A Step Farther Out (15 page)

The prism spread fan-shaped rainbow across the paper. But the rainbow was almost too dim to see, vanishing beside a single line of aquamarine; and that line
blazed.

"One line," said Potter. "Monochromatic?" "I told you yon was no nova."

"Too right it wasn't. But what is it? Laser light? It has to be artificial! Lord, what a technology they've built!"

"Och, come now." Edwards interrupted the monologue. "I doubt yon's artificial at all. Too intense." His voice was cheerful. "We're seeing something new. Somehow yon Mote is generating natural coherent light."

"I don't believe it."

Edwards looked annoyed. After all, it was
his
telescope. "What think you, then? Some booby calling for help? If they were that powerful, they would send a ship. A ship would come thirty-five years sooner!"

"But there's no tramline from the Mote to New Caledonia! Not even theoretically possible. Only link to the Mote has to start inside the Eye. Murcheson looked for it, you know, but he never found it. The Mote's alone out there."

"Och, then how could there be a colony?" Edwards demanded in triumph. "Be reasonable, Thad! We have a new natural phenomenon, something new in stellar process."

"But if someone
is
calling—"

"Let's hope not. We could no help them. We couldn't reach them, even if we knew the links! There's no starship in the New Cal system, and there's no likely to be until the war's over." Edwards looked up at the sky. The moon was a small, irregular half-disk; and a circular crater still burned red in the dark half.

A brilliant violet streak flamed high overhead. The violet light grew more intense and flared white, then vanished. A warship had died out there.

"Ah, well," Edwards said. His voice softened. "If someone's calling he picked a hell of a time for it. But at least we can search for modulations. If the beam is no modulated, you'll admit there's nobody there, will you not?"

"Of course," said Potter.

* * *

In 2862 there were no starships behind the Coal Sack. On the other side, around Crucis and the Capital, a tiny fleet still rode the force paths between stars to the worlds Sparta controlled. There were fewer loyal ships and worlds each year.

The summer of 2862 was lean for New Scotland. Day after day a few men crept outside the black dome that defended the city; but they always returned at night. Few saw the rising of the Coal Sack.

It climbed weirdly, its resemblance to a shrouded human silhouette marred by the festive two-colored eye. The Mote burned as brightly as Murcheson's Eye now. But who would listen to Potter and Edwards and their crazy tales about the Mote? The night sky was a battlefield, dangerous to look upon.

The war was not really fought for the Empire now. In the New Caledonia system the war continued because it would not end. Loyalist and Rebel were meaningless terms; but it hardly mattered while bombs and wrecked ships fell from the skies.

Henry Morrissey was still head of the University Astronomy Department. He tried to talk Potter and Edwards into returning to the protection of the Langston Field. His only success was that Potter sent his wife and two sons back with Morrissey. Edwards had no living dependents, and both refused to budge.

Morrissey was willing to believe that something had happened to the Mote, but not that it was visible to the naked eye. Potter was known for his monomaniacal enthusiasms.

The Department could supply them with equipment. It was makeshift, but it should have done the job. There was laser light coming from the Mote. It came with terrific force, and must have required terrific power, and enormous sophistication to build that power. No one would build such a thing except to send a message.

And there was no message. The beam was not modulated. It did not change color, or blink off and on, or change in intensity. It was a steady, beautifully pure, terribly intense beam of coherent light.

Potter watched to see if it might change silhouette, staring for hours into the telescope. Edwards was no help at all. He alternated between polite gloating at having proved his point, and impolite words muttered as he tried to investigate the new "stellar process" with inadequate equipment. The only thing they agreed on was the need to publish their observations, and the impossibility of doing so.

One night a missile exploded against the edge of the black dome. The Langston Field protecting University City could only absorb so much energy before radiating inward, vaporizing the town, and it took time to dissipate the hellish fury poured into it. Frantic engineers worked to radiate away the shield energy before the generators melted to slag.

They succeeded, but there was a burn-through: a generator left yellow-hot and runny. A relay snapped open, and New Caledonia stood undefended against a hostile sky. Before the Navy could restore the Field a million people had watched the rising of the Coal Sack.

"I came to apologize," Morrissey told Potter the next morning. "Something damned strange has happened to the Mote. What have you got?"

He listened to Potter and Edwards, and he stopped their fight. Now that they had an audience they almost came to blows. Morrissey promised them more equipment and retreated under the restored shield. He had been an astronomer in his time. Somehow he got them what they needed.

Weeks became months. The war continued, wearing New Scotland down, exhausting her resources. Potter and Edwards worked on, learning nothing, fighting with each other and screaming curses at the New Irish traitors.

They might as well have stayed under the shield. The Mote produced coherent light of amazing purity. Four months after it began the light jumped in intensity and stayed that way. Five months later it jumped again.

It jumped once more, four months later, but Potter and Edwards didn't see it. That was the night a ship from New Ireland fell from the sky, its shield blazing violet with friction. It was low when the shield overloaded and collapsed, releasing stored energy in one ferocious blast.

Gammas and photons washed across the plains beyond the city, and Potter and Edwards were carried into the University hospital by worried students. Potter died three days later. Edwards walked for the rest of his life with a backpack attached to his shoulders: a portable life support system.

* * *

It was 2870 on every world where clocks still ran when the miracle came to New Scotland.

An interstellar trading ship, long converted for war and recently damaged, fell into the system with her Langston Field intact and her hold filled with torpedoes. She was killed in the final battle, but the insurrection on New Ireland died as well. Now all the New Caledonia system was loyal to the Empire; and the Empire no longer existed.

The University came out from under the shield. Some had forgotten that the Mote had once been a small yellow-white point. Most didn't care. There was a world to be tamed, and that world had been bare rock terraformed in the first place. The fragile imported biosphere was nearly destroyed, and it took all their ingenuity and work to keep New Scotland inhabitable.

They succeeded because they had to. There were no ships to take survivors anywhere else. The Yards had been destroyed in the war, and there would be no more interstellar craft. They were alone behind the Coal Sack.

The Mote continued to grow brighter as the years passed. Soon it was more brilliant than the Eye; but there were no astronomers on New Scotland to care. In 2891 the Coal Sack was a black silhouette of a hooded man. It had one terribly bright blue-green eye, with a red fleck in it.

* * *

One night at the rising of the Coal Sack, a farmer named Howard Grote Littlemead was struck with inspiration. It came to him that the Coal Sack was God, and that he ought to tell someone.

Tradition had it that the Face of God could be seen from New Caledonia; and Littlemead had a powerful voice. Despite the opposition of the Imperial Orthodox Church, despite the protests of the Viceroy and the scorn of the University staff, the Church of Him spread until it was a power on New Scotland.

It was never large, but its members were fanatics; and they had the miracle of the Mote, which no scientist could explain. By 2895 the Church of Him was a power among New Scot farmers, but not in the cities. Still, half the population worked in the fields. The converter kitchens had all broken down.

By 2900 New Scotland had two working interplanetary spacecraft, one of which could not land. Its Langston Field had died. The term was appropriate. When a piece of Empire technology stopped working, it was dead. It could not be repaired. New Scotland was becoming primitive.

For forty years the Mote had grown. Children refused to believe that it had once been called the Mote. Adults knew it was true, but couldn't remember why. They called the twin stars Murcheson's Eye, and believed that the red supergiant had no special name.

The records might have showed differently, but the University records were suspect. The Library had been scrambled by electromagnetic pulses during the years of siege. It had large areas of amnesia.

In 2902 the Mote went out.

Its green light dimmed to nothing over a period of several hours; but that happened on the other side of the world. When the Coal Sack rose above University City that night, it rose as a blinded man.

All but a few remnants of the Church of Him died that year. With the aid of a handful of sleeping pills Howard Grote Littlemead hastened to meet his God. . . possibly to demand an explanation.

Astronomy also died. There were few enough astronomers and fewer tools; and when nobody could explain the vanishing of the Mote. . . and when telescopes turned on the Mote's remnant showed only a yellow dwarf star, with nothing remarkable about it at all. . .

People stopped considering the stars. They had a world to save.

* * *

The Mote was a
G-2
yellow dwarf, thirty-five light years distant: a white point at the edge of Murcheson's Eye. So it was for more than a century, while the Second Empire rose from Sparta and came again to New Caledonia.

Then astronomers read old and incomplete records, and resumed their study of the red supergiant known as Murcheson's Eye; but they hardly noticed the Mote.

And the Mote did nothing unusual for one hundred and fifteen years.

* * *

Thirty-five light years away, the aliens of Mote Prime had launched a light-sail spacecraft, using batteries of laser cannon powerful enough to outshine a neighboring red supergiant.

As for why they did it that way, and why it looked like that, and what the bejeesus is going on. . . explanations follow.

* * *

Most hard science fiction writers follow standard rules for building worlds. We have formulae and tables for getting the orbits right, selecting suns of proper brightness, determining temperatures and climates, building a plausible ecology. Building worlds requires imagination, but a lot of the work is mechanical. Once the mechanical work is done the world may suggest a story, or it may even design its own inhabitants. Larry Niven's "known space" stories include worlds which have strongly affected their colonists.

Or the exceptions to the rules may form stories. Why does Mote Prime, a nominally Earthlike world, remind so many people of the planet Mars? What strangeness in its evolution made the atmosphere so helium-rich? This goes beyond mechanics.

In THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE (Simon and Schuster, 1974) we built not only worlds, but cultures.

From the start MOTE was to be a novel of first contact. After our initial story conference we had larger ambitions: MOTE would be, if we could write it, the
epitome
of first contact novels. We intended to explore every important problem arising from first contact with aliens—and to look at those problems from both human and alien viewpoints.

That meant creating cultures in far more detail than is needed for most novels. It's easy, when a novel is heavy with detail, for the details to get out of hand, creating glaring inconsistencies. (If civilization uses hydrogen fusion power at such a rate that world sea level has dropped by two feet, you will not have people sleeping in abandoned movie houses.) To avoid such inconsistencies we worked a great deal harder developing the basic technologies of both the Motie (alien) and the human civilizations.

In fact, when we finished the book we had nearly as much unpublished material as ended up in the book. There are many pages of data on Motie biology and evolutionary history; details on Empire science and technology; descriptions of space battles, how worlds are terraformed, how light-sails are constructed; and although these background details affected the novel and dictated what we would actually write, most of them never appear in the book.

* * *

We made several boundary decisions. One was to employ the Second Empire period of Pournelle's future history. That Empire existed as a series of sketches with a loose outline of its history, most of it previously published. MOTE had to be consistent with the published material.

Another parameter was the physical description of the aliens. Incredibly, that's all we began with: a detailed description of what became the prototype Motie, the Engineer: an attempt to build a nonsymmetrical alien, left over from a Niven story that never quite jelled. The history, biology, evolution, sociology, and culture of the Moties were extrapolated from that being's shape during endless coffee-and-brandy sessions.

That was our second forced choice. The Moties lived within the heart of the Empire, but had never been discovered. A simple explanation might have been to make the aliens a young civilization just discovering space travel, but that assumption contradicted Motie history as extrapolated from their appearance. We found another explanation in the nature of the Alderson Drive.