“No more than we’ve done to them,” Dr. Horvath interrupted. Blast! I have to control myself better than that. The point must be made, but if the Senator gets really irritated—
“It’s what they lie about that concerns us, Doctor,” Fowler said smoothly. He paused a moment, and power seemed to gather around him. The dumpy old man in baggy clothing vanished. The Prime Minister spoke. “Look, all of you, I like things informal. If you’ve got something to say, spit it out. But let me finish my sentences first.” There was a thin smile, wintry cold. “Anybody else you can interrupt, if you’re big enough. Now, Dr. Horvath, just what are the Moties hiding from us?”
Anthony Horvath ran his slim fingers through thinning hair. “I need more time, Senator. Until this morning it hadn’t occurred to me that the Moties were hiding anything.” He glanced nervously at Chaplain Hardy, but the priest said nothing.
“It was a bit of a surprise to all of us,” Fowler said. “But we’ve got evidence that Moties breed at a godawful rate. The question is, could we make them keep their numbers down if they don’t want to? Rod, could the Moties have been hiding weapons from us?”
Rod shrugged. “In a whole system? Ben, they could hide damn near anything they wanted to.”
“But they are utterly unwarlike,” Horvath protested. “Senator, I am as concerned for the safety of the Empire as anyone in this room. I take my duties as a Sector Minister quite seriously, I assure you.”
You’re not assurin’ us, you’re talkin’ for the record, Kelley thought. Cap’n Blaine knows it, too. What’s botherin’ the boss? He looks like he does before an action.
“—no evidence of warlike activities among the Moties,” Horvath finished.
“That turns out not to be the case,” Renner put in. “Doc, I like Moties as well as you do, but something produced the Mediators.”
“Oh, well, yes,” Horvath said easily. “In their prehistory they must have fought like lions. The analogy is quite apt, by the way. The territorial instinct shows up still in their architecture and in their social organization, for example. But the combats were a long time ago.”
“Just how long?” Senator Fowler asked.
Horvath looked uncomfortable. “Possibly a million years.”
There was silence. Sally shook her head sadly. Cooped up in one tiny system for a million years—a million civilized years! The patience they must have learned!
“No wars in all the time since?” Fowler asked. “Really?”
“Yes, damn it, they’ve had wars,” Horvath answered. “At least two of the kind that Earth went through at the close of the CoDominium period. But that was a long time ago!” He had to raise his voice to carry across Sally’s startled gasp. There were mutters around the table.
“One of those was enough to make Earth damn near uninhabitable,” Ben Fowler said slowly. “How long ago are you talking about? Million years again?”
Horvath said, “Hundreds of thousands, at least.”
“Thousands, probably,” Chaplain Hardy said carefully. “Or less. Sally, have you revised your estimates of the age of that primitive civilization you dug up?”
Sally didn’t answer either. There was an uncomfortable silence.
“For the record, Father Hardy,” Senator Fowler asked, “are you here as Commission staff?”
“No, sir. Cardinal Randolph has asked me to represent the Church to the Commission.”
“Thank you.”
There was more silence.
“They had nowhere to go,” Anthony Horvath said. He shrugged nervously. Someone giggled, then fell silent when Horvath continued. “It’s obvious that their first wars were a very long time ago, in the million-year range. It shows in their development. Dr. Horowitz has examined the expedition biological findings and—well, you tell them, Sigmund.”
Horowitz smiled in triumph. “When I first examined the probe pilot I thought it might be a mutation. I was right. They are mutations, only it all happened a long time ago. The original animal life on Mote Prime is bilaterally symmetric, as on Earth and nearly everywhere. The first asymmetric Motie must have been a drastic mutation. Couldn’t have been as well developed as the present forms, either. Why didn’t it die out? Because there were deliberate efforts to obtain the asymmetric form, I think. And because everything else was mutating also. The competition for survival was low.”
“But that means they had civilization when the present forms developed,” Sally said. “Is that possible?”
Horowitz smiled again.
“What about the Eye?” Sally asked. “It must have irradiated the Mote system when it went supergiant.”
“Too long ago,” Horvath said. “We checked. After all, we’ve got the equivalent of five hundred years’ observation of the Eye in data from our explorer ships, and it checks with the information the Moties gave Midshipman Potter. The Eye’s been a supergiant for six million years or more, and the Moties haven’t had their present form anything like that long.”
“Oh,” said Sally. “But then what caused the—”
“Wars,” Horowitz announced. “General increase in radiation levels, planet-wide. Coupled with deliberate genetic selection.”
Sally nodded reluctantly. “All right—they had atomic wars. So did we. If the CoDominium hadn’t developed the Alderson Drive we’d have exterminated ourselves on Earth.” She didn’t like the answer, though. It was hard to accept. “Couldn’t there have been another dominant species that killed itself off, and the Moties developed later?”
“No,” Horvath said carefully. “Your own work, Lady Sally: you’ve shown just how well adapted the Motie form is to using tools. The mutation must have been a tool user to begin with—or was controlled by tool users. Or both.”
“That’s one war,” Senator Fowler said. “The one that created the Moties as we see ‘em. You said two.”
Horvath nodded sadly. “Yes, sir. The presently evolved Moties must have fought with atomic weapons. Later there was another period of radiation that split the species into all those castes—both the civilized forms and the animals. Plus intermediates like Watchmakers.” Horvath looked apologetically at Blaine, but there was no sign of emotion.
Sigmund Horowitz cleared his throat. He was clearly enjoying this. “I believe the Browns were the original form. When the Whites became dominant they bred the other subspecies to their own uses. Controlled evolution again, you see. But some forms evolved by themselves.”
“Then the asymmetric animals are not ancestors to Moties?” Senator Fowler asked curiously.
“No.” Horowitz rubbed his hands together and fingered his pocket computer in anticipation. “They are degenerate forms—I can show you the gene mechanisms.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Senator Fowler said hastily. “So we have two wars. Presumably the Mediators could have been bred in the second one—”
“Better make it three wars,” Renner put in. “Even if we assume they ran out of radioactives in the second one.”
“Why?” Sally demanded.
“You saw the planet. Then there’s the adaptation to space,” Renner said. He looked expectantly at Horvath and Horowitz.
Horowitz’ triumphant grin was even broader now. “Your work again, my lady. The Moties are so well adapted to space that you wondered if they’d evolved there. They did.” The xenobiologist nodded emphatically. “But not until they’d had a long evolutionary period on the planet itself. Want me to review the evidence? Physiological mechanisms that adjust to low pressure and no gravity, intuitive astrogation—”