The Mote in God's Eye

Her head was in a plastic hood that sealed around her neck like a Navy shower bag; she was obviously not used to nasal respirators. The bag blurred her voice slightly. “None at all. I certainly learned as much as they did from the um, er, orgy. What’s next?”

Language lessons.

There was a word: Fyunch(click). When the Chaplain pointed at himself and said “David,” the Motie he was looking at twisted her lower right arm around into the same position and said “Fyunch(click),” making the click with her tongue.”

Fine. But Sally said, “My Motie had the same name I think.”

“Do you mean you picked the same alien?”

“No, I don’t think so. And I know Fyunch(click)”—she said it carefully, making the click with her tongue then ruined the effect by giggling—”isn’t the word for Motie. I’ve tried that.”

The Chaplain frowned. “Perhaps all proper names sound alike to us. Or we may have the word for arm,” he said seriously. There was a classic story about that, so old that it probably came from preatomic days. He turned to another Motie, pointed at himself, and said, “Fyunch(click)?” His accent was nearly perfect, and he didn’t giggle.

The Motie said, “No.”

“They picked that up quickly,” said Sally.

Whitbread tried it. He swam among the Moties, pointing to himself and saying “Fyunch(click)?” He obtained four perfectly articulated No’s before an inverted Motie tapped him on the kneecap and said, “Fyunch(click) Yes.”

So: there were three Moties who would say “Fyunch(click)” to a human. Each to a different human, and not to the others. So?

“It may mean something like ‘I am assigned to you,’ ” Whitbread suggested.

“Certainly one hypothesis,” Hardy agreed. A rather good one, but there were insufficient data—had the boy made a lucky guess?

Moties crawled around them. Some of the instruments they carried might have been cameras or recorders. Some instruments made noises when the humans spoke; others extruded tape, or made wiggly orange lines on small screens. The Moties gave some attention to Hardy’s instruments, especially the male Brown mute, who disasembled Hardy’s oscilioscope and put it back together again before his eyes. The images on it seemed brighter and the persistence control worked much better, he thought. Interesting. And only the Browns did things like that.

The language lessons had become a group effort. It was a game now, this teaching of Anglic to Moties. Point and say the word, and the Moties would generally remember it. David Hardy gave thanks.

The Moties kept fiddling with the insides of their instruments, tuning them, or sometimes handing them to a Brown with a flurry of bird whistles. The range of their own voices was astonishing. Speaking Mote, they ranged from bass to treble in instants. The pitch was part of the code, Hardy guessed.

He was aware of time passing. His belly was a vast emptiness whose complaints he ignored with absentminded contempt. Chafe spots developed around his nose where the respirator fitted. His eyes smarted from Motie atmosphere that got under his goggles, and he wished he’d opted for either a helmet or a plastic sack like Sally’s. The Mote itself was a diffused bright point that moved slowly across the curved translucent wall. Dry breathing air was slowly dehydrating him.

These things he felt as passing time, and ignored. A kind of joy was in him. David Hardy was fulfilling his mission in life.

Despite the uniqueness of the situation, Hardy decided to stick to traditional linguistics. There were unprecedented problems with hand, face, ears, fingers. It developed that the dozen fingers of the right hands had one collective name, the three thick fingers of the left another. The ear had one name flat and another erect. There was no name for face, although they picked up the Anglic word immediately, and seemed to think it a worthwhile innovation.

He had thought that his muscles had adjusted to free fall; but now they bothered him. He did not put it down to exhaustion. He did not know where Sally had disappeared to, and the fact did not bother him. This was a measure of his acceptance of both Sally and the Moties as colleagues; but it was also a measure of how tired he was. Hardy considered himself enlightened, but what Sally would have called “overprotectiveness of women” was deeply ingrained in the Imperial culture—especially so in the monastic Navy.

It was only when his air gave out that the others could persuade Hardy to go back to the cutter.