The Mote in God's Eye (46 page)

Whitbread leaned close and peered into the vines. “No cement, Gavin. They’ve fitted the blocks together. And still it supports the rest of the building—which is concrete. They built to last.”

“Do ye remember what Horst said about the Stone Beehive?”

“He said he could feel the age in it. Right. Right...”

“It must be of all different ages, this place. I think we’ll find that it’s a museum. A museum of architecture? And they’ve added to it, century after century. Finally they threw up that dome to protect it from the elements.”

“Yah...”

“Ye sound dubious.”

“That dome is two meters thick, and metal. What kind of elements...”

“Asteroid falls, it may be. No, that’s nonsense. The asteroids were moved away eons ago.”

“I think I want to have a look at that cathedral. It looks to be the oldest building here.”

The cathedral was a museum right enough. Any civilized man in the Empire would have recognized it. Museums are all alike.

There were cases faced in glass, and old things within, marked by plaques with dates and printing on them. “I can read the numbers,” said Potter. “Look, they’re in four and five figures. And this is base twelve!”

“My Motie asked me once how old our recorded civilization is. How old is theirs, Gavin?”

“Well, their year is shorter... Five figures. Dating backward from some event; that’s a minus sign in front of each of them. Let me see...” He took out his computer and scrawled quick, precise figures. “That number would be seventy-four thousand and some-odd. Jonathon, the plaques are almost new.”

“Languages change. They must translate the plaques every so often.”

“Yes . . . yes, I know this sign. ‘Approximately.’” Potter moved swiftly from exhibit to exhibit. “Here it is again. Not here . . . but here. Jonathon, come look at this one.”

It was a very old machine. Once iron, it must be rust now, all the way through. There was a sketch of what it must have looked like once. A howitzer cannon.

“Here on the plaque. This double-approximation sign means educated guesswork. I wonder how many times that legend has been translated.”

Room after room. They found a wide staircase leading up, the steps shallow but broad enough for human feet. Above, more rooms, more exhibits. The ceilings were low. The lighting came from lines of bulbs of incandescent filaments that came on when they entered, went out when they left. The bulbs were mounted carefully so they wouldn’t mar the ceiling. The museum itself must be an exhibit.

The plaques were all alike, but the cases were all different. Whitbread did not think it strange. No two Motie artifacts were ever precisely alike. But one . . . he almost laughed.

A bubble of glass several meters long and two meters wide rested on a free-form sculpted frame of almost beach-colored metal. Both looked brand-new. There was a plaque on the frame. Inside was an ornately carved wooden box, coffin sized, bleached white by age, its lid the remains of a rusted wire grille.
It
had a plaque. Under the rusted wire, a selection of wonderfully shaped, eggshell-thin pottery, some broken, some whole. Each piece in the set had a dated plaque. “It’s like nested exhibits,” he said.

Potter did not laugh. “That’s what it is. See here? The bubble case is about two thousand years old . . . that can’t be right, can it?”

“Not unless...” Whitbread rubbed his class ring along the glass bubble. “They’re both scratched. Artificial sapphire.” He tried it on the metal. The metal scratched the stone. “I’ll accept two thousand.”

“But the box is around twenty-four hundred, and the pottery goes from three thousand up. Look you how the style changes. ‘Tis a depiction of the rise and fall of a particular school of pottery styling.”

“Do you think the wooden case came out of another museum?”

“Aye.”

Whitbread did laugh then. They moved on. Presently Whitbread pointed and said, “Here, that’s the same metal, isn’t it?” The small two-handed weapon—it had to be a gun—carried the same date as the sapphire bubble.

Beyond that was a puzzling structure near the wall of the great dome. It was made of a vertical lacework of hexagons, each formed from steel members two meters long. There were thick plastic frames in some of the hexagons, and broken fragments in others.

Potter pointed out the gentle curve of the structure. “‘Twas another dome. A spherical dome with geodesic bracing. Not much left of it—and it wouldn’t hae covered all of the compound anyway.”

“You’re right. It didn’t weather away, though. Look at how these members near the edge are twisted. Tornadoes? This part of the country seems flat enough.”

It took Potter a moment to understand. There were no tornadoes in the rough terraformed New Scotland. He remembered his meteorology lessons and nodded. “Aye. Maybe. Maybe.” Beyond the fragments of the earlier dome Potter found a framework of disintegrating metal within what might have been a plastic shell. The plastic itself looked frayed and motheaten. There were two dates on the plaque, both in five figures. The sketch next to the plaque showed a narrow ground car, primitive looking, with three seats in a row. The motor hood was open.

“Internal combustion,” said Potter. “I had the idea that Mote Prime was short on fossil fuels.”

“Sally had an idea on that too. Their civilization may have gone downhill when they used up all their fossil fuels. I wonder.”

But the prize was behind a great glass picture window in one wall. They found themselves looking into the “steeple” past an ancient, ornately carved bronze plaque that had a smaller plaque on it.

Within the “steeple” was a rocket ship. Despite the holes in the sides and the corrosion everywhere, it still held its shape: a long, cylindrical tank, very thin-walled, with a cabin showing behind a smoothly pointed nose.

They made for the stairs. There must be another window on the first floor...

And there was. They knelt to look into the motor.

Potter said, “I don’t quite...”

“NERVA style,” said Whitbread. His voice was almost a whisper. “Atomic. Very early type. You send some inert fuel through a core of uranium or plutonium or the like. Fission pile, prefusion...”

“Are you sure?”

Whitbread looked again before he nodded. “I’m sure.”

Fission had been developed after internal combustion; but there were still places in the Empire that employed internal combustion engines. Fission power was very nearly a myth, and as they stared the age of the place seemed to fail from the walls like a cloak and wrap them in silence.

The plane landed near the orange rags of a parachute and the remains of a cone. The open doorway was an accusing mouth just beyond.

Whitbread’s Motie jumped from the plane and rushed over to the cone. She twittered, and the pilot bounded from the ship to join her. “They opened it,” Whitbread’s Motie said. “I never thought Jonathon would solve it. It must have been Potter. Horst, is there any chance at all they didn’t go inside?”

Staley shook his head.

The Motie twittered to the Brown again. “Watch for aircraft, Horst,” Whitbread’s Motie said. She spoke to the other Brown-and-white, who left the airplane and stared at the skies.

The Brown picked up Whitbread’s empty pressure suit and armor. She worked rapidly, shaping something to take the place of the missing helmet and closing the suit top. Then she worked on the air regenerator, picking at the insides with tools from a belt pouch. The suit inflated and was set upright. Presently the Brown closed the panel and the suit was taut, like a man in vacuum. She tied lengths of line to constrict the shoulders and punched a hole at each wrist.

The empty man raised his arms to the sound of hissing air blowing out the wrist holes. The pressure dropped and the arms fell. Another spurt of hissing, and the arms rose again...

“That ought to do it,” Whitbread’s Motie said. “We set your suit up the same way, and raised the temperature to your body normal. With luck they may blast it without checking to see if you’re in it.”

“
Blast
it?”

“We sure can’t count on it, though. I wish there were some way to make it fire on an aircraft...”

Staley shook the Motie’s shoulder. The Brown stood by watching with the tiny half-smile that meant nothing at all. The equatorial sun was high overhead. “Why would anyone want to kill us?” Staley demanded.

“You’re all under death sentence, Horst.”

“But
why
? Is it the dome? Is there a taboo?”

“The dome, yes. Taboo, no. What do you take us for, primitives? You know too much, that’s all. Dead you-name-its tell no tales. Now come on, we’ve got to find them and get out of here.”

Whitbread’s Motie stooped to get under the door. Needlessly: but Whitbread would have stooped. The other Brown-and-white followed silently, leaving the Brown standing outside, her face a perpetual gentle smile.

They saw the other midshipmen near the cathedral. Horst Staley’s boots clumped hollowly as they approached. Whitbread looked up, noticed the Motie’s walk, and said “Fyunch(click)?”

“Fyunch(click).”

“We’ve been exploring your—”

“Jonathon, we don’t have time,” the Motie said. The other Brown-and-white eyed them with an air of impatience.

“We’re under a death sentence for trespassing,” Staley said flatly. “I don’t know why.”

There was silence. Whitbread said, “Neither do I. This is nothing but a museum—”

“Yes,” Whitbread’s Motie said. “You
would
have to land
here
. It’s not even bad luck. Your dumb animal miniatures must have programmed the reentry cones not to hit water or cities or mountain peaks. You were bound to come down in farm lands. Well, that’s where we put museums.”

“Out here? Why?” Potter asked. He sounded as if he already knew. “There are nae people here—”

“So they won’t get bombed.”

The silence was part of the age of the place. The Motie said, “Gavin, you aren’t showing much surprise.”

Potter attempted to rub his jaw. His helmet prevented it. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of persuading you that we hae learned nothing?”

“Not really. You’ve been here three hours.”

Whitbread broke in. “More like two. Horst, this place is fantastic! Museums within museums; it goes back incredibly far—is that the secret? That civilization is very old here? I don’t see why you’d hide that.”

“You’ve had a lot of wars,” Potter said slowly.

The Motie bobbed her head and shoulder. “Yah.”

“Big wars.”

“Right. Also little wars.”

“How many?”

“God’s sake, Potter! Who counts? Thousands of Cycles. Thousands of collapses back to savagery. Crazy Eddie eternally trying to stop it. Well, I’ve had it. The whole decision-maker caste has turned Crazy Eddie, to my mind. They think they’ll stop the pattern of Cycles by moving into space and settling other solar systems.”

Horst Staley’s tone was flat. As he spoke he looked carefully around the dome and his hand rested on his pistol butt. “Do they? And what is it we know too much of?”

“I’m going to tell you. And then I’m going to try to get you to your ship, alive—” She indicated the other Motie, who had stood impassively during the conversation. Whitbread’s Motie whistled and hummed. “Best call her Charlie,” she said. “You can’t pronounce the name. Charlie represents a giver of orders who’s willing to help you. Maybe. It’s your only chance, anyway—”

“So what do we do now?” Staley demanded.

“We try to get to Charlie’s boss. You’ll be protected there. (Whistle, click, whistle.) Uh, call him King Peter. We don’t have kings, but he’s male now. He’s one of the most powerful givers of orders, and after he talks to you he’ll probably be willing to get you home.”

“Probably,” Horst said slowly. “Look, just what is this secret you’re so afraid of?”

“Later. We’ve got to get moving.”

Horst Staley drew his pistol. “No. Right now. Potter, is there anything in this museum that could communicate with
Lenin
? Find something.”

“Aye aye—do ye think ye must hae the pistol?”

“Just find us a radio!”

“Horst, listen,” Whitbread’s Motie insisted. “The decision makers
know
you landed near here somewhere. If you try to communicate from here, they’ll cut you off. And if you
do
get a message through, they’ll destroy
Lenin
.” Staley tried to speak, but the Motie continued insistently. “Oh, yes, they can do it. It wouldn’t be easy. That Field of yours is pretty powerful. But you’ve seen what our Engineers can come up with, and you’ve
never
seen what the
Warriors
can do. We’ve seen one of your best ships destroyed now. We know how it can be done. Do you think one little battleship can survive against fleets from both here and the asteroid stations?”

“Jesus, Horst, she may be right,” Whitbread said.

“We’ve got to let the Admiral know.” Staley seemed uncertain, but the pistol never wavered. “Potter, carry out your orders.”

“You’ll get a chance to call
Lenin
as soon as it’s safe,” Whitbread’s Motie insisted. Her voice was almost shrill for a moment, then fell to a modulated tone. “Horst, believe me, it’s the only way. Besides, you’ll never be able to operate a communicator by yourself. You’ll need our help, and we aren’t going to help you do anything stupid. We’ve got to get
out
of here!”

The other Motie trilled. Whitbread’s Motie answered, and they twittered back and forth. Whitbread’s Motie translated. “If my own Master’s troops don’t get here, the Museum Keeper’s Warriors will. I don’t know where the Keeper stands on this. Charlie doesn’t know either. Keepers are sterile, and they’re not ambitious, but they’re very possessive of what they already have.”

“Will they bomb us?” Whitbread asked.

“Not as long as we’re in here. It would wreck the museum, and museums are
important
. But the Keeper will send troops—if my own Master’s don’t get here first.”

“Why aren’t they here yet?” Staley demanded. “I don’t hear anything.”

“For God’s sake, they may be coming already! Look, my Master—my old Master—won jurisdiction over human studies. She won’t give that up, so she won’t invite anybody else in. She’ll try to keep the locals out of this, and since her holdings are around the Castle it’ll take a while to get Warriors here. It’s about two thousand kilometers.”