The Mote in God's Eye

“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 Blaines 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.