The Mote in God's Eye

“We’d build them on colony worlds and send them back,” the Motie answered. “Hire commercial shipping from men like Bury. We could pay more than anyone else. But look—it couldn’t last. The colonies would secede, so to speak. We’d have to start over with new colonies farther away. And on every world we settled there’d be population problems. Can you imagine what it would be like three hundred years from now?”

Whitbread tried. Ships like flying cities, millions of them. And Secession Wars, like the one that wrecked the First Empire. More and more Moties.

“Hundreds of Motie worlds, all trying to ship our expanding population out to newer worlds! Billions of Masters competing for territory and security! It takes time to use your Crazy Eddie Drive. Time and fuel to move around in each system looking for the next Crazy Eddie point. Eventually the outer edge of the Mote Sphere wouldn’t be enough. We’d have to expand inward, into the Empire of Humanity.”

“Um.” said Whitbread. The others only looked at the Motie, then plodded onward toward the city. Staley held the big rocket launcher cradled in his arms, as if the bulk gave him comfort. Sometimes he put his hand to his holster to touch the reassuring butt of his own weapon as well.

“It’d be an easy decision to reach,” Whitbread’s Motie said. “There’d be jealousy.”

“Of us? Of what? Birth control pills?”

“Yes.”

Staley snorted.

“Even that wouldn’t be the end. Eventually there would be a huge sphere of Motie-occupied systems. The center stars couldn’t even reach the edge. They’d fight among themselves. Continual war, continually collapsing civilizations. I suspect a standard technique would be to drop an asteroid into an enemy sun and figure on resettling the planet when the flare dies down. And the sphere would keep expanding, leaving more systems in the center.”

Staley said, “I’m not so sure you could whip the Empire.”

“At the rate our Warriors breed? Oh, skip it. Maybe you’d wipe us out. Maybe you’d save some of us for zoos; you sure wouldn’t have to worry about us not breeding in captivity. I don’t really care. There’s a good chance we’d bring on a collapse just by converting too much of our industrial capacity to building space craft.”

“If you’re not planning war with the Empire,” Staley said, “why are the three of us under death sentence?”

“Four. My Master wants my head as much as yours… well, maybe not. You’ll be wanted for dissection.”

Nobody showed surprise.

“You’re under death sentence because you now have enough information to have worked this out yourselves, you and MacArthur

’s biologists. A lot of the other Masters support the decision to kill you. They’re afraid that if you escape now, your government will see us as a spreading plague, expanding through the Galaxy, eventually wiping out the Empire.”

“And King Peter? He doesn’t want us killed?” Staley asked. “Why not?”

The Moties twittered again. Whitbread’s Motie spoke for the other one. “He may decide to kill you. I have to be honest about that. But he wants to put the djinn back in the bottle—if there’s any way that humans and Moties can go back to where we were before you found our Crazy Eddie probe, he’ll try it. The Cycles are better than—a whole Galaxy of Cycles!”

“And you?” Whitbread asked. “How do you see the situation?”

“As you do,” the Motie said carefully. “I am qualified to judge my species dispassionately. I am not a traitor.” There was a plea in the alien voice. “I am a judge. I judge that association between our species could only result in mutual envy, you for your birth control pills, us for our superior intelligence. Did you say something?”

“No.”

“I judge that spreading my species across space would involve ridiculous risks and would not end the pattern of the Cycles. It would only make each collapse more terrible. We would breed faster than we could spread, until collapse came for hundreds of planets at a stroke, routinely…”

“But,” said Potter, “ye’ve reached your dispassionate judgment by adopting our viewpoint—or rather, Whitbread’s. You act so much like Jonathon the rest of us have to keep counting your arms. What will happen when you give up the human viewpoint? Might not your judgment— Ugh!”

The alien’s left arm closed on the front of Potter’s uniform, painfully tight, and drew him down until his nose was an inch from the Motie’s sketched-in face. She said, “Never say that. Never think that. The survival of our civilization, any civilization, depends entirely on the justice of my class. We understand all viewpoints, and judge between them. If other Mediators come to a different conclusion from mine, that is their affair. It may be that their facts are incomplete, or their aims different. I judge on the evidence.”

She released him, Potter stumbled backward. With the fingers of a right hand the Motie picked Staley’s gunpoint out of her ear.

“That wasna’ necessary,” said Potter.

“It got your attention, didn’t it? Come on, we’re wasting time.”