Tuf Voyaging

They dined at one-quarter gee.

The Crystal Room clung to the underside of Spiderhome, its exterior a dome of transparent crystalline plasteel. Beyond the all-but-invisible walls of the dome, they were surrounded by the black clarity of space, fields of cool clean stars, and the intricate traceries of the web. Below was the rocky exterior of the station, transport tubes tangled thickly across its surface, the swollen silvery blisters of habitats clinging to nexus points, the sculpted minarets and shining arrow-towers of star-class hotels rising into the cold darkness. Directly overhead hung the immense globe of S’uthlam itself, pale blue and brown, aswirl with cloud patterns, the elevator hurtling up toward it, higher and higher, until the huge shaft became a thin bright thread and then was lost to the eye entirely. The perspectives were dizzying, and more than a little unsettling.

The room was customarily used only on major state occasions; it had last been opened three years ago, when Josen Rael had come upstairs to entertain a visiting dignitary. But Tolly Mune was pulling out all the stops. The food was prepared by a chef she borrowed for the night from a Transcorp liner, the beer was commandeered from a trader in transit to Henry’s World; the service was a rare antique from the Museum of Planetary History; the great ebonfire table, made of gleaming black wood shot through with long scarlet veins, had room enough for twelve; and everything was served by a silent, discreet phalanx of waiters in gold and black livery.

Tuf entered cradling his cat, considered the splendor of the table, and gazed up at the stars and the web.

“You can see the Ark,” Tolly Mune told him. “There, that bright dot, beyond the web to the upper left.”

Tuf glanced at it. “Is this effect achieved through three-dimensional projection?” he asked, stroking the cat.

“Hell no. This is the real thing, Tuf.” She grinned. “Don’t worry, you’re safe. That’s triple-thick plasteel. Neither the world nor the elevator is likely to fall on us, and the chances of the dome being struck by a meteor are astronomically low.”

“I perceive a substantial amount of traffic,” said Haviland Tuf. “What are the chances of the dome being struck by a tourist piloting a rented vacuum sled, a lost circuit-tracer, or a burned-out pulse-ring?”

“Higher,” admitted Tolly Mune. “But the instant it happens, the airlocks will seal, claxons will sound, and an emergency cache will spring open. They’re required in any structure that fronts on vacuum. Port regs. So in the unlikely event that anything happens, we’ll have skinthins, breather pacs, even a laser torch if we want to try and repair the damage before the spinnerets get here. But it’s only happened two, three times in all the years there’s been a port, so just enjoy the view and don’t get too nervous.”

“Madam,” said Haviland Tuf with ponderous dignity, “I was not nervous, merely curious.”

“Right,” she agreed. She gestured him to his seat. He folded himself stiffly into it and sat quietly stroking Havoc’s black-and-white fur while the waiters brought out appetizer plates and baskets of hot mushroom bread. The savories were of two sorts—tiny pastries stuffed with deviled cheese and mushroom paté, and what appeared to be small snakes, or perhaps large worms, cooked in an aromatic orange sauce. Tuf fed two of the latter to his cat, who devoured them eagerly, before lifting one of the pastries, sniffing at it, and biting into it delicately. He swallowed and nodded. “Excellent,” he pronounced.

“So that’s a cat,” said Tolly Mune.

“Indeed,” replied Tuf, tearing off some mushroom bread—a wisp of steam rose from the interior of the loaf when he broke it open—and methodically slathering it with a thick coating of butter.

Tolly Mune reached for her own bread, burning her fingers on the hot crust. But she persisted; it would not do to show any weakness in front of Tuf. “Good,” she said, around the first mouthful. She swallowed. “You know Tuf, this meal we’re about to have—most S’uthlamese don’t eat this well.”

“This fact had not escaped my notice,” said Tuf, lifting another snake between thumb and forefinger and holding it out for Havoc, who climbed halfway up his arm to get at it.

“In fact,” said Tolly Mune, “the actual caloric content of this meal approximates what the average citizen consumes in a week.”

“On the strength of the savories and bread alone, I would venture to suggest that we have already enjoyed more gustatory pleasure than the average S’uthlamese does in a lifetime,” Tuf said impassively.

The salad was set before them; Tuf tasted it and pronounced it good. Tolly Mune pushed her own food around on her plate and waited until the waiters had retreated to their stations by the walls. “Tuf,” she said, “you had a question, I believe.”



Haviland Tuf raised his eyes from his plate and stared at her, his long white face blank and still and expressionless. “Correct,” he said. Havoc was looking at her, too, from slitted eyes as green as the neograss in their salads.

“Thirty-nine billion,” said Tolly Mune in a crisp, quiet voice.

Tuf blinked. “Indeed,” he said.

She smiled. “Is that your only comment?”

Tuf glanced up at the swollen globe of S’uthlam overhead. “Since you solicit my opinion, Portmaster, I shall venture to say that while the world above us seems formidably large, I cannot but wonder if it is indeed large enough. Without intending any censure of your mores, culture, and civilization, the thought does occur to me that a population of thirty-nine billion persons might be considered, on the whole, a trifle excessive.”

Tolly Mune grinned. “You don’t say?” She sat back, summoned a waiter, called for drinks. The beer was thick and brown, with a heavy fragrant head; they served it in huge double-handled mugs of etched glass. She lifted hers a bit awkwardly, watching the liquid slosh about. “The one thing I’ll never get used to about gravity,” she said. “Liquids ought to be in squeeze bulbs, goddamnit. These seem so damned … messy—like an accident waiting to happen.” She sipped, and came away with a foam mustache. “Good, though,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Time to quit this damned fencing, Tuf,” she continued as she lowered the mug back to the table with the excessive care of one unaccustomed to even this trace gravity. “You obviously had some suspicion of our population problem, or you would never have inquired after it. And you’ve been soaking up all kinds of other information. To what end?”

“Curiosity is my sad affliction, madam,” Tuf said, “and I sought merely to solve the puzzle that was S’uthlam, with perhaps the vaguest hope that in study I might come across some means of resolving our present impasse.”

“And?” Tolly Mune said.

“You have confirmed the assumption I was forced to make about your excessive population. With that datum in place, all becomes clear. Your sprawling cities climb ever higher because you must accommodate this swelling population even as you struggle futilely to preserve your agricultural areas from encroachment. Your proud port is impressively busy, and your great elevator moves constantly, because you lack the capacity to feed your own population and must import food from other worlds. You are feared and perhaps even hated by your neighbors because centuries ago you attempted to export your population problem through emigration and annexation, until stopped violently by war. Your people keep no pets because S’uthlam has no room for any nonhuman species that is not a direct, efficient, and necessary link in the food chain. You are on the average distinctly smaller than the human norm due to the rigors of centuries of nutritional deprivation and rationing in all but name, economically enforced. Therefore generation succeeds generation, each smaller and thinner than the last, struggling to subsist on ever-diminishing provender. All these woes are directly attributable to your surfeit of population.”

“You don’t sound very approving, Tuf,” Tolly Mune said.

“I intend no criticism. You are not without your virtues. In the main, you are an industrious, cooperative, ethical, civilized, and ingenious folk, and your society, your technology and especially your rate of intellectual advance, is much to be admired.”

“Our technology,” said Tolly Mune dryly, “is the only thing that has saved our goddamned asses. We import thirty-four percent of our raw calories. We grow perhaps another twenty percent on what agricultural land remains to us. The rest of our food comes out of the food factories, processed from petrochemicals. That percentage goes up every year. Has to. Only the food factories can gear up fast enough to keep pace with the population curve. One goddamned problem, though.”

“You are running out of petroleum,” ventured Haviland Tuf.

“Damned right we are,” said Tolly Mune. “A nonrenewable resource and all that, Tuf.”

“Undoubtedly your governing bodies know approximately when the famine will come upon you.”

“Twenty-seven standard years,” she said. “More or less. The date changes constantly, as various factors are altered. We may get a war before we get famine. That’s what some of our experts believe. Or maybe we’ll get war and famine.

Either way we get a lot of dead people. We’re a civilized people, Tuf, you said it yourself. So goddamned civilized you wouldn’t believe it. Cooperative, ethical, life-affirming, all that bladder-bloat. Even that’s breaking down, though. Conditions in the undercities are growing worse, have been for generations, and some of our leaders go so far as to say they’re devolving down there, turning into some kind of puling vermin. Murder, rape, all the violent crimes, the rates go up each year. Within the past eighteen months, two reports of cannibalism. All that will get a lot worse in years to come. Rising with the puling population curve. You receiving my transmission, Tuf?”

“Indeed,” he said impassively.

The waiters returned, bearing the entrees. Slices of meat were piled high on the platter, still steaming from the oven, and four different types of vegetables were available. Haviland Tuf allowed his plate to be filled to overflowing with spicepods, mashed smackles, sweetroot, and butterknots, and bid the waiter cut several thin slivers of ham for Havoc. Tolly Mune took a thick ham slice herself, and drowned it in brown sauce, but after the first taste she found herself without appetite; she watched Tuf eat. “Well?” she prompted.

“Perhaps I can be of some small service to you in this quandary,” Tuf said, deftly spearing a forkful of spicepods.

“You can be a big service to us,” Tolly Mune said. “Sell us the Ark. It’s the only way out, Tuf. You know it. I know it. Name your own price. I appeal to your goddamned sense of morality. Sell, and you’ll save millions of lives—maybe billions. Not only will you be wealthy, you’ll be a hero. Say the word and we’ll name the goddamned planet after you.”

“An interesting notion,” said Tuf. “Yet, my vanity notwithstanding, I fear you greatly overestimate the prowess of even the lost Ecological Engineering Corps. In any case the Ark is not for sale, as I have already informed you. Perhaps I might venture to suggest an obvious solution to your difficulties? If it proves efficacious, I would be pleased to allow you to name a city or a small asteroid after me.”

Tolly Mune laughed and took a healthy swallow of beer. She needed it. “Go on, Tuf. Say it. Tell me this easy, obvious solution.”

“A plethora of terms come to mind,” said Tuf. “Population control is the heart of the concept, to be achieved through biochemical or mechanical birth control, sexual abstinence, cultural conditioning, legal prohibitions. The mechanisms may vary, but the end result must be the same. The S’uthlamese must breed at a somewhat diminished rate.”

“Impossible,” said Tolly Mune.

“That is scarcely so,” said Tuf. “Other worlds, vastly older than S’uthlam, have accomplished the same.”

“Makes no damned difference,” Tolly Mune said. She made a sharp gesture with her mug, and beer sloshed on the table. She ignored it. “You don’t win any prizes for original thinking, Tuf. This is anything but a new idea. In fact, we’ve got a political faction that has been advocating this for, hell, hundreds of years. The zeros, we call ’em. They want to zero out the population curve. I’d say maybe seven, eight percent of the citizenry supports them.”

“Mass famine will undoubtedly increase the number of adherents to their cause,” Tuf observed, lifting a heavily laden forkful of mashed smackles. Havoc yowled in approval.

“By then it will be too puling late, and you damn well know it. Problem is, the teeming masses down there really don’t believe any such thing is coming, no matter what the politicians say, no matter how many dire predictions they hear over the newsfeeds. We’ve heard that before, they say, and damned if they haven’t. Grandmother and great-grandfather heard similar predictions about famine just around the corner. But S’uthlam has always been able to avoid the catastrophe before. The technocrats have stayed on top for centuries by perpetually managing to keep the day of collapse a generation away. They always find a solution. Most citizens are confident they always will find a solution.”

“Such solutions as you imply are by their very nature only stopgaps,” commented Haviland Tuf. “Surely this must be obvious. The only true solution is population control.”

“You don’t understand us, Tuf. Restrictions against birth are anathema to the vast majority of S’uthlamese. You’ll never get any meaningful number of people to accept them—certainly not just to avoid some damned unreal catastrophe that none of them believe in anyway. A few exceptionally stupid and exceptionally idealistic politicians have tried, and they’ve been dragged down overnight, denounced as immoral, as anti-life.”

“I see,” said Haviland Tuf. “Are you a woman of strong religious conviction, Portmaster Mune?”

She made a face and drank some more beer. “Hell no. I suppose I’m an agnostic. I don’t know, I don’t think about it much. But I’m also a zero, though I’d never admit it downstairs. A lot of spinnerets are zeros. In a small closed system like the port, the effects of unrestrained breeding soon become damned apparent, and damned scary. Downstairs, it’s not so puling clear. And the church … are you familiar with the Church of Life Evolving?”

“I have a certain cursory familiarity with its precepts,” Tuf said, “of admittedly recent acquisition.”

“S’uthlam was settled by the elders of the Church of Life Evolving,” Tolly Mune said. “They were escaping from religious persecution on Tara, and they were persecuted because they bred so damned fast they were threatening to take over the planet, which the rest of the Tarans didn’t much like.”

“An understandable sentiment,” said Tuf.

“Same damned thing killed the colonization program the expansionists launched a few centuries back. The church—well, its fundamental belief is that the destiny of sentient life is to fill up the universe, that life is the ultimate good. Anti-life—entropy—is the ultimate evil. The church believes that life and anti-life are in a kind of race. We must evolve, the church says, evolve through higher and higher states of sentience and genius into eventual godhood, and we must achieve that godhood in time to avert the heat-death of the universe. Since evolution operates through the biological mechanism of breeding, we must therefore breed, must ever expand and enrich the gene-pool, must spread our seed to the stars. To restrict birth … we might be interfering with the next step in human evolution, might be aborting a genius, a proto-god, the carrier of the one mutant chromosome that would pull the race up to the next, transcendent rung on the ladder.”

“I believe I grasp the essentials of the credo,” Tuf said.

“We’re a free people, Tuf,” Tolly Mune said. “Religious diversity, freedom of choice, all that. We’ve got Erikaners, Old Christers, Children of the Dreamer. We’ve got Steel Angel bastions and we’ve got Melder communes, anything you want. But more than eighty percent of the population still belongs to the Church of Life Evolving, and if anything, their beliefs are stronger now than they’ve ever been. They look around, and they see all the obvious fruits of the church’s teachings. When you’ve got billions of people, you’ve got millions at genius level, and you’ve got the stimulus of virulent cross-fertilization, of savage competition for advancement, of incredible need. So, puling hell, it’s only logical, S’uthlam has achieved miraculous technological breakthroughs. They see our cities, our elevator, they see the visitors coming from a hundred worlds to study here, they see us eclipsing all the neighboring worlds. They don’t see a catastrophe, and the church leaders say everything will be fine, so why the bloody hell should anybody stop breeding!” She slapped the table hard, turned to a waiter. “You!” she snapped. “More beer. And quick.” She turned back to face Tuf. “So don’t give me these naïve suggestions. Birth restrictions are utterly infeasible given our situation. Impossible. You understand that, Tuf?”

“There is no need to impugn my intelligence,” said Haviland Tuf. He stroked Havoc, who had settled into his lap, surfeit with ham. “The plight of S’uthlam has touched my heart. I shall endeavor to do what I can to relieve your world’s distress.”

“You’ll sell us the Ark, then?” she said sharply.

“This is an unwarranted assumption,” Tuf replied. “Yet I shall certainly do what I can in my capacity as an ecological engineer, before moving on to other worlds.”

The waiters were bringing out the dessert—fat blue-green jellyfruit swimming in bowls of thickened, clotted cream. Havoc sniffed the cream and leapt up on to the table for a closer investigation as Haviland Tuf lifted the long silver spoon they had provided him.

Tolly Mune shook her head. “Take it away,” she snapped, “too damn rich. Just beer for me.”

Tuf looked up and raised a finger. “A moment! No use in letting your portion of this delightful confection go to waste. Havoc will surely enjoy it.”

The Portmaster sipped a fresh mug of brown beer, and scowled. “I’ve run out of things to say, Tuf. We have a crisis here. We must have that ship. This is your last chance. Will you sell?”

Tuf looked at her. Havoc moved in quickly on the dessert. “My position is unchanged.”

“I’m sorry, then,” Tolly Mune said. “I didn’t want to do this.” She snapped her fingers. In the quiet of that moment, when the only sound was Havoc lapping at the clotted cream, the noise was like a gunshot. All around the clear crystalline walls, the tall, attentive waiters reached beneath their snug gold-and-black jackets and produced nerveguns.

Tuf blinked, and moved his head first right, then left, studying each man in turn while Havoc plundered his jellyfruit. “Treachery,” he said flatly. “I am gravely disappointed. My trust and good nature have been ill used.”

“You forced my hand. Tuf, you damned fool—”

“Such rank abuse exacerbates this betrayal rather than justifying it,” said Tuf, with spoon in hand. “Am I now to be secretly and villainously slain?”

“We’re civilized people,” Tolly Mune said angrily, furious at Tuf, at Josen Rael, at the goddamned Church of Life Evolving, and mostly at herself for letting it come to this. “No, you won’t be killed. We won’t even steal that goddamned derelict of a ship you care so damned much about. This is all legal, Tuf. You’re under arrest.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf. “Please accept my surrender. I am always anxious to comply with all pertinent local laws. On what charge am I to be tried?”

Tolly Mune smiled thinly, without joy, knowing full well they’d be calling her the Steel Widow in Spiderhome tonight. She pointed down to the far end of the table, where Havoc sat licking cream off her whiskers. “Bringing illegal vermin into the Port of S’uthlam,” she said.

Tuf laid down his spoon carefully and folded his hands atop his paunch. “It is my recollection that I brought Havoc here with me on your specific invitation.”

Tolly Mune shook her head. “Won’t wash, Tuf. I’ve got our talk recorded. True, I observed that I’d never seen a live animal before, but that’s a simple factual declaration, and no court could possibly construe it as an incitement for you to commit a criminal violation of our health statutes. No court of ours, anyway.” Her smile was almost apologetic.

“I see,” said Tuf. “In that case, let us dispense with time-consuming legal machinations. I will plead guilty and pay the prescribed fine for this minor infraction.”

“Good,” said Tolly Mune. “The fine is fifty standards.” She gestured, and one of her men strode forward and gathered up Havoc from the table. “Of course,” she finished, “the vermin in question must be destroyed.”


“I hate gravity,” Tolly Mune said to Josen Rael’s smiling, magnified face after she’d finished her report on the dinner. “It exhausts me, and I hate to think what all that goddamned drag does to my muscles, my internal organs. How can you worms live that way? And all that puling food! It was obscene the way he put it away, and the smells …”

“Portmaster, we have more important things to discuss,” Rael said. “It’s done, then? We have him?”

“We have his cat,” she said glumly. “More precisely, I have his goddamned cat.” As if on cue, Havoc yowled and pressed her face against the meshwork plasteel cage that the security men had rigged up in a corner of her apartment. The cat yowled a lot; it was distinctly uncomfortable in weightlessness, and kept spinning out of control when it tried to move. Every time it caromed off the side of the cage, Tolly Mune winced with guilt. “I was sure he’d thumb the transfer to save the puling cat.”

Josen Rael looked upset. “I can’t say I think much of your plan, Portmaster. Why in the name of life would anyone surrender a treasure the magnitude of this Ark to preserve an animal specimen? Especially since you tell me he has other samples of the same type of vermin back aboard his craft?”

“Because he’s got an emotional attachment to this particular vermin,” Tolly Mune said, with a sigh. “Except that Tuf is even cagier than I thought. He called my bluff.”

“Destroy the vermin, then. Show him we mean what we say.”

“Oh, be sane, Josen!” she replied impatiently. “Where does that leave us? If I go ahead and kill the damned cat, then I’ve got nothing. Tuf knows that, and he knows that I know that, and he knows that I know that he knows. At least this way, we’ve got something he wants. We’re stalemated.”

“We’ll change the law,” Josen Rael suggested. “Let me … yes, the penalty for smuggling vermin into port should include confiscation of the ship used for the smuggling!”

“A goddamned masterstroke,” said Tolly Mune. “Too bad the charter prohibits retroactive laws.”

“I have yet to hear a better plan from you.”

“That’s because I don’t have one yet, Josen. But I will. I’ll argue him out of it. I’ll swindle him out of it. We know he’s got weaknesses. Food, his cats. Maybe there’s something else, something we can use. A conscience, a libido, a weakness for drink, for gambling.” She paused, thoughtful. “Gambling,” she repeated. “Right. He likes to play games.” She pointed a finger at the screen. “Stay out of it. You gave me three days, and my time’s not up yet. So hold your bladder.” She wiped his features off the huge vidscreen, and replaced them with the darkness of space, with the Ark floating against a field of unwinking stars.

The cat somehow seemed to recognize the image up on the screen, and made a thin, plaintive mewing sound. Tolly Mune looked over, frowned, and asked to be put through to her security monitor. “Tuf,” she barked, “where is he now?”

“In the Worldview Hotel star-class gaming salon, Ma,” the woman on duty responded.

“The Worldview?” she groaned. “He would pick a goddamned worm palace, wouldn’t he? What’s that, under, full gee? Oh, puling hell, never mind. Just see that he stays there. I’m coming down.”


She found him playing five-sided quandary against a couple of elderly groundworms, a cybertech she had had suspended for systems-looting a few weeks back, and a moon-faced, fleshy trade negotiator from Jazbo. Judging from the mountain of counters stacked in front of him, Tuf was winning handily. She snapped her fingers, and the salon hostess came gliding over with a chair. Tolly Mune sat herself next to Tuf and touched him lightly on the arm. “Tuf,” she said.

He turned his head and pulled away from her. “Kindly refrain from laying hands upon my person, Portmaster Mune.”

She pulled her hand back. “What are you doing, Tuf?”

“At the moment, I am assaying an interesting new stratagem of my own devising against Negotiator Dez. I fear it will be proved unsound, but we shall see. In a larger sense, I strive to earn a few meager standards through the application of statistical analysis and applied psychology. S’uthlam is by no means inexpensive, Portmaster Mune.”

The Jazboite, his long hair gleaming with iridescent oils, his fat face covered with rank-scars, laughed roughly and displayed a mouth of polished black teeth inset with tiny crimson jewels. “I challenge, Tuf,” he said, touching a button underneath his station to flash his array upon the lighted surface of the table.

Tuf leaned forward briefly. “Indeed,” he said. A long pale finger moved appropriately, and his own formation lit up within the gaming circle. “I fear you are lost, sir. My experiment has been proven successful, though no doubt by mere fluke.”

“Blast you and your damnable luck!” the Jazboite said, lurching unsteadily to his feet. More counters changed hands.

“So you game well,” Tolly Mune said to him. “It won’t do you a damned bit of good, Tuf. The odds in these places favor the house. You’ll never gamble your way to the money you need.”

“I am not unaware of this,” Tuf replied.

“Let’s talk.”

“We are engaged in talking at this very moment.”

“Let’s talk privately,” she stressed.

“During our last private discussion, I was set upon by men with nerveguns, verbally pummeled, cruelly deceived, deprived of a beloved companion, and denied the opportunity to enjoy dessert. I am not favorably predisposed to accept further invitations.”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Tolly Mune.

“Very well,” said Tuf. He rose ponderously, scooped up his counters, and bid farewell to the other players. The two of them walked to a privacy booth on the far side of the gaming room, Tolly Mune puffing a bit from the strain of fighting gravity. Once inside, she slumped into the cushions, ordered iced narcoblasts for two and opaqued the curtain.

“The ingestion of narcotic beverages will have scant effect on my decision-making capacities, Portmaster Mune,” said Haviland Tuf, “and while I am willing to accept your largesse as a token of redress for your earlier perversion of civilized hospitality, my position is nonetheless unchanged.”

“What do you want, Tuf?” she said wearily, after the drinks had come. The tall glasses were rimed with frost, the liquor cobalt blue and icy.

“Like all of humanity, I have many desires. At the moment I most urgently wish the safe return of Havoc to my custody.”

“I told you, I’ll swap the cat for the ship.”

“We have discussed this proposal, and I have rejected it as inequitable. Must we go over the same ground again?”

“I have a new argument,” she said.

“Indeed.” Tuf sipped at his drink.

“Consider the question of ownership, Tuf. By what right do you own the Ark? Did you build it? Did you have any role in its creation? Hell no.”

“I found it,” said Tuf. “True, this discovery was made in the company of five others, and it cannot be denied that their claims to ownership were, in some cases, superior to my own. They, however, are dead, and I am alive. This strengthens my claim considerably. Moreover, I presently possess the artifact in question. In many ethical systems, possession is the key, indeed oft times the overriding determinant of ownership.”

“There are worlds where the state owns everything of value, where your goddamned ship would have been seized out of hand.”

“I am mindful of this and purposefully avoided such worlds when choosing my destination,” said Haviland Tuf.

“We could take your damned ship by force if we wanted, Tuf. Maybe it’s power that conveys ownership, eh?”

“It is true that you command the fierce loyalty of numerous lackeys armed with nerveguns and lasers, while I am alone, a humble trader and neophyte ecological engineer, companioned only by his harmless cats. Nonetheless, I am not without certain small resources of my own. It is theoretically possible for me to have programmed defenses into the Ark that would make such a seizure perhaps less easily accomplished than you imagine. Of course this supposition is entirely hypothetical, but you might do well to give it due consideration. In any case, brutal military action would be illegal under the laws of S’uthlam.”

Tolly Mune sighed. “Some cultures hold that utility confers ownership. Others opt for need.”

“I am not unfamiliar with these doctrines.”

“Good. S’uthlam needs the Ark more than you do, Tuf.”

“Incorrect. I have need of the Ark to pursue my chosen profession and earn a livelihood. Your world has no need of the ship itself, but rather of ecological engineering. Therefore I have offered you my services, only to find my generous offer spurned and dubbed insufficient.”

“Utility,” Tolly Mune interrupted. “We have a whole goddamned world of brilliant scientists. You’re nothing but a trader, by your own admission. We can make better use of the Ark.”

“Your brilliant scientists are largely specialists in physics, chemistry, cybernetics, and other like fields. S’uthlam is not especially advanced in the areas of biology, genetics, or ecology. This is doubly obvious. If you possessed such expertise as you imply, firstly, your need for the Ark would not be urgent, and secondly, your ecological problem would never have been allowed to reach its present ominous proportions. Therefore I question your assertion that your people would put the ship to more efficient use. Since coming upon the Ark and commencing my voyage here, I have dutifully immersed myself in study, and I would be so bold as to suggest that I am now the single most qualified ecological engineer in human space, possibly excluding Prometheus.”

Haviland Tuf’s long white face was without expression; he shaped each pronouncement carefully and fired them at her in cool salvos. Yet, unflappable as he was, Tolly Mune sensed that behind Tuf’s calm façade was a weakness—pride, ego, a vanity she could twist to her own ends. She jabbed a finger at his face. “Words, Tuf. Nothing but puling empty words. You can call yourself an ecological engineer, but that doesn’t mean a damned thing. You can call yourself a jellyfruit, but you’d still look damned silly squatting in a bowl of clotted cream!”

“Indeed,” Tuf said.

“I’ll make you a wager,” she said, going for the kill, “that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing with that damned ship.”

Haviland Tuf blinked, and made a steeple of his hands on the table. “This is an interesting proposition,” he said. “Continue.”

Tolly Mune smiled. “Your cat against your ship,” she said. “I’ve described our problem. Solve it, and you get back Havoc, safe and sound. Fail, and we get the Ark.”

Tuf raised a finger. “This scheme is flawed. Although you set me a formidable task, I am not loath to accept such a challenge, were the suggested stakes not so imbalanced. The Ark and Havoc are both mine, though you have unscrupulously, albeit legally, seized custody of the latter. Therefore it appears that by winning, I simply get back that which is rightfully mine to begin with, whereas you stand to gain a great prize. This is inequitable. I have a counteroffer. I came to S’uthlam for certain repairs and alterations. In the event of my success, let this work be performed without cost to me.”

Tolly Mune lifted her drink to her mouth to give herself a moment to consider. The ice had turned slushy, but the narcoblaster still had a nice sting to it. “Fifty million standards of free repairs? That’s too damn much.”

“Such was my opinion,” said Tuf.

She grinned. “The cat,” she said, “may have been yours to start with, but now she’s ours. But I’ll go this far on the repairs, Tuf—I’ll give you credit.”

“On what terms and at what interest rate?” Tuf asked.

“We’ll do the refitting,” she said, smiling. “We’ll start immediately. If you win—which you won’t—you get the cat back, and we’ll give you an interest-free loan for the cost of the repair bill. You can pay us off from the money you make out there”—she waved vaguely toward the rest of the universe—“doing your damned eco-engineering. But we get a lien on the Ark. If you haven’t paid half the money back in five standard years, or all of it in ten, the ship is ours.”

“The original estimate of fifty million standards was excessive,” Tuf said, “obviously an inflated figure intended solely to force me to sell you my ship. I suggest we settle on a sum of twenty million standards as the basis for this agreement.”

“Ridiculous,” she snapped. “My spinnerets couldn’t even paint your goddamned ship for twenty million standards. But I’ll go down to forty-five.”

“Twenty-five million,” Tuf suggested. “As I am alone aboard the Ark, it is not strictly necessary that all decks and systems be restored to full optimal function. A few distant, dysfunctional decks are of no ultimate importance. I will trim my work order to include only the repairs that must be made for my safety, comfort, and convenience.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “I’ll go to forty million.”

“Thirty,” Tuf insisted, “would seem more than enough.”

“Let’s not quibble over a few million standards,” said Tolly Mune. “You’re going to lose, so it doesn’t matter one hot damn.”

“I have a somewhat different viewpoint. Thirty million.”

“Thirty-seven,” she said.

“Thirty-two,” Tuf replied.

“Obviously, we’re going to settle on thirty-five, right? Done!” She stuck out her hand.

Tuf looked at it. “Thirty-four,” he said calmly.

Tolly Mune laughed, withdrew her hand, and said, “What does it matter? Thirty-four.”

Haviland Tuf stood up.

“Have another drink,” she said, gesturing. “To our little wager.”

“I fear I must decline,” Tuf said. “I will celebrate after I have won. For the nonce, there is work to do.”

“I cannot believe you’ve done this,” Josen Rael said, very loudly. Tolly Mune had turned the volume up high on her comm unit, to drown out the constant irritating protests of her captive cat.

“Give me a little sanity, Josen,” she said querulously. “This is goddamned brilliant.”

“You’ve bet the future of our world! Billions and billions of lives! Do you seriously expect me to honor this little pact of yours?”

Tolly Mune sucked on her beer bulb and sighed. Then, in the same voice she would have used to explain things to an especially slow child, she said, “We can’t lose, Josen. Think about it, if that wormy thing in your skull isn’t too atrophied by gravity to be capable of thought. Why the hell did we want the Ark? To feed ourselves, of course. To avoid the famine, to solve the problem, to work a puling biological miracle. To multiply the loaves and fishes.”

“Loaves and fishes?” the First Councilor said, baffled.

“Times infinity. It’s a classical allusion, Josen. Christian, I think. Tuf is going to take a try at making fish sandwiches for thirty billion. I think he’ll just get flour on his face and choke on a fish bone, but that doesn’t matter. If he fails, we get the goddamned seedship, all nice and legal. If he succeeds, we don’t need the Ark any more. We win either way. And the way I got things rigged, even if Tuf does win, he’ll still owe us thirty-four million standards. If by some miracle he pulls it off, odds are we’ll get the ship anyway, when he comes up short on his damned note.” She drank some more beer and grinned at him. “Josen, you’re damned lucky I don’t want your job. Has it ever dawned on you that I’m a lot smarter than you?”

“You’re a lot less politic too, Ma,” he said, “and I doubt you’d last a day in my job. I can’t deny that you do yours well, however. I suppose your plan is viable.”

“You suppose?” she said.

“There are political realities to consider. The expansionists want the ship itself, you must realize, against the day they regain power. Fortunately, they are a minority. We’ll outvote them in council once again.”

“See that you do, Josen,” Tolly Mune said. She broke the connection and sat floating in the dimness of her home. On her vidscreen, the Ark came into view again. Her work crews were all over it now, jury-rigging a temporary dock. Permanence would come later. She expected the Ark to be around for a good few centuries, so they needed a place to keep the damned thing, and even if Tuf did make off with it by some freakish chance, a major expansion of the web was long overdue and would provide new docking facilities for hundreds of ships. With Tuf paying the bill, she saw no sense in postponing the construction any longer. A long translucent plasteel tube was being assembled, section by section, to link the huge seedship to the end of the nearest major spur, so shipments of materials and teams of spinnerets could reach it more easily. Cybertechs were already inside, linked to the ship’s computer system, reprogramming to suit Tuf’s requirements and, incidentally, dismantling any internal defenses he might have coded in. Secret orders from the Steel Widow herself; Tuf didn’t know. It was just a little extra precaution, in case he was a poor loser. She didn’t want any monsters or plagues popping out of her prize box when she opened it.

As for Tuf, her sources said he had been in his own computer room almost continuously since leaving the Worldview’s gaming salon. On her authority as Portmaster, the council databanks had been authorized to give him whatever information he required, and he certainly required a great deal, from the reports she was getting. He had the Ark’s own computers data-storming extensive series of projections and simulations. Tolly Mune had to give him credit; he was giving it his best.

The cage in the corner thumped as Havoc crashed against its side and gave out a small, hurt mew. She felt sorry for the cat. She felt sorry for Tuf, too. Maybe, when he failed, she’d see if she couldn’t get him that Longhaul Nine anyway.