George Martin - Tuf Voyaging

Tuf sucked his bulb with ponderous dignity as the tubetrain fell down the elevator toward the surface of the planet below. It was not a comfortable ride. Haviland Tuf had found the cost of starclass accommodations prohibitively high, and had therefore settled for premiere class, the next best available, only to discover himself crammed into a seat seemingly designed for a S’uthlamese child, and a small S’uthlamese child at that, in a row of eight similar seats divided by a narrow central aisle.

Sheer chance had given him the aisle seat, fortunately; without such placement, Tuf entertained grave doubts about whether he could have made the voyage at all. But even here, it was impossible to move without brushing against the bare thin arm of the woman to his left, a contact that Tuf found distasteful in the extreme. When he sat in his accustomed manner, the crown of his head bumped against the ceiling, so he was forced to hunker down, and tolerate a most annoying tightness in his neck as a result. Farther back on the tubetrain, Tuf understood, were the first-, second-, and third-class accommodations. He resolved to avoid experiencing their dubious comforts at all costs.

When the descent commenced, the majority of the passengers pulled privacy hoods down over their heads, and punched up the personal diversion of their choice. The offerings, Haviland Tuf noted, included three different musical programs, a historical drama, two erotic fantasy loops, a business interface, something listed as a “geometric pavane,” and direct stimulation to the pleasure center of the brain. Tuf considered investigating the geometric pavane, until discovering that the privacy hood was too small for his head, his skull being unduly large and long by S’uthlamese standards.

“You the big fly?” asked a voice from across the aisle.

Tuf looked over. The S’uthlamese were sitting in silent isolation, their heads enveloped by their dark eyeless helmets. Aside from the cluster of stewards far at the rear of the car, the only passenger still in the world of reality was the man in the aisle seat across from him one row back. Long, braided hair, copper-colored skin, and plump, fleshy cheeks branded the man as much an offworlder as Tuf himself. “The big fly, right?”

“I am Haviland Tuf, an ecological engineer.”

“I knew you were a fly,” the man said. “Me, too. I’m Ratch Norren, from Vandeen.” He held out a hand.

Haviland Tuf looked at it. “I am familiar with the ancient ritual of shaking hands, sir. I have noted that you are carrying no weapons. It is my understanding that the custom was originally intended to establish this fact. I am unarmed as well. You may now withdraw your hand, if you please.”

Ratch Norren grinned and pulled back his arm. “You’re a funny duck,” he said.

“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf, “I am neither a funny duck nor a large fly. I would think this much obvious to any person of normal human intelligence. Perhaps standards are different on Vandeen.”

Ratch Norren reached up and pinched his own cheek. It was a round, full, fleshy cheek, covered with red powder, and he gave it a good strong pinch. Tuf decided this was either a particularly perverse tic or a Vandeeni gesture the significance of which escaped him. “The fly stuff,” the man said, “that’s just spinneret talk. An idiom. They call all us offworlders flies.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf.

“You are the one who arrived in that giant warship, right? The one who was on all the newsfeeds?” Norren did not wait for an answer. “Why are you wearing the wig?”

“I am traveling incognito,” said Haviland Tuf, “though it appears that you have penetrated my disguise, sir.”

Norren pinched his cheek again. “Call me Ratch,” he said. He looked Tuf up and down:. “Pretty feeb disguise, though. Wig or no wig, you’re still a big fat giant with a complexion like a mushroom.”

“In future, I shall employ makeup,” said Tuf. “Fortunately, none of the native S’uthlamese have displayed your perspicacity.”

“They’re just too polite to mention it. That’s how it is on S’uthlam. There’s so many of them, you know? Most of them can’t afford any kind of real privacy, so they go in for a lot of pretend privacy. They won’t take any notice of you in public unless you want to be noticed.”

Haviland Tuf said, “The inhabitants of Port S’uthlam that I encountered did not seem unduly reticent, nor overburdened with elaborate etiquette.”

“The spinnerets are different,” Ratch Norren replied offhandedly. “Things are looser up there. Say, let me give you a little advice. Don’t sell that ship of yours here, Tuf. Take it to Vandeen. We’ll give you a lot better price for it.”

“It is not my intention to sell the Ark ,” Tuf replied.

“No need to dickerdaddle with me,” Norren said. “I don’t have the authority to buy it anyhow. Or the standards. Wish I did.” He laughed. “You just go to Vandeen and get in touch with our Board of Coordinators. You won’t regret it.” He glanced about, as if he were checking to see that the stewards were far away and the other passengers still dreaming behind their privacy helmets, and then dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Besides, even if the price wasn’t a factor, I hear that warship of yours has got nightmare-class power, right? You don’t want to give the S’uthlamese power like that. No lying, I love ’em, I really do, come here regularly on business, and they’re good people, when you get one or two of them alone, but there are so many of them, Tuffer, and they just breed and breed and breed, like goddamned rodents. You’ll see. A couple centuries back, there was a big local war just on account of that. The suthies were planting colonies all over the damned place, grabbing every piece of real estate they could, and if anybody else happened to be living there, the suthies would just outbreed ’em. We finally put an end to it.”

“We?” said Haviland Tuf.

“Vandeen, Skrymir, Henry’s World, and Jazbo, officially, but we had help from a lot of neutrals, right? The peace treaty restricted the S’uthlamese to their own solar system. But you give them that hellship of yours, Tuf, and maybe they break free again.”

“I had understood the S’uthlamese to be a singularly honorable and ethical people.”

Ratch Norren pinched his cheek again. “Honorable, ethical, sure, sure. Great folks to cut deals with, and the swirls—know some blistery erotic tricks. I tell you, I got a hundred suthie friends, and I love every one of ’em. But between them, my hundred friends must have maybe a thousand children. These people breed, that’s the problem, Tuf, you listen to Ratch. They’re all liferoos, right?”

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. “And what, might I inquire, is a liferoo?”

“Liferoos,” Norren repeated impatiently. “Anti-entropists, kiddie-culters, helix-humpers, genepool puddlers. Religious fanatics, Tuffer, religious crazies.” He might have said more, but the steward was wheeling the beverage cart back down the aisle just then. Norren sat back in his seat.

Haviland Tuf raised a long pale finger to check the steward’s progress. “I will have another bulb, if you please,” he said. He hunched over in silence for the remainder of the trip, sucking thoughtfully on his beer.

Tolly Mune floated in her cluttered apartment, drinking and thinking. One wall of the room was a huge vidscreen, six meters long and three meters high. Customarily, Tolly keyed it to display scenic panoramas; she liked the effect of having a window overlooking the high, cool mountains of Skrymir, or the dry canyons of Vandeen with their swift Whitewater rivers, or the endless city lights of S’uthlam itself spreading across the night, with the shining silver tower that was the base of the elevator ascending up and up and up into the dark, moonless sky, soaring high above even starclass tower-homes four kays tall.