George Martin - Tuf Voyaging

“In that case,” said Tuf, “you leave me no choice.” He stood up.

The Vandeeni frowned. “Hey, where are you going?”

Tuf gave a ponderous shrug. “Most immediately to a sanitary facility,” he replied, “and afterwards to my control chamber. Please accept my assurances that no personal animosity of any sort is intended toward any of you. Nonetheless it appears, unfortunately, that I must now go forth and destroy your respective worlds. Perhaps you would like to draw straws, to determine where I might best start.”

The woman from Jazbo choked and sputtered.

Deep inside his haze of blurred holograms, the envoy from the Azure Triune cleared his throat, a sound as small and dry as an insect scuttling across a sheet of paper.

“You would not dare,” boomed the cyborg from Roggandor.

The Skrymirian folded his arms in a chilly silence.

“Ah,” said Ratch Norren. “You. Ah. That is. You won’t. Yes, but surely. Ah.”

Tolly Mune laughed at them all. “Oh, he means it,” she said, though she was no less astonished than the rest of them. “And he can do it, too. Or the Ark can, rather. Commander Ober will be sure he gets an armed escort, too.”

“There is no need for haste,” the woman from Henry’s World said in precise, measured tones. “Perhaps we might reconsider.”

“Excellent,” said Haviland Tuf. He sat back down. “We will proceed with all deliberate haste,” he said. “A one year armistice will go into effect, as I have outlined, and I shall seed S’uthlam with manna immediately. “

“Not so fast,” Tolly Mune interjected. She felt giddy and triumphant. Somehow the war had just ended—Tuf had done it, S’uthlam was safe for at least a year. But relief did not make her entirely lightheaded. “All this sounds fine, but we’ll have to run some studies on this manna plant of yours before you start dropping spores all over S’uthlam. Our own biotechs and ecologists will want to examine the damn thing, and the High Council will want to run a few projections. A month ought to do. And of course, Tuf, what I said before still goes—you’re not just dumping your manna on us and leaving. You’ll stay this time, for the duration of the armistice, and maybe longer, until we have a good idea of how this latest miracle of yours is going to work.”

“Alas,” said Tuf, “I fear I have pressing engagements elsewhere in the galaxy. A sojourn of a standard year or more is inconvenient and unacceptable, as is a delay of a month before commencing my seeding program.”

“Wait just one puling second!” Tolly Mune began. “You can t just—”

“I can indeed,” said Tuf. He looked from her to the envoys, significantly, and then back again. “First Councillor Mune, allow me to point out the obvious. A rough balance of military force now exists between S’uthlam and its adversaries. The Ark is a formidable instrument of destruction, capable of wasting worlds. Just as it is possible for me to throw in with your forces and destroy any of the allied planets, so the converse is also within the realm of possibility.”

Tolly Mune suddenly felt as though she’d been assaulted. Her mouth gaped open. “Are you . . . Tuf, are you threatening us? I don’t believe it. Are you threatening to use the Ark against S’uthlam?”

“I am merely bringing certain possibilities to your attention,” said Haviland Tuf, his voice as flat as ever.

Dax must have sensed her rage; he hissed. Tolly Mune stood helplessly, bewildered. Her hands balled into fists.

“I will charge no fee for my labors as mediator and ecological engineer,” Tuf announced. “Yet I will require certain safeguards and concessions from both parties to our agreement. The allied worlds will furnish me with a bodyguard, so to speak—a small fleet of warships, sufficient in number and weaponry to stave off any attacks upon the Ark from the Planetary Defense Flotilla of S’uthlam and to escort me safely out of the system when my task here is done. The S’uthlamese, for their part, will agree to allow this allied fleet into their home system in order that my fears may be laid to rest. Should either side initiate hostilities during the period of the armistice, they will do so in full knowledge that this will surely provoke me to a most awful fit of wrath. I am not overly excitable, but when my anger is indeed aroused, I ofttimes frighten even myself. Once a standard year has passed, I shall be long departed and you may feel yourself free to resume your mutual slaughter, if you so choose. Yet it is my hope, and my prediction, that this time the steps I am initiating will prove so efficacious that none of you will feel compelled to resume hostilities.” He stroked Dax’s thick black fur, and the tomcat regarded each of them in turn with his huge golden eyes, seeing, weighing.

Tolly Mune felt cold all over. “You are imposing peace on us,” she said.

“Albeit temporarily,” said Tuf.

“And you are imposing this solution, whether we want it or not,” she said.

Tuf looked at her, but did not reply.

“ Just who the goddamned puling hell do you think you are ?” she screamed at him, unleashing the fury that had been swelling inside her.

“I am Haviland Tuf,” he said evenly, “and I have run out of patience with S’uthlam and the S’uthlamese, madam.”

After the conference was over, Tuf drove the ambassadors back to their diplomatic shuttle, but Tolly Mune refused to go along.

For long hours, she roamed the Ark alone, cold, tired, yet relentless. She called out as she went. “Blackjack!” she shouted, from the top of the moving staircases. “Here, Blacky, here,” she sang as she strode through the corridors. “Jack!” she cried when she heard a noise around a corner, but it was only a door opening or closing, the whirr of some machine repairing itself, or perhaps the scurrying of some stranger cat, some familiar of Tuf’s. “Blaaaaackjaaaaaaaaack!” she shouted at intersections where a dozen corridors crossed, and her voice boomed and rattled off his distant walls and echoed back at her.

But she did not find her cat.

Finally her wanderings took her up several decks, and she emerged in the dimly lit central shaft that cored the vast seedship—towering, echoing immensity thirty kilometers long, its ceiling lost in shadows, its wall lined by cloning vats large and small. She chose a direction at random and walked, and walked, and walked, calling out Blackjack’s name.

From somewhere ahead she heard a small, uncertain meow.

“Blackjack?” she called. “Where are you?”

Again she heard it. Up there, ahead. She took two hurried steps forward, and began to run.

Haviland Tuf stepped out from beneath the shadow of a plasteel tank twenty meters high; Blackjack was cradled in his arms, purring.

Tolly Mune stopped dead.

“I have located your cat,” said Tuf.

“I can see that,” she said coldly.

Tuf handed the huge gray tomcat to her gently, his hands brushing against her arms as he made the transfer. “You will find him none the worse for his wanderings,” Tuf declared. “I took the liberty of giving him a full medi-probe, to ascertain that he had suffered no misadventures, and determined that he is in the best of health. Imagine my surprise when I also chanced to discover that all the various bionic augmentations of which you informed me have somehow mysteriously and inexplicably vanished. I am at a loss to explain it.”

Tolly Mune hugged the cat to her chest. “So I lied,” she said. “He’s telepathic, like Dax. Maybe not as powerful. But that’s all. I couldn’t risk him fighting with Dax. Maybe he’d have won, maybe not. I didn’t want him cowed.” She grimaced. “So you got him laid instead. Where’s he been?”