The Mote in God's Eye

Just like a monkey, Whitbread thought. It was the first chance he’d had to look at the miniatures. Their fur was thicker, and mottled brown and yellow where the large one was uniformly soft brown. The four arms were nearly alike, five fingers on the left hands and six on the rights; but the arms and fingers were identically slender, identically jointed. Yet the muscles of the upper left shoulder were anchored to the top of the skull. Why, if not for greater strength and leverage?

He was delighted when Sally led him to a small corner table away from where the biosciences people were scratching their heads and arguing loudly. He got coffee for both of them and asked her about the strange musculature of the miniatures; it wasn’t what he’d really like to talk to her about, but it was a start…

“We think it’s vestigial,” she said. “They obviously don’t need it; the left arms aren’t sized for heavy work anyway.”

“Then the little ones aren’t monkeys! They’re an offshoot of the big ones.”

“Or they’re both an offshoot of something else. Jonathon, we’ve got more than two classifications already. Look.” She turned to the intercom screen and a view of the Motie’s room appeared.

“She seems happy enough,” said Whitbread. He grinned at what the Motie had been doing. “Mr. Crawford isn’t going to like what she’s done to his bunk.”

“Dr. Horvath didn’t want to stop her. She can fiddle with anything she likes as long as it isn’t the intercom.

Crawford’s bunk had been shortened and contoured. The contours were exceedingly strange, not only because of the complex joints in the Motie’s back, but also because she apparently slept on her side. The mattress had been cut and sewn, the underlying steel bent and twisted. Now there were grooves for two right arms and a pit for a projecting hipbone and a high ridge to serve as a pillow— “Why would she sleep only on her right side?” Whitbread asked.

“Maybe she’d rather defend herself with her left, if she happened to be surprised in her sleep. The left is so much stronger.”

“Could be. Poor Crawford. Maybe she’s expecting him to try and cut her throat some night.” He watched the alien at work on the overhead lamp. “She does have one-track mind, doesn’t she? We could get some good out of this. She might improve something.”

“Perhaps. Jonathon, did you study sketches of the dissected alien?”

She sounded like a schoolmistress. She was old enough to be one, too; but much too pretty, Whitbread thought. He said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you see any differences?”

“The color of the fur is different. But that’s nothing. The other one was in suspended animation for hundred of years.”

“Anything else?”

“The other one was taller, I think. I wouldn’t swear.”

“Look at her head.”

Whitbread frowned. “I don’t see it.”

Sally used her pocket computer. It hummed slightly, indicating that it was in communication with the main ship’s memory. Somewhere in MacArthur a laser moved across holographic lines. The ship’s memory held everything humanity knew of Moties—such as it was. It found the information Sally asked for and sent it to her pocket computer; a sketch appeared on the face of the flat box.

Whitbread studied the sketch, then looked to the screen and the Motie. “Her forehead. It slopes!”

“That’s what we thought, Dr. Horvath and I.”

“It’s not easy to see. The Motie’s head is so flunking lopsided anyway!’

“I know. But it’s there. We think there’s a difference in the hands, too, but it’s very small.” Sally frowned and three short grooves appeared between brown eyes. She’d cut her hair short for space, and the frown and short hair made her look very efficient. Whitbread didn’t like it. “That gives us three different kinds of Motie,” she said. “And only four Moties. That’s a high mutation rate, wouldn’t you say?”

“I… wouldn’t be surprised.” Whitbread remembered the history lessons Chaplain Hardy had held for the midshipmen during the trip out. “They’re trapped in this system. Bottled up. If they had an atomic war, they’d have to live with it afterwards, wouldn’t they?” He thought of Earth and shuddered.

“We haven’t seen any evidence of atomic wars.”

“Except the mutation rate.”

Sally laughed. “You’re arguing in circles. Anyway, it doesn’t hold up. None of these three types is a cripple, Jonathon. They’re all very well adapted, all healthy—except the dead one, of course, and she hardly counts. They wouldn’t choose a cripple to pilot the probe.”

“No. So what’s the answer?”

“You saw them first, Jonathon. Call the one in the probe Type A. What was the relationship between Types B and C?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you saw them together.”

“It didn’t make sense. The little ones stayed out of the big one’s way, at first, and the big one let them alone. Then I signaled the big one that I wanted her to go with me to MacArthur. She forthwith picked the first two little ones that came to hand, made sure they were safe, and killed the rest without warning!”