David Weber - Hell's Gate

It was entirely possible that it was, he admitted. And if it was, the fact that relatively few people on Sharona?Davir Perthis, included?had ever seen a violent death with their own eyes had undoubtedly contributed to it. The sheer, horrifying emotional impact of seeing that sort of carnage with your physical eyes would have been bad enough for someone who'd never seen it before. Going the extra step and Seeing it with the total clarity (and emotional overtones) which could only come from a powerful Voice trapped in the middle of it only made it infinitely worse.

"What about what they say happened to Shaylar?"

Elivath's question broke in on the Chief Voice's thoughts, and Perthis looked back up at him with a sour expression.

"They haven't really said all that much, when you come right down to it," he pointed out. "Aside from the fact that she wasn't killed outright?which we already knew?all we have is their claims that they tried to get her to one of their Healers before she died. Or that they could have done anything for her if they'd managed to reach one in time. We didn't get that from a Voice, either, you know. And either way, she's still dead, and they still killed her."

"So you think they're lying?"

"I didn't say that." Perthis realized he sounded a little defensive, and waved one hand. "All right, I admit I thought it. I'm having a hard time getting past my original image of them, I guess. But the fact is, Darl, that we don't have any sort of confirmation of a single thing they've said, and I'm just … uncomfortable with the fact."

"But if they did try to save her, and if it turns out they can prove it, don't you think it would make a difference with public opinion?"

"If they genuinely tried to save her life after making an honest mistake, then probably yes," Perthis said. "But that's a lot of ifs, Darl. They've still got a lot of talking to do, as far as I'm concerned, to explain how what were supposed to be a bunch of trained soldiers mistook someone standing up and holding out empty hands as an act of aggression. Mind you, I'm not saying mistakes like that can't happen. Gods know they've happened in our own past. I'm just saying that after actually Seeing the events from our crew's side, it's going to be hard to convince a lot of our people, including me, that that's what happened here."

He started to say something else, then stopped himself. He didn't know exactly how much Elivath actually knew about the rumors regarding the Voice messages to Emperor Zindel and the Conclave. The original message from Regiment-Captain Velvelig, informing the Emperor and the Conclave that the Arcanans had asked for negotiations, had been released directly to the Voice network and the general public. The follow-on messages had not been, and neither had any of the Conclave's?or Zindel's?responses to Velvelig.

Ostensibly, that was to avoid further exacerbating public opinion by generating unreasonable expectations, on the one hand, or generating additional fury when the bobbles and stumbles which were undoubtedly inevitable in opening negotiations with a totally alien civilization occurred, on the other hand. Perthis supposed that the official reasoning made sense, but he'd picked up on a few very quiet rumors that it was because those follow-on messages from whoever was actually talking to these people included reports that the Arcanans weren't being completely truthful. He had no idea what they were supposed to be lying about, but the thought that they were lying at all was hardly reassuring.

"Well, let's assume it turns out they really did their best to save her life," Elivath said. "And that they really do want to settle this as peacefully as they can, given everything that's already happened. If all that's true, what kind of effect do you think it's going to have on the Conclave and the unification?"

"I don't know that I expect it to have any effect," Perthis replied. Elivath raised one skeptical eyebrow, and the Chief Voice shrugged. "By now," he pointed out, "the debate's taken on the life of its own. Besides, even if we manage to put the brakes on this current confrontation, we still know the bastards are out there, don't we? All of our conventional political equations are going to have to take them into account from now on."

"Do you really think so?"

Elivath grimaced and set down his tea cup. He sat turning it on its saucer for a moment, lips slightly pursed, while he gazed out of the green room's window at the Great Palace's well-lit grounds under the great, midnight-blue dome of the starstruck heavens. Then he returned his gaze to Perthis.

"I was talking to one of the Authority's theoreticians," the Voice correspondent said. "From the way he was talking, this may be the only point of contact we'll see with these people. So if we get control of it, or just seal it off, wouldn't that be more or less the end of it?"

"Only point of contact?"

Perthis leaned back in his own chair. To be totally honest, he'd never thought of Elivath as the sharpest pencil in SUNN's box. He respected the strength of Elivath's Talent, and his integrity, but he'd also always thought of Elivath as one of his correspondents who required rather more careful direction than many.

He knew Elivath knew he regarded him that way?that was one of the problems when Voices with powerful Talents worked with one another?but he also knew that both he and Elivath had qualities the other respected, as well. Still, he'd never really considered Elivath an investigative reporter. The correspondent was extraordinarily good at explaining even complicated concepts to his audience, once he'd mastered those concepts himself, but he usually needed them explained to him in the first place by the investigators who'd gone out and turned them up initially. Part of Perthis' job was to see to it that the proper experts were found to explain things to him, and he was unaccustomed to having Elivath go out and do the finding for himself, especially in technical matters. But if the correspondent had, indeed, turned up some new technical information, Perthis wanted to know about it.

"Why should this be the only point of contact?" the Chief Voice continued after a moment. "Aside from the fact that we've never had one before, which might predispose us to expect it to be the only one, that is."

"I'm not the best technical man we've got," Elivath pointed out mildly?and, Perthis thought, with considerable understatement. "We both know that. But according to this fellow, the latest models for how the multiverse works suggest that our particular universe is part of what I guess you might call a 'cable' of universes. Sort of like those stranded cables they used to hang the bridge across the Ylani Strait, I guess."

He waved one hand, frowning, as if he weren't completely satisfied with his own analogy. Not too surprisingly, Perthis reflected. No one, as far as he was aware, had ever come up with an analogy for the multiverse's structure that he really liked.

"Anyway, this fellow I was talking to says that all of the empirical and theoretical work that's been done suggests that all of the universes in the multiverse had the same common starting point. What caused them to … separate from one another were events that had multiple possible outcomes. Each possible outcome happened somewhere, and that started the separate, divergent universes."

He paused, one eyebrow raised, and Perthis nodded to indicate that he was still following. That part of the theory had been explained to everyone, over and over again. There might be an Arpathian septman somewhere so far up in the hills that they still hadn't invented fire who hadn't heard it, but everyone else was fully aware of it.

"Well," Elivath continued, "this guy I was talking to says that up until recently we always figured that whenever a new universe was created, it went off in its own unique direction. That each new universe radiated at what I guess you could think of as right angles to the universe it split off from because of the particular event that created it. But he says that that theory's been challenged lately, and that the brains' best current guess is that the universes that are most similar lie … parallel to one another, for want of a better word, instead. They're all 'headed the same direction,' so to speak, not racing away from each other."