The Mote In God's Eye

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  "There is obviously no sex discrimination such as exists in the Empire; in fact the predominance of females is remarkable. One Brown is male and cares for both pups. The pups are weaned, or at least there is no obvious sign of a nursing female—or male—aboard.

  "My hypothesis is that, unlike humanity after the Secession Wars, there is no shortage of mothers or childbearers, and thus there is no cultural mechanism of overprotectiveness such as survives within the Empire. I have no theory of why there are no pups among the Brown-and-whites, although it is possible that the immature Moties I observe are the issue of Brown-and-whites and the Browns serve as child trainers. There is certainly a tendency to have the Browns do all the technical work.

  "The difference in the two types is definite if not dramatic. The hands are larger and better developed in the Brown, and the forehead of the Brown slopes back more sharply. The Brown is smaller. Question: Which is better evolved as a tool user? The Brown-and-white has a slightly larger brain capacity, the Brown has better hands. So far every Brown-and-white I have seen is female, and there is one of each sex of Brown: is this accident, a clue to their culture, or something biological? Transcript ends. Welcome aboard, gentlemen."

  Whitbread said, "Any trouble?"

  Her head was in a plastic hood that sealed around her neck like a Navy shower bag; she was obviously not used to nasal respirators. The bag blurred her voice slightly. "None at all. I certainly learned as much as they did from the um, er, orgy. What's next?"

  Language lessons.

  There was a word: Fyunch(click). When the Chaplain pointed at himself and said "David," the Motie he was looking at twisted her lower right arm around into the same position and said "Fyunch(click)," making the click with her tongue.

  Fine. But Sally said, "My Motie had the same name, I think."

  "Do you mean I've picked the same alien?"

  "No, I don't think so. And I know Fyunch(click) "—she said it carefully, making the click with her tongue, then ruined the effect by giggling—"isn't the word for Motie. I've tried that."

  The Chaplain frowned. "Perhaps all proper names sound alike to us. Or we may have the word for arm," he said seriously. There was a classic story about that, so old that it probably came from preatomic days. He turned to another Motie, pointed at himself, and said, "Fyunch(click)?" His accent was nearly perfect, and he didn't giggle.

  The Motie said, "No."

  "They picked that up quickly," said Sally.

  Whitbread tried it. He swam among the Moties, pointing to himself and saying "Fyunch(click)?" he obtained four perfectly articulated Nos before an inverted Motie tapped him on the kneecap and said, “Fyunch(click)? Yes."

  So: there were three Moties who would say "Fyunch(click)" to a human. Each to a different human, and not to the others. So?

  "It may mean something like 'I am assigned to you,'" Whitbread suggested.

  "Certainly one hypothesis," Hardy agreed. A rather good one, but there were insufficient data—had the boy made a lucky guess?

  Moties crawled around them. Some of the instruments they carried might have been cameras or recorders. Some instruments made noises when the humans spoke; others extruded tape, or made wiggly orange lines on small screens. The Moties gave some attention to Hardy's own instruments, especially the male Brown mute, who disassembled Hardy's oscilloscope and put it back together again before his eyes. The images on it seemed brighter, and the persistence control worked much better, he thought. Interesting. And only the Browns did things like that.

  The language lessons had become a group effort. It was a game now, this teaching of Anglic to Moties. Point and say the word, and the Moties would generally remember it. David Hardy gave thanks.

  The Moties kept fiddling with the insides of their instruments, tuning them, or sometimes handing them to a Brown with a flurry of bird whistles. The range of their own voices was astonishing. Speaking Motie, they ranged from bass to treble in instants. The pitch was part of the code, Hardy guessed.

  He was aware of time passing. His belly was a vast emptiness whose complaints he ignored with absent-minded contempt. Chafe spots developed around his nose where the respirator fitted. His eyes smarted from Motie atmosphere that got under his goggles, and he wished he'd opted for either a helmet or a plastic sack like Sally's. The Mote itself was a diffused bright point that moved slowly across the curved translucent wall. Dry breathing air was slowly dehydrating him.

  These things he felt as passing time, and ignored. A kind of joy was in him. David Hardy was fulfilling his mission in life.

  Despite the uniqueness of the situation, Hardy decided to stick to traditional linguistics. There were unprecedented problems with hand, face, ears, fingers. It developed that the dozen fingers of the right hands had one collective name, the three thick fingers of the left another. The ear had one name flat and another erect. There was no name for face, although they picked up the Anglic word immediately, and seemed to think it a worthwhile innovation.

  He had thought that his muscles had adjusted to free fall; but now they bothered him. He did not put it down to exhaustion. He did not know where Sally had disappeared to, and the fact did not bother him. This was a measure of his acceptance of both Sally and the Moties as colleagues; but it was also a measure of how tired he was. Hardy considered himself enlightened, but what Sally would have called "over-protectiveness of women" was deeply ingrained in the Imperial culture —especially so in the monastic Navy.

  It was only when his air gave out that the others could persuade Hardy to go back to the cutter.

  Their supper was plain, and they hurried through it to compare notes. Mercifully the others left him alone until he'd eaten, Horvath taking the lead in shushing everyone although he was obviously the most curious of the lot. Even though the utensils were designed for free-fall conditions, none of the others were used to long periods of zero gravity, and eating took new habits that could be learned only through concentration. Finally Hardy let one of the crewmen remove his lap tray and looked up. Three eager faces telepathically beamed a million questions at him.

  "They learn Anglic well enough," David said. "I wish I could say the same for my own progress."

  "They work at it," Whitbread wondered. "When you give them a word, they keep using it, over and over, trying it out in sentences, trying it out on everything around whatever you showed them—I never saw anything like it."

  "That's because you didn't watch Dr. Hardy very long," Sally said. “We were taught that technique in school, but I'm not very good at it."

  "Young people seldom are." Hardy stretched out to relax. That void had been filled. But it was embarrassing—the Moties were better at his job than he was. "Young people usually haven't the patience for linguistics. In this case, though, your eagerness helps, since the Moties are directing your efforts quite professionally. By the way, Jonathon, where did you go?"

  "I took my Fyunch(click) outside and showed him around the taxi. We ran out of things to show the Moties in their own ship and I didn't want to bring them here. Can we do that?"

  "Certainly." Horvath smiled. "I've spoken to Captain Blaine and he leaves it to our judgment. As he says, there's nothing secret on the cutter. However, I'd like there to be something a little special—some ceremony, wouldn't you think? After all, except for the asteroid miner the Moties have never visited a human ship."

  Hardy shrugged. "They make little enough of our coming aboard their craft. You want to remember, though, unless the whole Motie race is fantastically gifted at languages—a hypothesis I reject—they've had their special ceremony before they lifted off their planet. They've put language specialists aboard. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that our Fyunch(click)s are the Motie equivalent of full professors."

  Whitbread shook his head. The others looked at him, and finally he spoke. He was rather proud of having worked out a technique to let a junior officer interrupt the others. "Sir, that ship left the Mote planet only hours—maybe less than one hou
r—after MacArthur appeared in their system. How would they have time to gather specialists?"

  "I hadn't known that," Hardy said slowly. "But these must be specialists of some kind. What use would such fantastic linguistic abilities be among the general population? And fantastic is not too strong a word. Still and all, we've managed to puzzle them slightly, or did the rest of you notice?"

  "The tool room?" Sally asked. "I guess that's what you'd call it, although I don't think I'd have figured it out if Jonathon hadn't given me the clue first. They took me there just after I left you, Dr. Hardy, and they didn't seem puzzled to me. I noticed you stayed a lot longer than I did, though."

  "What did you do there?" David asked.

  "Why, nothing. I looked at all the gadgetry. The whole place was covered with junk—by the way, those wall clamps weren't substantial enough to take real gravity, I'm sure of that. They must have built that room after they got here. But anyway, since there wasn't anything I could understand I didn't pay much attention to the place."

  Hardy folded his hands in an attitude of prayer, then looked up embarrassed. He'd got into that habit long before he entered the priesthood, and somehow could never break himself of it; but it indicated concentration, not reverence. "You did nothing, and they were not curious about it." He thought furiously for long seconds. "Yet I asked the names of the equipment, and spent quite a long time there, and my Fyunch(click) seemed very surprised. I could be misinterpreting the emotion, but I really think my interest in the tools unsettled them."

  "Did you try to use any of the gadgets?" Whitbread asked.

  "No. Did you?"

  "Well, I played around with some of the stuff. . ."

  "And were they surprised or curious about that?"

  Jonathon shrugged. "They were all watching me all the time. I didn't notice anything different."

  "Yes." Hardy folded his hands again, but this time didn't notice he was doing it. "I think there is something odd about that room and the interest they showed in our interest in it. But I doubt that we'll know why until Captain Blaine sends over his expert. Do you know who's coming?"

  Horvath nodded. "He's sending Chief Engineer Sinclair."

  "Hmmm." The sound was involuntary. The others looked at Jonathon Whitbread, who grinned slowly. "If the Moties were puzzled by you, sir, just think what'll go through their heads when they hear Commander Sinclair talk."

  On a Navy warship men do not maintain an average weight. During the long idle periods those who like to eat amuse themselves by eating. They grow fat. But men who can dedicate their lives to a cause—including a good percentage of those who will remain in the Navy—tend to forget about eating. Food cannot hold their attention.

  Sandy Sinclair looked straight ahead of himself as he sat rigid on the edge of the examining table. It was this way with Sinclair: he could not look a man in the eye while he was naked. He was big and lean, and his stringy muscles were much stronger than they looked. He might have been an average man given a skeleton three sizes too large.

  A third of his surface area was pink scar tissue. Sharp metal flying out of an explosion had left that pink ridge across his short ribs. Most of the rest had been burned into him by puffs of flame or droplets of metal. A space battle left burns, if it left a man alive at all.

  The doctor was twenty-three, and cheerful. "Twenty-four years in service, eh? Ever been in a battle?"

  Sinclair snapped, "You'll hae your own share o' scars if ye stay wi' the Navy long enough."

  "I believe you, somehow. Well, Commander, you're in admirable shape for a man in his forties. You could handle a month of free fall, I think, but we'll play safe and drag you back to MacArthur twice a week. I don't suppose I have to tell you to keep up on the free-fall exercises."

  Rod Blaine called the cutter several times the next day, but it was evening before he could get anyone besides the pilot. Even Horvath had gone aboard the Motie ship.

  Chaplain Hardy was exhausted and jubilant, with a smile spread across his face and great dark circles under his eyes. "I'm taking it as a lesson in humility, Captain. They're far better at my job—well, at linguistics, anyway—than I am. I've decided that the fastest way to learn their language will be to teach them Anglic. No human throat will ever speak their language—languages?—without computer assistance."

  "Agreed. It would take a full orchestra. I've heard some of your tapes. In fact, Chaplain, there wasn't much else to do."

  Hardy smiled. "Sorry. We'll try to arrange more frequent reporting. By the way, Dr. Horvath is showing a party of Moties through the cutter now. They seem particularly interested in the drive. The brown one wants to take things apart, but the pilot won't let him. You did say there were no secrets on this boat."

  "Certainly I said that, but it might be a bit premature to let them fool with your power source. What did Sinclair say about it?"

  "I don't know, Captain." Hardy looked puzzled. "They've had him in that tool room all day. He's still in there."

  Blaine fingered the knot on his nose. He was getting the information he needed, but Chaplain Hardy hadn't been exactly whom he wanted to talk to. "Uh, how many Moties are there aboard your ship?"

  "Four. One for each of us: myself, Dr. Horvath, Lady Sally, and Mr. Whitbread. They seem to be assigned as mutual guides."

  "Four of them." Rod was trying to get used to the idea. The cutter wasn't a commissioned vessel, but it was one of His Majesty's warships, and somehow having a bunch of aliens aboard was— nuts. Horvath knew the risks he was taking. "Only four? Doesn't Sinclair have a guide?"

  "Oddly enough, no. A number of them are watching him work in the tool room, but there was no special one assigned to him."

  "And none for the coxswain or the spacers on the cutter?"

  "No." Hardy thought a moment. "That is odd, isn't it? As if they class Commander Sinclair with the unimportant crewmen."

  "Maybe they just don't like the Navy."

  David Hardy shrugged. Then, carefully, he said, "Captain, sooner or later we'll have to invite them aboard MacArthur."

  "I'm afraid that's out of the question."

  Hardy sighed. "Well, that's why I brought it up now, so that we could thrash it out. They've shown that they trust us, Captain. There's not a cubic centimeter of their embassy ship that we haven't seen, or at least probed with instruments. Whitbread will testify that there's no sign of weaponry aboard. Eventually they're going to wonder what guilty secrets we're hiding aboard."

  "I'm going to tell you. Are there Moties within earshot?"

  "No. And they haven't learned Anglic that well anyway."

  "Don't forget they will learn, and don't forget recorders. Now, Chaplain, you've got a problem—about Moties and Creation. The Empire has another. For a long time we've talked about the Great Galactic Wizards showing up and deciding whether to let the humans join, right? Only it's the other way around, isn't it? We've got to decide whether to let the Moties out of their system, and until that's decided we don't want them to see the Langston Field generators, the Alderson Drive, our weapons . . . not even just how much of MacArthur is living space, Chaplain. It would give away too much about our capabilities. We've a lot to hide, and we'll hide it."

  "You're treating them as enemies," David Hardy said gently.

  "And that's neither your decision nor mine, Doctor. Besides, I've got some questions I want answered before I decide that the Moties are nothing more than steadfast friends." Rod let his gaze go past the Chaplain, and his eyes focused a long way off. I'm not sorry it's not my decision, he thought. But ultimately they're going to ask me. As future Marquis of Crucis, if nothing else.

  He had known the subject would come up, and would again; and he was ready. "First, why did they send us a ship from Mote Prime? Why not from the Trojan cluster? It's much closer."

  "I'll ask them when I can."

  "Second, why four Moties? It may not be important, but I'd like to know why they assigned one to each of you scientists, one to Whitbread, an
d none to any of the crew."

  "They were right, weren't they? They set guides on the four people most interested in teaching them—"

  "Exactly. How did they know? Just for example, how could they have known Dr. Horvath would be aboard? And the third question is, what are they building now?"

  "All right, Captain." Hardy looked unhappy, not angry. He was and would be harder to refuse than Horvath . . . partly because he was Rod's confessor. And the subject would come up again. Rod was sure of that.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Eliza Crossing the Ice

  During the weeks that followed MacArthur was a bustle of activity. Every scientist worked overtime after each data transmission from the cutter, and every one of them wanted Navy assistance immediately. There was also the problem of the escaped miniatures, but this had settled to a game, with MacArthur losing. In the mess room it was even money that they were both dead, but no bodies were found. It worried Rod Blaine, but there was nothing he could do.

  He also allowed the Marines to stand watches in normal uniform. There were no threats to the cutter, and it was ridiculous to keep a dozen men uncomfortable in battle armor. Instead he doubled the watch keeping surveillance around MacArthur, but no one—or no thing—tried to approach, escape, or send messages. Meanwhile the biologists went wild over clues to Motie psychology and physiology, the astronomy section continued to map Mote Prime, Buckman dithered whenever anyone else used the astronomical gear, and Blaine tried to keep his overcrowded ship running smoothly. His appreciation of Horvath grew every time he had to mediate a dispute between scientists.

  There was more activity aboard the cutter. Commander Sinclair had gone aboard and been immediately taken to the Motie ship. Three days passed before a Brown-and-white began following Sinclair around, and it was a peculiarly quiet Motie. It did seem interested in the cutter's machinery, unlike the others who had assigned themselves to a human. Sinclair and his Fyunch(click) spent long hours aboard the alien ship, poking into corners, examining everything.