Tuf Voyaging - Call Him Moses

Call Him Moses

While peaceably eating in a restaurant, Tuf is attacked by Jaime Kreen. Kreen is convicted for the attack and bonded to Tuf as a servant in debt. Kreen explains that his society (a technologically advanced secondary colony established as an arcology on the planet Charity) has been taken over by a primitivist religious leader named Moses. Taking his cues from the Bible, Moses had unleashed plagues on the inhabitants of the arcology, driving them out of their city into the countryside to labor and suffer under Moses' back-to-nature Holy Altruistic Restoration.

Kreen had attempted to murder Tuf because he blames Moses' plagues upon Tuf, who has gained an interstellar reputation as an ecological engineer, and Tuf realizes that Moses' "plagues" (actually low-tech simulations easily imposed by sabotage upon the closed system of an arcology) offer him an opportunity for revenue.

Kreen is sent down to the planet to bring back the former leaders of the now-conquered and evacuated arcology for negotiations, and Tuf offers to help them against Moses — for a hefty fee. Using the Ark's technology, Tuf introduces himself to Moses as God, in the guise of a pillar of fire. He afflicts the followers of Moses with the bibilical plagues of legend, but these are widespread planetary ecological assaults instead of Moses' fraudulent localized afflictions.

After two such attacks, Tuf invites Moses aboard the Ark and shows him simulations of the increasingly horrible plagues that he could further inflict upon Moses and his followers. Moses, frightened, gives up his claim on the arcology's population, allowing them to escape his nasty, brutish religious fanatacism and return to the comforts of modern civilization.