“But you do have birth control pills then!” Whitbread said. “You can use them to control the population—”
“That’s what this Crazy Eddie thought. Well, they used the hormone for something like three generations in the Empire. Stabilized the populations, all right. Not very many Masters there. Everything peaceful. Meanwhile, of course, the population explosion was happening on the other continents. The other Masters got together and invaded the Emperor’s territory. They had plenty of Warriors—and plenty of Masters to control them. End of Empire. Our time machine builder had the idea she could set things up so that the Empire would control all of Mote Prime.” Whitbread’s Motie snorted in disgust. “It never works. How are you going to get the Masters to become sterile males? Sometimes it happens anyway, but who’d want to before having children? That’s the only time the hormone can work.”
“Oh.”
“Right. Even if the Emperor had conquered all of Mote Prime and stabilized the population—and think about it, Jonathon, the only way to do that would be for the rulers to pass control on to breeders while never having any children themselves—even if they did, they’d have been attacked by the asteroid civilizations.”
“But man, it’s a start!” said Whitbread. “There’s got to be a way—”
“I am not a man, and there doesn’t got to be a way. And that’s another reason I don’t want contact between your species and mine. You’re all Crazy Eddies. You think every problem has a solution.”
“All human problems hae at least one final solution,” Gavin Potter said softly from the seat behind them.
“Human, perhaps,” the alien said. “But do Moties have souls?”
“ ’Tis nae for me to say,” Potter answered. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I am no a spokesman for the Lord.”
“It isn’t for your chaplain to say either. How can you expect to find out? It would take revealed knowledge—a divine inspiration, wouldn’t it? I doubt if you’ll get it.”
“Hae ye nae religion at all, then?” Potter asked incredulously.
“We’ve had thousands, Gavin. The Browns and other semisentient classes don’t change theirs much, but every civilization of Masters produces something else. Mostly they’re variants of transmigration of souls, with emphasis on survival through children. You can see why.”
“You didn’t mention Mediators,” Whitbread said.
“I told you—we don’t have children. There are Mediators who accept the transmigration idea. Reincarnation as Masters. That sort of thing. The closest thing to ours I’ve heard of in human religions is Lesser-Way Buddhism. I talked to Chaplain Hardy about this. He says Buddhists believe they can someday escape from what they call the Wheel of Life. That sounds an awful lot like the Cycles. I don’t know, Jonathon. I used to think I accepted reincarnation, but there’s no knowing, is there?”
“And you hae nothing like Christianity?” Potter demanded.
“No. We’ve had prophecies of a Savior who’d end the Cycles, but we’ve had everything, Gavin. It’s for damn sure there’s been no Savior yet.”
The endless city unrolled beneath them. Presently Potter leaned back in his chair and began to snore softly. Whitbread watched in amazement.
“You should sleep too,” said the Motie. “You’ve been up too long.”
“I’m too scared. You tire easier than we do—you ought to sleep.”
“I’m too scared.”
“Brother, now I’m really scared.” Did I really call him brother? No, I called her brother. Hell with it. “There was more to your museum of art than we understood, wasn’t there?”
“Yeah. Things we didn’t want to go into detail about. Like the massacre of the Doctors. A very old event, almost legend now. Another Emperor, sort of, decided to wipe the entire Doctor breed off the planet. Damn near succeeded, too.” The Motie stretched. “It’s good to talk to you without having to lie. We weren’t made to lie, Jonathon.”
“Why kill off the Doctors?”
“To keep the population down, you idiot! Of course it didn’t work. Some Masters kept secret stables, and after the next collapse they—”
“—were worth their weight in iridium.”
“It’s thought that they actually became the foundation of commerce. Like cattle on Tabletop.”
The city fell behind at last, and the plane moved over oceans dark beneath the red light of Murcheson’s Eye. The red star was setting, glowing balefully near the horizon, and other stars rose in the east below the inky edge of the Coal Sack.
“If they’re going to shoot us down, this is the place,” Staley said. “Where the crash won’t hit anything. Are you sure you know where we’re going?”
Whitbread’s Motie shrugged. “To King Peter’s jurisdiction. If we can get there.” She looked back at Potter. The midshipman was curled into his seat, his mouth slightly open, gently snoring. The lights in the plane were dim and everything was peaceful, the only jarring note the rocket launcher that Staley clutched across his lap. “You ought to get some sleep too.”
“Yeah.” Horst leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. His hands never relaxed their tight grip on the weapon.
“He even sleeps at attention,” Whitbread said. “Or tries to. I guess Horst is as scared as we are.”
“I keep wondering if any of this does any good,” the alien said. “We’re damned close to falling apart anyway. You missed a couple of other things in that zoo, you know. Like the food beast. A Motie variant, almost armless, unable to defend itself against us but pretty good at surviving. Another of our relatives, bred for meat in a shameful age, a long time ago.”
“My God.” Whitbread took a deep breath. “But you wouldn’t do anything like that now.”
“Oh, no.”
“Then why bring it up?”
“A mere statistical matter, a coincidence you may find interesting. There isn’t a zoo on the planet that doesn’t have breeding stock of Meats. And the herds are getting larger…”
“God’s teeth! Don’t you ever stop thinking about the next collapse?”
“No.”
Murcheson’s Eye had long since vanished. Now the east was blood-red in a sunrise that still startled Whitbread. Red sunrises were rare on inhabitable worlds. They passed over a chain of islands. Ahead to the west lights glowed where it was still dark. There was a cityscape like a thousand Spartas set edge to edge, crisscrossed everywhere by dark strips of cultivated land. On man’s worlds they would be parks. Here they were forbidden territory, guarded by twisted demons.
Whitbread yawned and looked at the alien beside him. “I think I called you brother, some time last night.”
“I know. You meant sister. Gender is important to us, too. A matter of life and death.”
“I’m not sure I mean that either. I meant friend,” Whitbread said with some awkwardness.
“Fyunch(click) is a closer relationship. But I am glad to be your friend,” said the Motie. “I wouldn’t have given up the experience of knowing you.”
The silence was embarrassing. “I better wake up the others,” Whitbread said softly.
The plane banked sharply and turned northwards. Whitbread’s Motie looked out at the city below, across to the other side to be sure of the location of the sun, then down again. She got up and went forward into the pilot’s compartment, and twittered. Charlie answered and they twittered again.