Larry Niven - The Mote in God's Eye

Charlie shrugged. “If you’re going to exterminate us, you may as well know why. I’m trying to explain that the Masters will not surrender. King Peter might, but he doesn’t control Mote Prime, much less the asteroid civilization. Someone will fight.”

“As I predicted, my lords,” Kutuzov said heavily. “And men and ships sent to accept surrender will be doomed. Perhaps Fleet as well. If we enter Mote System, it must be in full attack.”

“Oh, boy,” Senator Fowler muttered. “Yeah. I see your plan. You think we can’t order an unprovoked attack, and maybe we won’t send in a suicide mission first. Well, you read us wrong, Charlie. It’ll mean my head, maybe, but all you’ve convinced me of is to give the Admiral his way. Sorry, Father, but that’s the way I see it.”

The Senator’s voice crackled across the room. “Admiral Kutuzov. You will hold your fleet in readiness, and it will accept no communications from any source without my prior approval. And I mean any source. Understood?”

“Aye aye, Senator.” Kutuzov raised a communicator to his lips. “Mikhailov. Da.” He spoke fluid syllables. “It is done, Senator.”

“I have not finished,” Charlie said. “You have another alternative.”

“And what’s that?” Fowler demanded.

“Blockade.”

They stood for a long time on the balcony outside Rod’s suite. Faint sounds of a city after dark floated up to them. The Hooded Man rose high in the sky, his baleful red eye watching them with indifference: two human lovers, who would send squadrons of ships into the Eye itself and keep them there, until they too passed away…

“It doesn’t look very big,” Sally murmured. She moved her head against his shoulder and felt his arms tighten around her. “Just a fleck of yellow in Murcheson’s Eye. Rod, will it work?”

“The blockade? Sure. We worked out the plan at Fleet Battle Ops. Jack Cargill set it up: a squadron inside the Eye itself to take advantage of the Jump shock. The Moties don’t know about that, and their ships won’t be under command for minutes at best. If they try to send them through on automatic it just makes it worse.”

She shivered against him. “That wasn’t really what I meant. The whole plan—will it work?”

“What choices have we?”

“None. And I’m glad you agree. I couldn’t live with you if— I couldn’t, that’s all.”

“Yeah.” And that makes me grateful to the Moties for thinking up this scheme, because we can’t let the Moties get out. A galactic plague—and there are only two remedies for that kind of plague. Quarantine and extermination. At least we’ve got a choice.

“They’re—” She stopped and looked up at him. “I’m afraid to talk to you about it. Rod, I couldn’t live with myself if we had to—if the blockade won’t work.”

He didn’t say anything. There was a shouted laugh from somewhere beyond the Palace grounds. It sounded like children.

“They’ll get past that squadron in the star,” Sally said. Her voice was tightly controlled.

“Sure. And past the mines Sandy Sinclair’s designing too. But where can they go, Sally? There’s only one exit from the Eye system, they don’t know where it is, and there’ll be a battle group waiting for them when they find it. Meanwhile they’ve been inside a star. No place to dissipate energy. Probably damaged. There’s nothing you can think of that we haven’t considered. That blockade’s tight . I wouldn’t approve it otherwise.”

She relaxed again and leaned against his chest. His arms encircled her. They watched the Hooded Man and his imperfect eye.

“They won’t come out,” Rod said.

“And they’re still trapped. After a million years—what will we be like in a million years?” she wondered. “Like them? There’s something basic we don’t understand about Moties. A fatalistic streak I can’t even comprehend. After a few failures they may even just—give up.”

He shrugged. “We’ll keep the blockade anyway. Then, in about fifty years, we’ll go in and see what things are like. If they’ve collapsed as thoroughly as Charlie predicts, we can take them into the Empire.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to think of something.”

“Yes.” She drew away from him and turned excitedly. “I know! Rod, we have to really look at the problem. For the Moties. We can help them.”

He looked at her wonderingly. “I think the best brains in the Empire are likely to be working on it.”

“Yes, but for the Empire. Not for the Moties. We need—an Institute. Something controlled by people who know the Moties. Something outside of politics. And we can do it. We’re rich enough…”

“Eh?”

“We can’t spend half of what we have between us.” She dashed past him and into his suite, then through it and across the corridor to her own. Rod followed to see her burrowing among the stacks of wedding gifts that littered the large rose-teak table in her entry hail. She grunted in satisfaction when she found her pocket computer.

Now should I be irritated? Rod thought. I think I’d better learn to be happy when she’s like this. I’ll have a long time to do it. “The Moties have been working on their problem awhile,” he reminded her.

She looked up with faint irritation. “Pooh. They don’t see things the way we do. Fatalism, remember? And they’ve had nobody to force them into adopting any solutions they do think up.” She went back to scribbling notes. “We’ll need Horowitz, of course. And he says there’s a good man on Sparta, we’ll have to send for him. Dr. Hardy. We’ll want him.”

He regarded her with awe and wonder. “When you get going, you move.” And I better move with you if I’m going to have you around all my life. Wonder what it’s like to live with a whirlwind? “You’ll have Father Hardy if you want him. The Cardinal’s assigned him to the Mote problem—and I think His Eminence has something bigger in store. Hardy could have been a bishop long ago but he doesn’t have the normal share of miterosis. Now I don’t think he’s got much choice: First apostolic delegate to an alien race, or something.”

“Then the Board will be you and me, Dr. Horvath, Father Hardy—and Ivan.”

“Ivan?” But why not? And as long as we’re doing this, we may as well do it right. We’ll need a good executive director, Sally’s no use as an administrator, and I won’t have time. Horvath, maybe. “Sally, do you know just how much we’re up against? The biology problem: how to turn a female to male without pregnancy or permanent sterility. But even if you find something, how do we get the Moties to use it?”

She wasn’t really listening. “We’ll find a way. We’re pretty good at governing—”

“We can hardly govern a human empire!”

“But we do, don’t we? Somehow.” She pushed a stack of gaily wrapped packages aside to make more room. A large box almost fell and Rod had to catch it as Sally continued to scrawl notes into her computer’s memory bank. “Now just what’s the code for Imperial Men and Women of Science ?” she asked. “There’s a man on Meiji who’s done some really good work in genetic engineering, and I can’t remember his name…”

Rod sighed heavily. “I’ll look him up for you. But there’s one condition.”

“What’s that?” She looked up in curiosity,

“You finish this up by next week, because, Sally, if you take that pocket computer on our honeymoon, I’ll throw the goddamn thing into the mass converter!”

She laughed, but Rod didn’t feel reassured at all. Oh well. The computers weren’t expensive. He could buy her a new one when they got back. In fact, maybe he ought to make a deal with Bury; he might need the things in shipload lots if they were ever going to have a family…