George Martin - Tuf Voyaging

Haviland Tuf, driving a segmented vehicle that glided across the deck like a snake on wheels, stopped directly in front of the ambassadors. The Vandeeni stepped forward beaming, reached up and pinched his own full cheek very vigorously, and bowed. “I would offer my hand, but I recall your opinion of that custom,” he said. “Do you remember me, fly?”

Haviland Tuf blinked. “I have some vague recollection of encountering you upon the train to the surface of S’uthlam some ten years ago,” he said.

“Ratch Norren,” the man said. “I’m not what you call a regular diplomat, but the Board of Coordinators figured they’d send somebody who’d met you, and knew the Suthies, too.”

“That’s an offensive term, Norren,” Tolly Mune said bluntly.

“You’re an offensive bunch,” Ratch Norren replied.

“And dangerous,” whispered the envoy from the Azure Triune, from the center of his holographic fog.

“You’re the puling aggressors,” Tolly Mune started.

“Defensive aggression,” boomed the cyborg from Roggandor.

“We recall the last war,” said the Jazbot. “This time we decline to wait until your damnable evolutionists burst forth and try to colonize our worlds again.”

“We have no such plans,” Tolly Mune said.

’“You don’t, spinneret,” Ratch Norren said. “But look me in the optics here and tell me your expansionists don’t have wet dreams about breeding all over Vandeen.”

“And Skrymir.”

“Roggandor wants no part of your cast-off human detritus.”

“You will never take the Azure Triune.”

“Who the hell would want the puling Azure Triune?” snapped Tolly Mune. Blackjack purred approval.

“This glimpse into the inner working of high interstellar diplomacy has been most elucidating,” Haviland Tuf announced. “Nonetheless, I sense that more pressing business awaits. If the envoys would be so cooperative as to board my vehicle, we might proceed onward to our conference.”

Still muttering among themselves, the allied ambassadors did as Tuf bid them. Fully loaded, the vehicle set out across the landing deck, weaving a path between the myriad abandoned starships. An airlock, round and dark as the mouth of a tunnel or the jaws of some insatiable beast, opened at their approach and swallowed them. They entered and stopped; the lock closed behind them, engulfing the party in darkness. Tuf ignored the whispered complaints. Around them came a screeching metallic noise; the floor began to descend. When they had dropped at least two decks, another door opened in front of them. Tuf turned on his headlamps and they drove out into a pitch-black corridor.

They drove through a maze of dark, chilly corridors, past countless closed doors, following a dim indigo trace that flitted before them, a ghost embedded in the dusty floor. The only light was the beam from the train’s headlamps, and the faint glow of the instrument panel in front of Tuf. At first the envoys bantered among themselves, but the black depths of the Ark were oppressive and claustrophobic, and one by one the members of the delegation fell silent. Blackjack began to knead Tolly Mune’s knees rhythmically with his claws.

After a long time rolling through dust, darkness, and silence, the train approached a towering pair of double doors that hissed open ominously at their approach, and closed with a loud clang of finality behind them. Within, the air was moist and hot. Haviland Tuf stopped, and turned off the headlamps. Total darkness enveloped them.

“Where are we?” Tolly Mune demanded. Her voice rang off some distant ceiling, although the echo seemed strangely muffled. Though black as a pit, the room was obviously cavernous. Blackjack hissed uneasily, sniffed the air, and made a tiny, uncertain mewing sound.

She heard footsteps, and a small light flicked on two meters away. Tuf was bent over an instrument console, watching a monitor panel. He pressed one key in a luminescent keyboard, and turned. A padded wingback floater chair came whispering out of the warm darkness. Tuf climbed into it like a king ascending a throne, and touched a control on the arm. The chair lit up with a feint violet phosphorescence. “Kindly follow,” Tuf announced. The floater swiveled in the air and began to drift off.

“Puling hell,” Tolly Mune muttered. She climbed out of her seat hastily, cradling Blackjack, and scrambled after Tuf’s retreating throne. The allied ambassadors followed en masse, whining and complaining every step of the way. She could hear the cyborg’s massive footsteps behind her. Tuf’s floater was the only spot of light in an enveloping sea of darkness. As she rushed after him, she stepped on something.

The sudden feline yowl made her recoil, bumping into the cyborg’s armored chest. Confused, Tolly Mune knelt and reached out a tentative hand, holding Blackjack awkwardly in the crook of her arm; her fingers brushed soft fur. The cat rubbed up against her furiously, purring loudly. She could barely make out its shape—a small shorthair, hardly more than a kitten. It rolled over so she could scratch its belly. The Jazbot almost stumbled over her as she knelt there. And then suddenly Blackjack had leaped free and was sniffing around the new cat. It returned the favor briefly, then whirled, and in a blink it had vanished into the darkness. Blackjack hesitated, then howled and bounded after it. “Goddamn it,” Tolly Mune shouted. “Goddamn it, Jack, get your puling ass back here!” Her voice echoed, but her cat did not return. The rest of the party was growing more distant. Tolly Mune swore and hurried to catch up.

An island of light appeared ahead of her. When she arrived, the others were settling into seats arrayed along one side of a long metal table. Haviland Tuf, in the thronelike floater, was on the other side of the table, his face expressionless, his white hands folded atop his stomach.

Dax was stalking back and forth across his shoulders, purring.

Tolly Mune stopped, glared, swore. “Damn you to hell,” she said to Tuf. She turned around. “ Blackjack! ” she screamed at the top of her lungs. The echoes seemed swaddled in thick cloth, curiously indistinct. “ Jack! ” Nothing.

“I hope we have not come all this way simply to listen to the First Councillor of S’uthlam practice animal calls,” the envoy from Skrymir said.

“Indeed not,” said Tuf. “First Councillor Mune, if you will kindly take your seat, we may proceed at once.”

She scowled, and sank down into the only vacant chair. “Where the hell is Blackjack?”

“I can hardly venture an opinion on that subject,” said Tuf flatly. “He is, after all, your cat.”

“He ran off after one of yours,” Tolly Mune snapped.

“Indeed,” said Tuf. “Interesting. At the moment it so happens that I have a young female who has recently gone into heat. Perhaps that explains his actions. I have no doubt that he remains quite safe, First Councillor.”

“I want him back for this puling conference!” she said.

“Alas,” said Tuf, “the Ark is a large ship and they might be sporting in any of a thousand places, and in any case, to interfere with their sexual congress would be unconscionably anti-life by S’uthlamese standards. I would hesitate to do such violence to your cultural mores. Moreover, you have stressed to me repeatedly that time is of the essence, as many human lives are at stake. Ergo, I think it best we proceed with all due haste.”

Tuf moved his hand slightly, touched a control. A section of the long table sank out of sight. A moment later, a plant rose from within, directly in front of Tolly Mune. “Behold,” said Tuf. “Manna.”

It grew from a low bedding pan, a tangle of pale green vines almost a meter high, a living gordian knot, tendrils weaving back and forth on themselves and edging over the lip of the container. All along the vines were thick clusters of leaves, as tiny as fingernails, their waxy green surface shot through with a delicate tracery of black veins. Tolly Mune reached out and touched the nearest leaf, and discovered that its underside was covered with a dusting of fine powder that came off on the tips of her fingers. Between the clusters of leaves, the branching vines were swollen with clusters of fat white carbuncles, larger and more pustulent-looking in toward the central tangle of growth. She saw one palp, half concealed under a canopy of leaves, that had grown as big as a man’s hand.