They stared at each other.
Dax began to purr. Then he looked away, and began to lap up cream-of-mushroom bisque from Tuf’s bowl. Blackjack rubbed up against her leg, keeping a wary eye on Dax as he stalked across the room.
Tolly Mune turned back to the console very slowly; it took her a day to make that turn—a week, a year, a lifetime. It took her forty billion lifetimes, but when she had completed that turn, it had only taken an instant, and those lives were gone as if they had never been.
She looked at the cold silent mask confronting her over the comm link, and in that dark shiny plastic she saw reflected all the faceless horror of war, and behind it burned the grim, fevered eyes of starvation and disease. She turned the sound transmission back up.
“What’s going on there?” Wald Ober was demanding, over and over. “First Councillor, I can’t hear you. What are your orders, do you hear me? What’s going on there?”
“Commander Ober,” Tolly Mune said. She forced a broad smile.
“What’s wrong?”
She swallowed. “Wrong? Nothing. Nothing at all. Puling hell, everything is incredibly right. The war’s over and so’s the crisis, Commander.”
“Are you under coercion?” Wald Ober barked.
“No,” she said quickly. “Why do you say that?”
“Tears,” he replied. “I see tears, First Councillor.”
“Of joy, Commander. Tears of joy. Manna, Ober, that’s what he calls it. Manna from heaven.” She laughed lightly. “Food from the stars. Tuf’s a genius. Sometimes . . . ” She bit her lip, hard. “Sometimes I even think he might be . . . ”
“What?”
“ . . . a god,” she said. She touched a button: the screen went dark.
Her name was Tolly Mune, but in the histories they call her all sorts of things.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-a219c7-51ad-0f4b-e490-445e-edf4-9cfd1f
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 22.10.2010
Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
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George R. R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging
(Series: # )
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