The Mote in God's Eye

“We try to get to Charlie’s boss. You’ll be protected there. (Whistle, click, whistle.) Uh, call him King Peter. We don’t have kings, but he’s male now. He’s one of the most powerful givers of orders, and after he talks to you he’ll probably be willing to get you home.”

“Probably,” Horst said slowly. “Look, just what is this secret you’re so afraid of?”

“Later. We’ve got to get moving.”

Horst Staley drew his pistol. “No. Right now. Potter, is there anything in this museum that could communicate with Lenin? Find something.”

“Aye aye—do ye think ye must hae the pistol?”

“Just find us a radio!”

“Horst, listen,” Whitbread’s Motie insisted. “The decision makers know

you landed near here somewhere. If you try to communicate from here, they’ll cut you off. And if you do get a message through, they’ll destroy Lenin.” Staley tried to speak, but the Motie continued insistently. “Oh, yes, they can do it. It wouldn’t be easy. That Field of yours is pretty powerful. But you’ve seen what our Engineers can come up with, and you’ve never seen what the Warriors can do. We’ve seen one of your best ships destroyed now. We know how it can be done. Do you think one little battleship can survive against fleets from both here and the asteroid stations?”

“Jesus, Horst, she may be right,” Whitbread said.

“We’ve got to let the Admiral know.” Staley seemed uncertain, but the pistol never wavered. “Potter, carry out your orders.”

“You’ll get a chance to call Lenin

as soon as it’s safe,” Whitbread’s Motie insisted. Her voice was almost shrill for a moment, then fell to a modulated tone. “Horst, believe me, it’s the only way. Besides, you’ll never be able to operate a communicator by yourself. You’ll need our help, and we aren’t going to help you do anything stupid. We’ve got to get out of here!”

The other Motie trilled. Whitbread’s Motie answered, and they twittered back and forth. Whitbread’s Motie translated. “If my own Master’s troops don’t get here, the Museum Keeper’s Warriors will. I don’t know where the Keeper stands on this. Charlie doesn’t know either. Keepers are sterile, and they’re not ambitious, but they’re very possessive of what they already have.”

“Will they bomb us?” Whitbread asked.

“Not as long as we’re in here. It would wreck the museum, and museums are important. But the Keeper will send troops—if my own Master’s don’t get here first.”

“Why aren’t they here yet?” Staley demanded. “I don’t hear anything.”

“For God’s sake, they may be coming already! Look, my Master—my old Master—won jurisdiction over human studies. She won’t give that up, so she won’t invite anybody else in. She’ll try to keep the locals out of this, and since her holdings are around the Castle it’ll take a while to get Warriors here. It’s about two thousand kilometers.”

“That plane of yours was a fast one,” Staley said flatly.

“An emergency Mediator’s vehicle. Masters forbid each other to use them. Your coming to our system almost started a war over jurisdiction anyway, and putting Warriors in one of those could certainly do it…”

“Don’t your decision makers have any military planes at all?” Whitbread asked.

“Sure, but they’re slower. They might drive you to cover anyway. There’s a subway under this building—”

“Subway?” Staley said carefully. Everything was happening too fast. He was in command here, but he didn’t know what to do.

“Of course. People do visit museums sometimes. And it’ll take a while to get here by subway from the Castle. Who knows what the Keeper will be doing meantime? He might even forbid my Master’s invasion. But if he does, you can be sure he’ll kill you, to keep any other Masters from fighting here.”

“Find anything, Gavin?” Staley shouted.

Potter appeared at the doorway of one of the modernistic glass-and-steel pillars. “Nothing I can operate as a communicator. Nothing I can even be sure is one. And this is all the newer stuff, Horst. Anything in the older buildings may be rusted through.”

“Horst, we’ve got to get out of here!” Whitbread’s Motie insisted again. “There’s no time for talk—”

“Those Warriors could come in planes to the next station and then take the subway from there,” Whitbread reminded them. “We’d better do something, Horst.”

Staley nodded slowly. “All right. How do we leave? In your plane?”

“It won’t hold all of us,” Whitbread’s Motie said. “But we can send two with Charlie and I could—”

“No.” Staley’s tone was decisive. “We stay together. Can you call a larger plane?”

“I can’t even be sure that one would escape. You’re probably right. It would be better to stay together. Well, there’s nothing left but the subway.”

“Which might be full of enemies right now.” Staley thought for a moment. The dome was a bomb shelter and the mirror was a good defense against lasers. They could hole up here—but for how long? He began to feel the necessary paranoia of a soldier in enemy territory.

“Where do we have to go to get a message through to Lenin?” he demanded. That was obviously the first thing.