"George R. R. Martin - Loaves and Fishes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

your perspicacity.”
“They’re just too polite to mention it. That’s how it is on S’uthlam. There’s so many of them, you know?
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.”
Haviland Tuf said, “The inhabitants of Port S’uthlam that I encountered did not seem unduly reticent, nor
overburdened with elaborate etiquette.”
“The spinnerets are different,” Ratch Norren replied offhandedly. “Things are looser up there. Say, let me
give you a little advice. Don’t sell that ship of yours here, Tuf. Take it to Vandeen. We’ll give you a lot
better price for it.”
“It is not my intention to sell the Ark,” Tuf replied.
“No need to dickerdaddle with me,” Norren said. “I don’t have the authority to buy it anyhow. Or the
standards. Wish I did.” He laughed. “You just go to Vandeen and get in touch with our Board of
Coordinators. You won’t regret it.” He glanced about, as if he were checking to see that the stewards
were far away and the other passengers still dreaming behind their privacy helmets, and then dropped his
voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Besides, even if the price wasn’t a factor, I hear that warship of yours
has got nightmare-class power, right? You don’t want to give the S’uthlamese power like that. No lying,
I love ’em, I really do, come here regularly on business, and they’re good people, when you get one or
two of them alone, but there are so many of them, Tuffer, and they just breed and breed and breed, like
goddamned rodents. You’ll see. A couple centuries back, there was a big local war just on account of
that. The suthies were planting colonies all over the damned place, grabbing every piece of real estate
they could, and if anybody else happened to be living there, the suthies would just outbreed ’em. We
finally put an end to it.”
“We?” said Haviland Tuf.
“Vandeen, Skrymir, Henry’s World, and Jazbo, officially, but we had help from a lot of neutrals, right?
The peace treaty restricted the S’uthlamese to their own solar system. But you give them that hellship of
yours, Tuf, and maybe they break free again.”
“I had understood the S’uthlamese to be a singularly honorable and ethical people.”
Ratch Norren pinched his cheek again. “Honorable, ethical, sure, sure. Great folks to cut deals with, and
the swirls—know some blistery erotic tricks. I tell you, I got a hundred suthie friends, and I love every
one of ’em. But between them, my hundred friends must have maybe a thousand children. These people
breed, that’s the problem, Tuf, you listen to Ratch. They’re all liferoos, right?”
“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. “And what, might I inquire, is a liferoo?”
“Liferoos,” Norren repeated impatiently. “Anti-entropists, kiddie-culters, helix-humpers, genepool
puddlers. Religious fanatics, Tuffer, religious crazies.” He might have said more, but the steward was
wheeling the beverage cart back down the aisle just then. Norren sat back in his seat.
Haviland Tuf raised a long pale finger to check the steward’s progress. “I will have another bulb, if you
please,” he said. He hunched over in silence for the remainder of the trip, sucking thoughtfully on his beer.


Tolly Mune floated in her cluttered apartment, drinking and thinking. One wall of the room was a huge
vidscreen, six meters long and three meters high. Customarily, Tolly keyed it to display scenic
panoramas; she liked the effect of having a window overlooking the high, cool mountains of Skrymir, or
the dry canyons of Vandeen with their swift Whitewater rivers, or the endless city lights of S’uthlam itself
spreading across the night, with the shining silver tower that was the base of the elevator ascending up
and up and up into the dark, moonless sky, soaring high above even starclass tower-homes four kays tall.
But tonight she had a starscape spread across her wall, and against it was outlined the grim metallic
majesty of the immense starship called Ark. Even a screen as large as hers—one of the perks of her
status as Portmaster—could not really convey the ship’s sheer size.
And the things it represented—the hope, the threat—were immeasurably bigger than the Ark itself, Tolly
Mune knew.