The Mote in God's Eye

After a long time the Admiral grunted, “Yeah. Here’s a copy of the report on what we found in the probe. Take it somewhere and study it, you’ve got an appointment with the Viceroy tomorrow afternoon and he’ll expect you to know something. Your anthropologist helped write that report, you can discuss it with her if you want. Later on you can go look at the probe, we’re bringing it down today.” Cranston chuckled at Blaine’s surprised look. “Curious about why you’re getting this stuff? You’ll find out. His Highness has plans and you’re going to be part of them. We’ll let you know.”

Rod saluted and left in bewilderment, the TOP SECRET report clutched under his arm.

The report was mostly questions.

Most of the probe’s internal equipment was junk, fused and melted clutters of plastic blocks, remains of integrated circuitry, odd strips of conducting and semi conducting materials jumbled together in no rational order. There was no trace of the shroud lines, no gear for reeling them in, no apertures in the thirty-two projections at one end of the probe. If the shrouds were all one molecule it might explain why they were missing; they would have come apart, changed chemically, when Blaine’s cannon cut them. But how had they controlled the sail? Could the shrouds somehow be made to contract and relax, like a muscle?

An odd idea, but some of the intact mechanisms were just as odd. There was no standardization of parts in the probe. Two widgets intended to do almost the same job could be subtly different or wildly different. Braces and mountings seemed hand carved. The probe was as much a sculpture as a machine.

Blaine read that, shook his head, and called Sally. Presently she joined him in his cabin.

“Yes, I wrote that,” she said. “It seems to be true. Every nut and bolt in that probe was designed separately. It’s less surprising if you think of the probe as having a religious purpose. But that’s not all. You know how redundancy works?”

“In machines? Two gilkickies to do one job. In case one fails.”

“Well, it seems that the Moties work it both ways.”

“Moties?”

She shrugged. “We had to call them something. The Mote engineers made two widgets do one job, all right, but the second widget does two other jobs, and some of the supports are also bimetallic thermostats and thermoelectric generators all in one. Rod, I barely understand the words. Modules: human engineers work in modules, don’t they?”

“For a complicated job, of course they do.”

“The Moties don’t. It’s all one piece, everything working on everything else. Rod, there’s a fair chance the Moties are brighter than we are.”

Rod whistled. “That’s… frightening. Now, wait a minute. They’d have the Alderson Drive, wouldn’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. But they have some things we don’t. There are biotemperature superconductors,” she said, rolling it as if she’d memorized the phrase, “painted on in strips.”

“Then there’s this.” She reached past him to turn pages. “Here, look at this photo. And the little pebbly meteor holes.”

“Micrometeorites. It figures.”

“Well, nothing larger than four thousand microns got through the meteor defense. Only nobody ever found a meteor defense. They don’t have the Langston Field or anything like it.”

“But—”

“It must have been the sail. You see what that means? The autopilot attacked us because it thought MacArthur

was a meteor.”

“What about the pilot? Why didn’t—”

“No. The alien was in frozen sleep, as near as we can tell. The life-support systems went wrong about the time we took it aboard. We killed it.”

“That’s definite?”

Sally nodded.

“Hell. All that way it came. The Humanity League wants my head on a platter with an apple in my mouth, and I don’t blame them. Aghhhh…” A sound of pain.

“Stop it,” Sally said softly.

“Sorry. Where do we go from here?”

“The autopsy. It fills half the report.” She turned pages and Rod winced. Sally Fowler had a stronger stomach than most ladies of the Court.

The meat of the Motie was pale; its blood was pink, like a mixture of tree sap and human blood. The surgeons had cut deep into its back, exposing the bones from the back of the skull to where the coccyx would have been on a man.

“I don’t understand. Where’s the spine?”

“There is none,” Sally told him. “Evolution doesn’t seem to have invented vertebrae on Mote Prime,”

There were three bones in the back, each as solid as a leg bone. The uppermost was an extension of the skull, as if the skull had a twenty-cm handle. The joint at its lower end was at shoulder level; it would nod the head but would not turn it.

The main backbone was longer and thicker. It ended in a bulky, elaborate joining, partly ball-and-socket, at about the small of the back. The lower backbone flared into hips and sockets for the thighs.

There was a spinal cord, a major nervous connective line, but it ran ventral to the backbones, not through them.

“It can’t turn its head,” Rod said aloud. “It has to turn at the waist. That’s why the big joint is so elaborate. Right?”