Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin
“Is it hopeless, then? Tuf, I am a man begging—I, a Senior Beast-Master of Norn. Soon we will drop from the games entirely. We will have no funds for Arena fees or betting, no animals to enter. We are cursed by ill fortune. No Great House has ever failed to provide its allotment of fighters—not even Feridian during its Twelve-Year Drought. We will be shamed. The House of Norn will sully its proud history by sending snufflers and barnyard animals onto the sand, to be shredded ignominiously by the huge monsters that you have sold the other houses.”
“Sir,” Tuf said. “If you will indulge me in a bit of prognostication, it occurs to me that perhaps Norn will not be alone in its quandaries. I have a hunch—hunch, yes, that is the proper word, and a curious word it is, too—a hunch, as I was saying, that the monsters you fear may be in short supply in the weeks and months to come. For example, the adolescent ursoids of Vagabond may very shortly go into hibernation. They are less than a year old, you understand. I hope the lords of Wrai Hill are not unduly disconcerted by this, yet I fear that they may be. Vagabond, as I’m sure you are aware, has an extremely irregular orbit about its primary, so that its Long Winters last approximately twenty standard years. The ursoids are attuned to this cycle. Soon their body processes will slow to such an extent that an untrained observer might even assume them to be dead. I fear that they will not be easily awakened. Perhaps, as the trainers of Wrai Hill are men of keen intellect, they might find a way. But I would be strongly inclined to further suspect that most of their energies and their funds will be devoted to feeding their populace, in the light of the voracious appetites of scampersloths.
“In quite a like manner, the men of the House of Varcour will be forced to deal with an explosion of Cathadayn tree-slugs. The tree-slugs are particularly fascinating creatures. At one point in their life cycle, they become veritable sponges, and double in size. A large enough grouping is fully capable of drying up even an extensive swampland.” Tuf paused, and his thick fingers beat in drumming rhythms across his stomach. “I ramble unconscionably, I am afraid, and perhaps I am boring you. Do you grasp my point? My thrust?”
Herold Norn looked like a dead man. “You are mad. You have destroyed us. Our economy, our ecology . . . in five years, we will all be dead of starvation.”
“Unlikely,” said Tuf. “My experience in these matters suggests that Lyronica may indeed suffer a certain interlude of ecological instability and hardship, yet it will be of limited duration and ultimately I have no doubt that a new ecosystem will emerge. It appears unlikely that this successor ecology will offer niches for large predators, alas, but I am optimistic that the quality of Lyronican life will be otherwise unimpaired.”
“No predators? No . . . but the games, the arena . . . no one will pay to see a hopper fight a slug! How can the games go on? No one will send fighters to the Bronze Arena!”
Haviland Tuf blinked. “Indeed,” he said. “An intriguing thought. I will have to consider it thoroughly.”
He cleared the screen, and began to talk to Dax.
6: CALL HIM MOSES
Rumors were seldom of any concern to Haviland Tuf. For one thing, he seldom heard any. Tuf was not averse to acting the tourist on most of the worlds he visited, but even when he was mingling with others in public places he remained somehow apart and unapproachable. His chalk-white skin and utterly hairless face and body usually made him conspicuous among the peoples of the planets on which he plied his trade, and even on those infrequent occasions when his complexion might have allowed him to pass, his size made him stand out. Thus, though people might stare at Tuf and talk of him everywhere he went, few of them talked to him unless they had business to transact.
Given his nature, then, it was hardly remarkable that Haviland Tuf had never heard of the man called Moses until the evening that he and Dax were assaulted by Jaime Kreen in a restaurant on K’theddion.
It was a small shabby place just off the spaceport. Tuf had finished a plate of smokeroots and neograss and was relaxing with his third liter of mushroom wine when abruptly Dax raised his head from the table. Tuf shook a bit, slopping some wine on his sleeve, and ducked his head quickly to one side, barely far enough so that the bottle Kreen was wielding smashed open against the back of Tuf’s chair instead of the back of Tuf’s skull.
Glass exploded, and the liquid within—a smelly local liquor—went everywhere, soaking the chair, the table, the cat, and both men. Jaime Kreen, a thin blond youth with drunken blue eyes, stood blinking stupidly, holding the broken bottle in a bleeding fist.
Haviland Tuf rose ponderously to his feet, his long white face singularly impassive. He glanced at his assailant, blinked, and then reached down to pick up Dax, who was wet and unhappy. “Can you fathom this, Dax?” he said in a deep bass. “We have here a mystery, albeit an inconvenient one. Why does this odd stranger attack us, I wonder? Do you have any ideas?” He stroked Dax slowly as he cradled him in his arms, and only when the cat began to purr did he look at Jaime Kreen again. “Sir,” he said. “It might be wise of you to release the fragments of that bottle. It appears to me that your hand is full of glass and blood and that particularly noxious brew, and I have severe doubts that the combination will enhance your health.”
The stricken Kreen seemed to come alive. His thin lips drew back in anger, and he flung the bottle away from him. “Are you mocking me, criminal?” he said in a slurred, dangerous voice.
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf. The restaurant had grown very still: the other patrons were quiet and staring, and the proprietor had vanished. Tuf’s deep voice could be heard in every corner of the room. “I would venture that the title ‘criminal’ as more applicable to you than to myself, but perhaps that is not to the point. No, I am not mocking you. You appear to be upset. Under such conditions it would be folly to mock you, and I am not given to folly.” He placed Dax back on the table and scratched the tomcat behind the ear.
“You are mocking me,” Jaime Kreen said. “I’ll hurt you!”
Haviland Tuf betrayed no emotion. “You will not, sir, although I believe you are thinking of attacking me once again. I do not approve of violence. However, your boorish behavior leaves me with little choice.” So saying, he stepped forward quickly, and lifted Jaime Kreen high off the floor before the younger man could react. Then, carefully, he broke both of his arms.
Kreen emerged pale and blinking from the tomblike dark of Kytheddene Prison into the bright street. His arms were in slings. He looked baffled and tired.
Haviland Tuf stood by the curbside, cradling Dax in one arm and petting him with the other. He looked up when Kreen came forth. “Your mood appears to have quieted somewhat,” Tuf commented. “Moreover, you are now sober.”
“You!” Kreen looked more baffled than ever; his face was so screwed up that it threatened to collapse in upon itself. “Do I understand that you bought my freedom?”
“You raise an interesting point,” Haviland Tuf said. “I did indeed pay a certain sum—two hundred standards, actually, if we want to be precise—and upon that payment you were handed over to me. Yet it is incorrect to say that I bought your freedom. The crux of the matter is that you are not free. Under Kytheddene law, you belong to me, a bound servant whom I may work as I see fit until such time as you have discharged your debt.”
“Debt?”
“I calculate it as follows,” said Haviland Tuf. “Two hundred standards for the sum I paid to the local authorities in order to bask in your presence. One hundred standards for my suit, which was genuine Lambereen cotton, and which you quite ruined. Forty standards for the damage to the eatery, which damages I paid in order to settle the proprietor’s claims against you. Seven standards for the delightful mushroom wine that you gave me no opportunity to drink. Mushroom wine is a noted specialty of K’theddion, and that was a particularly choice vintage. These total some three hundred forty-seven standards in actual damages. Furthermore, your unprovoked assault made Dax and myself the center of a highly unpleasant scene, and much disturbed our tranquility. Fo
r that I am assessing you an additional fifty-three standards, which is a generously low sum, to bring your total to an even four hundred standards.”
Jaime Kreen chuckled maliciously. “You’ll have a hard time getting even a tenth of that out of me, animal-seller,” he said. “I have no funds, and I won’t be good for much in the way of work. My arms are broken, you know.”
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf. “If you had any significant funds of your own, you could have paid your own fines, in which case my assistance would not have been necessary. And since I myself broke your arms, I am aware of that condition as well. Kindly do not belabor the obvious with statements that convey no meaningful information. Despite your handicaps, I intend to take you with me back to my ship, and work you until your obligation has been discharged. Come.”
Haviland Tuf turned and took two steps down the street. When Kreen made no move to follow, Tuf stopped and turned back to him. Kreen smiled. “If you want me anywhere, you can carry me,” he said.
Tuf stroked Dax dispassionately. “I have no intention of carrying you,” he said in even tones. “You forced me to touch you once, and that experience was sufficiently unpleasant that I have no intention of repeating it. If you decline to follow me, I will return to the authorities and hire two guards to take you bodily where I wish you to be. Their wages will be tallied to your debt. The choice is yours.” Tuf turned again and moved off toward the spaceport.
Jaime Kreen, suddenly docile, followed behind, muttering under his breath.
The ship that waited for them at K’theddion Star Port was impressive enough to Kreen’s eyes. An ancient, deadly looking craft of pitted black metal, with small rakish wings, it loomed half again as tall as the modern big-bellied trading ships that surrounded it. Like virtually all of Haviland Tuf’s infrequent visitors, Kreen was awed (though he did not admit it) to discover that the Griffin was only a shuttle, that the Ark itself waited above, in orbit.
The shuttle deck of the Ark was twice the size of the landing field at K’theddion Star Port, and fall of ships; four other shuttles identical to the Griffin, an old cargo ship with the teardrop shape characteristic of Avalon sitting on its three bent landing legs, a wicked-looking military flyer, an absurd golden barge with baroque ornamentation and a primitive harpoon gun mounted atop it, two craft that looked alien and vaguely untrustworthy, another that appeared to be nothing but a large square plate with a pole in its center. “Do you collect spacecraft?” Jaime Kreen asked, after Tuf had docked the Griffin and they had emerged onto the deck.
“An interesting concept,” Tuf replied. “But no. The five landing shuttles are part of the Ark itself, and I retain the old trader for sentimental reasons, since it was my first ship. The others I have acquired along the way. Perhaps I should clean out the deck at some point, but there is the possibility that some of these vessels might have some commercial value, so I have refrained up to now. I will have to give the matter some thought. Now, come along with me.”
They moved past a series of reception rooms and down several corridors, to a motor pool where several small three-wheeled vehicles were parked side-by-side. Haviland Tuf ushered Kreen into one, set Dax between them, and drove them down a great echoing tunnel that seemed to go on and on for kilometers. The shaft was lined by glass vats of many different sizes and shapes, each filled with fluids and gels. In some vats, dark shapes moved sluggishly within translucent bags, and seemed to peer out at them as they passed. Kreen found the suggestive motions somehow terrible and frightening. Haviland Tuf never noticed; he looked neither right nor left as he drove.
Tuf stopped the vehicle in a room identical to the one that they had started from, gathered up Dax, and led his prisoner down another corridor into a cramped, dustily comfortable chamber fall of overstuffed furniture. He motioned Kreen to a seat and took one himself, setting Dax in a third chair since, when seated, he had no apparent lap. “Now,” said Haviland Tuf, “we shall talk.”
The vast dimensions of Tuf’s ship had left Jaime Kreen somewhat subdued, but now a bit of spirit returned to his face. “We have nothing to talk about,” he said.
“You think not?” said Haviland Tuf. “I disagree. It was not simply the generosity of my soul which bid me to rescue you from the ignominy of imprisonment. You pose a mystery to me, as I remarked to Dax when you first assaulted us. Mysteries disturb me. I desire some clarification.”
Jaime Kreen’s thin face took on a calculating look. “Why would I help you out? Your false charges put me in prison and now you’ve bought me as a slave. And you broke my arms, too! I don’t owe you anything.”
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf, locking his large hands together on his immense paunch, “we have already established that you owe me four hundred standards. I am prepared to be reasonable. I will ask you questions. You will give me answers. For each answer, I will deduct one standard from the sum you owe me.”
“One standard! Absurd. Whatever you want to know is worth more than that! Ten standards for each answer! Not a tenth less!”
“I assure you,” said Haviland Tuf, “that whatever information you possess is probably worth nothing at all. I am merely curious. I am a slave to curiosity. It is a fault of mine, one I am helpless to correct, and one that you are now in a position to take advantage of. Yet you should not attempt to press me too far. I refuse to be cheated. Two standards.”
“Nine,” said Kreen.
“Three, and I will go no higher. I grow impatient.” Tuf’s face was completely emotionless.
“Eight,” said Kreen. “Don’t try to bluff me.”
Haviland Tuf was silent. He sat unmoving except for his eyes, which wandered over to Dax. The big black tomcat yawned and stretched himself.
After five minutes of silence, Kreen said, “Six standards, and that’s cheap. I know a lot of important things, things that Moses would want to know. Six.”
Haviland Tuf said nothing. Minutes passed.
“Five,” said Kreen, swearing.
Haviland Tuf said nothing.
“All right,” Kreen said at last. “Three standards. You are a cheat and a scoundrel, as well as a criminal. You have no ethics.”
“I will ignore your bombast,” said Haviland Tuf. “Three standards is the agreed sum, then. A sudden hunch comes to me that you may attempt to give evasive or confusing answers, so that I would have to ask many questions in order to elicit a small particle of information. I warn you that I will brook no such nonsense. Nor will I tolerate any deception. For each lie you attempt to tell me, I will add an additional ten standards on to your debt.”
Kreen laughed. “I have no intention of lying, Tuf. But even if I did, how would you ever know? I am not that transparent.”
Haviland Tuf permitted himself a smile, a tiny tight-lipped smile that barely touched his face and then was gone again. “Sir,” he said, “I assure you that I would know at once. Dax would tell me, in precisely the same manner that he told me how far you would come down from your absurd demand for ten standards, and warned me of your cowardly attack on K’theddion. Dax is a feline, sir, as no doubt even you will perceive. All felines are at least partially psionic, as mankind has known throughout history, and Dax is the end product of generations of breeding and genetic manipulation that have greatly strengthened this trait in him. So you will save all of us a good deal of time and effort if you will give complete, honest answers. While Dax’s talents are not sufficiently sophisticated to pluck difficult abstract concepts from your mind, I assure you that he can easily tell if you are lying or holding something back. So, with this in mind, shall we begin?”
Jaime Kreen was glaring at the big tomcat with venom in his eyes. Dax yawned again. “Go ahead,” Kreen said sullenly.
“First,” said Tuf, “there is the mystery of your assault upon us. I do not know you, sir. You are utterly a stranger to me. I am a simple merchant, and my services benefit all those who employ me. I had in no way given you offense. Yet you attacked me. This raises several questions!
Why? What was your motive? Did you know me in some way? Had I given you offense in some action I have since forgotten?”
“Is that one question or four?” Kreen said.
Haviland Tuf folded his hands against his stomach again. “A point, sir. Begin with this: do you know me?”
“No,” said Kreen, “but I know of you, by reputation. You and your Ark are unique and widely famed, Tuf. And you were easy to recognize, when I chanced across you in that slimy Kytheddene restaurant. Gross hairless white giants are not exceptionally common, you know.”
“Three standards,” Tuf said. “I will take notice of neither your insults nor your flattery. You did not know me, then. Why did you assault me?”
“I was drunk.”
“Insufficient. It is true that you were drunk. But there were a number of other patrons in the eatery, any of whom might have obliged you if you were simply looking for a brawl. You were not. You chose me out of all those others. Why?”
“I dislike you. You are a criminal, by my standards.”
“Standards vary, of course,” Haviland Tuf replied. “On some worlds, my size itself would be a crime. On others, the fact that you wear boots made of cowhide would be punishable by long imprisonment. So in that sense, we are both criminals. Yet it is my feeling that it is unjust to judge a man by any laws save those of the culture in which he lives, or is presently moving. In that sense, I am no criminal, and your answer is still insufficient. Explain your dislike of me. What crimes do you charge against me?”
“I am a Charitan,” Kreen said. He coughed. “Or perhaps I should say I was formerly a Charitan. In fact, I was an administrator, although only sixth grade. Moses destroyed my career. I charge you with the crime of assisting Moses. It is well known. Do not bore me with your denials.”
Haviland Tuf glanced at Dax. “You appear to be telling the truth, and your answer contains a fair amount of information, although it raises several questions as well, and is far from clear. Nonetheless, I will do you a kindness and count it as an answer. Six standards, then. And my next questions will be simple ones. Who is Moses and what is a Charitan?”
“Sir,” Tuf said. “If you will indulge me in a bit of prognostication, it occurs to me that perhaps Norn will not be alone in its quandaries. I have a hunch—hunch, yes, that is the proper word, and a curious word it is, too—a hunch, as I was saying, that the monsters you fear may be in short supply in the weeks and months to come. For example, the adolescent ursoids of Vagabond may very shortly go into hibernation. They are less than a year old, you understand. I hope the lords of Wrai Hill are not unduly disconcerted by this, yet I fear that they may be. Vagabond, as I’m sure you are aware, has an extremely irregular orbit about its primary, so that its Long Winters last approximately twenty standard years. The ursoids are attuned to this cycle. Soon their body processes will slow to such an extent that an untrained observer might even assume them to be dead. I fear that they will not be easily awakened. Perhaps, as the trainers of Wrai Hill are men of keen intellect, they might find a way. But I would be strongly inclined to further suspect that most of their energies and their funds will be devoted to feeding their populace, in the light of the voracious appetites of scampersloths.
“In quite a like manner, the men of the House of Varcour will be forced to deal with an explosion of Cathadayn tree-slugs. The tree-slugs are particularly fascinating creatures. At one point in their life cycle, they become veritable sponges, and double in size. A large enough grouping is fully capable of drying up even an extensive swampland.” Tuf paused, and his thick fingers beat in drumming rhythms across his stomach. “I ramble unconscionably, I am afraid, and perhaps I am boring you. Do you grasp my point? My thrust?”
Herold Norn looked like a dead man. “You are mad. You have destroyed us. Our economy, our ecology . . . in five years, we will all be dead of starvation.”
“Unlikely,” said Tuf. “My experience in these matters suggests that Lyronica may indeed suffer a certain interlude of ecological instability and hardship, yet it will be of limited duration and ultimately I have no doubt that a new ecosystem will emerge. It appears unlikely that this successor ecology will offer niches for large predators, alas, but I am optimistic that the quality of Lyronican life will be otherwise unimpaired.”
“No predators? No . . . but the games, the arena . . . no one will pay to see a hopper fight a slug! How can the games go on? No one will send fighters to the Bronze Arena!”
Haviland Tuf blinked. “Indeed,” he said. “An intriguing thought. I will have to consider it thoroughly.”
He cleared the screen, and began to talk to Dax.
6: CALL HIM MOSES
Rumors were seldom of any concern to Haviland Tuf. For one thing, he seldom heard any. Tuf was not averse to acting the tourist on most of the worlds he visited, but even when he was mingling with others in public places he remained somehow apart and unapproachable. His chalk-white skin and utterly hairless face and body usually made him conspicuous among the peoples of the planets on which he plied his trade, and even on those infrequent occasions when his complexion might have allowed him to pass, his size made him stand out. Thus, though people might stare at Tuf and talk of him everywhere he went, few of them talked to him unless they had business to transact.
Given his nature, then, it was hardly remarkable that Haviland Tuf had never heard of the man called Moses until the evening that he and Dax were assaulted by Jaime Kreen in a restaurant on K’theddion.
It was a small shabby place just off the spaceport. Tuf had finished a plate of smokeroots and neograss and was relaxing with his third liter of mushroom wine when abruptly Dax raised his head from the table. Tuf shook a bit, slopping some wine on his sleeve, and ducked his head quickly to one side, barely far enough so that the bottle Kreen was wielding smashed open against the back of Tuf’s chair instead of the back of Tuf’s skull.
Glass exploded, and the liquid within—a smelly local liquor—went everywhere, soaking the chair, the table, the cat, and both men. Jaime Kreen, a thin blond youth with drunken blue eyes, stood blinking stupidly, holding the broken bottle in a bleeding fist.
Haviland Tuf rose ponderously to his feet, his long white face singularly impassive. He glanced at his assailant, blinked, and then reached down to pick up Dax, who was wet and unhappy. “Can you fathom this, Dax?” he said in a deep bass. “We have here a mystery, albeit an inconvenient one. Why does this odd stranger attack us, I wonder? Do you have any ideas?” He stroked Dax slowly as he cradled him in his arms, and only when the cat began to purr did he look at Jaime Kreen again. “Sir,” he said. “It might be wise of you to release the fragments of that bottle. It appears to me that your hand is full of glass and blood and that particularly noxious brew, and I have severe doubts that the combination will enhance your health.”
The stricken Kreen seemed to come alive. His thin lips drew back in anger, and he flung the bottle away from him. “Are you mocking me, criminal?” he said in a slurred, dangerous voice.
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf. The restaurant had grown very still: the other patrons were quiet and staring, and the proprietor had vanished. Tuf’s deep voice could be heard in every corner of the room. “I would venture that the title ‘criminal’ as more applicable to you than to myself, but perhaps that is not to the point. No, I am not mocking you. You appear to be upset. Under such conditions it would be folly to mock you, and I am not given to folly.” He placed Dax back on the table and scratched the tomcat behind the ear.
“You are mocking me,” Jaime Kreen said. “I’ll hurt you!”
Haviland Tuf betrayed no emotion. “You will not, sir, although I believe you are thinking of attacking me once again. I do not approve of violence. However, your boorish behavior leaves me with little choice.” So saying, he stepped forward quickly, and lifted Jaime Kreen high off the floor before the younger man could react. Then, carefully, he broke both of his arms.
Kreen emerged pale and blinking from the tomblike dark of Kytheddene Prison into the bright street. His arms were in slings. He looked baffled and tired.
Haviland Tuf stood by the curbside, cradling Dax in one arm and petting him with the other. He looked up when Kreen came forth. “Your mood appears to have quieted somewhat,” Tuf commented. “Moreover, you are now sober.”
“You!” Kreen looked more baffled than ever; his face was so screwed up that it threatened to collapse in upon itself. “Do I understand that you bought my freedom?”
“You raise an interesting point,” Haviland Tuf said. “I did indeed pay a certain sum—two hundred standards, actually, if we want to be precise—and upon that payment you were handed over to me. Yet it is incorrect to say that I bought your freedom. The crux of the matter is that you are not free. Under Kytheddene law, you belong to me, a bound servant whom I may work as I see fit until such time as you have discharged your debt.”
“Debt?”
“I calculate it as follows,” said Haviland Tuf. “Two hundred standards for the sum I paid to the local authorities in order to bask in your presence. One hundred standards for my suit, which was genuine Lambereen cotton, and which you quite ruined. Forty standards for the damage to the eatery, which damages I paid in order to settle the proprietor’s claims against you. Seven standards for the delightful mushroom wine that you gave me no opportunity to drink. Mushroom wine is a noted specialty of K’theddion, and that was a particularly choice vintage. These total some three hundred forty-seven standards in actual damages. Furthermore, your unprovoked assault made Dax and myself the center of a highly unpleasant scene, and much disturbed our tranquility. Fo
Jaime Kreen chuckled maliciously. “You’ll have a hard time getting even a tenth of that out of me, animal-seller,” he said. “I have no funds, and I won’t be good for much in the way of work. My arms are broken, you know.”
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf. “If you had any significant funds of your own, you could have paid your own fines, in which case my assistance would not have been necessary. And since I myself broke your arms, I am aware of that condition as well. Kindly do not belabor the obvious with statements that convey no meaningful information. Despite your handicaps, I intend to take you with me back to my ship, and work you until your obligation has been discharged. Come.”
Haviland Tuf turned and took two steps down the street. When Kreen made no move to follow, Tuf stopped and turned back to him. Kreen smiled. “If you want me anywhere, you can carry me,” he said.
Tuf stroked Dax dispassionately. “I have no intention of carrying you,” he said in even tones. “You forced me to touch you once, and that experience was sufficiently unpleasant that I have no intention of repeating it. If you decline to follow me, I will return to the authorities and hire two guards to take you bodily where I wish you to be. Their wages will be tallied to your debt. The choice is yours.” Tuf turned again and moved off toward the spaceport.
Jaime Kreen, suddenly docile, followed behind, muttering under his breath.
The ship that waited for them at K’theddion Star Port was impressive enough to Kreen’s eyes. An ancient, deadly looking craft of pitted black metal, with small rakish wings, it loomed half again as tall as the modern big-bellied trading ships that surrounded it. Like virtually all of Haviland Tuf’s infrequent visitors, Kreen was awed (though he did not admit it) to discover that the Griffin was only a shuttle, that the Ark itself waited above, in orbit.
The shuttle deck of the Ark was twice the size of the landing field at K’theddion Star Port, and fall of ships; four other shuttles identical to the Griffin, an old cargo ship with the teardrop shape characteristic of Avalon sitting on its three bent landing legs, a wicked-looking military flyer, an absurd golden barge with baroque ornamentation and a primitive harpoon gun mounted atop it, two craft that looked alien and vaguely untrustworthy, another that appeared to be nothing but a large square plate with a pole in its center. “Do you collect spacecraft?” Jaime Kreen asked, after Tuf had docked the Griffin and they had emerged onto the deck.
“An interesting concept,” Tuf replied. “But no. The five landing shuttles are part of the Ark itself, and I retain the old trader for sentimental reasons, since it was my first ship. The others I have acquired along the way. Perhaps I should clean out the deck at some point, but there is the possibility that some of these vessels might have some commercial value, so I have refrained up to now. I will have to give the matter some thought. Now, come along with me.”
They moved past a series of reception rooms and down several corridors, to a motor pool where several small three-wheeled vehicles were parked side-by-side. Haviland Tuf ushered Kreen into one, set Dax between them, and drove them down a great echoing tunnel that seemed to go on and on for kilometers. The shaft was lined by glass vats of many different sizes and shapes, each filled with fluids and gels. In some vats, dark shapes moved sluggishly within translucent bags, and seemed to peer out at them as they passed. Kreen found the suggestive motions somehow terrible and frightening. Haviland Tuf never noticed; he looked neither right nor left as he drove.
Tuf stopped the vehicle in a room identical to the one that they had started from, gathered up Dax, and led his prisoner down another corridor into a cramped, dustily comfortable chamber fall of overstuffed furniture. He motioned Kreen to a seat and took one himself, setting Dax in a third chair since, when seated, he had no apparent lap. “Now,” said Haviland Tuf, “we shall talk.”
The vast dimensions of Tuf’s ship had left Jaime Kreen somewhat subdued, but now a bit of spirit returned to his face. “We have nothing to talk about,” he said.
“You think not?” said Haviland Tuf. “I disagree. It was not simply the generosity of my soul which bid me to rescue you from the ignominy of imprisonment. You pose a mystery to me, as I remarked to Dax when you first assaulted us. Mysteries disturb me. I desire some clarification.”
Jaime Kreen’s thin face took on a calculating look. “Why would I help you out? Your false charges put me in prison and now you’ve bought me as a slave. And you broke my arms, too! I don’t owe you anything.”
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf, locking his large hands together on his immense paunch, “we have already established that you owe me four hundred standards. I am prepared to be reasonable. I will ask you questions. You will give me answers. For each answer, I will deduct one standard from the sum you owe me.”
“One standard! Absurd. Whatever you want to know is worth more than that! Ten standards for each answer! Not a tenth less!”
“I assure you,” said Haviland Tuf, “that whatever information you possess is probably worth nothing at all. I am merely curious. I am a slave to curiosity. It is a fault of mine, one I am helpless to correct, and one that you are now in a position to take advantage of. Yet you should not attempt to press me too far. I refuse to be cheated. Two standards.”
“Nine,” said Kreen.
“Three, and I will go no higher. I grow impatient.” Tuf’s face was completely emotionless.
“Eight,” said Kreen. “Don’t try to bluff me.”
Haviland Tuf was silent. He sat unmoving except for his eyes, which wandered over to Dax. The big black tomcat yawned and stretched himself.
After five minutes of silence, Kreen said, “Six standards, and that’s cheap. I know a lot of important things, things that Moses would want to know. Six.”
Haviland Tuf said nothing. Minutes passed.
“Five,” said Kreen, swearing.
Haviland Tuf said nothing.
“All right,” Kreen said at last. “Three standards. You are a cheat and a scoundrel, as well as a criminal. You have no ethics.”
“I will ignore your bombast,” said Haviland Tuf. “Three standards is the agreed sum, then. A sudden hunch comes to me that you may attempt to give evasive or confusing answers, so that I would have to ask many questions in order to elicit a small particle of information. I warn you that I will brook no such nonsense. Nor will I tolerate any deception. For each lie you attempt to tell me, I will add an additional ten standards on to your debt.”
Kreen laughed. “I have no intention of lying, Tuf. But even if I did, how would you ever know? I am not that transparent.”
Haviland Tuf permitted himself a smile, a tiny tight-lipped smile that barely touched his face and then was gone again. “Sir,” he said, “I assure you that I would know at once. Dax would tell me, in precisely the same manner that he told me how far you would come down from your absurd demand for ten standards, and warned me of your cowardly attack on K’theddion. Dax is a feline, sir, as no doubt even you will perceive. All felines are at least partially psionic, as mankind has known throughout history, and Dax is the end product of generations of breeding and genetic manipulation that have greatly strengthened this trait in him. So you will save all of us a good deal of time and effort if you will give complete, honest answers. While Dax’s talents are not sufficiently sophisticated to pluck difficult abstract concepts from your mind, I assure you that he can easily tell if you are lying or holding something back. So, with this in mind, shall we begin?”
Jaime Kreen was glaring at the big tomcat with venom in his eyes. Dax yawned again. “Go ahead,” Kreen said sullenly.
“First,” said Tuf, “there is the mystery of your assault upon us. I do not know you, sir. You are utterly a stranger to me. I am a simple merchant, and my services benefit all those who employ me. I had in no way given you offense. Yet you attacked me. This raises several questions!
“Is that one question or four?” Kreen said.
Haviland Tuf folded his hands against his stomach again. “A point, sir. Begin with this: do you know me?”
“No,” said Kreen, “but I know of you, by reputation. You and your Ark are unique and widely famed, Tuf. And you were easy to recognize, when I chanced across you in that slimy Kytheddene restaurant. Gross hairless white giants are not exceptionally common, you know.”
“Three standards,” Tuf said. “I will take notice of neither your insults nor your flattery. You did not know me, then. Why did you assault me?”
“I was drunk.”
“Insufficient. It is true that you were drunk. But there were a number of other patrons in the eatery, any of whom might have obliged you if you were simply looking for a brawl. You were not. You chose me out of all those others. Why?”
“I dislike you. You are a criminal, by my standards.”
“Standards vary, of course,” Haviland Tuf replied. “On some worlds, my size itself would be a crime. On others, the fact that you wear boots made of cowhide would be punishable by long imprisonment. So in that sense, we are both criminals. Yet it is my feeling that it is unjust to judge a man by any laws save those of the culture in which he lives, or is presently moving. In that sense, I am no criminal, and your answer is still insufficient. Explain your dislike of me. What crimes do you charge against me?”
“I am a Charitan,” Kreen said. He coughed. “Or perhaps I should say I was formerly a Charitan. In fact, I was an administrator, although only sixth grade. Moses destroyed my career. I charge you with the crime of assisting Moses. It is well known. Do not bore me with your denials.”
Haviland Tuf glanced at Dax. “You appear to be telling the truth, and your answer contains a fair amount of information, although it raises several questions as well, and is far from clear. Nonetheless, I will do you a kindness and count it as an answer. Six standards, then. And my next questions will be simple ones. Who is Moses and what is a Charitan?”