The Mote In God's Eye

"We're to tell you that all contact with you will be through this ship," Whitbread told his Motie. "Sorry, but we can't invite you aboard MacArthur."

Whitbread's Motie gave a very human shrug to express her opinion of orders. Obedience posed no strain on either her or her human. "What will you do with the cutter when you leave?"

"It's a gift," Whitbread told her. "Maybe you'll want it for a museum. There are things the Captain wants you to know about us-"

"And things he wants to conceal. Certainly."

From orbit the planet was all circles: seas, lakes, an arc of a mountain range, the line of a river, a bay. There was one, eroded and masked by a forest. It would have been undetectable had it not fallen exactly across a line of mountains, breaking the backbone of a continent as a man's foot breaks a snake. Beyond, a sea the size of the Black Sea showed a flattish island in the exact center.

"The magma must have welled up where the asteroid tore the crust open," said Whitbread. "Can you imagine the sound it must have made?"

Whitbread's Motie nodded.

"No wonder you moved all the asteroids out to the Trojan points. That was the reason, wasn't it?"

"I don't know. Our records aren't complete from that long ago. I imagine the asteroids must have been easier to mine, easier to make a civilization from, once they were lumped together like that."

Whitbread remembered that the Beehive had been stone cold without a trace of radiation. "Just how long ago did all this happen?"

"Oh, at least ten thousand years. Whitbread, how old are your oldest records?"

"I don't know. I could ask someone." The midshipman looked down. They were crossing the Terminator-which was a series of arcs. The night side blazed with a galaxy of cities. Earth might have looked this way during the CoDominium; but the Empire's worlds had never bee so heavily populated.

"Look ahead." Whitbread's Motie pointed to a fleck o flame at the world's rim. "That's the transfer ship. Nov we can show you our world."

"I think your civilization must be a lot older than ours," said Whitbread.

Sally's equipment and personal effects were packed and ready in the cutter's lounge, and her minuscule cabin seemed bare and empty now. She stood at the view port and watched the silver arrowhead approach MacArthur Her Motie was not watching.

"I, um, I have a rather indelicate question," Sally's Fyunch(click) said.

Sally turned from the view port. Outside, the Motie ship had come alongside and a small boat was approaching from MacArthur. "Go ahead."

"What do you do if you don't want children yet?"

"Oh, dear," said Sally, and she laughed a little. She was the only woman among nearly a thousand men-and in a male-oriented society. She had known all this before she came, but still she missed what she thought of as girl talk. Marriage and babies and housekeeping and scandals: they were part of civilized life. She hadn't known how big a part until the New Chicago revolt caught her up, and she missed it even more now. Sometimes in desperation she had talked recipes with MacArthur's cooks as a poor substitute, but the only other feminine-oriented mind within light years was-her Fyunch(click).

"Fyunch(click)," the alien reminded her. "I wouldn't raise the subject but I think I ought to know-do you have children aboard MacArthur?"

"Me? No!" Sally laughed again. "I'm not even married."

"Married?"

Sally told the Motie about marriage. She tried not to skip any basic assumptions. It was sometimes hard to remember that the Motie was an alien. "This must sound a bit weird," she finished.

"'Come, I will conceal nothing from you,' as Mr. Renner would say." The mimicry was perfect, including gestures. "I think your customs are strange. I doubt that we'll adopt many of them, given the differences in physiology."

"Well-yes."

"But you marry to raise children. Who raises children born without marriage?"

"There are charities," Sally said grimly. Her distaste was impossible to disguise.

"I take it you've never..." The Motie paused delicately.

"No, of course not."

"How not? I don't mean why not, I mean how?"

"Well-you know that men and women have to have sexual relations to make a baby, the same as you-I've examined you pretty thoroughly."

"So that if you aren't married you just don't-get together?"

"That's right. Of course, there are pills a woman can take if she likes men but doesn't want to take the consequences.

"Pills? How do they work? Hormones?" The Motie seemed interested, if somewhat detached.

"That's right." They had discussed hormones. Motie physiology employed chemical triggers also, but the chemicals were quite different.

"But a proper woman doesn't use them," Sally's Motie suggested.

"When will you get married?"

"When I find the right man." She thought for a moment, hesitated, and added, "I may have found him already." And the damn fool may already be married to his ship, she added to herself.

"Then why don't you marry him?"