David Weber - The Road to Hell

White-hair grunted to demand back chan Rahool’s attention.

‹Fruit in a bowl› again. The picture changed flashing through a series of other fruits he might offer instead.

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: ‹ neatly stacked bananas or maybe some type of plantain,› with an over layer of intense humor from Tusk.

Nothing fell, chan Rahool noted with amazement.

Tusk lifted a bottle from the most recent batch of moonshine and proffered it to chan Rahool: ‹ an image of an open bottle with shriveled fruit inside .›

“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.

‹Cheese .› White-hair rejected the meats and expressed a decided interest in trying the cheeses. All of them.

* * *

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.