“Nothing lives in that poisoned gutter,” Moses said. “You have seen to that.” Then he slammed the door, and would listen no more to the pillar of fire.
The guards that Moses sent to the river at dawn came back bloody and hysterical with fear.
“There are things there,” one of them testified, “moving around in the pools of blood. Little crimson wrigglers, ’bout as big as your finger, but their legs was twice as long. Looked like red frogs, except when we got closer we saw that they had teeth, and they was ripping up the dead fish. Hardly any fish was left at all, and them that were had these frog things crawling all over them. Then Danel tried to pick up one of these frogs, and it snapped at him, right into his hand, and he screamed and all of a sudden the air was full of the damn things, jumping around like they was flying, biting people, tearing at you when they got hold. It was terrible. How are you going to fight a frog? Stab it? Shoot it? How?” He was shaking.
Moses sent another party down to the river, armed with sacks and poison and torches. They came back in total disarray, carrying two of their number. One man died that morning, his throat torn out by a frog. Another went a few hours later, from the fever that many of those bitten had developed.
By dusk, all the fish were gone. The frogs began to move up from the river, into the villages. The Altruists dug trenches and filled them with water and flame. The frogs leaped over the trenches. The Altruists fought with knives and clubs and fire, some even with the modern weapons they had taken from the cityfolk. Six more people were dead by dawn. Moses and his followers retreated behind closed doors.
“Our people are out in the open,” Jaime Kreen said fearfully. “The frogs will come into the camps and kill them.”
“No,” said Haviland Tuf. “If your Rej Laithor can keep her charges calm and quiet, they have nothing to fear. Scarnish bloodfrogs are carrion eaters chiefly. They attack living creatures larger than themselves only when attacked or frightened.”
Kreen looked incredulous, then slowly smiled. “And Moses hides in fear! That’s rich, Tuf.”
“Rich,” said Haviland Tuf. There was nothing in his tone to indicate either agreement or mockery. But Dax was in his arms, and Kreen noticed suddenly that the cat was still and stiff, his fur slowly bristling.
That night the pillar of fire came not to the man called Moses, but to the refugees from the City of Hope, huddled in fear in their ramshackle camp, watching the frogs prowl beyond the fences that kept them apart from the Altruists.
“Rej Laithor,” the pillar of fire said, “your enemies have imprisoned themselves behind barred doors. You are free—Go. Take your people in hand and lead them back to your arcology. Walk slowly, watch where you set your feet, make no sudden moves. Do these things without fail, and the frogs will leave you unharmed. Clean and repair your City of Hope, and ready my forty thousand standards.”
Rej Laithor, surrounded by her junior administrators, stared up at the writhing flames. “Moses will attack us again as soon as you depart, Tuf,” she shouted. “Finish him. Unleash your other plagues.”
The pillar of fire said nothing. It turned and crackled for long minutes, and then it was gone entirely.
Wearily, the people of the City of Hope began to file out of camp, being very careful where they set their feet.
“The generators are working again,” Jaime Kreen reported two weeks later. “The City will soon function as before. But that is only half our bargain, Tuf. Moses and his followers still sulk in their villages. The bloodfrogs are nearly all dead now, for want of any carrion to eat except each other. And the river shows signs of clearing. When are you going to unleash the lice on them? And the flies? They deserve to scratch, Tuf.”
“Take the Griffin,” Haviland Tuf ordered. “Bring Moses to me, willing or no. Do this and one hundred standards of your City’s funds will be yours.”
Jaime Kreen looked astonished. “Moses? Why? Moses is our enemy. If you think you can turn around and make a deal with him now, sell us back into slavery for a better price . . . ”
“Contain your suspicions,” Tuf replied. He stroked Dax. “Always people think the worst of us, Dax. Perhaps it is our sad fate to be ever suspect.” He addressed Kreen again. “I wish only a conference with Moses. Do as I have told you.”
“I am not in your debt any more, Tuf,” Kreen said sharply. “I assist you only as a patriotic Charitan. Tell me your motives, and I may do your bidding. Otherwise, do it yourself. I refuse.” He crossed his arms.
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf, “are you aware of how many meals and mugs of ale you have taken aboard the Ark since our balance was adjudged even? Are you aware of the quantity of my air you have breathed, and how many times you have used my sanitary facilities? I am abundantly aware of all of these things. Are you further aware that the usual charge for a voyage from K’theddion to Charity is some three hundred seventy-nine standards? All of these amounts could easily be added to your account. I have foregone this, to my great financial disadvantage, only because you have afforded me certain minor conveniences. I can see now that my forbearance was an error. I will rectify the mistakes in my bookkeeping.”
“Don’t bluff me, Tuf,” Kreen said stubbornly. “We’re even, and we’re a long way from Kytheddene Prison, and any claims you have to me under their absurd laws are null and void on Charity.”
“The laws of K’theddion and Charity are alike to me, except when they serve my purposes,” Haviland Tuf said very quietly. “I am my own law, Jaime Kreen. And if I should determine to make you my slave until the last days of your life, neither Rej Laithor nor Moses nor your own bravado could help you in the least.” Tuf delivered the words as always, evenly, calmly, in his bass voice, with hardly a hint of emotion in his flat inflection.
But Jaime Kreen suddenly felt very cold. And he did as he was bid.
Moses was a tall, strong man, but Tuf had told Jaime Kreen of his nightly reflections, and it was an easy enough thing to wait one evening in the hills beyond the village, in the brush with three others, and overcome Moses as he passed. One of Kreen’s assistants suggested killing the Altruistic leader then and there, but Kreen forbade it. They carried the unconscious Moses back to the waiting Griffin, where Kreen dismissed the others.
Shortly after, Kreen delivered Moses to Haviland Tuf, and turned to take his leave.
“Stay,” Tuf said. They were in a room that Kreen had never seen before, a vast echoing chamber where the walls and ceiling were of the purest white. Tuf was seated in the center of the chamber, at a horseshoe-shaped instrument panel. Dax sat atop the console, looking quite alert.
Moses was still groggy. “Where am I?” he demanded.
“You are aboard the seedship Ark, the last functioning biowar ship of the Ecological Engineering Corps. I am Haviland Tuf.”
“Your voice,” Moses said.
“I am the Lord God,” Haviland Tuf said.
“Yes,” Moses said. He stood up suddenly. Jaime Kreen, standing behind him, grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him roughly back into his seat. Moses protested, but did not try to rise again. “You were the one who brought the plagues, the voice from the pillar of fire, the devil who impersonated God.”
“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. “Yet you misunderstand. You are the impersonator in this company, Moses. You sought to impersonate a prophet, to pretend to vast supernatural powers you do not have. You employed tricks, and waged a primitive form of ecological warfare. I, in contrast, am no pretender. I am the Lord God.”
Moses spat. “You are a man with a starship, and a host of machines. You played the plague game well. But two plagues do not make a man a god.”
“Two,” said Haviland Tuf. “Do you doubt the other eight?” His large hands moved over the instruments before him, the room darkened, the dome ran with light, and it seemed they were out in space, looking down on Charity. Then Haviland Tuf did something else to his instruments. The holograms shifted and they were moving, sinking, soaring, until the blurs reso
lved themselves. They floated above the settlements of the Holy Altruists, in the Hills of Honest Labor. “Watch,” commanded Haviland Tuf. “This is a computer simulation. These things were not, yet could have been. I am confident that you will find this enlightening.”
In the domed room, all about them, they saw the villages, and shadow-faced people moving among them, shoveling the carcasses of dead frogs into pits for burning. They saw within the cabins, too, where weaker people burned with fevers. “It is after the second plague,” Haviland Tuf announced, “even as now. The bloodfrogs have spent themselves.” His hands moved. “Lice,” he said.
The lice came. The dust itself seemed to burst with them, and suddenly they were everywhere. All the shadow-folk were scratching, and Jaime Kreen (who had scratched a good bit himself before departing for K’theddion) chuckled. Then he stopped chuckling. The lice seemed more than lice. The people broke out in a scarlet rash, and many of them took to bed, screaming of the itches, the horrible itches. Some scratched themselves so badly that they drew blood, scratched deep gouges in their skin, and tore their fingernails loose in their fury.
“Flies,” said Haviland Tuf. And the flies swarmed, flies of all kinds—the swollen stinging flies of Dam Tullian, the flies of Old Earth with their ancient diseases, the black and grey fleshflies of Gulliver, the sluggish flies of Nightmare who plant their eggs in living tissue. They settled on the villages and the Hills of Honest Labor in immense clouds, and covered them as if they were but a particularly large dung heap, and left them black and thick and stinking.
“The murrain,” said Haviland Tuf. They watched the herds die by the thousands. The gross immobile meatbeasts in the cellar of the City of Hope turned to rot and corruption. Burning could not check the pestilence. Soon, no meat was left, and those people who still lived grew gaunt and bitter-looking. Haviland Tuf said other words—anthrax, Ryerson’s Disease, roserot, calierosy.
“Boils,” said Haviland Tuf, and again disease raged, but this time among the people and not their animals. They sweated and screamed as the boils covered their faces and hands and chests, each swelling until it burst, so the blood and the pus ran free. Then new boils grew as fast as the old ones vanished. Men and women staggered through the streets of the simple villages, blind and pockmarked, bodies crusted and covered with open sores, the perspiration running like oil over their skin. When they fell in the dirt, among the dead flies and lice and cattle, they rotted there, with none to bury them.
“Hail,” said Haviland Tuf, and it came, a great thundering pounding hail, the stones fists of ice, for a day and a night and a day and a night and a day and a night, and on and on, and fire mingled with the hail. Those who went outside died, the hailstones smashing them to the ground. And many of those who stayed within died, too. When the hail had stopped at last, there was hardly a cabin left standing.
“Locusts,” said Haviland Tuf. They covered the earth and the sky, clouds of them, worse than the flies. They landed everywhere, crawled over the living and the dead both, and ate what little food was left, until there was nothing at all.
“Darkness,” said Haviland Tuf. Darkness moved. It was a gas, a thick black gas, drifting with the wind. It was a liquid, flowing, moving like a sensuous stream of jet, gleaming, shining. It was silence. It was night. It was alive. Where it moved, no life remained behind it; the weeds and grasses were dry and dead, and the soil itself looked raw and ravaged and bruised. It was a cloud larger than the villages, or the Hills of Honest Labor, or the locusts. It settled over all of them, and nothing moved for a day or a night, and then the living darkness rolled on, and behind it was only dust, and dry decay.
Haviland Tuf touched his instruments, and the visions were gone from them. The lights came on again. The walls were very white.
“The tenth plague,” Moses said slowly, in a voice that no longer seemed rich or large. “The death of the firstborn.”
“I admit to my own failures,” said Haviland Tuf. “I cannot make such fine distinctions. I would point out, however, that all of the firstborn are dead, in these scenes that never were, even as the lastborn. I am a gross and clumsy god in that; in my awkwardness, I must need kill all.”
Moses was pale and broken, but within him was still a strong and stubborn man. “You are only human,” he whispered.
“Human,” said Haviland Tuf, in his voice without emotion. His huge pale hand was stroking Dax. “I was born human, and lived as such for long years, Moses. Yet then I found the Ark, and I have ceased to be a man. The powers I may wield are vaster than those of many gods that humans have worshipped. There is not a man I meet but I could take his life. There is not a world I pause on that I could not waste utterly, or remake as I choose. I am the Lord God, or as much of one as either of you is ever likely to encounter.”
“It is a great fortune for you that I am kind and benevolent and merciful, and too frequently bored. You are counters to me, nothing more—pieces and players in a game with which I have whiled away a few weeks. It seemed an interesting game, this plague business, and so it was for a time. Yet it quickly grew dull. Even after two plagues, it was clear that I had no meaningful opposition, that you, Moses, were incapable of anything that might surprise me. My objectives were accomplished—I had taken back the people of the City of Hope, and the rest would be meaningless ritual. I have elected instead to end it.
“Go, Moses, and plague no more. I am through with you.
“And you, Jaime Kreen, see that your Charitans take no further vengeance. You shall have victories enough. In a generation, his culture and his religion and his way of life will all be dead.
“Remember who I am, and remember that Dax can look into your thoughts. If the Ark should pass this way again, and find that you have disobeyed me, it will be as I have shown you. The plagues will sweep your little world until nothing lives upon it.”
Jaime Kreen shuttled Moses back to his people in the Griffin, then—on Tuf’s instructions—collected forty thousand standards from Rej Laithor and took it back up to the Ark. Haviland Tuf met him on the shuttle deck, with Dax in his arms, and took his payment with only a stately blink.
Jaime Kreen was thoughtful. “You are bluffing, Tuf,” he said. “You’re no god. Those were only simulations you showed us. You could never have actually done all that. But you can program a computer to show anything.”
“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf.
“Indeed,” said Jaime Kreen, warming now. “You frightened Moses out of his head, but you didn’t deceive me for a minute with your picture show. The hail gave you away. Bacteria, disease, pests—all that is within the sphere of ecological warfare. Maybe even that darkness creature, although I think you made that up. But hail is a meteorological phenomenon, it has nothing to do with biology or ecology. You slipped up, Tuf. But it was a nice try, and it should keep Moses humble.”
“Humble,” agreed Haviland Tuf. “I should have hesitated and planned more thoroughly before attempting to mislead a man of your perception and insight, no doubt. At every turn you frustrate my small schemes.”
Jaime Kreen chuckled. “I have a hundred standards due me,” he said, “for bringing Moses up and back.”
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf, “I would never forget such a debt. It is not necessary to chivvy me.” He opened the box that Kreen had brought up from Charity, and paid out one hundred standards. “You will find a convenient personal airlock in section nine, just beyond the doors marked Climate Control.”
Jaime Kreen frowned. “Airlock? What do you mean?”
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf, “I would think it obvious. I mean airlock, a device by which you may depart the Ark without my valuable atmosphere departing with you. Since you have no spacecraft, it would be foolish to use the large airlock here. A smaller personal lock, as I said, may be found in section nine.”
Kreen looked aghast. “Are you going to jettison me?”
“Not the best choice of words,” said Haviland Tuf. “They sound so harsh. Yet I
can hardly keep you aboard the Ark, and were you to depart in one of my shuttles, there would be no one to bring it back to me. I can hardly afford to sacrifice a valuable piece of equipment simply for your personal convenience.”
Kreen frowned. “The solution to your dilemma is simple. We will both board the Griffin. You will take me down to Port Faith. Then you will return to your ship.”
Haviland Tuf stroked Dax. “Interesting,” he said. “Yet I do believe it might work. You must understand, of course, that such a trip would constitute a distinct annoyance for me. Surely I should receive something for my troubles.”
Jaime Kreen stared into the still white face of Haviland Tuf for a minute, then sighed, and handed back the hundred standards.
7: MANNA FROM HEAVEN
The S’uthlamese armada was sweeping the outskirts of the solar system, moving through the velvet darkness of space with all the stately silent grace of a tiger on the prowl, on an interception course with the Ark.
Haviland Tuf sat before his master console, scanning the banks of telescreens and computer monitors with small, careful turns of his head. The fleet angling to meet him appeared more formidable with every passing moment. His instruments reported some fourteen capital ships and swarms of smaller fighters. Nine bulbous silver-white globes, bristling with unfamiliar weaponry, comprised the wings of the formation. Four long black dreadnaughts served as outriders on the flanks of the wedge, their dark hulls crackling with energy. The flagship in the center was a colossal saucer-shaped fort with a diameter Tuf’s sensors measured as six kilometers from rim to rim. It was the largest spaceship that Haviland Tuf had seen since the day, more than ten years past, when he had first sighted the derelict Ark. Fighters swarmed around the saucer like angry stinging insects.
Tuf’s long, pale, hairless face was still and unreadable, but in his lap, Dax made a small sound of disquiet as Tuf pressed his fingertips together.