George Martin - Tuf Voyaging

“You’d have had ample goddamned warning this time,” said Tolly Mune, pulling out a beer, “if you’d told me that you intended to condemn our beliefs, our church, and our whole puling way of life. Did you expect they’d give you a medal?”

“A rousing hand of applause would have been sufficient.”

“I warned you a long time ago, Tuf. On S’uthlam, it’s not popular to be anti-life.”

“I decline to be thus labeled,” said Tuf. “I stand squarely in favor of life. Indeed, daily I create life in my cloning vats. I have a decided personal aversion to death, I find entropy distasteful, and if invited to the heat death of the universe, I would most certainly make other plans.” He raised a finger. “Nonetheless, Portmaster Mune, I said what had to be said. Unlimited procreation as taught by your Church of Life Evolving and practiced by the majority of S’uthlamese, yourself and your fellow zeros excluded, is irresponsible and foolish, producing as it does a geometric population increase that will most assuredly pull down your proud civilization.”

“Haviland Tuf, prophet of doom,” the Portmaster said with a sigh. “They liked you better as a rogue ecologist and a lover.”

“Everywhere I visit, I find heroes to be an endangered species. Perhaps I am more aesthetically pleasing when mouthing reassuring falsehoods through a filter of facial hair in melodramatic vidshows reeking of false optimism and post-coital complacency. This is a symptom of a great S’uthlamese affliction, your blind preference for things as you would have them rather than as they are. It is time that your world looked upon naked truth, be it my hairless face or the near certainty of famine in your future.”

Tolly Mune swallowed some beer and stared at him. “Tuf,” she said, “you remember what I said five years ago?”

“As I recall, you said a great many things.”

“At the end,” she said impatiently, “when I decided to help you escape with the Ark instead of helping Josen Rael take it from you. You asked me why, and I explained my reasons.”

“You said,” Tuf stated, “that power corrupts, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, that the Ark had already corrupted First Councillor Josen Rael and his associates, and that I was better fitted to retain possession of the seedship because I was an incorruptible man.”

She gave him a wan smile. “Not quite, Tuf. I said I didn’t think there was such a thing as an incorruptible man, but if there was, you were the item.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf, stroking Dax. “I stand corrected.”

“Now you’re making me wonder,” she said. “You know what you just did, back there? For starters, you toppled another government. Creg can’t survive this. You told the whole world he’s a liar. Maybe that’s fair enough; you made him, now you unmade him. First Councillors don’t seem to last long when you come calling, do they? But never mind that. You also told, oh, some thirty-odd billion members of the Church of Life Evolving that their most deeply held religious beliefs are so much bladder bloat. You as much as said that the entire basis of the technocratic philosophy that has dominated council policy for centuries is mistaken. We’ll be lucky if the next damned election doesn’t bring the expansionists back in, and if that happens, it means war. Vandeen and Jazbo and the other allies will not tolerate another expansionist government. You probably ruined me, too. Again. Unless I’m even faster on my goddamned feet than I was last time around. Instead of a star-crossed lover, I’m now the sort of gnarly old bureaucrat who likes to lie about her sexual escapades, and I helped Citizen Anti-Life, too.” She sighed. “You seem determined to see me in disgrace. But that’s nothing, Tuf. I can take care of myself. The main thing is, you took it upon yourself to dictate policy to forty-plus billion people, with only the vaguest conception of the consequences. By what authority? Who gave you the right?”

“I would maintain that any human has the right to speak the truth.”

“And the right to demand a worldwide all-net newsfeed to speak it on? Where did that puling right come from?” she said. “There are several million people on S’uthlam who belong to the zero faction, me included. You didn’t say much that we haven’t said for years. You just said it louder.”

“I am aware of this. It is my hope that the words spoken this evening, no matter how bitterly they were received, will ultimately have a beneficial effect upon S’uthlamese politics and society. Perhaps Cregor Blaxon and his technocrats will grasp the truth that no true salvation can be found in what he calls Tuf’s Flowering and what you once referred to as ‘the miracle of loaves and fishes’. Perhaps from this point on, policies and opinions will be changed. Perhaps your zero faction may even triumph in the next election.”

Tolly Mune scowled. “That’s damned unlikely, and you should know it. And even if the zero faction won, the question arises as to what the hell we could do.” She leaned forward. “Would we have the right to enforce population control? I wonder. Never mind about that, though. My point is that you don’t have any damned monopoly on truth. Any zero could have given your damned speech. Hell, half the damned technocrats know what the ledger looks like. Creg’s no fool. Neither was poor Josen. What allowed you to do that was power , Tuf. The power of the Ark. The help you can give us, or withhold, as you choose.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf. He blinked. “I cannot take issue with you. The sad truth of history has always been that the unreasoning masses follow the powerful, and not the wise.”

“And which are you, Tuf?”

“I am but a humble—”

“Yes, yes,” she snapped, “I know, a goddamned humble ecological engineer. A humble ecological engineer who has taken it on himself to play prophet. A humble ecological engineer who has visited S’uthlam exactly twice in his life, for a total of maybe a hundred days, and yet feels competent to topple our government, discredit our religion, and lecture forty-odd billion strangers about how many puling children they ought to have. My people may be stupid, they may be shortsighted, and they may be blind, but they are still my people, Tuf. I don’t think I entirely approve of you arriving here and trying to remake us according to your own enlightened values.”

“I deny this charge, madam. Whatever my personal standards might be, I do not seek to impose them upon S’uthlam. I merely took it upon myself to elucidate certain truths, and to make your population aware of certain cold, hard equations, the sum of which is assuredly disaster, and cannot be changed by beliefs, prayers, or melodramatic romances on your vidnets.”

“You’re being paid—” Tolly Mune started.

“Insufficiently,” Tuf interrupted.

She smiled despite herself. “You’re being paid for ecological engineering, Tuf, not for religious or political instruction, thank you.”

“You are most welcome, Portmaster Mune.” He made a steeple of his hands. “Ecology,” he said. “Consider the word, if you will. Meditate upon its meaning. An ecosystem might be likened to a great biological machine, perhaps. If this analogy is pursued, humanity must be seen as part of the machine. No doubt an important part—an engine, a key circuit—but in no case apart from the mechanism, as is often fallaciously assumed. Ergo, when one such as myself re-engineers an ecology, he must by necessity refit as well the humans who inhabit it.”

“Now you’re giving me a chill, Tuf. You’ve been alone in this ship for too long.”

“This is an opinion I do not share,” said Tuf.

“People aren’t old pulse-rings, or blast-tubes to be recalibrated, you know.”