Portmaster Tolly Mune grinned. “Look at us, Tuf. A damned unlikely pair of star-crossed lovers. But you’ve got to admit, it makes a better story.”
Tuf’s long face was still and expressionless. “Surely you do not defend this grossly inaccurate vidshow,” he said flatly.
The Portmaster laughed again. “Defend it? Puling hell, I wrote it!”
Haviland Tuf blinked six times.
Before he could frame a reply, the outer door slid open and the newsfeed peeps came swarming in, a good two dozen of them, yammering and exclaiming and shouting out rude questions. In the center of each forehead, a third eye whirred and blinked.
“This way, Tuffer. Smile.”
“Do you have any cats with you?”
“Will you be taking out a marriage contract, Portmaster?”
“Where’s the Ark?”
“Let’s have an embrace, hey!”
“When did you turn brown, trader?”
“Where’s the mustache?”
“Any opinion of Tuf and Mune, Citizen Tuf?”
“How’s Havoc these days?”
Strapped immobile into his chair, Haviland Tuf glanced up, down, and all around with a series of quick, precise head motions. He blinked and said nothing. The torrent of questions continued until Portmaster Tolly Mune came swimming effortlessly through the pack, pushing peeps aside with either hand, and settled down next to Tuf. She slid her arm through his and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Puling hell,” she said, “hold your goddamned bladders, he just got here.” She raised a hand. “No questions, sorry. We’re invoking privacy. It’s been five years, after all. Give us some time to get reacquainted.”
“Are you going off to the Ark together?” one of the more aggressive reporters asked. She was floating a half-meter in front of Tuf’s face, her third eye whirring.
“Of course,” said Tolly Mune. “Where else?”
It was not until the Ferocious Veldt Roarer was well out of the web, en route back to the Ark, that Haviland Tuf deigned to walk back to the cabin he had assigned to Tolly Mune. He was freshly showered, cleansed, and scrubbed, all traces of disguise removed. His long hairless face was as white and unreadable as blank paper. He wore a plain gray coverall that did little to conceal his formidable paunch, and a green duck-billed cap adorned with the golden theta of the Ecological Engineers covered his bald pate. Dax rode upon one broad shoulder.
Tolly Mune had been reclining and sipping on a bulb of St. Christopher Malt, but she grinned when he entered. “This is damn good stuff,” she said. “Well now, who’s that? Not Havoc.”
“Havoc is safely back aboard the Ark, with her mate and her kittens, though in truth they can scarcely be said to be kittens any longer. The feline population of my ship has grown somewhat since my last call at S’uthlam, albeit not as precipitously as the human population of S’uthlam is wont to grow.” He lowered himself stiffly into a seat. “This is Dax. While every cat is of course special, Dax might accurately be said to be extraordinary. All cats have a touch of psi; this is well known. Due to an unusual set of circumstances I encountered upon the world known as Namor, I initiated a program to enhance and expand upon this innate feline ability. Dax is the end result, madam. We share a certain rapport, and Dax is gifted with a psi ability that is far from rudimentary.”
“In short,” said Tolly Mune, “you cloned yourself a mindreading cat.”
“Your perspicacity remains acute, Portmaster,” Tuf replied. He folded his hands. “We have much to discuss. Perhaps you will be so kind as to explain why you have requested that I bring the Ark back to S’uthlam, why you have insisted on accompanying me, and most crucially why you have embroiled me in this strange though colorful deception, and even gone so far as to make free with my person?”
Tolly Mune signed. “Tuf, you remember how things stood when we parted five years ago?”
“My memory is unimpaired,” said Haviland Tuf.
“Good. Then you might recall that you left me in a real puling mess.”
“You anticipated immediate removal from your post as Portmaster, trial on charges of high treason, and a sentence to a penal farm on the Larder,” said Tuf. “Nonetheless, you declined my effort to provide you with free transport to another system of your choice, preferring instead to return to face imprisonment and disgrace.”
“Whatever the hell I am, I’m S’uthlamese,” she said. “These are my people, Tuf. Big puling fools at times, but still my goddamned people.”
“Your loyalty is no doubt commendable. Since you are still Portmaster, I must assume that circumstances changed.”
“I changed them,” Tolly Mune said.
“Indeed.”
“Had to, if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life driving a weeder-wheel through the neograss while gravity pulled me apart.” She made a face. “As soon as I got back to port, security grabbed me. I’d defied the High Council, broken laws, damaged property, and helped you escape with a ship they wanted to confiscate. Damned dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”
“My opinion has no bearing on the matter.”
“So dramatic, in fact, that it had to be either a crime of enormous magnitude or an act of enormous heroism. Josen was sick about it. We went way back, him and me, and he wasn’t a bad man really, I told you that. But he was First Councillor, and he knew what he had to do. He had to try me for treason. And I’m no damned fool either, Tuf. I knew what I had to do.” She leaned forward. “I wasn’t that pleased by my cards either, but I had to play them or fold. To save my bony ass, I had to destroy Josen—discredit him and most of the High Council. I had to make myself a heroine and him a villain, in terms that would be perfectly clear to every goddamned drooling slackjaw in the undercity.”
“I see,” said Tuf. Dax was purring; the Portmaster was perfectly sincere. “Ergo the overblown melodrama that was called Tuf and Mune.”
“I needed cals for legal costs,” she said. “That was real enough, puling hell, but I used it as an excuse to sell my version of events to one of the big vidnets. I, let us say, seasoned the story a bit. They were so excited they decided to follow the newsfeed exclusive with a dramatized version. I was more than happy to provide the script. Had a collaborator, of course, but I told him what to write. Josen never understood what was happening. He wasn’t as canny a pol as he thought, and his heart was never in it. Besides, I had help.”
“From what source?” Tuf inquired.
“A young man named Cregor Blaxon, mostly.”
“The name is unknown to me.”
“He was on the High Council. Councillor for agriculture. A very crucial post, Tuf, and Blaxon was the youngest man ever to fill it. Youngest man on the Council, too. You’d think he’d be satisfied, right?”
“Please do not presume to tell me my thoughts, unless you have developed psionic abilities in my absence. I would think no such thing, madam. I have found that it is almost always a mistake to assume that any human being is ever satisfied.”
“Cregor Blaxon is and was a very ambitious man,” Tolly Mune said. “He was part of Josen’s administration. Both of them were technocrats, but Blaxon aspired to the First Councillor’s seat and that was where Josen Rael had planted his buttocks.”
“I grasp his motivation.”
“Blaxon became my ally. He was quite impressed with what you’d provided anyway. The omni-grain, the fish and that plankton, the slime-molds, all the damn mushrooms. And he saw what was happening. He used every bit of his power to cut short bio-testing and put your stuff in the field. Screamer priorities all around. Did a smash-run on any puling fool tried to slow things down. Josen Rael was too preoccupied to notice.”
“The intelligent and efficient politician is a species virtually unknown in the galaxy,” said Haviland Tuf. “Perhaps I might secure a scraping from Cregor Blaxon for the Ark’s cell library.”
“You’re getting ahead of me.”
“The end of the story is obvious. The appearance of vanity notwithst
anding, I will venture a guess that my small effort at eco-engineering was deemed a success, and that Cregor Blaxon’s energetic implementation of my solutions rebounded to his credit.”
“He called it Tuf’s Flowering,” Tolly Mune said with a certain cynical twist to the corner of her mouth. “The newsfeeds took up the term. Tuf’s Flowering, a new golden age for S’uthlam. Soon we had edible fungus growing along the walls of our sewer systems. We started huge mushroom farms in every undercity. Carpets of neptune’s shawl crept across the surface of our seas, and underneath, your fish multiplied at an astounding rate. We planted your omni-grain instead of neograss and nanowheat, and the first crop gave us almost triple the caloric yield. You did one nova-class job of eco-engineering for us, Tuf.”
“The compliment is noted with due appreciation,” said Tuf.
“Fortunately for me, the Flowering was already in full bud when Tuf and Mune hit the nets, long before I went to trial. Creg was extolling your brilliance to the newsfeeds daily and telling billions that our food crisis was done, finished, over.” The Portmaster shrugged. “So he made you a hero, for his own reasons. Couldn’t help it, if he wanted to replace Josen. And that helped make me a heroine. It all ties together in one big neat puling knot—prettiest goddamned thing you’d ever want to see. I’ll spare you the details. The end of it was, Tolly Mune acquitted, restored to office in triumph. Josen Rael in disgrace, denounced by all the opinionaters, forced to resign. Half the High Council resigned with him. Cregor Blaxon became the new technocratic leader and won the elections that followed. Creg’s now First Councillor. Josen, poor soul, died two years ago. And you and I have become the stuff of legends, Tuf, the most celebrated lovers since, oh, puling hell, since all those famous romantic couples from ancient times—you know, Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah, Sodom and Gomorrah, Marx and Lenin.”
Perched on Tuf’s shoulder, Dax began to emit a low, frightened growl. Tiny claws dug through the fabric of Tuf’s jumpsuit into his flesh. Haviland Tuf blinked, then reached over and stroked the kitten soothingly. “Portmaster Mune, your smile is broad and your news seems to indicate nothing but the trite yet nonetheless eternally popular happy ending, but Dax has grown alarmed, as if you seethe with turmoil beneath this placid surface. Perhaps, you are omitting some crucial part of the tale.”
“Just the footnote, Tuf,” the Portmaster said.
“Indeed. What might that be?”
“Twenty-seven years, Tuf. Does that trip any claxons in your head?”
“Indeed. Before I embarked upon my program of ecological engineering, your projections indicated S’uth-lam to be twenty-seven standard years from mass famine, given the alarming population growth and the declining food resources.”
“That was five years ago,” said Tolly Mune.
“Indeed.”
“Twenty-seven minus five.”
“Twenty-two,” said Tuf. “I assume there is a point in this exercise in elementary arithmetic.”
“Twenty-two years left,” Portmaster Tolly Mune said. “Ah, but that was before the Ark, before the genius ecologist Tuf and the daring spinneret Mune fixed it all, before the miracle of the loaves and fishes, before courageous young Cregor Blaxon ushered in Tuf’s Flowering.”
Haviland Tuf turned his head to look at the cat on his shoulder. “I detect a certain note of sarcasm in her voice,” he said to Dax.
Tolly Mune sighed, reached into a pocket, and extracted a case of crystalline data-chips. “Here you go, lover,” she said. She tossed them through the air.
Tuf reached up, caught the spinning case in a large white hand, said nothing.
“Everything you need is there. Straight from the council databanks. The hard-classified files, of course. All the reports, all the projections, all the analyses, and it’s for your eyes only. You understand? That’s why I was so puling mysterious and that’s why we’re heading back to the Ark. Creg and the High Council figured our romance made a terrific cover. Let the billions of newsfeed viewers think we’re sexing up a storm. As long as their heads are full of visions of the pirate and Portmaster blazing new sexual frontiers, they won’t stop to ponder what we’re really up to, and everything can be done quietly. We want loaves and fishes, Tuf, but this time on a covered platter, you understand? Those are my instructions.”
“What is the most recent projection?” said Haviland Tuf, his voice even and expressionless.
Dax stood up, hissing in alarm, and sudden fear.
Tolly Mune sipped on her beer, and slumped back deep into her chair. She closed her eyes. “Eighteen years,” she said. She looked like the hundred-year-old woman she was, instead of a youngster of sixty, and her voice was infinitely weary. “Eighteen years,” she repeated, “and counting.”
Tolly Mune was far from unsophisticated. Having spent her life on S’uthlam, with its vast continent-wide cities, its teeming billions, its towers rising ten kays into the sky, its deep underways far below the surface, and its great orbital elevator, she was not a woman easily impressed by mere size. But there was something about the Ark, she thought.
She felt it from the moment of their arrival, as the great dome of the landing deck cracked open beneath them and Tuf took the Ferocious Veldt Roarer down into darkness and settled it among his shuttles and junked starships, upon a circular landing pad that glowed a dim blue in welcome. The dome closed over them and atmosphere was pumped back in; to fill so large a space so quickly it came with gale force, howling and sighing all around them. Finally Tuf opened their locks and preceded her down an ornate stair that slid from the lionboat’s mouth like a gilded tongue. Below, a small three-wheeled cart was waiting. Tuf drove past the clutter of dead and abandoned ships, some more alien than any Tolly Mune had ever seen. He drove in silence, looking neither right nor left, Dax a limp, boneless, purring ball of fur stretched across his knees.
Tuf gave her an entire deck to herself. Hundreds of sleeping berths, computer stations, labs, accessways, sanitary stations, recreation halls, kitchens, and no tenants but her. On S’uthlam, a cityspace this large would have housed a thousand people, in apartments smaller than the Ark’s storage closets. Tuf turned off the gravity grid on that level, since he knew she preferred zero-gee.
“If you have need of me, you will find my own quarters on the top deck, under full gravity,” he told her. “I intend to address all my energies to the problems of S’uthlam. I will not require your counsel or assistance. No offense is intended, Portmaster, but it has been my bitter experience that such liaisons are more trouble than they are worth and serve only to distract me. If there is an answer to your most vexing quandary, I shall arrive at it soonest by my own efforts, left undisturbed. I shall program a leisurely voyage toward S’uthlam and its web; it is my hope that when we arrive I will be able to solve your difficulty.”
“If you can’t,” she reminded him sharply, “we get the ship. Those were the terms.”
“I am fully aware of this,” said Haviland Tuf. “In the event you grow restive, the Ark offers a full spectrum of diversions, entertainments, and occupations. Feel free to avail yourself to the automated food facilities as well. The fare so provided is not equal to the meals I prepare personally, though it will acquit itself admirably when compared to typical S’uthlamese provender, I have no doubt. Partake of as many meals as you require during the day; I will be pleased to have you join me each evening for dinner at eighteen-hundred ship’s time. Kindly be punctual.” And so saying, he took his leave.
The computer system that ran the great ship observed cycles of light and darkness, to simulate the passage of day and night. Tolly Mune spent her nights before a holo monitor, viewing dramas several millennia old recorded upon worlds half-legendary. Her days she spent exploring—first the deck that Tuf had ceded her, and then the rest of the ship. The more she saw and learned, the more awed and uneasy Tolly Mune became.
She sat for days in the old captain’s chair on the tower ridge that Tuf had bypassed as inconvenient, watching r
andom selections from the ancient log roll down the great vidscreen.
She walked a labyrinth of decks and corridors, found three skeletons in scattered parts of the Ark (only two of them human), wondered at one corridor intersection where the thick duralloy bulkheads were blistered and cracked, as if by great heat.
She spent hours in a library she discovered, touching and handling old books, some printed on thin leaves of metal or plastic, others on real paper.
She returned to the landing deck and climbed around a few of the derelict starships Tuf had there. She stood in the armory and gazed on a frightening array of weapons, some of them obsolete, some of them unrecognizable, some of them forbidden.
She wandered down the dim vastness of the central shaft that cored the ship, walked the full thirty kays of its length, her bootsteps echoing overhead, her breath coming hard by the end of her daily treks. Around her were cloning vats, growth tanks, microsurgeries, and computer stations in staggering profusion. Ninety percent of the vats were empty, but here and there the Portmaster found life growing. She peered through dusty glass and thick, translucent fluids at dim, living shapes, shapes as small as her hand, and shapes as large as a tubetrain. It made her feel cold.