George Martin - Tuf Voyaging

“Yes,” she said. “Listen to me, Ober, and—”

“Tolly Mune,” Tuf said.

She whirled on him. “ What ?”

“If procreation is the mark of godhood,” Tuf said, “then cats are gods, too, it would seem to follow. They, too, reproduce themselves. Permit me to point out that, in a very short time, we have arrived at a situation whereby you have more cats than I do, though you started with but a single pair.”

She scowled. “What are you saying?” She punched off the sound, so Tuf’s words would not transmit.

Wald Ober gestured in sudden silence.

Haviland Tuf pressed the tips of his fingers together. “I am merely pointing out that, as much as I relish the properties of the feline, I nonetheless take steps to control their breeding. I reached this decision after careful consideration, and the weighing of all the alternatives. Ultimately, as you yourself will discover, there are but two fundamental options. You must either reconcile yourself to inhibiting the fertility of your cats, entirely without their consent, I might add, or, failing that, some day most assuredly you will find yourself about to cycle a bag full of newborn kittens out your airlock into the cold vacuum of space. Make no choice, and you have chosen. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, First Councillor. In abstaining, you vote.”

“Tuf,” she said, her voice agonized, “ don’t! I don’t want this damned power.”

Dax jumped up on the table, and turned his golden eyes upon her. “Godhood is a profession even more demanding than ecology,” Tuf said, “though it might be said that I knew the job to be hazardous when I accepted its burdens.”

“It’s not,” she started. “You can’t say,” she fumbled. “Kittens and babies aren’t,” she tried. “They’re people, they, they have the power of, that is, minds, minds and hearts as well as gonads. They’re rational, it’s their choice—theirs, not mine. I can’t possibly make it for them—the millions, the billions.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf. “I had forgotten about the good people of S’uthlam and their long history of rational choice. Undoubtedly they will look in the face of war, of famine, and of plague, and then in billions they will change their ways and deftly avert the shadow that threatens to engulf S’uthlam and its proud towers. How strange that I failed to see this.”

They stared at each other.

Dax began to purr. Then he looked away, and began to lap up cream-of-mushroom bisque from Tuf’s bowl. Blackjack rubbed up against her leg, keeping a wary eye on Dax as he stalked across the room.

Tolly Mune turned back to the console very slowly; it took her a day to make that turn—a week, a year, a lifetime. It took her forty billion lifetimes, but when she had completed that turn, it had only taken an instant, and those lives were gone as if they had never been.

She looked at the cold silent mask confronting her over the comm link, and in that dark shiny plastic she saw reflected all the faceless horror of war, and behind it burned the grim, fevered eyes of starvation and disease. She turned the sound transmission back up.

“What’s going on there?” Wald Ober was demanding, over and over. “First Councillor, I can’t hear you. What are your orders, do you hear me? What’s going on there?”

“Commander Ober,” Tolly Mune said. She forced a broad smile.

“What’s wrong?”

She swallowed. “Wrong? Nothing. Nothing at all. Puling hell, everything is incredibly right. The war’s over and so’s the crisis, Commander.”

“Are you under coercion?” Wald Ober barked.

“No,” she said quickly. “Why do you say that?”

“Tears,” he replied. “I see tears, First Councillor.”

“Of joy, Commander. Tears of joy. Manna, Ober, that’s what he calls it. Manna from heaven.” She laughed lightly. “Food from the stars. Tuf’s a genius. Sometimes . . . ” She bit her lip, hard. “Sometimes I even think he might be . . . ”

“What?”

“ . . . a god,” she said. She touched a button: the screen went dark.

Her name was Tolly Mune, but in the histories they call her all sorts of things.