by David Weber
The problem was that chan Rahool didn’t have any fermented marula fruit. Why hadn’t they gone to their own ambassador?
Chan Rahool was rewarded with a series of images in fast succession starting with medicinal plants and ending with giggling chimp babies. Right. He’d arranged for the Minarti’s exchange of medicinal herbs for periodic medical care. No good deed goes unpunished. I figured out what grand dame Minarti wanted, so now I get all the hard cases. Of course that one was easy because Dorrick over with the Nishani told everyone about the trade of chimp mineral rights for human medical care. The only tricky part was that the chimps asked me instead of the other way around.
White-hair grunted to demand back chan Rahool’s attention.
White-hair didn’t seem to have any qualms against leafing freely through his mind for useful images. He hadn’t known simians even had Voices, if Voice was really the right term for it. For that matter, he hadn’t known they had Talents at all! Should he call her a Human Speaker? Or should—
White-hair snapped a command punctuated by clicks and cheek flexing, and Tusk hopped over chan Rahool’s kitchen table, landed lightly, and began flinging open cupboards. Chan Rahool followed quickly hoping to catch any falling dishes before they shattered and further ruined the embassy visit.
Tusk snorted.
A much fuzzier picture formed:
Nothing fell, chan Rahool noted with amazement.
Tusk lifted a bottle from the most recent batch of moonshine and proffered it to chan Rahool:
“Oh, right, get the drinks.”
White-hair grunted a snorting laughter at the final comprehension.
Chan Rahool put back Tusk’s bottle. He grabbed instead the bottle of single malt from the back of a high cupboard. After a moment’s reflection, he also pulled out two bags of his favorite nuts. Grand dame Minarti usually wanted just the ’shine, but sometimes she tried some of the snacks he ate along with it, and he considered the dried jerky and the assortment of cheeses and sausages in his cold storage.
* * *
Tusk nicked the rest of the single malt when the gorillas left. The other two grabbed the moonshine. Soolan chan Rahool didn’t even notice.
The cheese was long gone. Part way through the meeting, he’d been sent back to the kitchen to get all the jerky and sausages, too, but he didn’t really care about that, either. No, what he cared about was that his job had just gotten a whole lot harder.
These simians weren’t actually cheerful happy outdoorsmen. Or they probably were, but they weren’t only that. They’d obviously been playing their cards close to the chest with the embassies for quite a while. There had to have been humans here and there who’d had higher level contact, but who really listened to that kind of loner?
Today White-hair had decided to go all in. And unless chan Rahool had drastically mistaken something, she was doing it because some really big bluish fish had told them it was a good idea.
Also, she wanted to start colonizing the new universes. Not just move to open jungles in near universes but, if he understood the images right, the White-hair gorilla matriarch wanted tribes of simians moved to the furthest outbound universes bordering Arcanan held worlds. Chan Rahool’s mind boggled. None of the simians he’d worked with had ever expressed any interest in leaving Sharona. Sure, some clans were established in nearby universes, but those resettlements had been done on human initiative. He helped the Minarti exchange messages with Minarti sister clans on New Sharona from time to time, but they hadn’t seemed to understand when he’d told his chimps about the human war with Arcana. He’d only told them because in his worst nightmares the Arcanans managed a strike deep enough to threaten the simians too.
He hadn’t thought they even really understood the concept of other universes. But someone must have figured it out, because White-hair had given him a perfectly clear view of the outbound Sharonian portal.
Chan Rahool vaguely remembered a training lecture mentioning a few early portal exploration crews who’d taken a pair or two of higher order monkeys with them for deep explorations. It had been one of things he’d disregarded when none of the groups he was assigned to had any interest in multiverse travel.
He rubbed his throbbing head. This was going to be an impossible report to write up for the CSE. So he didn’t.
Instead he dashed off a note to Dorrick, who was over with the Nishani chimp clan. Technically, Dorrick was the senior chimp ambassador. There was even a CSE org chart that said chan Rahool reported to him, and chan Rahool grinned evilly to himself at the thought. It was amazing how useful military training could be.
A carefully detailed report, complete with a requisition for more cheese, was folded up and stuffed in the mailbox with Dorrick’s name written in bold print on the front. Of course the mail was only taken twice a month when the postal Flicker snatched everything in the box out to the depot, and at the depot they’d sort it and wait another two weeks before sending it on to Dorrick with the routine mail. If Dorrick even read it, chan Rahool would have two more weeks before anything could go back out to the depot and be rushed priority up to CSE.
He felt it was only fair to leave the CSE in the dark for another six weeks. The bureaucrats with no field experience continually tried to claim simians couldn’t tell the difference between sweet tree-ripened and cheaper green-picked fruit. They deserved to be left to rot. All they could do was try to stop him, and Soolan chan Rahool did not want to be the one to tell that steely-eyed gorilla matriarch he’d elected not to deliver her message because some bureaucrat didn’t understand the need.
Chan Rahool didn’t understand it either, but White-hair hadn’t been much interested in his comprehension. She’d been more concerned about his recall, and after testing that aspect of his Voice Talent with a few memories of what could only have been her great grandbabies bounced back and forth, he’d gotten the distinct sense that he’d passed.
And earned a massive headache. So many pictures, so quickly, and with such intricate detail…they’d hurt. He’ played them back in slow motion and the pain had eased.
White-hair had expressed herself satisfied and had directed him to present these images to his human White-hair. Chan Rahool had thought immediately of Emperor Zindel and the impossibility of a low-level simian ambassador getting a hearing with the Emperor of Sharona.
White-hair had cuffed him lightly and rattled his head. She’d refused to believe humanity could be other than a matriarchy. She’d given him a picture of Empress Varena instead.
How did they know what the Empress looked like? The picture was a bit old, but still!
His attempt to explain the difficulty in seeing the Empress had been met with Tusk snarling in his face. His old noncoms could have taken lessons from the gorilla.
The report to Dorrick double-checked and tucked carefully into the postal box, chan Rahool set out to arrange a meeting with the Empress Consort of the known Sharonan universes.
He might have had the makings of a soldier after all.
* * *
At the heart of the known Arcanan universes, Garth Showma celebrated winter as only Andarans could: with marches, ice dances, and dragon flights over the frozen falls. Snowfall Night, when the faculty and students of Garth Showma Institute filled the fall’s basin with floats and hung the sky with faerie lights, drew crowds even from Mythal and Ransara.
Her Grace Sathmin Olderhan capably arranged it all each year, and this year was no different…in that respect, at least. There were plenty of other differences, unfortunately, all of them revolving around the hideous news which had reached New Arcana less than two
weeks ago.
The only good news was that Jasak was alive and unhurt. Which, she had to admit in her fairer moments, was far more important than anything else. But every other word of the terse hummer reports from Governor mul Gurthak in Erthos about events in the universe which had been—all too aptly for her taste—christened “Hell’s Gate” had only made the unmitigated extent of the disaster clearer and clearer. That contact with another human civilization, after more than two centuries of inter-universal exploration, should have ended in massacre and carnage was bad enough. The news that Arcana’s newly acquired enemies possessed some new, bizarre, and very deadly technology of their own only made it worse. But worst of all, her son had been caught in the middle of it—had been the officer whose command first encountered these “Sharonians” and fought the first battle with them.
The public—predictably, in Sathmin’s opinion —had reacted to the news with mingled shock, fear, and ferocity. And after digesting Two-Thousand mul Gurthak’s report, she couldn’t really blame the man-in-the-street for reacting exactly that way. Unfortunately, the official dispatch from mul Gurthak differed in several critical particulars from the private message which had already reached Sathmin and her husband from Jasak. There were no aspects of mul Gurthak’s report which contradicted Jasak’s account, but there were certainly some very significant differences of emphasis. Nor had the two-thousand’s dispatch made any mention of Jasak’s decision to declare the two surviving Sharonian prisoners his shardonai…or of the reasons which had impelled him to do so. And she knew her husband had cherished some dark suspicions about the reason Jasak’s private message had reached New Arcana almost a full week before the governor’s official dispatch. Given the hummer priority accorded to official messages, if there was a discrepancy in arrival times, mul Gurthak’s report should have arrived before Jasak’s, not after it.
Thankhar had decided to adopt a wait-and-see posture, and Sathmin hoped it had been the right call. It wasn’t that she thought they had any other option—the plain truth was that they didn’t know much more about events than anyone else in the Union’s government—but she hated the waiting. And she hated the murmurs already floating around where people thought she wouldn’t hear about them. While mul Gurthak had expressed his personal approval of Jasak’s actions and decisions under the circumstances as Jasak had then understood them, not everyone else agreed. For that matter, even mul Gurthak’s approval had been qualified by those deadly words “under the circumstances.”
Sathmin Olderhan had not been the Duchess of Garth Showma for over thirty years without learning to read between the lines of official statements and recognize the hidden daggers wrapped in carefully chosen turns of phrase. And mul Gurthak was shakira. That was more than enough to set her every cat’s whisker of suspicion acquiver under the best of circumstances, which these most definitely were not. And much as she loved her husband, he was Andaran to his toenails. He would not launch any sort of preemptive defense of his son until he knew to his own satisfaction what had happened, and that was enough to drive even the most loving wife to screaming distraction…at least in the privacy of her own mind. Besides—
Enough, she told herself firmly. Thankhar’s right. You can’t do anything about it until you know more, and nothing you can do is going to get Jasak back home one second sooner than he’d get here anyway. And whatever else happens, you still have a Snowfall Night to coordinate, so you’d better get back to doing it!
She smiled slightly at the acerbic edge of her own thoughts, drew a deep breath, and turned resolutely back to her responsibilities.
Magister Loriethe from the college would be arriving for a mid afternoon review with a final update on the Institute’s plans for the midnight grand finale, and Sir Kalivar of the Sarkhala Boy’s School was begging an invitation to have his students join in the Children’s March. Sathmin was inclined to grant the late addition if he’d also be willing to supervise the distribution of candy at the children’s pay call.
But first she had to dress. The staff jokingly called her around-the-estate skirts and blouses “women’s combat utilities.” The clothes didn’t have nearly enough pockets, but other than that, Sathmin didn’t object to the description. In her younger days, before Thankhar, she would have gone to Snowfall just as she was, watched the endurance competitions and enjoyed camping out on the frozen ground to get the best spot for the dragon flight show. The festival was better organized now, but she also had to put up with being one of the things the people came to see. And that involved hiring a dressing assistant.
Tellemay Lissia arrived precisely on schedule—Sathmin loved that about the woman—and produced a multitude of clothes from her baggage, any of which would certainly do fine. Tellemay always produced outfits that fitted the occasion and Sathmin was blessed with spending no more time deciding what to wear than her husband did. Uniforms were a magnificent invention, in her opinion. It was a pity most women—even in Andara—positively rebelled at the idea of all wearing the same thing. Until Sathmin managed to convince her fellow officer’s wives to adopt some manner of civilian uniform, however, she could always depend on her capable dresser.
“Delightful to see you again, Your Grace,” Tellemay said. “I’ve found the perfect things for you today. The absolute perfect! Classic pre-Hathak period reimagined with softened lines and in all the newest colors.” The dresser gave Sathmin a measuring look and added, “And yes, I’ve added pockets. Small ones that don’t ruin the lines. Stand just there in the middle and I’ll have this fitting done for you in no time at all.”
Sathmin complied, and she immediately turned her mind back to more interesting things.
The flights participating in the dragon air show had confirmed. She needed to check with Corilene about the repairs on the estate’s second slidercar. It would be needed to bring the last demo pilots from the landing grounds back to the falls after they flew their passes. The 2038th training wing had confirmed the extra dragon fodder had arrived. The full storerooms and stockyards should be more than enough to keep all the performing dragons comfortably fed.
“I didn’t hear until I went to pick up the new fabric samples, but I suppose you heard with the very first hummer arrival this morning,” said Tellemay as she pinned a coat sleeve.
“Pardon, what?”
Sathmin looked at Tellemay in surprise as the dresser’s comment pulled her mind back from planning details for Snowfall Night. The woman usually spent these moments talking about fashion and why she’d selected the pieces presented for the day’s outfit and hinting about what she was planning for events later in the year, with extra commentary about the occasions when Sathmin would be seen by senior officials or especially large crowds. Those sorts of questions could be answered almost automatically, using only a corner of her surface thoughts to monitor the process, but there was something about Tellemay’s tone.…
“Heard what Telley-dear?” Sathmin asked.
“Oh, you hadn’t heard yet!” Tellemay’s voice rose in delight to be first with the news. “It’s the Sharonians. The truce is over!”
“What?” Sathmin stared at her, stunned by the way the news echoed with her own earlier worried. The truce was over?! How? Why? And what was it going to mean for Jasak and—
“We’re back at war,” Tellemay continued blithely. “My cousins are so happy. They were afraid they’d miss it all.”
“Miss it?” Sathmin felt vaguely like she’d entered some other dimension—and not one with a portal route back home to New Arcana.
“Yes, Your Grace. Miss the war. We’ll trounce them all very soon, so the youngest boys will still miss it. But Ollie’s a Trooper out with the Second Andarans now. His brothers are all very jealous that he’ll have combat experience and the war won’t last long enough for them to get any.”
Sathmin placed the names quickly. Ollie Lissia was a reliable young man who’d run his father’s textile shop and supplied most of the cold weather gear for the 2nd Andaran Scout
s. He’d finally convinced a retired uncle to come manage the place long enough for Ollie to do a two-year enlistment.
Ransarans and Mythalans would never understand, but as an Andaran of course he’d had to do it. Family deferment or not, a well brought up Andaran boy would fight dragons barehanded if that’s what it took to do his basic service tour. And here was Tellemay, his proud cousin, delighting in the chance of her family member returning with a combat service badge on his shoulder. But—
“Are you sure about the truce?” Sathmin clutched at the hope Tellemay had misheard something.
“Absolutely sure. Everyone’s been getting hummer messages all at once. They don’t say what their orders are or where they’re headed, of course. But the war’s back on. I’m amazed you didn’t hear first. I suppose His Grace was at the Commandery by the time the first hummers arrived.” Tellemay paused a moment to adjust and repin a gather on Sathmin’s left shoulder. “Everyone’s been saying how taken by surprise they were and how the Commandery kept the secret perfectly.”
“I don’t understand,” Sathmin said. “Are you saying we broke off the truce talks?”
Tellemay sniffed. “When you say it like that, Your Grace, it just doesn’t sound right. I’m sure that couldn’t be it. The troop letters just say we won a battle and that they’re excited about the next one. The news’ll say more in the morning, won’t it?”
* * *
“They want what?” Shalassar Brintal-Kolmayr snapped up from her seat.
Intern Pelgra tried to melt into the Cetacean Embassy floor and only managed to look more puppyish instead. Not the kid’s fault, Shalassar reminded herself, and brushed past the young Cetacean Speaker to confront the orca at the pier herself.