The Mote In God's Eye

The demons had all found cover: cars parked or abandoned, doorways, the fluting along the sides of one building. They moved from cover to cover with the flickering speed of houseflies. Yet every time a Warrior fired, a Warrior died. There had not been all that much gunfire, yet two thirds of the Warriors in sight were dead. Whitbread's Motie had been right about -their marksmanship. It was inhumanly accurate.

Almost below Horst's window, a dead Warrior lay with its right arms blown away. A live one waited for a lull, suddenly broke for closer cover-and the fallen one came to life. Then it happened too fast to follow: the gun flying, the two Warriors colliding like a pair of buzz saws, then flying away, broken dolls still kicking and spraying blood.

Something crashed below. There were sounds in the stairwell. Hooves clicked on marble steps. The Moties twittered. Charlie whistled, loudly, and again. There was an answering call from below, then a voice spoke in David Hardy's perfect Anglic.

"You will not be mistreated. Surrender at once."

"We've lost," Charlie said.

"My Master's troops. What will you do, Horst?"

For answer Staley crouched in a corner with the x-ray rifle aimed at the stairwell. He waved frantically at the other midshipmen to take cover.

A brown-and-white Mode turned the corner and stood in the hallway. It had Chaplain Hardy's voice, but none of his ma

"Go to hell!"

"What can you gain by this?" the Motie asked. "We only wish you well-"

There were sounds of firing from below. The shots rebounded through the empty rooms and hallways of the Castle. The Mediator with Hardy's voice whistled and clicked to the other Moties.

"What's she saying?" Staley demanded. He looked around: Whitbread's Motie was crouched against the wall, frozen. "Jesus, now what?"

"Leave her alone!" Whitbread shouted. He moved from his post to stand beside the Motie and put his arm on her shoulder. "What should we do?"

The battle noises moved closer, and suddenly two demons were in the hallway. Staley aimed and fired in a smooth motion, cutting down one Warrior. He began to swing the beam toward the other. The demon fired, and Staley was flung against the far wall of the corridor. More demons bounded into the hallway, and there was a burst of fire that held Staley upright for a second. His body was chewed by dragon's teeth, and he fell to lie very still. Potter fired the rocket launcher. The shell burst at the end of the hallway. Part of the walls fell in, littering the floor with rubble and partly burying the Mediator and Warriors.

"It seems to me that no matter who wins yon fight below, we know aye more about the Langston Field than is safe," Potter said slowly. "What do ye think, Mr. Whitbread? ‘Tis your command now."

Jonathon shook himself from his reverie. His Motie was stock-still, unmoving- Potter drew his pistol and waited. There were scrabbling sounds in the hallway. The sounds of battle died away.

"Your friend is tight, brother," Whitbread's Mode said. She looked at the unmoving form of Hardy's Fyunch(click). "That one was a brother too..."

Potter screamed. Whitbread jerked around.

Potter stood unbelieving, his pistol gone, his arm shattered from wrist to elbow. He looked at Whitbread with eyes dull with just realized pain and said, "One of the dead ones threw a rock."

There were more Warriors in the hall, and another Mediator. They advanced slowly.

Whitbread swung the magic sword that would cut stone and metal. It came up in a backhanded arc and cut through Potter's neck-Potter, whose religion forbade suicide, as did Whitbread's. There was a burst of fire as he swung the blade - at his own neck, and two clubs smashed at his shoulders. Jonathon Whitbread fell and did not move.

They did not touch him at first except to remove the weapons from his belt. They waited for a Doctor, while the rest held off King Peter's attacking forces. A Mediator spoke quickly to Charlie and offered, a communicator

-there was nothing left to fight for. Whitbread's Motie remained by her Fyunch(click).

The Doctor probed at Whitbread's shoulders. Although she had never had a human to dissect, she knew everything any Motie knew about human physiology, and her hands were perfectly formed to make use of a thousand Cycles of instincts. The fingers moved gently to the pulverized shoulder joints, the eyes noted that there was no spurting blood. Hands touched the spine, that marvelous organ she'd known only through models.

The fragile neck vertebrae had been snapped. "High velocity bullets," she hummed to the waiting Mediator. "The impact has destroyed the notochord. This creature is dead."

The Doctor and two Browns worked frantically to build a blood pump to serve the brain. It was futile. The communication between Engineer and Doctor was too slow, the body was too strange, and there was too little equipment in time.

They took the body and Whitbread's Motie to the space port controlled by their Master. Charlie would be returned to King Peter, now that the war was finished. There were payments to be made, work in cleaning up after the battle, every Master who had been harmed to be satisfied; when next the humans came, there must be unity among Moties.

The Master never knew, nor did her white daughters ever suspect. But among her other daughters, the brown-and-white Mediator who served her, it was whispered that one of their sisters had done that which no Mediator had ever done throughout all the Cycles. As the Warriors hurried toward this strange human; Whitbread's Motie had touched it, not with the gentle right hands, but with the powerful left.

She was executed for disobedience; and she died alone. Her sisters did not hate her, but they could not bring themselves to speak to one who had killed her own Fyunch(click).

PART FOUR - CRAZY EDDIE'S ANSWER

39 Departure

"Boats report no trace of our midshipmen, my Admiral" Captain Mikhailov's tone was both apologetic and defensive; few officers wanted to report failure to Kutuzov. The burly Admiral sat impassively in his command chair on Lenin's bridge. He lifted his glass of tea and sipped, his only acknowledgment a brief grunt.

Kutuzov turned to the others grouped around him at staff posts. -Rod Blaine still occupied the flag Lieutenant's chair; he was senior to Commander Borman, and Kutuzov was punctilious about such matters.

"Eight scientists," Kutuzov said. "Eight scientists, five officers, fourteen spacers and Marines. All killed by Moties."

"Moties!" Dr. Horvath swiveled his command chair toward Kutuzov. "Admiral, nearly all those men were aboard MacArthur when you destroyed her. Some might still have been alive. As for the midshipmen, if they were foolish enough to try to land with lifeboats... His voice, trailed off as Rod turned dead eyes toward him. "Sorry, Captain. I didn't mean it that way. Truly, I am sorry. I liked those boys too. But you can't blame the Moties for what happened! The Moties have tried to help, and they can do so much for us- Admiral, -when can we get back to the embassy ship?"

Kutuzov's explosive sound might have been a laugh. "Hah! Doctor, we are going home as soon as boats are secured. I thought I had made that clear."

The Science Minister pressed his lips tightly against his wide teeth. "I was hoping that you had regained your sanity." His voice was a cold, feral snarl. "Admiral, you are ruining the best hopes mankind ever had. The technology we can buy-that they'll give us!-is orders of magnitude above anything we could expect for centuries. The Moties have gone to enormous expense to make us welcome. If you hadn't forbidden us to tell them about the escaped miniatures I'm sure they'd have helped. But you had to keep your damned secrets-and because of your stupid xenophobia we lost the survey ship and most of our instruments. Now you antagonize them by going home when they pla