The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [58]
This did not surprise her. She had known this new class were givers of orders, not takers of orders. Naturally they would have weapons. They might even have Warriors.
The double-door air lock was too complex, too easy to jam, primitive, and wasteful of metals and materials. She was needed here, she could see that. The new class must have come here to get her, there couldn’t be any Engineers aboard the ship if they used things like this. She started to take the mechanism apart, but the stranger pulled at her arm and she abandoned the idea. She didn’t have the tools anyway, and she didn’t know what it would be lawful to use to make the tools. There would be time for all that...
A lot of others, much like the first one, clustered around her. They wore strange coverings, most of it alike, and carried weapons, but they didn’t give orders. The stranger kept trying to talk to her.
Couldn’t they see she wasn’t a Mediator? They were not too bright, this primitive new class. But they were givers of orders. The first one had shouted a clear command.
And they couldn’t speak Language.
The situation was remarkably free of decisions. An Engineer need only go where she was led, repair and redesign where the opportunity arose, and wait for a Mediator. Or a Master. And there was so much to do, so much to do...
The petty officers’ lounge had been converted into a reception room for alien visitors. The petty officers had to take over one of the Marine messes, doubling the joeys into the other. All over the ship adjustments had to be made to accommodate the swarms of civilians and their needs.
As a laboratory the lounge might lack something, but it was secure, and had plenty of running water, wall plugs, hot plates, and refreshment facilities. At least there was nothing to smack of the dissection table.
After some argument it had been decided not to attempt to build furniture to fit the aliens. Anything they built would only accommodate the passenger aboard the probe, and that seemed absurd.
There were plenty of tv pickups, so that although only a few key personnel were allowed in the lounge, nearly everyone aboard the ship could watch. Sally Fowler waited with the scientists, and she was determined to win the Motie’s trust. She didn’t care who was watching or what it would take to do that.
As it turned out, the Motie’s trust was easy to come by. She was as trustful as a child. Her first move on coming out of the air lock was to tear open the plastic sack containing the miniatures, and give it to the first hand that reached for it. She never bothered about them again.
She went where she was led, walking between the Marines until Sally took her by the hand at the reception room door, and everywhere she went she looked about, her body swiveling like an owl’s head. When Sally let go, the Motie simply stood and waited for further instructions, watching everyone with that same gentle smile.
She did not seem to understand gestures. Sally and Horvath and others tried to talk to the Motie, with no result. Dr. Hardy, the Chaplain linguist, drew mathematical diagrams and nothing happened. The Motie did not understand and was not interested.
She was interested in tools, though. As soon as she was inside she reached for Gunner Kelley’s sidearm. At a command from Dr. Horvath the Marine reluctantly unloaded the weapon and let her handle one of the cartridges before surrendering the gun. The Motie took it completely apart, to Kelley’s annoyance and everyone else’s amusement, then put it back together again, correctly, to Kelly’s amazement. She examined the Marine’s hand, bending the fingers to the limit and working them in their joints, using her own fingers to probe the muscles and the complex bones of the wrist. She examined Sally Fowler’s hand in the same way for comparison.
The Motie took tools from her belt and began to work on the grip of the pistol, building it up with plastic squeezed from a tube.
“The little ones are female,” one of the biologists announced. “Like the big one.”
“A female asteroid miner,” Sally said. Her