The Gripping Hand

by Larry Niven

  Glenda Ruth felt Freddy's relief; she even shared it. Their life spans had just been extended by several weeks. More important was the timing.

  "We thank for glorious gift," she said in the language Jock and Charlie had taught her, King Peter's language, from Mote Prime.

  The Mediator's stance indicated receptivity but no understanding.

  Damn! But free-fall might alter a Motie's body language. (Stance, indeed!) Or her words might be wrong, or her own gestures. How would a crippled Mediator speak, one with a missing arm?

  Two of those little Moties with the Engineers weren't Watchmakers; they were Mediator pups. Jennifer waved. The larger pup jumped across ten meters of space, impacted, and clung. Jennifer wasn't having trouble communicating.

  Okay. Glenda Ruth released her seat belts to give her body full play, worked her foot under a strap for anchorage, and said, palms facing out, regal-but-unarmed. "Our lives much improved by generous-"

  The Moties converged on her.

  Glenda Ruth had to remember to resume breathing. She was very aware of the spiky Warriors. They shifted constantly to keep a free path between prisoners and weapons. The four humans held quite still as six-fingered hands moved over them.

  They had guessed this might happen. Glenda Ruth's mother, the only woman aboard MacArthur, had stripped so that Moties could learn something of human anatomy. Jennifer wanted that slot for herself.

  It didn't matter. The caste that Jennifer thought was a Doctor moved in with the Engineer, and they peeled Hecate's crew like bananas. The humans had to help in self-defense. The Doctor shied back from waves of alien pheromones, then sniffed dutifully. It had been many hours since there was a shower aboard Hecate.

  Jennifer blushed and twitched at tickle points. Freddy thought it was funny and was trying to hide it. Terry's rounded nudity didn't bother him, but his hyperawareness of the Warriors' guns was driving Glenda Ruth nuts. She tried not to flinch at the touch of Motie hands. Dry. Hard. Right hands felt like a dozen twigs gliding over her face, seeking the muscles that make the front of a human head into a signaling system. The left hand clamped like a vise to hold her arm or leg or torso to be probed.

  They turned and twisted for the Doctor. The Mediator and Master hung back, watching.

  Human vertebrae fascinated them, as they had thirty years before, when MacArthur's crew met Moties from Mote Prime. Evolution had not taken that path on the Mote. Motie life-forms had spines of solid bone and heavy, complex joints.

  The brown-and-white pup jumped from human to human, sniffing, feeling, comparing. Even the Master, judging it safe, moved forward to run its right hands along Glenda Ruth's spine. Jennifer collapsed in giggling that was half sobs, sandbagged by everyone's favorite memory from Summer Vacation.

  (Outside the museum on Mote Prime, a Master's dozen fingers explored Kevin Renner's back. Renner shifted in delight. "Right! A little lower. Okay, scratch right there. Ahh!")

  They couldn't talk under such circumstances. Glenda Ruth tried. They had to educate the Mediator, give it words to learn... but the others' embarrassment was just too strong. Glenda Ruth quickly gave up.

  The Doctor and Engineer began talking to the Master. Pointing, demonstrating, explaining. The white-furred Motie took it all in. It asked short questions (that one inflection, query, brought verbal responses, where another, command, caused action), and the Moties resumed their examination. One question sent the Engineer to join its Watchmakers at work in the air recycler. Another had it comparing Freddy and Terry, Jennifer and Glenda Ruth. Hands. Hair. Toes. Spines again. Genitals (will you stop that giggling?)

  The Mediator watched.

  And finally they were allowed, to put their clothes on. They found it hard to look at each other. The Master and its attendants were still talking.

  "We should have guessed," Glenda Ruth said. "Masters do talk. It's different from the Mediator skill. They have to organize data from a dozen different castes... professions."

  Clothed, it was all right to speak again. Jennifer said, "I think the Doctor's nearsighted. In a surgeon that's probably good."

  The adult Mediator took the second Mediator pup from its Engineer parent. She crossed to the bridge, caught herself, and offered the little Motie to Freddy: clearly an offer, not a demand.

  Freddy looked at Glenda Ruth. He was showing surprise, no distaste, and a touch of hope. She said, "Take it." Why Freddy? Freddy immediately reached out, smiling, and accepted the thing into his arms.

  Why Freddy? Why not me?

  It clung with five limbs, its hands exploring Freddy's head and shoulders, where his skin was exposed. Presently it pulled back to watch his face. Moties caught on to that one quick, the notion of a mobile face. Why not me, or Terry?

  The Master spoke. The Engineer led the Mediator to the door. The Mediator began playing with the code readout.

  "Damn," Glenda Ruth said. The others looked at her.

  If she let the others know exactly what she had in mind, a Mediator would know it now or later. Could she get some help on this? She pointed at the safe and shouted, "Show signs of distress, dammit! It's too soon!"

  Distress, right. Freddy spasmed, pointed to the safe with an outflung arm, and flung the other across his averted eyes, crying, "Weep! Wail!" Glenda Ruth choked back a laugh. The pup was trying to imitate him, right arms pointing, left across its eyes.

  Terry's hand closed on her ankle. "The Warriors."

  "They-" She looked. They would, "Freddy love, cut it."

  "What was that about?"

  She shook her head. "Anyway, you made the point."

  One of the Warriors scuttled forward and anchored itself next to the safe, gun pointed back toward the humans.

  The safe door slid open. A Watchmaker scuttled in. It handed out a laboratory sealed-environment jar as large as itself, then a plastic jar of dark powder, a stack of documents, a roll of gold coins.

  The Engineer examined the gold and said something to the Master. The Master answered.

  The Engineer put the papers back, and the cocoa. It examined the jar.

  "Don't touch that!" Glenda Ruth shouted. No Motie would understand, but the Mediator would remember.

  The Engineer opened the seals.

  There was a pop. The Warrior's head snapped around to catch the same puff of gas that caught the Engineer. Glenda Ruth wondered if they would be shot.

  The Warriors didn't shoot. The Engineer took a scraping from the sludge in the jar, then resealed it and put it back. It left the door open. It spoke a word and tossed the gold at one of the Watchmakers, who caught it and jumped through the new airlock.

  The other Engineers had reattached the sewage recyling system where six lines of graffiti-green met in a sunburst. They continued to work on it, add a pipe here, bend, constrict. The Warriors maintained their stations. When Glenda Ruth kicked herself forward to the safe, she could feel phantom bullets. The Warriors came alert; the Master gave no signal that she could recognize; but no Motie stopped her

  Thanks to the Moties' parsimonious lowering of cabin pressure, the canister's pressure had sprayed perhaps 10 percent of the encysted eggs of the Crazy Eddie Worm into the cabin as an aerosol. Most of the contents were intact. There was a mild odor of petroleum and other pollutants, the natural state of water on Mote Prime, fading rapidly as the air filters did their work. The Moties clearly didn't like the smell any more than the humans did. It wouldn't have bothered planet-dwelling Moties.

  They've evolved in space, Glenda Ruth thought. Space-dwelling Moties who don't detest pollution will die of it.

  Glenda Ruth carefully wiped the rim and resealed the canister, and glared at the Engineer. It might be vital to be able to claim that the Moties had been infected by accident.

  Then she suppressed a shudder: a hundred wormlets would hatch and die in her lungs.

  Thirty years before, Whitbread's asteroid-mining Engineer had been infected with the parasitic worm. MacArthur's biologists determined that it couldn't inf
ect humans and labeled it Form Zeta, the sixth living thing they'd found during autopsy on the Engineer. Present, not in large numbers, but present.

  Jock and Charlie and Ivan carried it in greater numbers, and they didn't care any more than humans care about E. Coli. Parasite Zeta did no harm beyond consuming a few calories; which was why the Blaine Institute biologists had used it as the base for their genetic engineering experiments.

  It would be interesting to know if the parasite was normal among these space-evolved Moties. Not that it mattered: surely it would live, and this worm was different. And it would not survive in human lungs, but just the thought-

  The Mediator spoke at her shoulder, and she jumped. It said, "Mediators talk. No Horace Bury Fyunch(click), but we talk."

  "Good," said Glenda Ruth. "Let's talk. Please leave our trade goods alone. This is all we have to bargain with. It should not be ruined."

  And now the Crazy Eddie Worm was growing in an Engineer, a female. Had the Warrior been female, too? Would it affect these Watchmakers?

  How many Masters were aboard? Too many, of course, more than their captors would actually want, but... three? Four? And the clock was counting down.

  "Your Lordship's presence is requested," the voice said. "My Lord. My Lord, I must insist. Rod Blaine, wake up, dammit!"

  Rod sat bolt upright. "All right, already."

  "What is it?" Sally asked. She sat up with a look of concern. "The children..."

  Rod spoke to the ceiling. "Who?"

  "Lord Orkovsky. He says the situation is urgent," the telephone said.

  Rod Blaine swung his feet over the edge of the bed and found his slippers. "I'll talk to him in the study. Send coffee." He turned to Sally. "Not the kids. The Foreign Secretary wouldn't call us in the middle of the night about that." He went across the hail to his study and sat at his desk. "I'm here. No visuals. All right, Roger, what's up?"

  "The Moties are loose."

  "How?"

  "Actually, it's not quite that bad." Lord Roger Orkovsky, Secretary of State for External Affairs, sounded like a diplomat under stress. "You'll recall there was some question of when Dr. Buckman's protostar would collapse."

  "Yes, yes, of course."

  "Well, it's happened, and the Moties were ready for it. Due to some clever thinking-Chris is mentioned in the dispatches-Mercer had sent everything he could scrape up out to where the new Alderson point would form, so we were ready, too. Almost ready.

  "Details later. We got a whole bunch of reports at once, about stellar geometry and such. You'll have to read them all. What's important is that there are some Motie ships with an ambassador on board cooling their heels under Navy detention while we decide what to do about them. And Mercer wants a battle fleet."

  Rod was aware that Sally had come up behind him. "Roger," she said.

  "Good morning, Sally. Sorry to yank you up like this-"

  "Are the children all right?"

  "I was just getting to that," Orkovsky said. "We don't know. Chris volunteered to be Navy liaison aboard Bury's ship-Sinbad. Commodore Kevin Renner commanding."

  "Commodore."

  "Yeah, that's complicated, too."

  "So they went into the Mote System," Rod said.

  "Right. Sinbad, a light cruiser-Atropos, Commander Rawlins- and a Motie ship. The reports say the first person the Moties wanted to talk to was Horace Bury."

  "Roger, that doesn't make sense," Sally said.

  "Maybe not, but it's true. Look, I better give you the rest of this. There'll be a cabinet meeting in the Palace in two hours. We want you there. Both of you. Matter of fact, we want you back on the Motie Commission. You were going back to New Caledonia anyway, now the government will pay for getting you there. The Navy will have a ship ready by the time you get to the Palace."

  "We can't leave so soon!" Rod said.

  "Yes, we can," Sally said. "Roger, thanks. You mentioned Chris. What about Glenda Ruth?"

  "That was the last message in the stack," Orkovsky said. "Sally, a hundred hours after Sinbud went into the Mote system, Freddy Townsend took his yacht through. Glenda Ruth was aboard."

  "I want his name," Sally said.

  "Huh?"

  "Whoever let them through. There's got to be a Navy man in charge out there, and he let our daughter go into the Mote system in an unarmed yacht. I want his name."

  "Sally..."

  "Yes, I know, he thought he had a good reason."

  "Maybe he did."

  "It wouldn't matter, would it? When was the last time you won an argument with her? I still want his name. Fyunch(click)!"

  "Yes, madame?"

  "Is our car ready?"

  "Yes, madame."

  "Tell Wilson we'll be leaving in an hour. Get clearances for the west entrance to the Palace."

  "Yes, madame."

  "So what do we take?" Sally said. "Jock. Fyunch(click), we want to talk to Jock. Wake him up, but check with the doctors first."

  "Good thinking," Rod said. "Sally, we can't take him with us."

  "No, but we can get him to record something to prove he's still alive," Sally said.

  "What?" Rod held a sheath of facsimile papers. "The last report says, and I quote: ‘The Hon. Glenda Ruth Blaine, on the basis of brief conversations with the Motie representatives, has concluded that although these Moties know Anglic and have some familiarity with the Empire, they are not part of any Motie group previously encountered.' I don't think they believe her."

  "More fools they."

  "Madame," the ceiling said. "Jock has been awakened. Do you want visuals?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  Brown and white fur streaked with gray. "Good morning, Sally. If you don't mind, I'll have chocolate while we talk."

  "By all means. Good morning. Jock, the Moties are loose."

  "Ah?"

  "You knew about the protostar."

  "I know what you have told me about the protostar. You said that it would collapse within the next hundred years. I take it that was wrong? That it has already happened?"

  "You got it," Rod said. "Jock, we have a problem. Moties that Glenda Ruth believes aren't part of King Peter's group have got out of the Mote system. So far they appear to be stuck in a red dwarf backwater, but we all know the Empire can't keep up two blockades."

  "And you and Sally have been given the problem of what to do about the Moties," Jock said. "Have they made you an admiral yet?"

  "No."

  "They will. And they'll give you a fleet." Jock's hand moved expressively. "At least it's not Kutuzov. Of course they want you to leave immediately. I am afraid I cannot accompany you."

  "No, the Jump shock would kill you."

  "Are the children well? They must have involved themselves by now."

  Sally said, "They've gone to the Mote."

  "I did not think you could surprise me," Jock said, "But you have. I see. Give me an hour. I will make what records I can."

  "In what language?" Rod asked.

  "In several. I will need recent pictures of Chris and Glenda Ruth, as well as of myself."

  "We have a meeting."

  "Of course. We will discuss this when you're done with that."

  The Motie paused, and somehow the Motie smile was a grin of triumph. "So the horse learned to sing after all."

  "I hadn't expected this," Jennifer said. "We're infested with Moties! Freddy... Freddy, I can't keep thinking of this ship as Hecate!"

  Freddy Townsend looked around. "Yeah. Hecate's cabin mounted on a ship of unknown name. Bandit-One? And we'll just hang numbers on the rest of the fleet."

  Glenda Ruth said, "We could ask-"

  And she shied back before he snarled, "I won't ask Victoria. She'd give us the name of this Motie ship, like we're strap-on cargo."

  Jennifer said, "A two-headed ship. Two captains. We've never seen the Master that gives the orders. Cerberus?"

  Five Watchmakers, two Warriors, three Engineers nursing two Mediator pups, the old Mediator they
now called Victoria, a Master, a Doctor, and a lean, spidery variant that scuttled back and forth through Cerberus's big new airlock, perhaps bearing messages, had all made their nests in the cabin.

  The change had come gradually, while they slept. Glenda Ruth remembered waking from time to time in a shifting pattern of variously shaped Moties. Twelve hours of that, then she woke choking and weeping. The Doctor had examined them and then meeped at the young male Master they'd named Merlin, who warbled at the engineers, who readjusted the air and sewage recyclers until the air was back to standard... but it was still thick with Motie smells, and every human's eyes were still red.

  The green strips painted along the walls had grown into vines, furry green tubes as thick Glenda Ruth's leg. The various Moties used the lines to mark off their territories

  They'd turned Cerberus's original airlock into a toilet: one toilet with a variety of attachments. The Engineers had worked on Cerberus's original toilet, too. It worked better now.

  "They've put screens up. Both toilets," Glenda Ruth "We're talking now."

  "Can you tell them to leave us some room?"

  "I'll give it another try, but you can guess the answer. This much is more personal room than they've ever seen in one spot."

  An Engineer arrived with food. All of the Moties converged except one Warrior. Glenda Ruth said, "Jennifer, go and see what they're eating."

  The meal was democratic: the young Master called Merlin supervised distribution and sent a Watchmaker with food for the Warrior on guard. Merlin looked around when Jennifer came near. Victoria said he was a young male; this was not obvious, given he was helping to nurse the Mediator pups. The human presence didn't disturb him. Jennifer looked about her; spoke a few words to Victoria.

  The Mediator swam to join Glenda Ruth. Victoria had been learning Anglic much faster than Glenda Ruth could learn Oort Cloud Recent.

  She said, "About food? I think, thought you have your own."

  "I'd like to know if this is like what we eat," she told it.

  "Will ask Doctor and Engineer."

  "I would like to feed you cocoa."

  "Why?"

  "On the planet they liked cocoa. If you like cocoa, we have something to trade."