The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

stopped the film.
    “Well?”
    “They look like—like that,” said Rod.
    “Glad you think so. Now watch.” The projector started again. The odd shapes dwindled, converged, and disappeared, not as if they had dwindled to infinity, but as if they had evaporated.
    “But that shows passengers being ejected from the probe and burned up by the light sail. What sense does that make?”
    “It doesn’t. And you can find forty explanations out at the university. Picture’s not too clear anyway. Notice how distorted they were? Different sizes, different shapes. No way to tell if they were alive. One of the anthropologist types thinks they were statues of gods thrown out to protect them from profanation. He’s about sold that theory to the rest of ‘em, except for those who say the pictures were flawed film, or mirages from the Langston Field, or fakes.”
    “Yes, sir.” That didn’t need comment, and Blaine made none. He returned to his seat and examined the photograph again. A million questions . . . if only the pilot were not dead.
    After a long time the Admiral grunted, “Yeah. Here’s a copy of the report on what we found in the probe. Take it somewhere and study it, you’ve got an appointment with the Viceroy tomorrow afternoon and he’ll expect you to know something. Your anthropologist helped write that report, you can discuss it with her if you want. Later on you can go look at the probe, we’re bringing it down today.” Cranston chuckled at Blaine’s surprised look. “Curious about why you’re getting this stuff? You’ll find out. His Highness has plans and you’re going to be part of them. We’ll let you know.”
    Rod saluted and left in bewilderment, the TOP SECRET report clutched under his arm.
     
    The report was mostly questions.
    Most of the probe’s internal equipment was junk, fused and melted clutters of plastic blocks, remains of integrated circuitry, odd strips of conducting and semi conducting materials jumbled together in no rational order. There was no trace of the shroud lines, no gear for reeling them in, no apertures in the thirty-two projections at one end of the probe. If the shrouds were all one molecule it might explain why they were missing; they would have come apart, changed chemically, when Blaine’s cannon cut them. But how had they controlled the sail? Could the shrouds somehow be made to contract and relax, like a muscle?
    An odd idea, but some of the intact mechanisms were just as odd. There was no standardization of parts in the probe. Two widgets intended to do almost the same job could be subtly different or wildly different. Braces and mountings seemed hand carved. The probe was as much a sculpture as a machine.
    Blaine read that, shook his head, and called Sally. Presently she joined him in his cabin.
    “Yes, I wrote that,” she said. “It seems to be true. Every nut and bolt in that probe was designed separately. It’s less surprising if you think of the probe as having a religious purpose. But that’s not all. You know how redundancy works?”
    “In machines? Two gilkickies to do one job. In case one fails.”
    “Well, it seems that the Moties work it both ways.”
    “Moties?”
    She shrugged. “We had to call them something. The Mote engineers made two widgets do one job, all right, but the second widget does two other jobs, and some of the supports are also bimetallic thermostats and thermoelectric generators all in one. Rod, I barely understand the words. Modules: human engineers work in modules, don’t they?”
    “For a complicated job, of course they do.”
    “The Moties don’t. It’s all one piece, everything working on everything else. Rod, there’s a fair chance the Moties are brighter than we are.”
    Rod whistled. “That’s . . . frightening. Now, wait a minute. They’d have the Alderson Drive, wouldn’t they?”
    “I wouldn’t know about that. But they have some things we don’t. There are biotemperature superconductors,” she