The Mote In God's Eye

They were comfortable, but still it was a cage; and at nights they saw the brilliant red Eye and its tiny Mote. The Coal Sack was high in the night sky. It looked like a hooded Master blind in one eye.

"I fear," said Jock. "For my family, my civilization, my species, and my world."

"That's right, think large thoughts," said Charlie. "Why waste your mighty brain on little things? Look you-" Her voice and posture changed; she would speak of serious matters. "We've done what we can. This Institute of Sally's is a trivial fiasco, but we continue to cooperate. We show how friendly and harmless and honest we are. And meanwhile the blockade works and it will always work. There's not a hole in it."

"There is," said Jock. "No human seems to consider that the Masters might reach the Empire through normal space."

"There is no hole," Charlie repeated. She shifted two arms for emphasis. "No breach before the next collapse. Curse! Who could build another Crazy Eddie probe before the famines begin? And where would they send it? Here, into their fleets?" She signaled contempt. "Perhaps into the Coal Sack, toward the heart of the Empire? Have you thought of the launching lasers-far greater to compensate for the dust in the Coal Sack? No. We have done what we can, and the Cycles have begun again."

"Then what can we anticipate?" Jock's right arms were folded, her left extended and open: ready for attack, and thus projecting rhetorical mercilessness. "There may be unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the blockade. Wasted effort. The collapse will be hastened. Then, a long period in which the spire can half forget that we exist.

"New technologies rise, warlike as rising technologies are always. They would know of humanity. Perhaps they can preserve or reinvent the Field. When they reach the height of their power, before the decline, they wilt breed Warriors and come forth conquering everything: Mote Prime, asteroids, all. And on to the Empire."

Charlie listened after a hurried glance at the Master. Ivan lay impassive, listening to the chatter of the Mediators as Masters often did, and it was impossible to know what he thought.

"Conquest," Jock said. "But the more progress they make against the Empire, the more thoroughly will the Empire retaliate. They have numbers. For all their talk of limiting populations, they have numbers and all of space. Until we can escape human space entirely and breed, they will always have the numbers. They bottle us up until we overbreed, and then collapse. And with the next collapse-extermination!"

Charlie's knees were against her belly, right arms pulled tight against her chest, left arm protecting her head. An infant about to be born into a cruel world. Her voice was muffled. "If you had better ideas, you should have raised them."

"No. There are no better ideas."

"We bought time. Hundreds of years of time. Sally and her silly institute will have hundreds of years to study the problem we raise for humans. Who knows, perhaps the horse will learn to sing hymns."

"Would you bet on it?"

Charlie looked out of the curve of her arm. "At these odds? Curse, yes!"

"Crazy Eddie!"

"Yes. A Crazy Eddie solution. What else is there? One way or another, the Cycles end now. Crazy Eddie has won his eternal war against the Cycles."

Jock looked to Ivan and met a shrug. Charlie had gone Crazy Eddie. It hardly mattered now; it was, in fact, a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.

They would never know. They would not live that long. But they had bought time; the Blains knew what they must find, and their children would grow up to know Moties as more than a legend. Two generations of power would not hate Moties.

If anyone could teach a horse to sing hymns, it would be a trained Mediator.