where do we go now?"

  "A neutral place. The Castle."

  "Castle?" Horst shouted. "That's your Master's territory!" His hand was very near his pistol again.

  "No. Think the others would give my Master that much control over you? The Mediators you met were all part of my clan, but the Castle itself belongs to a sterile male decision maker. A Keeper."

  Staley looked distrustful. "What do we do
once we're there?"

  The Motie shrugged. “Wait and see who wins. If King Peter wins, he's going to send you back to Lenin. Maybe this war will convince the Empire that it's better to leave us alone. Maybe you can even help us." The Motie gestured disgustedly. "Help us. He's Crazy Eddie too. There'll never be an end to the Cycles."

  "Wait?" Staley muttered. "Not me, damn it. Where is this Master of yours?"

  "No!" the Motie shouted. "Horst, I can't help you with something like that. Besides, you'd never get past the Warriors. They're good, Horst, better than your Marines; and what are you? Three junior officers with damn little experience and some weapons you got from an old museum."

  Staley looked below. Castle City was ahead. He saw the space port, an open space among many, but gray, not green. Beyond it was the Castle, a spire circled by a balcony. Small as it was, it stood out among the industrial ugliness of the endless cityscape.

  There was communications gear in their baggage. When Renner and the others came up, the Sailing Master had left everything but their notes and records in the Castle. He hadn't said why, but now they knew: he wanted the Moties to think they would return.

  There might even be enough to build a good transmitter. Something that would reach Lenin. "Can we land in the street?" Staley asked.

  "In the street?" The Motie blinked. "Why not? If Charlie agrees. This is her aircraft." Whitbread's Motie trilled. There were answering hums and clicks from the cockpit.

  "You're sure the Castle is safe?" Staley asked. "Whitbread, do you trust the Moties?"

  "I trust this one. But I may be a little prejudiced, Hor—Mr. Staley. You'll have to make your own judgment."

  "Charlie says the Castle is empty, and the ban on Warriors in Castle City still holds," Whitbread's Motie said. "She also says King Peter's winning, but she's only hearing reports from her side."

  "Will she land next to the Castle?" Staley asked.

  "Why not? We have to buzz the street first, to warn the Browns to look up." The Motie trilled again.