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

said, rolling it as if she’d memorized the phrase, “painted on in strips.”
    “Then there’s this.” She reached past him to turn pages. “Here, look at this photo. And the little pebbly meteor holes.”
    “Micrometeorites. It figures.”
    “Well, nothing larger than four thousand microns got through the meteor defense. Only nobody ever found a meteor defense. They don’t have the Langston Field or anything like it.”
    “But—”
    “It must have been the sail. You see what that means? The autopilot attacked us because it thought MacArthur was a meteor.”
    “What about the pilot? Why didn’t—”
    “No. The alien was in frozen sleep, as near as we can tell. The life-support systems went wrong about the time we took it aboard. We killed it.”
    “That’s definite?”
    Sally nodded.
    “Hell. All that way it came. The Humanity League wants my head on a platter with an apple in my mouth, and I don’t blame them. Aghhhh . . .” A sound of pain.
    “Stop it,” Sally said softly.
    “Sorry. Where do we go from here?”
    “The autopsy. It fills half the report.” She turned pages and Rod winced. Sally Fowler had a stronger stomach than most ladies of the Court.
    The meat of the Motie was pale; its blood was pink, like a mixture of tree sap and human blood. The surgeons had cut deep into its back, exposing the bones from the back of the skull to where the coccyx would have been on a man.
    “I don’t understand. Where’s the spine?”
    “There is none,” Sally told him. “Evolution doesn’t seem to have invented vertebrae on Mote Prime,”
    There were three bones in the back, each as solid as a leg bone. The uppermost was an extension of the skull, as if the skull had a twenty-cm handle. The joint at its lower end was at shoulder level; it would nod the head but would not turn it.
    The main backbone was longer and thicker. It ended in a bulky, elaborate joining, partly ball-and-socket, at about the small of the back. The lower backbone flared into hips and sockets for the thighs.
    There was a spinal cord, a major nervous connective line, but it ran ventral to the backbones, not through them.
    “It can’t turn its head,” Rod said aloud. “It has to turn at the waist. That’s why the big joint is so elaborate. Right?”
    “That’s right I watched them test that joint. It’ll turn the torso to face straight backward. Impressed?”
    Rod nodded and turned the page. In that picture the surgeons had exposed the skull.
    Small wonder the head was lopsided. Not only was the left side of the brain larger, to control the sensitive, complexly innervated right arms; but the massive tendons of the left shoulder connected to knobs on the left side of the skull for greater leverage.
    “All designed around the arms,” Sally said. “Think of the Motie as a toolmaker and you’ll see the point. The right arms are for the fine work such as fixing a watch. The left arm lifts and holds. He could probably lift one end of an air car with the left hand and use the right arms to tinker with the motors. And that idiot Horowitz thought it was a mutation!” She turned more pages. “Look.”
    “Right, I noticed that myself. The arms fit too well.” The photographs showed the right arms in various positions, and they could not be made to get in each other’s way. The arms were about the same length when extended; but the bottom arm had a long forearm and short humerus, whereas in the top arm the forearm and humerus were about the same length. With the arms at the alien’s side, the fingertips of the top arm hung just below the bottom arm’s wrist.
    He read on. The alien’s chemistry was subtly different from the human but not wildly so, as anyone might have expected from previous extraterrestrial biology. All known life was sufficiently similar that some theorists held to spore dispersion through interstellar space as the origin of life everywhere. The theory was not widely held, but it was defensible, and the