The Mote In God's Eye

"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 Mode 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, Jonathon! 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."

"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 Mote 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."

"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-"