The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [121]
The next was another outdoor scene: a score of Browns and Whites eating around a blazing campfire. Animal eyes gleamed red around them. The whole landscape was dark red; and overhead Murcheson’s Eye gleamed against the Coal Sack.
“You can’t tell what they’re thinking and feeling from looking at them, can you? We were afraid of that,” said Horvath’s Motie. “Nonverbal communication. The signals are different with us.”
“I suppose so,” said Bury. “These paintings would all be salable, but none especially so. They would be only curiosities . . . though quite valuable as such, because of the huge potential market and the limited source. But they do not communicate. Who painted them?”
“This one is quite old. You can see that it was painted on the wall of the building itself, and—”
“But what kind of Motie? Brown-and-whites?”
There was impolite laughter among the Moties. Bury’s Motie said, “You will never see a work of art that was not made by a Brown-and-white. Communication is our specialty. Art is communication.”
“Does a White never have anything to say?”
“Of course. He has a Mediator say it for him. We translate, we communicate. Many of these paintings are arguments, visually expressed.”
Weiss had been trailing along, saying nothing. Renner noticed. Keeping his voice down, he asked the man, “Any comments?”
Weiss scratched his jaw. “Sir, I haven’t been in a museum since grade school . . . but aren’t some paintings made just to be pretty?”
“Umm.”
There were only two portraits in all the halls of paintings. Brown-and-whites both, they both showed from the waist up. Expression in the Moties must show in body language, not faces. These portraits were oddly lighted and their arms were oddly distorted. Renner thought them evil.
“Evil? No!” said Renner’s Motie. “That one caused the Crazy Eddie probe to be built. And this was the designer of a universal language, long ago.”
“Is it still used?”
“After a fashion. But it fragmented, of course. Languages do that. Sinclair and Potter and Bury don’t speak the same language you do. Sometimes the sounds are similar, but the nonverbal signals are very different.”
Renner caught up with Weiss as they were about to enter the hall of sculpture. “You were right. In the Empire there are paintings that are just supposed to be pretty. Here, no. Did you notice the difference? No landscape without Moties doing something in it. Almost no portraits, and those two were slanted pictures. In fact, everything’s slanted.” He turned to appeal to his Motie. “Right? Those pictures you pointed out, done before your civilization invented the camera. They weren’t straight representations.”
“Renner, do you know how much work goes into a painting?”
“I’ve never tried. I can guess.”
“Then can you imagine anyone going to that much trouble if he doesn’t have something to say?”
“How about ‘mountains are pretty’?” Weiss suggested.
Renner’s Motie shrugged.
The statues were better than the paintings. Differences in pigment and lighting did not intrude. Most did show Moties; but they were more than portraits. A chain of Moties of diminishing size, Porter to three Whites to nine Browns to twenty-seven miniatures? No, they were all done in white marble and had the shape of decision makers. Bury regarded them without expression and said, “It occurs to me that I will need interpretations of any of these before I could sell them anywhere. Or even give them as gifts.”
“Inevitably so,” said Bury’s Motie. “This, for instance, illustrates a religion of the last century. The soul of the parent divides to become the children, and again to become the grandchildren, ad infinitum.”
Another showed a number of Moties in red sandstone. They had long, slender fingers, too many on the left hand, and the left arm was comparatively small. Physicians? They were being killed by a thread of green glass that swept among them like a scythe: a laser weapon, held by something offstage. The Moties were reluctant to talk about it. “An unpleasant event in history,” said Bury’s Motie, and that was that.
Another