The Mote In God's Eye

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  "Aye aye, sir." Weiss grinned suddenly. "You know? This is why I joined the Navy. Strange worlds. This is what the enlistment men promised us."

  " 'Golden cities far. . .' Me too."

  Afterwards Whitbread stood by the picture window. The city glowed with a million lights. Most of the tiny cars had disappeared, but the streets were alive with huge, silent trucks. The pedestrians had slacked off somewhat. Whitbread spotted something tall and spindly that ran among the Whites as if they were stationary objects. It dodged around a huge Porter type and was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Guided Tour

  Renner was up before dawn. The Moties chose and set out clothing for him while he was bathing in the remarkable tub. He let their choice stand. He would indulge them; they might be the last nonmilitary servants he would ever have. His sidearm was discreetly laid out with his clothing, and after a lot of thought, Renner buckled it under a civilian jacket woven from some marvelous shining fibers. He didn't want the weapon, but regulations were regulations . . .

  The others were all at breakfast, watching the dawn through the big picture window. It came on like sunset, in all the shades of red. Mote Prime's day was a few hours too long. At night they would stay up longer; they would sleep longer in the mornings and still be up at dawn.

  Breakfast featured large, remarkably egg-shaped boiled eggs. Inside the shell it was as if the egg came prescrambled, with a maraschino cherry buried off-center. Renner was told that the cherry thing was not worth eating, and he didn't try.

  "The Museum is only a few blocks from here." Dr. Horvath's Motie rubbed her right hands briskly together. "Let's walk. You'll want warm clothes, I think."

  The Moties all had that problem: which pair of hands to use to imitate human gestures? Renner expected Jackson's Motie to go psychotic. Jackson was left-handed.

  They walked. A cold breeze whipped them from around corners. The sun was big and dim; you could look directly at it this early in the day. Tiny cars swarmed six feet below them. The smell of Mote Prime air seeped faintly through the filter helmets, and so did the quiet hum of cars and the fast jabber of Motie voices.

  The group of humans moved among crowds of Moties of all colors —and were ignored. Then a group of white-furred pedestrians turned a corner and lingered to examine them. They chattered in musical tones and stared curiously.

  Bury seemed uncomfortable; he stayed within the group as much as he could. He doesn't want eye tracks all over him, Renner decided. The Sailing Master found himself being examined by a very pregnant White, the bulge of her child high up above the complexities of the major joint in her back. Renner smiled at her, squatted on his heels, and turned his back to her. His Fyunch(click) sang in low tones, and the White moved closer, then half a dozen white Moties were running a dozen small hands over his vertebrae.

  "Right! A little lower," said Renner. "OK, scratch right there. Ahh." When the Whites had moved on, Renner stretched his long legs to catch up with the tour. His Motie trotted alongside.

  "I trust I will not learn your irreverence," his Fyunch(click) said.

  "Why not?" Renner asked seriously.

  "When you are gone there will be other work for us. No, do not be alarmed. If you are capable of satisfying the Navy, I can have no more trouble keeping the givers of orders happy." There was an almost wistful tone, Renner thought—but he wasn't sure. If Moties had facial expressions, Renner hadn't learned them.

  The Museum was a good distance ahead of them. Like other buildings it was square-built, but its face was glass or something like it. "We have many places that fit your word 'museum,' " Horvath's Motie was saying, "in this and other cities. This one was closest and specializes in painting and sculpture."

  A juggernaut loomed over them, three meters tall, and another meter beyond that because of the cargo on its head. It—she, Renner noted from the long, shallow bulge of pregnancy high on her abdomen. The eyes were soft animal eyes, without awareness, and she caught up with them and passed, never slowing.

  "Carrying a child doesn't seem to slow a Motie down," Renner observed.

  Brown-and-white shoulders and heads turned toward him. Renner's Motie said, "No, of course not. Why should it?"

  Sally Fowler took up the task. She tried carefully to explain just how useless pregnant human females were. "It's one reason we tend to develop male-oriented societies. And—" She was still lecturing on childbirth problems when they reached the Museum.

  The doorway would have caught Renner across the bridge of his nose. The ceilings were higher; they brushed his hair. Dr. Horvath had to bend his head.

  And the lighting was a bit too yellow.

  And the paintings were placed too low.

  Conditions for viewing were not ideal. Aside from that, the colors in the paints themselves were off. Dr. Horvath and his Motie conversed with animation following his revelation that blue plus yellow equals green to a human eye. The Motie eye was designed like a human eye, or an octopus eye, for that matter: a globe, an adaptable lens, receptor nerves along the back. But the receptors were different.

  Yet the paintings had impact. In the main hall—which had three-meter ceilings and was lined with larger paintings—the tour stopped before a street scene. Here a Brown-and-white had climbed on a car and was apparently haranguing a swarm of Browns and Brown-and-whites, while behind him the sky burned sunset-red. The expressions were all the same flat smile, but Renner sensed violence and looked closer. Many of the crowd carried tools, always in their left hands, and some were broken. The city itself was on fire.

  "It's called 'Return to Your Tasks.' You'll find that the Crazy Eddie theme recurs constantly," said Sally's Motie. She moved on before she could be asked to explain further.

  The next painting in line showed a quasi-Motie, tall and thin, small-headed, long-legged. It was running out of a forest, at the viewer. Its breath trailed smoky-white behind it. "The Message Carrier," Hardy's Motie called it.

  The next was another outdoor scene: a score of Browns and Whites eating around a blazing campfire. Animal eyes gleamed red around them. The whole landscape was dark red; and overhead Murcheson's Eye gleamed against the Coal Sack.

  "You can't tell what they're thinking and feeling from looking at them, can you? We were afraid of that," said Horvath's Motie. "Nonverbal communication. The signals are different with us."

  "I suppose so," said Bury. "These paintings would all be salable, but none especially so. They would be only curiosities . . . though quite valuable as such, because of the huge potential market and the limited source. But they do not communicate. Who painted them?"

  "This one is quite old. You can see that it was painted on the wall of the building itself, and—"

  "But what kind of Motie? Brown-and-whites?"

  There was impolite laughter among the Moties. Bury's Motie said, "You will never see a work of art that was not made by a Brown-and-white. Communication is our specialty. Art is communication."

  "Does a White never have anything to say?"

  "Of course. He has a Mediator say it for him. We translate, we communicate. Many of these paintings are arguments, visually expressed."

  Weiss had been trailing along, saying nothing, Renner noticed. Keeping his voice down, he asked the man, "Any comments?"

  Weiss scratched his jaw. "Sir, I haven't been in a museum since grade school . . . but aren't some paintings made just to be pretty?"

  "Um."

  There were only two portraits in all the halls of paintings. Brown-and-whites both, they both showed from the waist up. Expression in the Moties must show in body language, not faces. These portraits were oddly lighted and their arms were oddly distorted. Renner thought them evil.

  "Evil? No!" said Renner's Motie. "That one caused the Crazy Eddie probe to be built. And this was the designer of a universal language, long ago."

  "Is it still used?"

  "After a fashion. But it fragmented, of course. Languages do that. Sinclair and Potter
and Bury don't speak the same language you do. Sometimes the sounds are similar, but the nonverbal signals are very different."

  Renner caught up with Weiss as they were about to enter the hall of sculpture. "You were right. In the Empire there are paintings that are just supposed to be pretty. Here, no. Did you notice the difference? No landscape without Moties doing something in it. Almost no portraits, and those two were slanted pictures. In fact, everything's slanted." He turned to appeal to his Motie. "Right? Those pictures you pointed out, done before your civilization invented the camera. They weren't straight representations."

  "Renner, do you know how much work goes into a painting?"

  "I've never tried. I can guess."

  "Then can you imagine anyone going to that much trouble if he doesn't have something to say?"

  "How about 'Mountains are pretty'?" Weiss suggested.

  Renner's Motie shrugged.

  The statues were better than the paintings. Differences in pigment and lighting did not intrude. Most did show Moties; but they were more than portraits. A chain of Moties of diminishing size, Porter to three White to nine Brown to twenty-seven miniatures? No, they were all done in white marble and had the shape of decision makers. Bury regarded them without expression and said, "It occurs to me that I will need interpretations of any of these before I could sell them anywhere. Or even give them as gifts."

  "Inevitably so," said Bury's Motie. "This, for instance, illustrates a religion of the last century. The soul of the parent divides to become the children, and again to become the grandchildren, ad infinitum."

  Another showed a number of Moties in red sandstone. They had long, slender fingers, too many on the left hand, and the left arm was comparatively small. Physicians? They were being killed by a thread of green glass that swept among them like a scythe: a laser weapon, held by something offstage. The Moties were reluctant to talk about it. "An unpleasant event in history," said Bury's Motie, and that was that.

  Another showed fighting among a few marble Whites and a score of an unrecognizable type done in red sandstone. The red ones were lean and menacing, armed with more than their share of teeth and claws. Some weird machine occupied the center of the melee. "Now that one is interesting," said Renner's Motie. "By tradition, a Mediator —one of our own type—may requisition any kind of transportation he needs, from any decision maker. Long ago, a Mediator used his authority to order a time machine built. I can show you the machine, if you will travel to it; it is on the other side of this continent."

  "A working time machine?"

  "Not working, Jonathon. It was never completed. His Master went broke trying to finish it."

  "Oh." Whitbread showed his disappointment.

  "It was never tested," said the Motie. "The basic theory may be flawed."

  The machine looked like a small cyclotron with a cabin inside . . . it almost made sense, like a Langston Field generator.

  "You interest me strangely," Renner said to his Motie. "You can requisition any transportation, any time?"

  "That's right. Our talent is communication, but our major task is stopping fights. Sally has lectured us on your, let's say, your racial problems involving weapons and the surrender reflex. We Mediators evolved out of that. We can explain one being's viewpoint to another. Noncommunication can assume dangerous proportions sometimes—usually just before a war, by one of those statistical flukes that make you believe in coincidence. If one of us can always get to transportation—or even to telephones or radios—war becomes unlikely."

  There were awed expressions among the humans. "Vee-erry nice," said Renner. Then, "I was wondering whether you could requisition MacArthur."

  "By law and tradition, yes. In practice, don't be a fool."

  "OK. These things fighting around the time machine—"

  "Legendary demons," Bury's Motie explained. "They defend the structure of reality."

  Renner remembered ancient Spanish paintings dating from the time of the Black Plague in Europe, paintings of living men and women being attacked by the revived and malevolent dead. Next to the white Moties these red sandstone things had that impossibly lean, bony look, and a malevolence that was almost tangible.

  "And why the time machine?"

  "The Mediator felt that a certain incident in history had happened because of a lack of communication. He decided to correct it." Renner's Motie shrugged—with her arms; a Motie couldn't lift her shoulders. "Crazy Eddie. The Crazy Eddie probe was like that. A little more workable, maybe. A watcher of the sky—a meteorologist, plus some other fields—found evidence that there was life on a world of a nearby star. Right away this Crazy Eddie Mediator wanted to contact them. He tied up enormous amounts of capital and industrial power, enough to affect most of civilization. He got his probe built, powered by a light sail and a battery of laser cannon for—"

  "This all sounds familiar."

  "Right. The Crazy Eddie probe was in fact launched toward New Caledonia, much later, and with a different pilot. We've been assuming you followed it home."

  "So it worked. Unfortunately the crew was dead, but it reached us. So why are you still calling it the Crazy Eddie probe? Oh, never mind," said Renner. His Motie was chortling.

  Two limousines were waiting for them outside the Museum and stairs had been erected leading down to street level. Tiny two-seater cars zipped around the obstruction without slowing down, and without collisions.

  Staley stopped at the bottom. "Mr. Renner! Look!"

  Renner looked. A car had stopped alongside a great blank building; for there were no curbs. The brown chauffeur and his white-furred passenger disembarked, and the White walked briskly around the corner. The Brown disengaged two hidden levers at the front, then heaved against the side of the car. It collapsed like an accordion, into something half a meter wide. The Brown turned and followed the white Motie.

  "They fold up!" Staley exclaimed.

  "Sure they do," said Renner's Motie. "Can you imagine the traffic jam if they didn't? Come on, get in the cars."

  They did. Renner said, "I wouldn't ride in one of those little death traps for Bury's own petty-cash fund."

  "Oh, they're safe. That is," said Renner's Motie, "it isn't the car that's safe, it's the driver. Browns don't have much territorial instinct, for one thing. For another, they're always fiddling with the car, so nothing's ever going to fail."

  The limousines started off. Browns appeared behind them and began removing the stairs.

  The buildings around them were always square blocks, the streets a rectangular grid. To Horvath the city was clearly a made city, not something that had grown naturally. Someone had laid it out and ordered it built from scratch. Were they all like this? It showed none of the Browns' compulsion to innovate.

  And yet, he decided, it did. Not in basics, but in such things as street lighting. In places there were broad electroluminescent strips along the buildings. In others there were things like floating balloons, but the wind did not move them. Elsewhere, tubes ran along the sides of the streets, or down the center; or there was nothing at all that showed in the daytime.

  And those boxlike cars—each was subtly different, in the design of the lights or the signs of repairs or the way the parked cars folded into themselves.

  The limousines stopped. “We're here," Horvath's Motie announced. "The zoo. The Life Forms Preserve, to be more exact. You'll find that it is arranged more for the convenience of the inhabitants than for the spectators."

  Horvath and the rest looked about, puzzled. Tall rectangular buildings surrounded them. There was no open space anywhere.

  "On our left. The building, gentlemen, the building! Is there some law against putting a zoo inside a building?"

  The zoo, as it developed, was six stories tall, with ceilings uncommonly high for Moties. It was difficult to tell just how high the ceilings were. They looked like sky. On the first floor it was open blue sky, with drifting clouds and a sun that stood just past noon.

  They stroll
ed through a steamy jungle whose character changed as they moved. The animals could not reach them, but it was difficult to see why not. They did not seem aware of being penned up.

  There was a tree like a huge bullwhip, its handle planted deep in the earth, its lash sprouting clusters of round leaves where it coiled around the trunk. An animal like a giant Motie stood flat-footed beneath it, staring at Whitbread. There were sharp, raking talons on its two right hands, and tusks showed between its lips. "It was a variant of the Porter type," said Horvath's Motie, "but never successfully domesticated. You can see why."

  "These artificial environments are astounding!" Horvath exclaimed. "I've never seen better. But why not build part of the zoo in the open? Why make an environment when the real environment is already there?"

  "I'm not sure why it was done. But it seems to work out."

  The second floor was a desert of dry sand. The air was dry and balmy, the sky baby blue, darkening to yellow-brown at the horizon. Fleshy plants with no thorns grew through the sand. Some were the shape of thick lily pads. Many bore the marks of nibbling teeth. They found the beast that had made the tooth marks, a thing like a nude white beaver with square protruding teeth. It watched them tamely as they passed.

  On the third floor it was raining steadily. Lightning flashed, illusory miles away. The humans declined to enter, for they had no rain gear. The Moties were half angry, half apologetic. It had not occurred to them that rain would bother humans; they liked it.

  "It's going to keep happening, too," Whitbread's Motie predicted. "We study you, but we don't know you. You're missing some of the most interesting plant forms too. Perhaps another day when they have the rain turned off. . ."

  The fourth floor was not wild at all. There were even small round houses on distant illusory hills. Small, umbrella-shaped trees grew red and lavender fruits beneath a flat green disc of foliage. A pair of proto-Moties stood beneath one of these. They were small, round, and pudgy, and their right arms seemed to have shrunk. They looked at the tour group with sad eyes, then one reached up for a lavender fruit. Its left arm was just long enough.