The Mote in God's Eye

“Languages change. They must translate the plaques every so often.”

“Yes… yes, I know this sign. ‘Approximately.’ ” Potter moved swiftly from exhibit to exhibit. “Here it is again. Not here… but here. Jonathon, come look at this one.”

It was a very old machine. Once iron, it must be rust now, all the way through. There was a sketch of what it must have looked like once. A howitzer cannon.

“Here on the plaque. This double-approximation sign means educated guesswork. I wonder how many times that legend has been translated.”

Room after room. They found a wide staircase leading up, the steps shallow but broad enough for human feet. Above, more rooms, more exhibits. The ceilings were low. The lighting came from lines of bulbs of incandescent filaments that came on when they entered, went out when they left. The bulbs were mounted carefully so they wouldn’t mar the ceiling. The museum itself must be an exhibit.

The plaques were all alike, but the cases were all different. Whitbread did not think it strange. No two Motie artifacts were ever precisely alike. But one… he almost laughed.

A bubble of glass several meters long and two meters wide rested on a free-form sculpted frame of almost beach-colored metal. Both looked brand-new. There was a plaque on the frame. Inside was an ornately carved wooden box, coffin sized, bleached white by age, its lid the remains of a rusted wire grille. It had a plaque. Under the rusted wire, a selection of wonderfully shaped, eggshell-thin pottery, some broken, some whole. Each piece in the set had a dated plaque. “It’s like nested exhibits,” he said.

Potter did not laugh. “That’s what it is. See here? The bubble case is about two thousand years old… that can’t be right, can it?”

“Not unless…” Whitbread rubbed his class ring along the glass bubble. “They’re both scratched. Artificial sapphire.” He tried it on the metal. The metal scratched the stone. “I’ll accept two thousand.”

“But the box is around twenty-four hundred, and the pottery goes from three thousand up. Look you how the style changes. ‘Tis a depiction of the rise and fall of a particular school of pottery styling.”

“Do you think the wooden case came out of another museum?”

“Aye.”

Whitbread did laugh then. They moved on. Presently Whitbread pointed and said, “Here, that’s the same metal, isn’t it?” The small two-handed weapon—it had to be a gun—carried the same date as the sapphire bubble.

Beyond that was a puzzling structure near the wall of the great dome. It was made of a vertical lacework of hexagons, each formed from steel members two meters long. There were thick plastic frames in some of the hexagons, and broken fragments in others.

Potter pointed out the gentle curve of the structure. “ ’Twas another dome. A spherical dome with geodesic bracing. Not much left of it—and it wouldn’t hae covered all of the compound anyway.”

“You’re right. It didn’t weather away, though. Look at how these members near the edge are twisted. Tornadoes? This part of the country seems flat enough.”

It took Potter a moment to understand. There were no tornadoes in the rough terraformed New Scotland. He remembered his meteorology lessons and nodded. “Aye. Maybe. Maybe.” Beyond the fragments of the earlier dome Potter found a framework of disintegrating metal within what might have been a plastic shell. The plastic itself looked frayed and motheaten. There were two dates on the plaque, both in five figures. The sketch next to the plaque showed a narrow ground car, primitive looking, with three seats in a row. The motor hood was open.

“Internal combustion,” said Potter. “I had the idea that Mote Prime was short on fossil fuels.”

“Sally had an idea on that too. Their civilization may have gone downhill when they used up all their fossil fuels. I wonder.”

But the prize was behind a great glass picture window in one wall. They found themselves looking into the “steeple” past an ancient, ornately carved bronze plaque that had a smaller plaque on it.

Within the “steeple” was a rocket ship. Despite the holes in the sides and the corrosion everywhere, it still held its shape: a long, cylindrical tank, very thin-walled, with a cabin showing behind a smoothly pointed nose.

They made for the stairs. There must be another window on the first floor…

And there was. They knelt to look into the motor.

Potter said, “I don’t quite…”

“NERVA style,” said Whitbread. His voice was almost a whisper. “Atomic. Very early type. You send some inert fuel through a core of uranium or plutonium or the like. Fission pile, prefusion…”

“Are you sure?”

Whitbread looked again before he nodded. “I’m sure.”

Fission had been developed after internal combustion; but there were still places in the Empire that employed internal combustion engines. Fission power was very nearly a myth, and as they stared the age of the place seemed to fail from the walls like a cloak and wrap them in silence.