The Mote in God's Eye

In a few minutes the plane was higher and coming straight toward him. It was moving slowly now, obviously searching. He waved again, although he had a momentary impulse to hide, which was plainly silly. He needed to be found, although what he would say to a Motie was not at all clear.

The plane moved past him and hovered. Jet pipes curved down and forward, and it dropped dangerously fast to settle into the plants. There were three Moties inside, and a Brown-and-white emerged quickly.

“Horst!” it called in Whitbread’s voice. “Where are the others?”

Staley waved toward the rounded dome. It was still an hour’s march away.

Whitbread’s Motie seemed to sag. “That’s torn it. Horst, are they there yet?”

“Sure. They’re waiting for me. They’ve been there about three hours.”

“Oh, my God. Maybe they couldn’t get inside. Whitbread couldn’t get inside. Come on, Horst.” She gestured toward the plane. “You’ll have to squeeze in somehow.”

Another Brown-and-white was inside and the pilot was a Brown. Whitbread’s Motie sang something ranging through five octaves and using at least nine tones. The other Brown-and-white gestured wildly. They made room for Staley between the contoured seats, and the Brown did things to the controls. The plane rose and shot toward the building ahead. “Maybe they didn’t get in,” Whitbread’s Motie repeated. “Maybe.”

Horst crouched uncomfortably in the speeding jet and wondered. He didn’t like this at all. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Whitbread’s Motie looked at him strangely. “Maybe nothing.” The other two Moties said nothing at all.

34. Trespassers

Whitbread and Potter stood alone within the dome. They stared in wonder.

The dome was only a shell. A single light source very like an afternoon sun blazed halfway down its slope. Moties used that kind of illumination in many of the buildings Whitbread had seen.

Underneath the dome it was like a small city—but not quite. Nobody was home. There was no sound, no motion, no light in any of the windows. And the buildings…

There was no coherency to this city. The buildings jarred horribly against each other. Whitbread winced at two—clean-lined many-windowed pillars framing what might have been an oversized medieval cathedral, all gingerbread, a thousand cornices guarded by what Bury’s Motie had said were Motie demons.

Here were a hundred styles of architecture and at least a dozen levels of technology. Those geodesic forms could not have been built without prestressed concrete or something more sophisticated, not to mention the engineering mathematics. But this building nearest the gate was of sun-baked mud bricks. Here a rectangular solid had walls of partly silvered glass; there the walls were of gray stone, and the tiny windows had no glass in them, only shutters to seal them from the elements.

“Rain shutters. It must have been here before the dome,” Potter said.

“Anyone can see that. The dome is almost new. That cathedral, it might be, that cathedral in the center is so old it’s about to fall apart.”

“Look there. Yon parabolic-hyperboloid structure has been cantilevered out from a wall. But look at the wall!”

“Yah, it must have been part of another building. God knows how old that is.” The wall was over a meter thick, and ragged around the edges and the top. It was made of dressed stone blocks that must have massed five hundred kilos each. Some vinelike plant had invaded it, surrounded it, permeated it to the extent that by now it must be holding the wall together.

Whitbread leaned close and peered into the vines. “No cement, Gavin. They’ve fitted the blocks together. And still it supports the rest of the building—which is concrete. They built to last.”

“Do ye remember what Horst said about the Stone Beehive?”

“He said he could feel the age in it. Right. Right…”

“It must be of all different ages, this place. I think we’ll find that it’s a museum. A museum of architecture? And they’ve added to it, century after century. Finally they threw up that dome to protect it from the elements.”

“Yah…”

“Ye sound dubious.”

“That dome is two meters thick, and metal. What kind of elements…”

“Asteroid falls, it may be. No, that’s nonsense. The asteroids were moved away eons ago.”

“I think I want to have a look at that cathedral. It looks to be the oldest building here.”

The cathedral was a museum right enough. Any civilized man in the Empire would have recognized it. Museums are all alike.

There were cases faced in glass, and old things within, marked by plaques with dates and printing on them. “I can read the numbers,” said Potter. “Look, they’re in four and five figures. And this is base twelve!”

“My Motie asked me once how old our recorded civilization is. How old is theirs, Gavin?”

“Well, their year is shorter… Five figures. Dating backward from some event; that’s a minus sign in front of each of them. Let me see…” He took out his computer and scrawled quick, precise figures. “That number would be seventy-four thousand and some-odd. Jonathon, the plaques are almost new.”