The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [170]
“They were powerful enough to take over civilization, too. What it amounts to is that the collapse came early that time, and we didn’t fall all the way back to savagery. The Mediators must have planned it that way from the beginning.”
“God’s teeth,” Whitbread muttered. “Do you always work that way?”
“What way, Jonathon?”
“Expecting everything to fall apart at any minute. Using the fact.”
“Intelligent people do. Everyone but the Crazy Eddies. I think the classic case of the Crazy Eddie syndrome was that time machine. You saw it in one of the sculptures.”
“Right.”
“Some historian decided that a great turning point in history had come about two hundred years earlier. If he could interfere with that turning point, all of Mote history from that point on would be peaceful and idyllic. Can you believe it? And he could prove it, too. He had dates, old memoranda, secret treaties...”
“What was the event?”
“There was an Emperor, a very powerful Master. All of her siblings had been killed and she inherited jurisdiction over an enormous territory. Her mother had persuaded the Doctors and Mediators to produce a hormone that must have been something like your birth control pills. It would stimulate a Master’s body into thinking she was pregnant. Massive shots, and after that she would turn male. A sterile male. When her mother died, the Mediators had the hormone used on the Emperor.”
“But you do have birth control pills then!” Whitbread said. “You can use them to control the population—”
“That’s what this Crazy Eddie thought. Well, they used the hormone for something like three generations in the Empire. Stabilized the populations, all right. Not very many Masters there. Everything peaceful. Meanwhile, of course, the population explosion was happening on the other continents. The other Masters got together and invaded the Emperor’s territory. They had plenty of Warriors—and plenty of Masters to control them. End of Empire. Our time machine builder had the idea she could set things up so that the Empire would control all of Mote Prime.” Whitbread’s Motie snorted in disgust. “It never works. How are you going to get the Masters to become sterile males? Sometimes it happens anyway, but who’d want to before having children? That’s the only time the hormone can work.”
“Oh.”
“Right. Even if the Emperor had conquered all of Mote Prime and stabilized the population—and think about it, Jonathon, the only way to do that would be for the rulers to pass control on to breeders while never having any children themselves—even if they did, they’d have been attacked by the asteroid civilizations.”
“But man, it’s a start!” said Whitbread. “There’s got to be a way—”
“I am not a man, and there doesn’t got to be a way. And that’s another reason I don’t want contact between your species and mine. You’re all Crazy Eddies. You think every problem has a solution.”
“All human problems hae at least one final solution,” Gavin Potter said softly from the seat behind them.
“Human, perhaps,” the alien said. “But do Moties have souls?”
“‘Tis nae for me to say,” Potter answered. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I am no a spokesman for the Lord.”
“It isn’t for your chaplain to say either. How can you expect to find out? It would take revealed knowledge—a divine inspiration, wouldn’t it? I doubt if you’ll get it.”
“Hae ye nae religion at all, then?” Potter asked incredulously.
“We’ve had thousands, Gavin. The Browns and other semisentient classes don’t change theirs much, but every civilization of Masters produces something else. Mostly they’re variants of transmigration of souls, with emphasis on survival through children. You can see why.”
“You didn’t mention Mediators,” Whitbread said.
“I told you—we don’t have children. There are Mediators who accept the transmigration idea. Reincarnation as Masters. That sort of thing. The closest thing to ours I’ve heard of in human religions is Lesser-Way Buddhism. I talked to Chaplain Hardy about this. He says Buddhists