The Mote in God's Eye

“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?”

“Umm.”

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 Whites to nine Browns 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.”