George Martin - Tuf Voyaging

“Having left the manna chamber by a secondary entrance in pursuit of the object of his affections, he subsequently discovered that the doors were programmed to deny him readmittance. Therefore, he has spent the intervening hours roaming through the Ark and making the acquaintance of various other feline members of my ship’s company.”

“How many cats do you have?” she asked.

“Fewer than you,” Tuf said, “yet this is not entirely unanticipated. You are S’uthlamese, after all.”

Blackjack was warm and reassuring in her arms, and all at once Tolly Mune was struck by the fact that Dax was no longer in evidence. She had the edge again. She scratched Jack behind an ear; he turned his limpid silver-gray eyes upon Tuf. “You don’t fool me,” she said.

“I thought it unlikely that I could,” Tuf admitted.

“The manna,” she said. “It’s some kind of a trap, isn’t it? You fed us a batch of lies, admit it.”

“Everything I have told you of the manna is the truth.”

Blackjack uttered a peep. “The truth,” said Tolly Mune, “oh, the puling truth. That means there are things you haven’t told us about the manna.”

“The universe abounds in knowledge. Ultimately, there are more facts to be known than humans to know them, an astonishing realization considering that populous S’uthlam is included in humanity’s tally. I could scarcely hope to tell you everything concerning any subject, however limited.”

She gave a snort. “What are you going to do to us, Tuf?”

“I am going to resolve your food crisis,” he said, his voice as flat and cold as still water, and as full of secret depths.

“Blackjack’s purring,” she said, “so you’re telling the truth. But how, Tuf, how ?”

“The manna is my instrument.”

“Bladder bloat,” she said. “I don’t give a puling wart how tasty and addictive the manna fruit is, or how fast the damned things grow, no plant is going to solve our population crisis. You’ve tried all that. We’ve been around those coordinates with omni-grain and the pods and the wind-riders and the mushroom farms. You’re holding something back. Come on, piss it out.”

Haviland Tuf regarded her in silence for well over a minute. His eyes locked with hers, and it seemed briefly as though he were looking deep inside her, as if Tuf too were a mind reader.

Perhaps it was something else he read; finally, he answered. “Once the plant has been sown, it will never be entirely eradicated, regardless of how diligently you may attempt to do so. It will spread with inexorable rapidity, within certain parameters of climate. Manna will not thrive everywhere; frost kills it, and cold is inimical to its growth, but it shall indeed spread to cover the tropical and subtropical regions of S’uthlam, and that will be enough.”

“Enough for what ?”

“The manna fruit is extremely nutritious. During the first few years, it will do much to relieve the pressures of your present caloric shortfalls and thereby improve conditions upon S’uthlam. Eventually, having exhausted the soil in its vigorous spread, the plants will expire and decay, and you will of necessity be forced to employ crop rotation for a few years before those particular plots are capable of sustaining manna once again. Yet, meanwhile, the manna shall have completed its real work, First Councillor Mune. The dust that collects upon the underside of each leaf is in actuality a symbiotic microorganism, vital to manna pollination, yet with certain other properties. Borne upon the wind, carried by vermin and human alike, it shall touch every cranny and nook upon the surface of your globe.”

“The dust,” she said. She had gotten it on her fingertips when she touched the manna plant . . .

Blackjack’s growl was so low she felt it more than heard it. .

Haviland Tuf folded his hands. “One might consider manna dust as an organic prophylactic of sorts,” he said. “Your biotechs will discover that it interferes powerfully, and permanently, with libido in the human male and fertility in the human female. The mechanisms need not concern you.”

Tolly Mune stared at him, opened her mouth, closed it, blinked to hold back tears. Tears of despair, tears of rage? She could not say. Not tears of joy. She would not let them be tears of joy. “Deferred genocide,” she said, forcing out the words. Her voice was hoarse and raw.

“Scarcely,” Tuf said. “Some of your S’uthlamese will display a natural immunity to the effects of the dust. My projections indicate that somewhere between point oh-seven and point one-one percent of your base population will be unaffected. They will reproduce, of course, and thus the immunity will be passed on and grow more prevalent in successive generations. Yet a population implosion of considerable magnitude will commence upon S’uthlam this year, as the birth curve ceases its upward thrust and starts a precipitous descent.”

“You have no right,” said Tolly Mune slowly.

“The nature of the S’uthlamese problem is such so as to admit but one lasting and effectual solution,” Tuf said, “as I have told you from the very beginning.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But so what? What about freedom, Tuf? What about individual choice? My people may be selfish and short-sighted fools, but they’re still people , just like you. They have the right to decide if they’re going to have children, and how many children. Who the hell gave you the authority to make that decision for them? Who the hell told you to go ahead and sterilize our world?” She was growing angrier with every word. “You’re no better than we are. You’re only human, Tuf. A puling peculiar human, I’ll give you that, but only human—no more and no less. What gives you the goddamned right to play god with our world and our lives?”

“The Ark ,” Haviland Tuf said, simply.

Blackjack squirmed in her arms, suddenly restless, uneasy. Tolly Mune let him jump to the ground, never taking her eyes off Tuf’s blank white face. Suddenly she wanted to strike him, hurt him, wound that mask of indifference and complacency, mark him. “I warned you, Tuf,” she said. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, remember?”

“My memory is unimpaired.”

“Too bad I can’t say the same thing about your goddamned morality,” said Tolly Mune. Her tone was acid. Blackjack growled counterpoint at her feet. “Why the hell did I ever help you keep this goddamned ship? What a damned fool I was! You’ve been alone in a power fantasy too damn long, Tuf. Do you think somebody just appointed you god, is that it?”

“Bureaucrats are appointed,” said Tuf. “Gods, insofar as they exist at all, are chosen by other procedures. I make no claims to godhood in the mythological sense. Yet I submit that I do indeed wield the power of a god, a truth that I believe you recognized long ago, when you first turned to me for loaves and fishes.” When she began to reply, he raised a hand, palm outward. “No, kindly do not interrupt. I will endeavor to be brief. You and I are not so different, Tolly Mune—”

“We’re nothing alike, damn you!” she shrieked at him.

“We are not so different,” Tuf repeated calmly, firmly. “You once confessed that you were not a religious woman; nor am I one to worship myths. I began as a trader, yet having come upon this ship called Ark , I began to find myself dogged at every step by gods, prophets, and demons. Noah and the flood, Moses and his plagues, loaves and fishes, manna, pillars of fire, wives of salt—I must needs have become acquainted with all. You challenge me to declare myself a god. I make no such claim. And yet, it must be said, my first act upon this ship, so many years ago, was to raise the dead.” He pointed ponderously at a work station a few meters away. “There is the very spot at which I performed that first miracle, Tolly Mune. Moreover, I do indeed wield godlike powers and traffic in the life and death of worlds. Enjoying as I do these godlike abilities, can I rightfully decline the accompanying responsibility, the equally awesome burden of moral authority? I think not.”