2986

New Ireland designated sector Naval shore leave destination.

3005

Union Planetoids registered, Maxroy’s Purchase.

3007

Maxroy’s Purchase joins Empire of Man.

3013

Prince Samual’s World discovered by units of Imperial Navy. Events of

King David’s Spaceship

begin.

3016

New Chicago Revolt. Events of

The Mote in God’s Eye

begin.

3017

First contact: Motie light sail reaches human space. MacArthur dispatched to investigate Mote System. Mote Blockade Treaty concluded with representatives from Mote Prime, preventing Motie exit from Mote Space.

3026

Tanner Metals registered, Pitchfork City, Maxroy’s Purchase.

3035

Sir Lawrence Jackson, Governor, Maxroy’s Purchase, dispatches Bury-owned ship to New Utah to invite Empire membership. The New Utah True Church refuses.

3047

Events of The Gripping Hand

begin. The “Motie scare” on Maxroy’s Purchase. Renner investigation reveals True Church use of a periodic tramline from Maxroy’s Purchase to New Utah. Collapse of The Curdle opens a second Alderson point from the Mote system into Imperial space.

3048

Motie Medina Trader Alliance concludes and polices the Second Mote Blockade Treaty in exchange for exclusive trading rights with the Empire. Motie access to Empire Space prohibited without infection with contraceptive C-L parasite.

Horace Bury bequeaths bulk of Imperial Autonetics voting stock to a combination of his own and Alliance families.

3049

Second Jackson Expedition to New Utah planned. Events of

Outies

begin.

Prologue

Nauvoo Vision, en route to Saint George, New Utah, 3035

Ship’s time, it was well past midnight. Reuben Fox padded silently through the empty corridor. The Delegation all slept like exhausted children, thanks to a generous dollop of melatonin in their evening nightcaps. “It’s a Mormon Tea,” he’d said, passing around the steaming cups, “No caffeine. Help you sleep like babies before we descend tomorrow.”

And indeed they did. He stopped before a door just outside the cargo bay, marked only by a small plate that read “Maintenance Access.” He tapped softly. Barely a tap, even. More like stroking the door with his fingertips. It opened, silently. “Twenty minutes to Fling,” he murmured. Asach Quinn nodded, stepped into the corridor, satchel in one hand, a sealed hard case in the other. Fox pulled the door shut noiselessly, and led the way.

Inside the cargo bay, they skirted two enormous, white, blunt-nosed cylinders cradled in Fling racks. Each bore a square red cross, half-encircled by a bright red crescent. They stopped at a double-walled safety lock beside the bay door. Quinn knelt on the floor, and unlocked the case. Three objects were lodged in form-fitting impact foam inside. The first was cylindrical, the size of a man’s fist, with several fittings around a collar at one end. The second was a spider of tubing, laced through a solid tubular framework with quick-connectors at either end and couplings at the ends of each hose. Third, there was a sphere, small enough to be enclosed by a woman’s hands cupped fingertip-to-fingertip, made of a tough, flexible composite compound.

Asach locked one end of the frame to the cylinder, then dogged a set of couplings to the collar fittings. Next, from the satchel came a tough, turgid, multi-celled, doughnut-shaped bladder, with more fittings ringing one base. Asach slipped it over the hose assembly, fitting side away from the cylinder, dogged down the other end of the hose couplings, and snapped the sphere to the top end of the frame. The whole thing—sphere, upon toroid surrounding the frame assembly, upon cylinder—was little longer than the distance from Asach’s elbow to wrist, and light enough to lift easily with one hand.

Fox tapped a code sequence, then pressed his thumb into the pad beside the safety lock. The door slid open. Coils of retractable lifeline were stowed neatly at four anchor points on the inner walls; it was otherwise empty. Asach slid the assembled contraption inside. It fit, just. Fox closed the door with another key sequence. It was still air-filled; still pressurized. It would not be for much longer.

A disembodied voice echoed in the quiet. “Commander Fox?”

“Present.”

“Cargo Bay cycle commencing, 60 seconds. Clear, or abort?”

“Clearing.”

“Aye-aye, sir. Clear to commence in fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven…”

It took only a few moments to traverse the bay, exit the hold, and seal the door. Fox remained at the view panel. The faint hum as air was sucked from the bay and recompressed somewhere in the bowels of the ship was audible for a few moments, then faded as the hold neared vacuum. The fling racks began sliding along their rails. The bay doors opened to space. A few stars glittered. Most were obscured by the Coal Sack.

Fox put the readout on audio. “…Three. Two. One. Cargo Bay cycle complete. Commencing Fling sequence. Fling in F minus…”

The rail extender arms rolled the medical supply canisters out the doors, injected them into the Flinger, then folded back inside. The bay doors closed. The faint thrum of the charging Flinger pulsed through the hull.

“…Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

The ship shuddered slightly as the linear accelerator shoved twenty tons of medical supplies toward the Sorting Station in the Oquirrh foothills outside Saint George on New Utah. As Nauvoo Vision slowed and prepared to drop into geosynchronous orbit, the cannisters would blaze down through the atmosphere, ablating heat from their noses, drogue chutes jerking them to drop to the ground, spilling their contents like Santa’s reindeer making a clumsy chimney-top landing.

And, unnoticed alongside the Flinging, the safety lock cycled. Or rather, failed to cycle. Instead, its outer door merely opened, and the donut with its ball-nose and soda-can tail puffed out into space like so much jetsam. Floating alongside Nauvoo Vision, the assemblage coasted in toward New Utah for awhile. Then, as the medical cargo raced off to its mountain rendezvous, and as the ship dropped into its parking space, the little ball sailed on by itself, a speck, alone with its own thoughts in the vastness.

Its own thoughts were simple. They went something like this:

“…Four. Three. Two. One.”

And then the tiny rocket fired.

1

Visitation Rights

Sargon came, to fill the sanctuary like a cargo-ship; to fuel its great furnaces; to see that its canals spew waters of joy, to see that the hoes till the arable tracts and that barley covers the fields; to turn the house of Kish, which was like a haunted town, into a living settlement again.

—The Legend of Sargon, Segment A

Farmer Moties tend crops, which grow on whatever land is not covered by buildings or roads. They ignore anything except plants and anything that seems to threaten the plants, being essentially agricultural relatives of Engineers. Their hands and feet are adapted for digging and tamping down soil. They can operate machinery such as tractors.

Runners are employed carrying messages and are much taller than other Moties, but the Runner is mostly leg. One variety of Runner has multicolored layers of erectile hairs that allow it to camouflage itself while delivering messages.