The Mote in God's Eye

Whitbread and Potter grimaced. At Staley’s direction they began to heave demon bodies out the hole in the side of the car. The Warriors were like twins of each other, all identical except for the cooked areas where the x-ray laser had swept through them. The feet were sheathed in sharp horn at toe and heel. One kick, backward or forward, and that would be all. The heads were small.

“Are they sentient?” Whitbread asked.

“By your standards, yes, but they aren’t very inventive,” Whitbread’s Motie said. She sounded like Whitbread reciting lessons to the First Lieutenant, her voice very precise but without feelings. “They can fix any weapon that ever worked, but they don’t tend to invent their own. Oh, and there’s a Doctor form, a hybrid between the real Doctor and the Warrior. Semisentient. You should be able to guess what they look like. You’d better have the Brown look at any weapons you keep—”

Without warning the car began to move. “Where are we going?” Staley asked.

Whitbread’s Motie twittered. It sounded a little like a mockingbird whistle. “That’s the next city down the line…”

“They’ll have a roadblock. Or an armed party waiting for us,” Staley said. “How far is it?”

“Oh—fifty kilometers.”

“Take us halfway and stop,” Staley ordered.

“Yes, sir.” The Motie sounded even more like Whitbread. “They’ve underestimated you, Horst. That’s the only way I can explain this. I’ve never heard of a Warrior killed by anything but another Warrior. Or a Master, sometimes, not often. We fight the Warriors against each other. It’s how we keep their population down.”

“Ugh,” Whitbread muttered. “Why not just—not breed them?”

The Motie laughed. It was a peculiarly bitter laugh, very human, and very disturbing. “Didn’t any of you ever wonder what killed the Engineer aboard your ship?”

“Aye.” “Of course.” “Sure.” They all answered together. Charlie twittered something.

“They may as well know,” Whitbread’s Motie said. “She died because there was nobody to get her pregnant.”

There was a long silence. “That’s the whole secret. Don’t you get it yet? Every variant of my species has to be made pregnant after she’s been female for a while. Child, male, female, pregnancy, male, female, pregnancy, ‘round and ‘round. If she doesn’t get pregnant in time, she dies. Even us. And we Mediators can’t get pregnant. We’re mules, sterile hybrids.”

“But—” Whitbread sounded like a kid just told the truth about Santa. “How long do you live?”

“About twenty-five of your years. Fifteen years after maturity. But Engineers and Farmers and Masters—especially Masters!—have to be pregnant within a couple of our years. That Engineer you picked up must have been close to the deadline already.”

They drove on in silence. “But—good Lord,” Potter said carefully. “That’s terrible.”

“ ‘Terrible.’ You son of a bitch. Of course it’s terrible. Sally and her—”

“What’s eating you?” Whitbread demanded.

“Birth control pills. We asked Sally Fowler what a human does when she doesn’t want children just yet. She uses birth control pills. But nice girls don’t use them. They just don’t have sex,” she said savagely.

The car was speeding down the tracks. Horst sat at the rear, which was now the front, staring out with his weapon poised. He turned slightly. The Moties were both glaring at the humans, their lips parted slightly to show teeth, enlarging their smile, but the bitterness of the words and tones belied the friendly looks. “They just don’t have sex!” Whitbread’s Motie said again. “Fyoofwuffle(whistle)! Now you know why we have wars. Always wars…”

“Population explosion,” Potter said.

“Yeah. Whenever a civilization rises from savagery, Moties stop dying from starvation! You humans don’t know what population pressure is! We can keep the numbers down in the lesser breeds, but what can the givers of orders do about their own numbers? The closest thing we’ve got to a birth control pill is infanticide!”

“And you can nae do that,” Potter said. “Any such instinct would be bred out o’ the race. So presently everyone is fighting for what food is left.”

“Of course.” Whitbread’s Motie was calmer now. “The higher the civilization, the longer the period of savagery. And always there’s Crazy Eddie in there pitching, trying to break the pattern of the Cycles, fouling things up worse. We’re pretty close to a collapse now, gentlemen, in case you didn’t notice. When you came there was a terrible fight over jurisdiction. My Master won—”

Charlie whistled and hummed for a second.

“Yeah. King Peter tried for that, but he couldn’t get enough support. Wasn’t sure he could win a fight with my Master… What we’re doing now will probably cause that war anyway. It doesn’t matter. It was bound to start soon.”

“You’re so crowded you grow plants on the rooftops,” said Whitbread.

“Oh, that’s just common sense. Like putting strips of cropland through the cities. Some always live, to start the Cycles over.”