Forty-seven days passed during which Tolly Mune talked neither to Tuf nor to First Councillor Josen Rael. Her duties as Portmaster, neglected during the onset of the Ark crisis, were more than sufficient to keep her occupied. She had disputes to hear and adjudicate, promotions to review, construction to supervise, beribboned fly diplomats to entertain before flushing them down the elevator, budgets to draw up, payrolls to thumb. And she had a cat to deal with, too.
At first, Tolly Mune feared the worst. Havoc refused to eat, seemed unable to reconcile herself to weightlessness, fouled the air in the Portmaster’s apartment with her waste products, and insisted on making some of the most pitiful noises the Portmaster had ever had the misfortune to hear. She got worried enough to bring in her chief verminologist, who assured her that the cage was spacious enough and the portions of protein paste were more than adequate. The she-cat did not agree, and continued to sicken, mewing and hissing until Tolly Mune was certain that insanity, either feline or human, was just around the corner.
Finally she took steps. She discarded the nutritious protein paste and began to feed the creature with the meat-sticks Tuf had sent over from the Ark. The ferocity with which Havoc attacked them when she thrust the ends through the bars was reassuring. Once she licked at Tolly Mune’s fingers after consuming a stick in record time; it was a strange sensation, but not entirely unpleasant. The cat took to rubbing up against the cage, too, as if she wanted contact; Tolly touched her tentatively, and was repaid with a far more pleasant sound than the cat had uttered previously. The touch of the creature’s black-and-white fur was almost sensuous.
After eight days, she let it out of its cage. The larger confines of the office would be a sufficient prison, she thought. No sooner did Tolly Mune slide back the cage door than Havoc bounded through, but when the bound took her sailing clear across the room, she began hissing wildly in distress. Tolly kicked off after her and snatched her as she tumbled, but the cat struggled wildly, clawing long gashes down the backs of her hands. After the medtech had come and gone, Tolly Mune called through to security. “Requisition a room in the Worldview,” she said, “a tower room with gravity control. Tell them to set the grid for one-quarter gee.”
“Who’s the guest?” they asked her.
“A port prisoner,” she snapped, “armed and dangerous.”
After the move, she visited the hotel daily at the end of her work-shift, at first strictly to feed her hostage and check on its welfare. By the fifteenth day, she was lingering long enough to soak up a few calories and give the cat the contact it craved. The beast’s personality had changed dramatically. It made sounds of pleasure when she opened the door for her daily inspection (although it still tried constantly to escape), rubbed up against her leg without provocation, kept its claws sheathed, and even seemed to be growing fat. Whenever Tolly Mune permitted herself to sit, Havoc was in her lap instantly. On the twentieth day she slept over. On the twenty-sixth she moved in temporarily.
Forty-seven days passed, and by the end of them Havoc had grown accustomed to sleeping next to her, curled up on her pillow, her soft black-and-white fur brushing against the Portmaster’s cheek.
On the forty-eighth day, Haviland Tuf called. If he was shocked to see his cat nestled in her lap, he gave no sign. “Portmaster Mune,” he said.
“Give up yet?” she asked him.
“Scarcely,” Tuf replied. “In point of fact, I stand ready to claim my victory.”
It was too important a meeting for a tele-link, even a shielded tele-link, Josen Rael had ruled. The Vandeeni might have ways of penetrating the shields. And yet, because Tolly Mune had dealt with Tuf firsthand and might understand him in a way the council could not, her presence was imperative, and her aversion to gravity was considered unimportant. She took the elevator down to the surface, for the first time in more years than she cared to contemplate, and was whisked by aircab to the highest chamber atop the council tower.
The huge drafty room had a certain spartan dignity. It was dominated by a long, wide conference table with a mirror-bright monitor-top. Josen Rael sat in the position of authority, in a high-backed black chair with the globe of S’uthlam worked in three-dimensional relief above his head. “Portmaster Mune,” he said, nodding to her as she struggled to an unoccupied seat near the foot of the table.
The room was crowded with the powerful—the inner council, the elite of the technocratic faction, key bureaucrats. Half her life had passed since the last time she had been summoned downstairs, but Tolly Mune watched the newsfeeds, and recognized many of the people—the young councillor for agriculture, surrounded by under-councillors, his assistants for botanical research, oceanic development, food processing. The councillor for war and his cyborg tactician. The transport administrator. The curator of the databanks and her chief analyst. The councillors for internal security, science and technology, interstellar relations, industry. The commander of the Planetary Defense Flotilla. The senior officer of the world police. They all nodded at her blankly.
To his credit, Josen Rael dispensed with all formality. “You’ve had a week with Tuf’s projections and the seedstock and samples he provided us,” he asked his council. “Well?”
“It’s difficult to judge with any degree of accuracy,” said the data analyst. “His projections may be right on target or they may be completely wrong, based on mistaken assumptions. I can’t begin to check for accuracy until, well, I’d say it will take several plantings at least, several years. These things Tuf has cloned for us, these plants and animals and the like, all of them are new to S’uthlam. Until we have some hard experience with them, to determine how they will flourish under S’uthlamese conditions, we can’t be certain how much of a difference they’ll make.”
“If any,” said the councillor for internal security, a short square brick of a woman.
“If any,” echoed the analyst.
“You’re being much too conservative,” the councillor for agriculture interrupted. He was the youngest man in the room, brash and outspoken, and at the moment his smile looked as though it might crack his thin face clean in two. “My reports are all positively glowing.” He had a tall pile of crystal data-chips on the conference table in front of him. He spread them out and shoved one into a port on his station; lines of readout began to scroll down the mirrored table-top, below the polished surface. “This is our analysis of the thing he calls omni-grain,” the councillor said. “Incredible, really incredible. A gene-tailored hybrid, completely edible. Completely edible, councillors, every part of the plant. The stalks grow waist high, like neograss, very high in carbohydrates, crunchy texture, not at all bad with a little dressing, but primarily useful as fodder for food animals. The heads yield an excellent cereal grain with a better food-to-chaff ratio than nanowheat or s’rice. The yield is easy to transport, stores forever without refrigeration, is impossible to bruise, and is high in protein. And the roots are edible tubers! Not only that, but it grows so damn fast that it will give us twice as many crops per season. Just guesswork, of course, but I estimate that if we plant omni-grain on the kays we’ve got alloted to nanowheat, neograss, and s’rice, we’ll reap three, four times the calories from the same plots.”
“It must have some disadvantages,” Josen Rael objected. “It sounds too good to be true. If this omni-grain is so perfect, why haven’t we heard of it before? Tuf certainly didn’t gene-splice it together in these past few months.”
“Of course not. It’s been around for centuries. I found a reference to it in the databanks, believe it or not. It was developed by the EEC during the war, as military fodder. The stuff grows so quickly that it’s ideal when you’re not sure whether you’ll be reaping the crops you’re sowing or fertilizing them, ah, personally. But it was never adapted by civilians. The taste was considered inferior. Not awful or unpleasant, you understand, just inferior to existing grains. Also, it exhausts the soil in a very short time.”
“Aha,” said the councillor for internal secur
ity. “So it’s a trap of sorts?”
“By itself, yes. You’d get maybe five years of bountiful crops and then disaster. But Tuf has also sent along some vermin—incredible things, super-worms and other aerators—and a symbiote, a kind of slime-mold that will grow together with the omni-grain without harming it, living off—get this now—living off air pollution and certain kinds of useless petrochemical waste, and using that to restore and enrich the soil.” He threw up his hands. “It’s an incredible breakthrough! If our own research teams had developed this, we’d have already declared a holiday.”
“What about the other things?” Josen Rael asked curtly. The First Councillor’s face did not reflect any of the enthusiasm of his subordinate.
“Almost as exciting,” was the reply. “The oceans—we’ve never been able to get a decent caloric yield from the oceans, relative to their size, and the last administration practically fished them to extinction with their sea-sweepers. Tuf is giving us a dozen new sorts of fast-breeding fish, and a variety of plankton . . . ” He fished around in front of him, found another data-chip, plugged it in. “Here, this plankton, it will gum up the sea lanes, certainly, but ninety percent of our commerce is subsurface or airborne, so it doesn’t matter. The fish will thrive on it, and under the right conditions, the plankton itself will grow so thick it will cover the water to a depth of three meters, like some vast gray-green carpet.”
“An alarming prospect,” said the councillor for war. “Is it edible? By humans, I mean.”
“No.” The agri-councillor grinned. “But when it’s dead and decaying, it will serve admirably as a raw material for our food factories, once the petroleum runs out.”
All the way down at the far end of the table, Tolly Mune laughed loudly. Heads turned to face her. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “He gave us loaves and fishes after all.”
“The plankton’s not really a fish,” the councillor said.
“If it lives in the goddamned ocean, it’s a puling fish as far as I’m concerned.”
“Loaves and fishes?” asked the councillor for industry.
“Go on with your report,” Josen Rael said impatiently. “Was there anything else?”
There was. There was a nutritious lichen that would grow on the highest mountains, and another that could survive even in airless conditions under hard radiation. “More Larder asteroids,” announced the agricultural councillor, “without having to spend decades and billions of cals terraforming.” There were parasitic food-vines that would infest S’uthlam’s steamy equatorial swamps and gradually choke out and displace the fragrant and poisonous native forms that now grew there in profusion. There was a grain called snow-oats that would grow on frozen tundra, and tunnel-tubers that could honeycomb even the frozen earth beneath a glacier with huge airy passages walled by buttery brown nut-meat. There were genetically improved cattle, pigs, fowl, and fish; a new bird that Tuf claimed would eliminate the leading S’uthlamese agricultural pest; and seventy-nine new varieties of edible mushroom and fungus that could be raised in the darkness of the undercities and nourished with human waste products.
And when the councillor had finished his report, there was silence.
“He’s won,” Tolly Mune said, grinning. The rest were all deferring to Josen Rael, but she was damned if she was going to sit and play politics. “I’ll be damned, Tuf actually did it.”
“We do not know that,” said the databanks curator.
“It will be years before we have meaningful statistics,” said the analyst.
“There may be a trap,” warned the councillor for war. “We must be cautious.”
“Oh, to hell with that,” said Tolly Mune. “Tuf has proved that—”
“Portmaster!” interrupted Josen Rael, very sharply.
Tolly Mune closed her mouth; she had never heard him use that tone before. The others all looked at him as well.
Josen Rael took out a cloth and mopped the perspiration from his brow. “What Haviland Tuf has proven, beyond any doubt, is that the Ark is far too valuable for us to even consider letting it go. We will now discuss how best to seize it, while minimizing the loss of life and the diplomatic repercussions.” He called upon the councillor for internal security.
Portmaster Tolly Mune listened quietly to her report, and sat through an hour of the discussion that followed, while they argued about tactics, the proper diplomatic stance, the most efficient utilization of the seedship, which department ought to take charge of it, and what to say to the newsfeeds. The discussion promised to last half the night, but Josen Rael said firmly that they would not break until the whole affair had been settled to the last jot and tittle. Food was ordered, records were sent for, subordinates and specialists were summoned and dismissed. Josen Rael gave orders that they were not to be interrupted for any reason whatsoever. Tolly Mune listened. Finally, she got unsteadily to her feet. “Sorry,” she apologized, “it’s . . . it’s the puling gravity. Not used to it. Where’s the nearest sani . . . sanitary . . . ulp.”
“Of course, Portmaster,” said Josen Rael. “Outside, the left corridor, fourth door down.”
“Thank you,” she said. They resumed talking as Tolly Mune staggered outside. She could hear their droning through the door. There was one police guard. She nodded to him, walked off briskly, and turned right.
Once out of his sight, she began to run.
On the roofdeck she commandeered an aircab. “The elevator,” she snapped, “and scream it.” She showed him her priority band.
A train was just about to leave. It was full. She bumped a starclass passenger. “Emergency in the web,” she said. “I have to get back in a hurry.” They made a record ascent, since after all she was Ma Spider, and transportation was waiting in Spiderhome to whisk her to her quarters.
She sailed in, sealed the door, turned on her comm, coded it to transmit a recording of her deputy’s face, and tried to punch through to Josen Rael. “I’m sorry,” the computer said with cybernetic sympathy. “He’s in meeting, and cannot be interrupted at this time. Would you care to leave a message?”
“No,” she said. She sent her own image when she punched through to her foreman out on the Ark. “How are things floating, Frakker?”
He looked tired, but he managed a smile for her. “We’re going great, Ma,” he said. “I guesstimate ninety-one percent done. Work will be complete in another six, seven days, and then it will be just clean-up.”
“The work’s done now,” Tolly Mune said.
“What?” He looked baffled.
“Tuf has been lying to us,” she said glibly. “He’s a con man, a puling abortion, and I’m pulling the crews on him.”
“I don’t understand,” the cybertech said.
“Sorry. Details are classified, Frakker. You know how it goes. Just get off the Ark. All of you. Spinnerets, cybertechs, security, everybody. I’ll give you an hour, then I’m coming over, and if I find anybody on that derelict except Tuf and his goddamned vermin, I’ll ship their rectums out to the Larder faster than you can say Steel Widow, you got that?”
“Uh, yes.”
“I mean now!” snapped Tolly Mune. “Move, Frakker.”
She cleared the screen, keyed in a top-priority shield, and placed her final call. Haviland Tuf, infuriatingly, had instructed the Ark to screen his calls while he napped. It took her fifteen priceless minutes to find the right formula of words to convince the idiot machine that this was an emergency.
“Portmaster Mune,” Tuf responded when his image finally materialized before her, wearing an absurd fuzzy robe belted around his overample stomach. “To what do I owe the singular delight of your call?”
“The refitting is ninety percent done,” Tolly Mune said. “Everything important. You’ll have to live with anything we left undone. My spinnerets are scuttling off down the web, fast. They’ll all be gone in, uh, now it’s down to forty-odd minutes. When that time’s up, I want you out of port, Tuf.”
“Indeed,” said Haviland T
uf.
“You’re spaceworthy,” she said. “I’ve seen your specs. You’ll rip apart the dock, but there’s no time to pull it down and it’s a small price to pay for what you’ve done. Shift to drive and get out of our system and don’t look back over your shoulder, unless you want to turn to goddamned salt.”
“I fail to understand,” said Haviland Tuf.
Tolly Mune sighed. “So do I, Tuf, so do I. Don’t argue with me. Prepare for departure.”
“Am I to make the assumption that your High Council found my humble offering to be a satisfactory solution to your crisis, so that I have been adjudged winner of our wager?”
She groaned. “Yes, if that’s what you want to hear, you give great vermin, they loved the omni-grain, the slime-mold was a real hit, you win, you’re brilliant, you’re wonderful. Now scream it, Tuf, before someone thinks to ask the sickly old Portmaster a question and they notice that I’m gone.”
“Your haste has left me nonplussed,” said Haviland Tuf, folding his hands calmly atop his paunch and staring at her.
“Tuf,” Tolly Mune said, from between clenched teeth. “You won your goddamned wager, but you’ll lose your ship if you don’t wake up and learn to dance. Get moving! Do I have to spell it out for you, damn it? Treachery, Tuf. Violence. Betrayal. Right at this very moment, the High Council of S’uthlam is discussing all the fine details of how to grab the Ark and dispose of you, and arguing about what kind of perfume will make it smell the best. Now do you understand? As soon as they finish talking, and it won’t be long, they’ll give the orders, and security will be converging on you with vacuum sleds and nerveguns. The Planetary Defense Flotilla has four protector-class ships and two dreadnaughts in the web right now, and if they go on alert, you might not even be able to run. I don’t want any goddamned space battle slagging my port and killing my people.”