“When my conditions have been met,” Tuf said.
“What conditions?”
“First,” said Tuf, “as the prospect of living out the rest of my life in orbit about S’uthlam is one I find unappealing, it must be agreed that I am free to go after my labors here are completed.”
“I can’t agree to that,” Tolly Mune said, “and if I did, the High Council would vote me out of office in a puling second.”
“Secondly,” Tuf continued, “this war must be terminated. I fear I will be unable to concentrate properly on my work when there is every likelihood of a major space battle breaking out around me at any moment. I am easily distracted by exploding starships, webs of laser fire, and the screams of dying men. Moreover, I see little point in exerting great efforts to make the S’uthlamese ecology balanced and functional once more when the allied fleets threaten to deposit plasma bombs all over my handiwork, and thereby undo my small achievements.”
“I’d end this war if I could,” Tolly Mune said. “It isn’t that damned easy, Tuf. I’m afraid what you ask is impossible.”
“If not a permanent peace, then perhaps at least a small cessation in hostilities,” Tuf said. “You might send an embassy to the allied forces and petition for a short armistice.”
“That might be possible,” Tolly Mune said tentatively. “But why?” Blackjack gave an uneasy meow. “You’re plotting something, damn it.”
“Your salvation,” Tuf admitted. “Pardon me if I deign to interfere with your diligent joint efforts to encourage mutation through radioactivity.”
“We’re defending ourselves! We didn’t want this war!”
“Excellent. In that case, a short delay will not unduly inconvenience you.”
“The allies will never buy it. Neither will the High Council.”
“Regrettable,” said Tuf. “Perhaps we ought to give S’uthlam some time to consider. In twelve years, the surviving S’uthlamese might have more flexible attitudes.”
Tolly Mune reached out and scratched Blackjack behind the ears. Blackjack stared at Tuf, and after a minute uttered a small, strange, peeping sound. When the First Councillor stood abruptly, the huge silver-gray cat leapt nimbly from her lap. “You win, Tuf,” she said. “Lead me to a comm set and I’ll set the damned thing up. You’re prepared to wait forever and I’m not. People are dying every moment we delay.” Her voice was hard, but inside, for the first time in months, Tolly Mune felt hope mingled with her unease. Maybe he could end the war and solve the crisis. Maybe there was really a chance. But she let no hint of that creep into her tone. She pointed. “But don’t think you’re going to get away with anything funny.”
“Alas,” said Haviland Tuf, “humor has never been my forte.”
“I’ve got Blackjack, remember. Dax is too freaked out and intimidated to do you any good, and Jack will let me know the instant you start thinking about treachery.”
“Always my best intentions are met with suspicion.”
“Blackjack and me, we’re your puling shadows, Tuf. I’m not leaving this ship until things are settled, and I’m going to look hard at everything you do.”
“Indeed,” said Tuf.
“Just keep a few damned things in mind,” Tolly Mune said. “I’m First Councillor now. Not Josen Rael. Not Cregor Blaxon. Me. Back when I was Portmaster, they liked to call me the Steel Widow. You might pass an hour or two pondering how and why I got that puling name.”
“I shall indeed,” said Tuf, rising. “Is there anything else you would like me to recall, madam?”
“Just one thing,” she said. “A scene from that Tuf and Mune vidshow.”
“I have striven diligently to put that unfortunate fiction out of my memory,” Tuf said. “Which particular of it would you force me to recall?”
“The scene where the cat rips the security man to shreds,” Tolly Mune said, with a small, sweet smile. Blackjack rubbed up against her knee, turned his smoky gaze up at Tuf, and rumbled deep in his massive body.
It took almost ten days to arrange the armistice, and another three for the allied ambassadors to make their way to S’uthlam. Tolly Mune spent the time haunting the Ark, two steps and a hasty thought behind Tuf, questioning everything he did, peering over his shoulder when he labored at his console, riding by his side when he made the rounds of his cloning vats, helping him feed his cats (and keep a hostile Dax away from Blackjack). He attemped nothing overtly suspicious.
Dozens of calls came through for her daily. She set up an office in the communications room, so she would never be far from Tuf, and handled the problems that could not wait.
Hundreds of calls came through daily for Haviland Tuf. He instructed his computer to refuse all of them.
When the day came, the envoys emerged from their long, luxurious diplomatic shuttle and stood gazing about at the Ark’s cavernous landing deck and fleet of derelict starships. They were a colorful and diverse lot. The woman from Jazbo had waistlong blue-black hair that shone with scented iridescent oils; her cheeks were covered with the intricate scars of rank. Skrymir sent a stocky man with a square red face and hair the color of mountain ice. His eyes were a crystalline blue that matched the color of his scaled metal shirt. The envoy from the Azure Triune moved within a haze of holographic projections, a dim, fractured, shifting shape that spoke in an echoey whisper. Roggandor’s cyborg ambassador was as broad as he was tall, made in equal parts of stainless duralloy, dark plasteel, and mottled red-black flesh. A slight, delicate-looking woman in transparent pastel silks represented Henry’s World; she had a boyish adolescent body and ageless scarlet eyes. The allied party was led by a large, plump, opulently dressed man from Vandeen. His skin, wrinkled by age, was the color of copper; his long hair fell past his shoulders in thin, delicate braids.
Haviland Tuf, driving a segmented vehicle that glided across the deck like a snake on wheels, stopped directly in front of the ambassadors. The Vandeeni stepped forward beaming, reached up and pinched his own full cheek very vigorously, and bowed. “I would offer my hand, but I recall your opinion of that custom,” he said. “Do you remember me, fly?”
Haviland Tuf blinked. “I have some vague recollection of encountering you upon the train to the surface of S’uthlam some ten years ago,” he said.
“Ratch Norren,” the man said. “I’m not what you call a regular diplomat, but the Board of Coordinators figured they’d send somebody who’d met you, and knew the Suthies, too.”
“That’s an offensive term, Norren,” Tolly Mune said bluntly.
“You’re an offensive bunch,” Ratch Norren replied.
“And dangerous,” whispered the envoy from the Azure Triune, from the center of his holographic fog.
“You’re the puling aggressors,” Tolly Mune started.
“Defensive aggression,” boomed the cyborg from Roggandor.
“We recall the last war,” said the Jazbot. “This time we decline to wait until your damnable evolutionists burst forth and try to colonize our worlds again.”
“We have no such plans,” Tolly Mune said.
’“You don’t, spinneret,” Ratch Norren said. “But look me in the optics here and tell me your expansionists don’t have wet dreams about breeding all over Vandeen.”
“And Skrymir.”
“Roggandor wants no part of your cast-off human detritus.”
“You will never take the Azure Triune.”
“Who the hell would want the puling Azure Triune?” snapped Tolly Mune. Blackjack purred approval.
“This glimpse into the inner working of high interstellar diplomacy has been most elucidating,” Haviland Tuf announced. “Nonetheless, I sense that more pressing business awaits. If the envoys would be so cooperative as to board my vehicle, we might proceed onward to our conference.”
Still muttering among themselves, the allied ambassadors did as Tuf bid them. Fully loaded, the vehicle set out across the landing deck, weaving a path between the myriad abandoned starships. An airlock, round and da
rk as the mouth of a tunnel or the jaws of some insatiable beast, opened at their approach and swallowed them. They entered and stopped; the lock closed behind them, engulfing the party in darkness. Tuf ignored the whispered complaints. Around them came a screeching metallic noise; the floor began to descend. When they had dropped at least two decks, another door opened in front of them. Tuf turned on his headlamps and they drove out into a pitch-black corridor.
They drove through a maze of dark, chilly corridors, past countless closed doors, following a dim indigo trace that flitted before them, a ghost embedded in the dusty floor. The only light was the beam from the train’s headlamps, and the faint glow of the instrument panel in front of Tuf. At first the envoys bantered among themselves, but the black depths of the Ark were oppressive and claustrophobic, and one by one the members of the delegation fell silent. Blackjack began to knead Tolly Mune’s knees rhythmically with his claws.
After a long time rolling through dust, darkness, and silence, the train approached a towering pair of double doors that hissed open ominously at their approach, and closed with a loud clang of finality behind them. Within, the air was moist and hot. Haviland Tuf stopped, and turned off the headlamps. Total darkness enveloped them.
“Where are we?” Tolly Mune demanded. Her voice rang off some distant ceiling, although the echo seemed strangely muffled. Though black as a pit, the room was obviously cavernous. Blackjack hissed uneasily, sniffed the air, and made a tiny, uncertain mewing sound.
She heard footsteps, and a small light flicked on two meters away. Tuf was bent over an instrument console, watching a monitor panel. He pressed one key in a luminescent keyboard, and turned. A padded wingback floater chair came whispering out of the warm darkness. Tuf climbed into it like a king ascending a throne, and touched a control on the arm. The chair lit up with a feint violet phosphorescence. “Kindly follow,” Tuf announced. The floater swiveled in the air and began to drift off.
“Puling hell,” Tolly Mune muttered. She climbed out of her seat hastily, cradling Blackjack, and scrambled after Tuf’s retreating throne. The allied ambassadors followed en masse, whining and complaining every step of the way. She could hear the cyborg’s massive footsteps behind her. Tuf’s floater was the only spot of light in an enveloping sea of darkness. As she rushed after him, she stepped on something.
The sudden feline yowl made her recoil, bumping into the cyborg’s armored chest. Confused, Tolly Mune knelt and reached out a tentative hand, holding Blackjack awkwardly in the crook of her arm; her fingers brushed soft fur. The cat rubbed up against her furiously, purring loudly. She could barely make out its shape—a small shorthair, hardly more than a kitten. It rolled over so she could scratch its belly. The Jazbot almost stumbled over her as she knelt there. And then suddenly Blackjack had leaped free and was sniffing around the new cat. It returned the favor briefly, then whirled, and in a blink it had vanished into the darkness. Blackjack hesitated, then howled and bounded after it. “Goddamn it,” Tolly Mune shouted. “Goddamn it, Jack, get your puling ass back here!” Her voice echoed, but her cat did not return. The rest of the party was growing more distant. Tolly Mune swore and hurried to catch up.
An island of light appeared ahead of her. When she arrived, the others were settling into seats arrayed along one side of a long metal table. Haviland Tuf, in the thronelike floater, was on the other side of the table, his face expressionless, his white hands folded atop his stomach.
Dax was stalking back and forth across his shoulders, purring.
Tolly Mune stopped, glared, swore. “Damn you to hell,” she said to Tuf. She turned around. “Blackjack!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. The echoes seemed swaddled in thick cloth, curiously indistinct. “Jack!” Nothing.
“I hope we have not come all this way simply to listen to the First Councillor of S’uthlam practice animal calls,” the envoy from Skrymir said.
“Indeed not,” said Tuf. “First Councillor Mune, if you will kindly take your seat, we may proceed at once.”
She scowled, and sank down into the only vacant chair. “Where the hell is Blackjack?”
“I can hardly venture an opinion on that subject,” said Tuf flatly. “He is, after all, your cat.”
“He ran off after one of yours,” Tolly Mune snapped.
“Indeed,” said Tuf. “Interesting. At the moment it so happens that I have a young female who has recently gone into heat. Perhaps that explains his actions. I have no doubt that he remains quite safe, First Councillor.”
“I want him back for this puling conference!” she said.
“Alas,” said Tuf, “the Ark is a large ship and they might be sporting in any of a thousand places, and in any case, to interfere with their sexual congress would be unconscionably anti-life by S’uthlamese standards. I would hesitate to do such violence to your cultural mores. Moreover, you have stressed to me repeatedly that time is of the essence, as many human lives are at stake. Ergo, I think it best we proceed with all due haste.”
Tuf moved his hand slightly, touched a control. A section of the long table sank out of sight. A moment later, a plant rose from within, directly in front of Tolly Mune. “Behold,” said Tuf. “Manna.”
It grew from a low bedding pan, a tangle of pale green vines almost a meter high, a living gordian knot, tendrils weaving back and forth on themselves and edging over the lip of the container. All along the vines were thick clusters of leaves, as tiny as fingernails, their waxy green surface shot through with a delicate tracery of black veins. Tolly Mune reached out and touched the nearest leaf, and discovered that its underside was covered with a dusting of fine powder that came off on the tips of her fingers. Between the clusters of leaves, the branching vines were swollen with clusters of fat white carbuncles, larger and more pustulent-looking in toward the central tangle of growth. She saw one palp, half concealed under a canopy of leaves, that had grown as big as a man’s hand.
“Ugly looking weed,” opined Ratch Norren.
“I fail to understand why it was necessary to declare an armistice and travel all this way to behold some festering hothouse monstrosity,” said the man from Skrymir.
“The Azure Triune grows impatient,” whispered their envoy.
“There’s some puling motive in this madness,” Tolly Mune said to Tuf. “Get on with it. Manna, you said. So what?”
“It will feed the S’uthlamese,” said Tuf. Dax was purring.
“For how many days?” asked the woman from Henry’s World, in a sweet voice that dripped sarcasm.
“First Councillor, if you would be so kind as to break off one of the larger paps, you will find the flesh delectably succulent and quite nutritious,” Tuf said.
Tolly Mune leaned forward, grimacing. She wrapped her fingers around the largest fruit. It felt soft and pulpy to her touch. She tugged, and it came off the vine easily. She broke it apart with her fingers. The flesh tore like fresh bread. Deep within its secret center was a sac of dark, viscous liquid that flowed with seductive slowness. A marvelous smell filled her nostrils, and she began to salivate. She hesitated for an instant, but it smelled too good. Quickly, she took a bite. She chewed, swallowed, took another bite, and another. In four bites it was all gone, and she was licking the stickiness off her fingers.
“Milkbread,” she said, “and honey. Rich, but tasty.”
“Nor will the taste pall,” Tuf announced. “The secretions in the heart of each palp are mildly narcotic. They are individual with each specimen of the manna plant, its distinct and subtle flavors a factor of the chemical composition of the soil in which the plant has taken root and the genetic heritage of the plant itself. The range of tastes is quite broad, and can be further expanded through cross-breeding.”
“Hold on,” Ratch Norren said loudly. He tugged at his cheek and frowned. “So this damned bread-and-honey fruit tastes just swell, sure, sure. So what? So the Suthies have something tasty to snack on after they make some more little Suthies. A nice treat to relieve the tedium of
conquering Vandeen and breeding all over it. Pardon, folks, but Ratch don’t feel like applauding right now.”
Tolly Mune frowned. “He’s rude,” she said, “but he’s right. You’ve given us miracle plants before, Tuf. Omni-grain, remember? Neptune’s shawl. Jersee-pods. How’s manna going to be any different?”
“In several respects,” said Haviland Tuf. “Firstly, my previous efforts have been directed at making your ecology more efficient, to increasing the caloric output from the finite areas of S’uthlam given over to agriculture, to getting more from less, as it were. Unfortunately, I did not adequately account for the perversity of the human species. As you yourself have reported, the S’uthlamese food chain is still far from maximum efficiency. Though you have meatbeasts to provide protein, you persist in raising and feeding wasteful herd animals, simply because some of your wealthier carnivores prefer the taste of such flesh to a slice of a meatbeast. Similarly, you continue to grow omni-grain and nanowheat for reasons of flavor and culinary variety, where jersee-pods would yield you more calories per square meter. Succinctly put, the S’uthlamese still persist in choosing hedonism over rationality. So be it. Manna’s addictive properties and flavors are unique. Once the S’uthlamese have eaten of it, you will enounter no resistance on the grounds of taste.”
“Maybe,” Tolly Mune said doubtfully, “but still—”
“Secondmost,” Tuf continued, “manna grows swiftly. Extreme difficulties demand extreme solutions. Manna represents such a solution. It is an artificial hybrid, a genetic quilt sewn together with DNA strands from a dozen worlds, its natural ancestors including the bread-bush of Hafeer, insinuating nightweed from Noctos, Gulliverian sugarsacs, and a specially enhanced variety of kudzu, from Old Earth itself. You will find it hardy and fast-spreading, in need of scant care, and capable of transforming an ecosystem with astonishing swiftness.”
“How astonishing?” Tolly Mune demanded bluntly.
Tuf’s finger moved slightly, pressed down on a glowing key set within the arm of his floater. Dax purred.