Hell's Gate

Yet it remained to be seen whether or not Ternathia's ruler could talk his own "allies"?including King Fyysel?into accepting an arrangement which would guarantee Chava Busar's dynastic grasp on the crown of Sharona.

"I think, in the end, they'll have to accept," he said finally. "If Zindel is willing, how can they refuse? They intend to make him the Emperor of all Sharona. Are they going to start right out by telling him he doesn't have the right to make this sort of decision for his own family?" Thaminar shook his head. "That's insane."

"And people don't regularly get insane where Chava is concerned?" Shalassar shot back.

"I don't have any easy answers for you, love," he said. "I wish I did. I wish I still believed in easy answers. But the only way we're going to find out is to wait until the votes are counted."

"I know, I know," Shalassar said, and managed to smile at him. He smiled back at her, then folded the paper and deliberately set it aside as she began spooning melon, grapes, and dates onto his plate. He wished that he could put his worries away as easily as he could discard the newspaper, but that wasn't going to happen. Today's vote was so critical that neither of them really wanted to think about it, but he knew they weren't going to be able to avoid it.

Which didn't mean they wanted both going to try to pretend they could.

"Do you have any delegations coming in today?" he asked, deliberately turning away from the vote in Tajvana and concentrating on their own lives, instead.

Shalassar gave him another smile, but he felt the terrible tension in her through their marriage bond. It was just as hard for her to let go of the Unification vote as it was for him.

"I'm not expecting any," she said, shaking her head. "That doesn't mean the bell won't ring anyway, of course."

Her smile turned a little less forced as she added the qualification. An ambassador to aquatic sentients couldn't do her job the way other diplomats did theirs, and Shalassar's life?and that of her family?had always reflected that inescapable reality.

Human-to-human ambassadors' jobs were almost boringly easy in comparison. They simply received written, verbal, or Voice messages about meeting dates, times, and places, then went and had them. They could actually calculate their calendars, at least for a day or so in advance.

The ambassadors assigned to serve the great apes?the mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, baboons, some of the higher monkey species, and so on?lived far lewith ifss organized lives. They couldn't expect comfortable quarters in the fashionable, diplomatic sections of Sharona's capital cities, because they had to live close to the populations they served. So they ended up parked out on the fringes of the wilderness areas set aside for the apes … which allowed primate emissaries to simply walk up to their houses and knock on the door whenever they felt like it. Which they were notoriously prone to do. The apes were much less interested in the sort of formal, regimented protocols and scheduling humans preferred.

More often, of course, contact with the apes was actually initiated from the human side. The human ambassador would find himself compelled to trek out into the wilderness, seeking out the population of apes affected by a proposed development in their area?a construction site, road, or mine?in order to ask the apes' permission to build on their territory.

Sometimes no permission was forthcoming, but those cases tended to be the exception, not the rule. Usually, some sort of quid pro quo could the arrived at. Sometimes the agreements hammered out provided for moving the whole clan into an unoccupied region capable of sustaining them. Sometimes all it took was a gift of technology to help the clan improve its standard of living. More than one large cat had been unpleasantly surprised by sword-wielding chimps protecting their young and infirm, and most of the clans loved steel axheads and saws. Other clans had acquired access to medicines and Healers, paid for by the private developer or government negotiating the treaty.

Word of that sort of agreement generally spread to other clans in the region. Thaminar and Shalassar had smiled over one news story, in particular. The Nishani chimps had allowed mines to be developed in their clan's territory in exchange for medical care. Not to be outdone, the neighboring Minarti chimpanzee clan had plied their telepathic ambassador with questions about what humans might need or want from them. Once they'd discovered that several varieties of rare medicinal herbs which grew in profusion in their territory could be found virtually nowhere else, they'd offered to exchange them for the same medical care.

Horticulturists had been imported to coach the Minarti clan on propagation techniques designed to promote a cultivated supply of the herbs, rather than deplete the wild sources. The delighted chimpanzees had settled down to enjoy their improved health care, tending the plants upon which it depended, and everyone had been quite satisfied by the arrangement.

It was all very human-like … which was one of the reasons it had amused Shalassar and Thaminar so much, since Shalassar's own experiences had been rather different.

For one thing, even chimpanzees had a far better developed sense of time?by human standards, at least?than the cetaceans did. There was, quite literally, no way to predict what hour of the day or night a whale or dolphin might suddenly come seeking the human ambassador. The denizens of the sea lived at an entirely different pace, and in a totally different environment, from humanity or its close cousins, and their perceptions and interests were shaped accordingly. If the cetaceans had even been aware of the Minarti clan's activities at all, they would have thought the entire business was unutterably boring.

Most of the land-dwelling sentients of Sharona (including the majority of humans) felt sorry for and smugly superior to the cetaceans, which had no hands and couldn't use human technology for much of anything. Most cetaceans, on the other hand, didn't think about the apes at all, except to feel sorry for and smugly superior to the hapless primates (including the majority of humans) who were stuck on dry land and unable to exploit a full three-quarters of their home planet's surface. They were totally disinterested in the goings-on of chimpanzees and mountain gorillas, although they'd been forced to modify that attitude where the humans who routinely crossed their home waters were involved.

Human beings might be unable to do much more than barely scratch the shallows of the cetaceans' endless oceans, but they did exploit at least some of the same territory. And since the emergence of Talents among them, it had been the humans who had initiated contact. No one?Shalassar included?quite understood how cetaceans maintained their historical record, but the fact that they did was beyond dispute. And because they did, they remembered the days in which even the greatest and most intelligent of them had been no more than one more food source for humanity … and how that had changed.

There were those, among the cetaceans, who remained wary of, even hostile towards, humanity because of things which had happened thousands upon thousands of years ago. More of them, though, remembered that humanity had altered its actions once it realized that it was dealing with other intelligent species. And even those who remained wary, recognized that at least some contact with human beings was inescapable.

That was where ambassadors like Shalassar stepped into the picture. She'd spent her life establishing contacts with the cetaceans, and even more than the ambassadors to the apes, she'd discovered that the nonhumans with whom she dealt had become the very center of her life and career. She wasn't simply their official conduit to land-dwelling humanity; she and her family had made friendships among the great whales, the dolphins and the porpoises, building intensely personal bridges across the inter-species gap.