The Mote in God's Eye

Rod shrugged, embarrassed. “I was only there a few days. Hardly time enough to get the feel of a world. Years ago, when I was Staley’s age. I remember mostly looking for a good tavern.” After all, he wanted to add, I’m not an anthropologist.

The conversation drifted on. Rod felt tired, and looked for a polite opportunity to bring the dinner to a close. The others seemed rooted to their seats.

“Ye study cultural evolution,” Sinclair was saying earnestly, “and perhaps that’s wise. But could we nae have physical evolution as well? The First Empire was verra large and sparsely spread, with room enough for almost anything. May we no find somewhere, off in some neglected corner of the old Empire, a planet full o’ supermen?”

Both midshipmen looked suddenly alert. Bury asked,

“What would physical evolution of humans bring, my lady?”

“They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent beings wasn’t possible,” she said. “Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they’re allowed to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war.” She smiled. “But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest.”

“But suppose,” Whitbread suggested, “suppose a culture were knocked even further back than Makassar? All the way to complete savagery: clubs and fire. There’d be evolution then, wouldn’t there?”

Three glasses of wine had overcome Sally’s black mood, and she was eager to talk of professional matters. Her uncle often told her she talked too much for a lady, and she tried to watch herself, but wine always did it to her—wine and a ready audience. It felt good, after weeks of nothingness.

“Certainly,” she said. “Until a society evolved. You’d have natural selection until enough humans got together to protect each other from the environment. But it isn’t long enough. Mr. Whitbread, there is a world where they practice ritual infanticide. The elders examine children and kill the ones who don’t conform to their standards of perfection. It’s not evolution, exactly, but you might get some results that way—except that it hasn’t been long enough.”

“People breed horses. And dogs,” Rod observed.

“Yes. But they haven’t got a new species. Ever. And societies can’t keep constant rules long enough to make any real changes in the human race. Come again in a million years— Of course there were the deliberate attempts to breed supermen. Like Sauron System.”

Sinclair grunted. “Those beasties,” he spat. “ ’Twas they started the Secession Wars and nearly killed the lot o’ us.” He stopped suddenly as Midshipman Whitbread cleared his throat.

Sally jumped into the lull. “That’s another system I can’t be sympathetic with. Although they’re Empire loyalists now.” She looked around. Everyone had a strange look, and Sinclair was trying to hide his face behind a tilted wineglass. Midshipman Horst Staley’s angular face might have been carved from stone. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

There was a long silence. Finally Whitbread spoke. “Mr. Staley is from Sauron System, my lady.”

“I—I’m sorry,” Sally blurted. “I guess I really put my foot in it, didn’t I? Really, Mr. Staley, I’m…”

“If my young gentlemen can’t take that much pressure, I don’t need them in my ship,” Rod said. “And you weren’t the only one to put your foot in it.” He looked significantly at Sinclair. “We don’t judge men by what their home worlds did hundreds of years ago.” Damn. That sounds stilted. “You were saying about evolution?”

“It—it ought to be pretty well closed off for an intelligent species,” she said. “Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.”

“A pity we don’t have any others for comparison,” Bury said easily. “Only a few fancied ones.” He told a long story about an improbably intelligent octopoid meeting a centaur, and everyone laughed. “Well, Captain, it was a fine dinner,” Bury ended.

“Yes.” Rod stood and offered Sally his arm, and the others scrambled to their feet. She was quiet again as he escorted her through the corridor to her cabin, and only polite as they parted. Rod went back to the bridge. More repairs had to be recorded into the ship’s brain.

4. Priority OC

Hyperspace travel can be strange and frustrating.

It takes an immeasurably short time to travel between stars: but as the line of travel, or tramline, exists only along one critical path between each pair of stars (never quite a straight line, but close enough to visualize it so) and the end points of the paths are far from the distortions in space caused by stars and large planetary masses, it follows that a ship spends most of its time crawling from one end point to another.