The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [161]
There was a long silence. “That’s the whole secret. Don’t you get it yet? Every variant of my species has to be made pregnant after she’s been female for a while. Child, male, female, pregnancy, male, female, pregnancy, ‘round and ‘round. If she doesn’t get pregnant in time, she dies. Even us. And we Mediators can’t get pregnant. We’re mules, sterile hybrids.”
“But—” Whitbread sounded like a kid just told the truth about Santa. “How long do you live?”
“About twenty-five of your years. Fifteen years after maturity. But Engineers and Farmers and Masters—especially Masters!—have to be pregnant within a couple of our years. That Engineer you picked up must have been close to the deadline already.”
They drove on in silence. “But—good Lord,” Potter said carefully. “That’s terrible.”
“‘Terrible.’ You son of a bitch. Of course it’s terrible. Sally and her—”
“What’s eating you?” Whitbread demanded.
“Birth control pills. We asked Sally Fowler what a human does when she doesn’t want children just yet. She uses birth control pills. But nice girls don’t use them. They just don’t have sex,” she said savagely.
The car was speeding down the tracks. Horst sat at the rear, which was now the front, staring out with his weapon poised. He turned slightly. The Moties were both glaring at the humans, their lips parted slightly to show teeth, enlarging their smile, but the bitterness of the words and tones belied the friendly looks. “They just don’t have sex!” Whitbread’s Motie said again. “Fyoofwuffle(whistle)! Now you know why we have wars. Always wars...”
“Population explosion,” Potter said.
“Yeah. Whenever a civilization rises from savagery, Moties stop dying from starvation! You humans don’t know what population pressure is! We can keep the numbers down in the lesser breeds, but what can the givers of orders do about their own numbers? The closest thing we’ve got to a birth control pill is infanticide!”
“And you can nae do that,” Potter said. “Any such instinct would be bred out o’ the race. So presently everyone is fighting for what food is left.”
“Of course.” Whitbread’s Motie was calmer now. “The higher the civilization, the longer the period of savagery. And always there’s Crazy Eddie in there pitching, trying to break the pattern of the Cycles, fouling things up worse. We’re pretty close to a collapse now, gentlemen, in case you didn’t notice. When you came there was a terrible fight over jurisdiction. My Master won—”
Charlie whistled and hummed for a second.
“Yeah. King Peter tried for that, but he couldn’t get enough support. Wasn’t sure he could win a fight with my Master... What we’re doing now will probably cause that war anyway. It doesn’t matter. It was bound to start soon.”
“You’re so crowded you grow plants on the rooftops,” said Whitbread.
“Oh, that’s just common sense. Like putting strips of cropland through the cities. Some always live, to start the Cycles over.”
“It must be tough, carving out a civilization without even radioactives,” said Whitbread. “You’d have to go direct to hydrogen fusion every time?”
“Sure. You’re getting at something.”
“I’m not sure what.”
“Well, it’s been that way for all of recorded history, a long time by your standards. Except for one period when they found radioactives in the Trojan asteroids. There were a few alive up there and they brought civilization here. The radioactives had been pretty thoroughly mined by some older civilization, but there were still some there.”
“God’s eyes,” said Whitbread. “But—”
“Stop the car, please,” Staley ordered. Whitbread’s Motie twittered and the car came smoothly to a halt. “I’m getting nervous about what we’re running into,” Staley explained. “They must be waiting for us. Those soldiers we killed haven’t reported in—and if those were your Master’s men, where are the Keeper’s? Anyway, I want to test the Warriors’ weapons.”
“Have the Brown look them over,” Whitbread’s Motie said. “They may be rigged.”
They looked deadly, those weapons. And no two were identical. The most common