Tuf Voyaging

by George R.R. Martin

Yet we and they have this much in common: death.

one—Hruun. That is the true name of the night-hunters. A slave race, she said, of the Hrangans, the great enemy;

She had names for these sicknesses that killed the flyers and night-hunters. She had names for the drugs that would cure these ills. To name a thing is to understand, she thought.

“Wackerfuss calls him Tuffy,” Nevis said. “His real name, I’m told, is Haviland Tuf.”

How fortunate for me that thus far, the deficiencies of the game itself, and my extraordinary fortune, have conspired to make up for my ignorance.

Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices.

Day and night are meaningless aboard a starship, but the ancient rhythms of the human body still made their demands, and technology had to conform.

“Equity is often difficult to judge, and still more difficult to achieve,”

“Rules are the essence of games, the very heart of them, if you will. They give structure and meaning to our small contests.”

One of the worlds I studied was Hro B’rana. Once it was a flourishing colony, a breeding ground for Hruun and dactyloids and lesser Hrangan slave races, but today it’s a devastation.

“It’s a seedship,” Jefri Lion finished, “a biowar seedship of the Ecological Engineering Corps.”

a vibroknife. The slender, humming blade, which could slice through solid steel, was a blur of motion

He stroked him one last time and spoke soothingly to him. Then, in a single swift clean motion, he snapped the cat’s neck.

To hell with all that dusty academic stuff. Jefri Lion was a man of action, and now he felt young again.

In the circuit, he had a thousand ears and a thousand eyes and a thousand hands to ball into fists and strike with;

the revolt of Alecto and Golem.

The Ark had duties for two hundred—strategists and scientists and eco-engineers and crew and officers—and she could carry more than a thousand soldiers, too, and feed all of them, and operate at full capacity, and lay waste to worlds, oh yes.

In the end all the Hruun were dead. And you know what, Kaj Nevis? All but four of the defenders were dead as well. One of those was grievously wounded, two others sick, and the last was dead inside. Would you like to know their names? No, I thought not.

These samples were cloned, as the ship’s tacticians and eco-engineers deemed appropriate, and so the Ark and its lost sister ships could send forth disease to decimate a world’s population, insects to devastate its crops, fast-breeding armies of small animals to wreak havoc on the ecology and food chain, or even terrible alien predators to strike fear into the heart of the enemy.

It was a stroke of tactical genius worthy of Napoleon or Chin Wu or Stephan Cobalt Northstar.

The kitten moved in his palm and opened and closed one eye, as if it understood; but then, as Tuf knew, all cats have a touch of psi.

“Let this be your first lesson in the hard ways of the universe,” he said loudly. “What matters fairness, when one party has a gun and one does not? Brute violence rules everywhere, and intelligence and good intent are trampled upon.”

“Haviland Tuf,” he said to himself in the mirror, “ecological engineer.” It had a certain ring to it, he thought.

They all came to the Port of S’uthlam and were welcome.

Tolly Mune was Ma Spider—irascible, foul-mouthed, rough-humored, frighteningly competent, omnipresent, indestructible, as big as a force of nature and twice as mean.

“Gravity’s the thing that ages you,”

Even out in naked space, where veteran spinnerets wore cumbersome suits and moved awkwardly along tether lines, Tolly Mune chose mobility and form-fitting skinthins.

“Puling hell,” she said, in the last uncomplicated moment of her life, before she made the acquaintance of Haviland Tuf.

“This is the Ecological Engineering Corps of the old Federal Empire, now?” she asked. “Based on Prometheus? Specialists in cloning, biowar—the ones who custom-tailored all kinds of ecological catastrophe?”

S’uthlamese were a small people—a matter of nutrition and genetics.

the Federal Empire collapsed, oh, a thousand years ago. And the EEC vanished too—disbanded, recalled to Prometheus or Old Earth, destroyed in combat, gone from human space,

they work better if they don’t think someone’s looking over their shoulders,”

I fear I am of a curious temperament. It is my great weakness.

The S’uthlamese currency was the calorie; the charge for the bulb amounted to almost four-and-a-half times the actual caloric content of the beer,

“I am familiar with the ancient ritual of shaking hands, sir. I have noted that you are carrying no weapons. It is my understanding that the custom was originally intended to establish this fact. I am unarmed as well. You may now withdraw your hand, if you please.”

Most of them can’t afford any kind of real privacy, so they go in for a lot of pretend privacy. They won’t take any notice of you in public unless you want to be noticed.”

A couple centuries back, there was a big local war just on account of that.

These people breed, that’s the problem,

technocrats, expansionists, zeros, the church party, the fringe factions.”

Traders are greedy abortions, every one of them.

We import thirty percent of our raw calories now—” “Thirty-four percent,” Rael corrected.

The city that was S’uthlam—the old names were only districts and neighborhoods now, the ancient cities having grown into one swollen megalopolis centuries ago—

he had always thought parks to be a perverse institution, designed principally to remind civilized humanity how raw and crude and uncomfortable life had been when they had been forced to live it in nature.

It was a cosmopolitan world, plugged into the network that linked the stars, freely plundering the music, drama, and sensoria imported from other worlds, and using those unceasing stimuli to endlessly transform and mutate its own cultural matrix.

Vanity is one of my great faults, I must confess,

“A tape of a cat and a cat, however, are somewhat different things, and require different treatment.

To fully appreciate our world, you must learn to see it through S’uthlamese eyes.” “I am unwilling to go about on my knees,” said Haviland Tuf.

in my experience, all good things can be carried to extremes.

“Weight, sir, is entirely a function of gravity, and is therefore most malleable.

A man the size of Tuf could not possibly be accustomed to having to look up at anyone during conversation; Tolly Mune figured it gave her a certain psychological edge.