"You're probably right. But I hadn't even finished my drink."
"Couple back in. I can fix that."
Hunt sat up, swung his legs down, yawned, and stretched. "No, I think that after an episode like that I could use a shot of the real thing. Is anyone else heading that way downstairs?"
"Duncan, Josef, Sandy… it seems most of them have the same idea. Be warned, though. It's got Chris Danchekker going."
"Oh, I think I'm used to dealing with that."
Yes, convergence was the most important issue. Nothing else was going to matter much until they had that cracked. Hunt's other self had tried to pass on the right advice, all that way back at the beginning. In view of that, it seemed odd that whoever had sent the device responsible for the recent pandemonium should have fitted it for communications capability while the convergence problem still remained evidently unsolved. Hunt could only suppose that the inhabitants of different universes would find reasons for going about things differently. Or, of course, there was always the possibility that the particular team he was a part of would find out why in good time.
Others were already in the bar area, including a few Thuriens, with a vigorous debate already in progress. Hunt could hear Danchekker remonstrating above the rest as he approached. He wondered if there were other realities out there in the Multiverse in which the inhabitants had not been so prudent as to operate their MP2 remotely, confining timeline effects to streams of neurocoupler information, not the actual bodies. If there were, then the kind of chaos he'd just witnessed could be real, not just a virtual experience. How would anyone deal with four Danchekkers in their universe, three of them marooned and unable to get back? It didn't bear thinking about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Frenua Showm met with Calazar in "Feyarvon," his official retreat away from Thurios-his counterpart of Showm's "eyrie," where he withdrew from the world of Thurien and its affairs. Its rooms and galleries rose around a central dome from terraces of gardens and groves bounded on the outside by an enclosing arcade-the whole forming a floating island drifting among Thurien's cloud tops. Showm was present physically, clad in the full purple robe and headpiece that signified her formal role. Calazar, likewise, was wearing his gold tunic and green cloak. By long custom this meant that their dealings were between the two offices that they represented, not the persons. Thuriens were able to separate such functions when necessity called for it. Private interests and preferences had no place in administering for the general good.
They walked slowly along beside the parapet wall above the perimeter arcade, flower banks and miniature fruit trees below them on one side, bottomless canyons disappearing down among cloud on the other. "I must say, such second thoughts are about the last thing I would have expected from you of all people," Calazar said. "You have always been one of the most intransigent when it comes to distrusting humans. I'll credit you with being the least surprised of all of us when we finally discovered the deceptions of the Jevlenese. And you were always of the opinion that the Terrans were more than willing pupils of the agents the Jevlenese infiltrated to set them against each other. Doesn't everything you've studied for this history you're working on uphold it? At one point you were all for writing them off as beyond hope, and going ahead with the containment option immediately. It's strange to hear you sounding as if you might be going soft now."
Yes, it was true. Calazar's last remark referred to a measure the Thuriens had been preparing to defend against the insatiable Terran lust for conquest that the exaggerated Jevlenese accounts had painted. It was not the Thurien way, nor in the Thurien nature, to meet a threat of violence with counter-violence. In accord with the colossal schemes they had devised when the occasion demanded, such as building webs of engineering around burnt-out stars, or power distribution grids that spanned sizeable portions of the Galaxy, their response had been to begin the construction of immense g-warp engines that would be positioned in a configuration to create an impassable shell of deformed spacetime enclosing and isolating the entire Solar System. And the Thuriens would have done it. As some previous episodes in Ganymean history had demonstrated, the same faculty that enabled them to divorce professional life from personal factors made them perfectly capable of setting sentiment aside when higher considerations depended on it.
"I admit it," Showm replied. "I don't know how much of Terran history you've studied yourself, Calazar. There are magnificent and stirring chapters, but most of what's recorded, century after century for millennia, is…" she shook her head, looking for a word, "horrifying. Even allowing for the Jevlenese distortions, I came to the conclusion that there was simply something inherently wrong in the human condition-Terrans, Jevlenese, all of them. Something innate and incurable, going back to the genetics involved in that biological experiment on Minerva long ago. If that were the case, then we owed it to ourselves and the other races that depend on us to be protected from it. It couldn't be allowed to break out into the Galaxy. But they are sentient living beings nevertheless, and we couldn't destroy them. It was ironic: Although the Jevlenese had been deceiving us to advance an agenda of their own, the solution that it induced us to devise was correct. Except that it didn't go far enough. I would have contained Athena as well." Athena was the star of Jevlen and its companion planets.
"Yes, I remember. So what has caused you to think again? The progress they seem to have been making in more recent times?" It had been Terrans, after all, notably those associated with the irrepressible Dr. Hunt, who had figured so much in the events concerning the Ganymeans. They had gone to extraordinary lengths to save the Shapieron from a Jevlenese plot to destroy it, made contact with Thurien, and it had been they who first awakened the Thuriens to what was going on.
It would have been easy for Showm to go along with the rationalization that Calazar was unintentionally offering. But to do so would have meant deceiving him. To speak or imply anything but the truth when functioning in a formal official capacity was unthinkable. Earth had seen periods of hope and apparent progress before, only to slide back again, sometimes to a worse state than had existed before. Their European culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had actually concocted a code of what they called "civilized" warfare to the point where by the end of that period some optimistic commentators had seriously believed the end of war and oppression as instruments of human affairs to be within sight… But the century that followed witnessed the two most savage and destructive wars ever, the perfection of industries of mass killing and mass destruction modeled on their methods of mass production, and some of the most murderous and repressive regimes the planet had ever seen. Even America, formerly hailed as the champion of individual freedom and the rule of law, had sunk for a while to plundering small and defenseless, resource-rich countries. It was now fashionable there to blame the Jevlenese and say that epoch was over. Showm would have liked to think so, but the cautious side of her nature overrode the temptation to wishful thinking. No, she couldn't pretend that she was convinced.
What way was there to explain that what had caused her outlook to change, and forced her to look again at habits of thought she had never before questioned, was listening to a lonely Terran woman of little consequence and no influence, tolerated by her cousin and regarded amiably but depreciatingly by her co-worlders as mildly eccentric? Showm replied finally, "We belong to a culture in which work that serves the well-being of all is morally fulfilling in itself. It gives us our sense of worth. To seek personal gain through the loss or detriment of others would be incomprehensible. In a world that lives by such an ethic, truth becomes the rule, and justice follows naturally. So naturally that we take it for granted. Thuriens have no concept of the brutality and suffering that can result from injustice. I hadn't, until I started delving into the story of Earth and saw what happens when injustice becomes not just the norm, but a mark of distinction for those possessing the power to inflict it-to be envied and emulated… I don't want us to risk being guilty of inflicting an injustice, Calazar."