The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [123]
They did. Renner said, “I wouldn’t ride in one of those little death traps for Bury’s own petty-cash fund.”
“Oh, they’re safe. That is,” said Renner’s Motie, “it isn’t the car that’s safe, it’s the driver. Browns don’t have much territorial instinct, for one thing. For another, they’re always fiddling with the car, so nothing’s ever going to fail.”
The limousine started off. Browns appeared behind them and began removing the stairs.
The buildings around them were always square blocks, the streets a rectangular grid. To Horvath the city was clearly a made city, not something that had grown naturally. Someone had laid it out and ordered it built from scratch. Were they all like this? It showed none of the Browns’ compulsion to innovate.
And yet, he decided, it did. Not in basics, but in such things as street lighting. In places there were broad electro luminescent strips along the buildings. In others there were things like floating balloons, but the wind did not move them. Elsewhere, tubes ran along the sides of the streets, or down the center; or there was nothing at all that showed in the daytime.
And those boxlike cars—each was subtly different, in the design of the lights or the signs of repairs or the way the parked cars folded into themselves.
The limousines stopped. “We’re here,” Horvath’s Motie announced. “The zoo. The Life Forms Preserve, to be more exact. You’ll find that it is arranged more for the convenience of the inhabitants than for the spectators.”
Horvath and the rest looked about, puzzled. Tall rectangular buildings surrounded them. There was no open space anywhere.
“On our left. The building, gentlemen, the building! Is there some law against putting a zoo inside a building?”
The zoo, as it developed, was six stories tall, with ceilings uncommonly high for Moties. It was difficult to tell just how high the ceilings were. They looked like sky. On the first floor it was open blue sky, with drifting clouds and a sun that stood just past noon.
They strolled through a steamy jungle whose character changed as they moved. The animals could not reach them, but it was difficult to see why not. They did not seem aware of being penned up.
There was a tree like a huge bullwhip, its handle planted deep in the earth, its lash sprouting clusters of round leaves where it coiled around the trunk. An animal like a giant Motie stood flat-footed beneath it, staring at Whitbread. There were sharp, raking talons on its two right hands, and tusks showed between its lips. “It was a variant of the Porter type,” said Horvath’s Motie, “but never successfully domesticated. You can see why.”
“These artificial environments are astounding!” Horvath exclaimed. “I’ve never seen better. But why not build part of the zoo in the open? Why make an environment when the real environment is already there?”
“I’m not sure why it was done. But it seems to work out.”
The second floor was a desert of dry sand. The air was dry and balmy, the sky baby blue, darkening to yellow brown at the horizon. Fleshy plants with no thorns grew through the sand. Some were the shape of thick lily pads. Many bore the marks of nibbling teeth. They found the beast that had made the tooth marks, a thing like a nude white beaver with square protruding teeth. It watched them tamely as they passed.
On the third floor it was raining steadily. Lightning flashed, illusory miles away. The humans declined to enter, for they had no rain gear. The Moties were half angry, half apologetic. It had not occurred to them that rain would bother humans; they liked it.
“It’s going to keep happening, too,” Whitbread’s Motie predicted. “We study you, but we don’t know you. You’re missing some of the most interesting plant forms too. Perhaps another day when they have the rain turned off...”
The fourth floor was not wild at all. There were even small round houses on distant illusory hills. Small, umbrella-shaped trees grew red and lavender fruits beneath a flat green disc of foliage. A pair of proto-Moties stood beneath one of these. They were