The Mote In God's Eye

"You asked me, remember. I've been studying the data from Mote Prime, and the reports on the gift ship-and thinking of what I can say that will convince the Admiral that we have to take the Motie ambassadors back with us, And we must convince him, Rod, we've just got to. I wish there were something else we could talk about, and there will be lots of time after we leave the Motie system." And we'll have a lot of it together, too, now that MacArthur's gone. I wonder. Honestly, am I a little glad my rival's dead? Boy, I better never let him think I even suspect that about myself. "Right now, though, Rod, there's so little time, and I haven't any ideas at all-"

Blaine fingered the knot on his nose. About time you stopped being the Man of Sorrows and started acting like the future Twelfth Marquis, isn't it?"

"All right, Sally. Let's see what we can come up with. Provided that you let Kelley serve us dinner here."

She smiled broadly. "My lord, you have got yourself a deal."

43 Trader's Lament

Horace Bury was not a happy man.

If MacArthur's crew had been difficult to deal with, Lenin's was an order of magnitude worse. They were Ekaterinas, Imperial fanatics, and this was a picked crew under an admiral and a captain from their home world. Even the Spartan Brotherhoods would have been easier to influence.

Bury knew all this in advance, but there was this damnable urge to dominate and control his environment under all circumstances; and he had almost nothing to work with.

His status aboard was more ambiguous than before. Captain Mikhailov and the Admiral knew that he was to remain under Blaine's personal control, not charged with any crime, but not allowed freedom either. Mikhailov had solved the problem by assigning Bury Marine servants and putting Blaine's man Kelley in charge of the Marines. Thus, whenever he left his cabin, Bury was followed through the ship.

He tried to talk to Lenin's crewmen. Few would listen. Perhaps they had heard rumors of what he could offer, and were afraid that MacArthur's Marines would report them. Perhaps they suspected him of treason and hated him.

A Trader needs patience, and Bury had more than most. Even so, it was hard to control himself when he could control nothing else; when there was nothing to do but sit and wait, his hair-trigger temper would flare into screaming rages and smashed furniture, but never in public. Outside his cabin Bury was calm, relaxed, a skilled conversationalist, comfortable even with-most especially with- Admiral Kutuzov.

This gave him access to Lenin's officers, but they were very formal, and suddenly busy when he wanted to talk. Bury soon found that there were only three safe subjects: card games, Moties, and tea. If MacArthur had been fueled by coffee, Lenin's drive operated on tea; and tea drinkers are more knowledgeable about the subject than coffee drinkers. Bury's ships traded in tea as they traded in anything else men would pay for, but he was carrying none; and he did not drink it.

Thus Bury spent endless hours at the bridge table; in threes, officers of both Lenin and MacArthur were willing to sit with him in his cabin, which was always less crowded than the wardroom. It was easy to talk to Lenin's officers about Moties, too-always in groups, but they were curious. After ten months in the Mote system, most had never seen a Motie. Everyone wanted to hear about aliens, and Bury was ready to tell them.

The intervals between rubbers stretched as Bury spoke animatedly of the Motie world, the Mediators who could read minds though they said they could not, the zoo, the Castle, the baronial estates with their fortified look-Bury had certainly noticed that. And the conversation would move to the dangers. The Moties had not sold weapons or even shown them, because they planned an attack and would keep its nature a surprise. They had seeded MacArthur with Brownies-it was almost the first act of the first Mode they'd ever encountered-and the insidiously helpful and likable beasts had seized the ship and nearly escaped with all the military secrets of the Empire. Only Admiral Kutuzov's vigilance had prevented total disaster.

And the Moties thought themselves more intelligent than humans. They saw humanity as beasts to be tamed, with gentleness if possible, but tamed, converted into another caste to serve the nearly invisible Masters.

He spoke of Moties and he hated them. Pictures flashed through his mind, sometimes at the mere thought of a Motie, and always at night when he tried to sleep. He had nightmares of a Marine space suit and battle armor. It approached from behind, and three thy pairs of eyes glittered through the faceplate. Sometimes the dream would end in a cloud of spidery six-limbed aliens thrashing, dying in vacuum, flopping around a human head; and Bury would sleep. But sometimes the nightmare ended with Bury mutely screaming at Lenin's guards while the suited figure entered the battleship, and Bury would wake in cold sweat. The Ekaterinas had to be warned.