The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [90]
When he was clean he joined the others in the lounge. The Chaplain and Horvath and Sally Fowler, all wearing sticky-bottomed falling slippers, all aligned in the up direction. Whitbread would never have noticed such a thing before. He said, “Science Minister Horvath, I am to place myself under your orders for the time being.”
“Very well, Mr. . . . Whitbread.” Horvath trailed off. He seemed worried and preoccupied. They all did.
The Chaplain spoke with effort. “You see, none of us really knows what to do next. We’ve never contacted aliens before.”
“They’re friendly. They wanted to talk,” said Whitbread.
“Good. Good, but it leaves me entirely on the hook.” The Chaplain’s laugh was all nerves. “What was it like, Whitbread?”
He tried to tell them. Cramped, until you got to the plastic toroids . . . fragile . . . no point in trying to tell the Moties apart except the Browns were somehow different from the Brown-and-whites. . . “They’re unarmed,” he told them. “I spent three hours exploring that ship. There’s no place aboard that they could be hiding big weapons.”
“Did you get the impression they were guiding you away from anything?”
“No-oo.”
“You don’t sound very certain,” Horvath said sharply.
“Oh it isn’t that, sir. I was just remembering the tool room. We wound up in a room that was all tools, wall and floor and ceiling. A couple of walls had simple thing on them: hand drills, ripsaws with odd handles, screw and a screwdriver. Things I could recognize. I saw nail and what I think was a hammer with a big flat head. It all looked like a hobby shop in somebody’s basement. But there were some really complex things in there too, things I couldn’t figure at all.”
The alien ship floated just outside the forward window. Inhuman shadows moved within it. Sally was watching them too . . . but Horvath said dryly, “You were saying that the aliens were not herding you.”
“I don’t think they led me away from anything. I’m sure I was led to that tool room. I don’t know why, but I think it was an intelligence test. If it was, I flunked.”
Chaplain Hardy said, “The only Motie we’ve questioned so far doesn’t understand the simplest gestures. Now you tell me that these Moties have been giving you intelligence tests—”
“And interpreting gestures. Amazingly quick to understand them, in fact. Yes, sir. They’re different. You saw the pictures.”
Hardy wound a strand of his thinning red hair around a knobby finger and tugged gently. “From your helmet camera? Yes, Jonathon. I think we’re dealing with two kinds of Moties. One is an idiot savant and doesn’t talk. The other . . . talks,” he finished lamely. He caught himself playing with his hair and smoothed it back into place. “I hope I can learn to talk back.”
They’re all dreading it, Whitbread realized. Especially Sally. And even Chaplain Hardy, who never gets upset about anything. All dreading that first move. Horvath said, “Any other impressions?”
“I keep thinking that ship was designed for free fall. There are sticky strips all over. Inflated furniture likewise. And there are short passages joining the toroids, as wide as the toroids themselves. Under acceleration they’d be like open trap doors with no way around them.”
“That’s strange,” Horvath mused. “The ship was under acceleration until four hours ago.”
“Exactly, sir. The joins must be new.” The thought hit Whitbread suddenly. Those joins must be new.
“But that tells us even more,” Chaplain Hardy said quietly. “And you say the furniture is at all angles. We all saw that the Moties didn’t care how they were oriented when they spoke to you. As if they were peculiarly adapted to free fall. As if they evolved there...”
“But that’s impossible,” Sally protested. “Impossible but—you’re right, Dr. Hardy! Humans always orient themselves. Even the old Marines who’ve been in space all their lives! But nobody can evolve in free fall.”
“An old enough race could,” Hardy said. “And there are the non-symmetric