The Gripping Hand (14 page)

The elevator opened onto a corridor lined with display cases. Jennifer led the way past them. She turned at the far end to find Renner ambling at leisure, peering at Mai Tai parasol fungi and huge-headed glider snakes and ponds of oddly colored water with microscope screens attached. . . . He sighed and moved briskly to join them.

At the far end was a conference room with refreshments, a large table, and a hologram wall.

"We've got specimens from four hundred Imperial worlds and thirty Outie planets," Jennifer said. "Too many. There's no room to set up live demonstrations, so mostly we have holograms. Wanora!"

"Ready," the ceiling said.

"My sequence one, please."

"Certainly."

A series of holograms formed at the far end of the room.

"These are from water worlds," Jennifer said. "Just about every one alike. Four fins, a head, and a tail. Like us."

Another series of holograms formed. "Then there are forms evolved from planets without much water. Theory says they crawled out earlier. Six- and eight-limbed forms. The Tabletop Crazylegs with eighteen. But again all symmetric."

"You have holograms of—how many do you have?" Bury asked.

"Excellency, we try to be
complete
."

"Do you have the Levantine Honeypot?"

"Mmm? Wanora! Levantine Honeypot."

The holograph display showed what looked like a grossly misshapen barrel, with bright flowers at its top. Small birdlike creatures fluttered around it. Abruptly, slender tendrils shot up from the edge of the barrel to entangle one of the fliers and drag it out of sight.

"What
is
that?" Ruth Cohen asked.

"I confess it's new to me," Jennifer said. Text was scrolling across the screen: "
Kaybo Sietzus
. Local Anglic name is the Levantine Honeypot. Largely sessile carnivorous animal.

"The Honeypot is one of the largest known animal life-forms to display radial but not bilateral symmetry. Its biochemistry was thought to be unique until 3030 when Ricardo haLevy described the life cycle of the Tabletop Ground Hag, whose larval form uses similar enzyme processes."

"Ugly thing," Renner said.

"They're not very common," Bury said. "Never more than one in an oasis. Usually none at all. They can't move fast, and dogs like to eat them." He read quickly. "Interesting. When I was in school, the Honeypot was used as an example of why panspermia wasn't true. Totally unique and all that. I hadn't heard there was anything like it. I take it that the Blaine Institute accepts the panspermia theory?"

"Most of us, Excellency," Jennifer said.

Bury chuckled at the note of surprise. "Traders do not spend all their time reading commodity price reports."

"Clearly."

"Panspermia?" Ruth Cohen said.

"An old theory, from before CoDominium times," Jennifer Banda said. "The notion is that life is so improbable that it can happen only once in a galaxy."

"
Omnia cellula e cellula
," Renner muttered.

Ruth frowned at him.

"Sorry. A phrase they taught in school. All cells come from cells. No spontaneous generation of life. It was an early experiment in scientific discovery."

"Right," Jennifer said. "So the theory is that eventually all successful life-forms evolve a means of reproducing across interstellar distances. When we got out into space, we found there were organics all over the place, and they could cross interstellar distances by hopping rides with comet clouds. Sometime back then, I guess during the early days of the First Empire, a scientist named Sir Fred Hoyle postulated that an intelligent entity was deliberately sending biochemical messages through the galaxy."

"You don't believe that, do you?" Ruth asked.

Jennifer shrugged. "Not really, but you know, for all that people keep saying Sir Fred must have been off his head, we've never been able to disprove it. Space is just
rich
with improbable organics." She paused for a moment. "I think the Moties believe it."

Bury looked at her critically. "How could you possibly know that?"

"Oh. Sorry. I've been trying to think like a Motie so long sometimes I forget. I mean, I think the Moties will believe it."

The holograms continued. A score of worlds had jet black plants. "It's based on selenium and it's a lot more complicated than chlorophyll," Jennifer said. "But again we can find copies in interstellar organics. If this stuff gets rooted first, chlorophyll doesn't have a chance because the black plants use yellow sunlight better.

"Dry worlds are different. More limbs, usually. But still symmetry," Jennifer said. "Always symmetry. That's the puzzle. If only you'd brought back some seeds or something from Mote Prime!"

Renner laughed (and Bury didn't). "Admiral Kutuzov went to great lengths to prevent that. Jennifer, we pretty well accepted that all the asymmetrical forms were derived from the Engineer class, and they evolved the three arms after they were intelligent."

"Yes, they believe that, too. But of course they don't remember."

Bury looked at her quickly, but she had turned back to the holographic displays.

When We said to the angels:

 

"Bow before Adam in adoration,"

 

they all bowed but Ibis.

 

He was one of the djinni and rebelled against his Lord's command.
And yet you take him and his offspring as your friends.

 

—al-Qur'an

 

This way," Jennifer Banda said. She ushered them into a twenty-fourth-floor windowed room that ran most of the length of the Institute. A dozen people in their twenties sat at tables or poured themselves coffee from an Imperial Autonetics urn. One wall of the room was French doors leading onto a veranda cantilevered out over the beach area far below. The brisk wind smelled of seawater.

"Quite a view," Ruth Cohen said.

Kevin Renner nodded absently. The atmosphere was odd. A dozen graduate students. They all knew that Kevin Renner and Horace Bury had been to Mote Prime—and they were all looking at each other, or out at a spectacular view that they had certainly seen before.

"McQuorquodale.
Philosophic Journal
, about six months ago," someone said. "Studies of a hummingdragon in motion."

"But it's not my field."

"It'll still be on the test. Depend on it."

Jennifer led them out to the balcony. Renner went to the rail and looked over, then noticed that Ruth Cohen had stayed near the door.

"Acrophobia?"

"Maybe a little." She sat at a table near the wall, and after a moment Bury wheeled his travel chair to join her. Renner leaned against the railing and enjoyed the view while listening to the conversations behind him.

A female voice waxed eloquent about the importance of parasites in ecologies, while her male companion pretended interest. Renner remembered similar conversations when he was that age and sympathized.

Two students at the next table sipped tea. "I still say it isn't fair. I'm in political science, for God's sake. I'll never need to know anything about organic chemistry that I can't find on the computer."

"That's what you get to prove next week," another said. He chuckled. "I offered to help, Miriam Anne."

Renner took a seat between Ruth Cohen and Jennifer Banda. "Nice place." He scratched his head. "Okay, I give up."

Jennifer Banda raised an eyebrow.

"This is Blaine Institute, the primary center for the study of Moties. Here are two people who've been on Mote Prime. And no one's interested in us."

"Polite," Jennifer said. "They were warned not to bother you."

"Ah." It was the explanation Renner had expected, but he still felt something was wrong.

"We've all studied your flick, Sir Kevin. And every Imperial Autonetics report that mentions the Mote."

"Commendable," Bury said. "And of course you had the Moties to study. I presume holograms were made of everything they said."

Jennifer's answer was drowned out as the girl at the next table choked on her drink, then set it down with exaggerated care.

"What have you learned?" Bury asked.

"Well, we've compiled a general history of the Mote," Jennifer said. "As much as Jock and Charlie could remember."

"Jock and Charlie?" Ruth asked.

"Jock and Charlie and Ivan were the ambassadors from Mote Prime," Jennifer said. "Admiral Kutuzov couldn't refuse them. But you have to remember, they don't represent the whole system; not even the planet. Just one government, or even one extended family, among maybe tens of thousands."

"King Peter," Bury said, "Of course he wasn't really a king and the government wasn't really a monarchy, but that is the name they chose in hopes that it would sound familiar to us. They knew us that well, even then."

Jennifer nodded. "They certainly learned more about us than we did about them. They sent three ambassadors, a Master and two Mediators. Ruth, you know about Masters and Mediators? Moties are a differentiated species with a lot of different castes. The Masters give the orders and the Mediators talk for them. Anyway, they called the Master 'Ivan'—probably because Admiral Kutuzov was in charge of the expedition and they thought the Russians were Masters in the Empire—and the Mediators got the names Jock and Charlie. Ivan died first, but he never talked much except through the Mediators so we didn't learn much from him. Then—anyway, as His Excellency said, we made holos of everything we could. Of course, once you get back a couple of cycles there wasn't much detail."

"Cycles," Ruth said. "I saw a lot about that in school. It's about all I remember about Moties."

"Too right," Renner said. "Everything about the Mote was cycles. Civilizations rise and fall."

"Sometimes incredibly fast," Jennifer said. "And they tried everything! Industrial feudalism, communism, capitalism, things we never even thought of. Anyway, we got lots of stories, what we'd call folk legends, but not much history."

"There couldn't be," Ruth Cohen said. "It takes continuity to make history. I can feel sorry for the Moties."

"I pity them, too," Bury said. "Who could not? They die in agony if they can't become pregnant and give birth. Endless population expansion, endless wars for limited resources. Sometimes I fear that only I can see how dangerous that makes them. Jennifer, we visited Mote Prime. A world crowded beyond description, with complex competitions for power and prestige. We were told it would collapse soon, and I believed them. We also saw signs of a civilization in the asteroid belt. Jacob Buckman told me that many of the asteroids had been moved."

"I'm surprised he noticed," Renner said.

"He lost interest in them after he found out," Bury said.

Jennifer laughed. The couple at the next table had fallen silent. They were joined by two other students who also pretended not to listen.

"We learned nothing important about the asteroid civilization," Bury said. "That has always concerned me. Perhaps you know more, now?"

"Not a lot," Jennifer said. "The—our Moties had never visited the asteroids. Jock believed that the Trailing Trojans were in an ascendant imperial phase, but he was never certain."

"The industrial feudalism on Mote Prime will long since have collapsed," Bury said. "Other systems will be emerging. Or perhaps nothing but savagery."

"Oh, surely not," the girl at the next table said.

"Circles," Renner said. "You didn't see them."

"Circles?" Ruth Cohen asked.

Before Renner could answer, the girl at the next table stood and bowed slightly. "Miriam Anne Vukcik. Political history. This is Tom Boyarski. May we join you?"

"Please do," Bury said.

"Circles?" Ruth asked again.