Horace Bury
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Horace Bury is a fictional character appearing in the "Motie" novels of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
His full name is Horace Hussein Chamoun al-Shamlan Bury and he is around 90 years old in the first book. In the Second Empire of Man, he has the titles of Imperial Trader and Magnate. He is Chairman of the Board of Imperial Autonetics Ltd. Though a native of the planet Levant, he was educated on Sparta, the Imperial capital.
Horace Bury appears as one of the minor characters in The Mote in God's Eye, the first "Moties" novel. While being held under open arrest on board INSS MacArthur on suspicion of treason and of fomenting rebellion against the Imperial Government on the planet New Chicago, Bury is taken on the expedition sent to Mote System as a result of the arrival in Human space of a Motie light-sail-driven ship. He thereby comes to know and to dread the threat the Moties present to Humanity. Under the threat of being shot as a traitor he is coerced into acting as a secret agent for the Imperial Government to watch for and to prevent any attempts by any group of Humans to make contact with Moties. Sir Kevin Renner is appointed his political overseer.
In the interval between the books, Bury and Renner travel to many worlds on Bury's space yacht, Sinbad.
In the sequel, The Gripping Hand (UK title: The Moat around Murcheson's Eye), Bury moves to centre stage. In that book it is revealed that his actions on New Chicago arose not from greed nor as an attempt to make money from others' misfortunes, but from Arab patriotism, supporting his own people in their struggle to obtain the right to live under their own customs. By the start of this book he has achieved this.
When he meets some Moties, he finds that his Trader manner of thought and action has been adopted by many of the Mediator caste, that Bury-style Mediators have become a trade item in their own right, and that these Mediators provide the basis of trade and negotiation among many of the groupings of Moties inside Mote System.
