Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  Some of those glittering fringes stroked the open circuitry of the communicator controls in the seat’s arm. “Point nine nine three,” said a scratchy voice from the voder box mounted on the rock’s back. “A nice triple sine.”

  “ ‘Nice’?” said Spock. Jim raised an eyebrow: you could have used Spock’s tone of voice to dry out a martini.

  “Within high-nominal limits,” said the rock, and there was a definite smile in the voice, despite the fact that the voder should not have been able to convey emotion. “A third-order curve, sir. Skew no more thane minus zero point two two four six. No crystal infrequency, no parasitic vibrations, signal loss within accepted IEEE and CCITT parameters, layback less than point zero two percent, hyperbolic—”

  “That should be sufficient, Mr. Naraht,” Spock said, looking over at the captain with a slight wry expression.

  “Mr. Naraht,” Jim said, stepping down beside the helm. Lieutenant Naraht was a Horta, a hatchling of the original Horta on Janus VI: one of an intensely curious species that could no more have stayed out of space, once they came to understand it, than they could have stopped eating rock. Jim had watched Naraht’s career since he was transferred to theEnterprise with both interest and pleasure: the Horta had gone from eager, avid “space cadet” to seasoned officer in a very short time…no surprise, considering some of the things he had been through, with the rest of the crew, since he came aboard. Now Jim patted the back of the center seat and said, “Trying her out for fit, mister?”

  There would have been a time when the remark would have made Naraht wriggle all over, embarrassed—and the sight of a quarter-ton of living stone, the shape and color of a giant fringed asbestos pan pizza, being embarrassed, had occasionally been memorable. But now Naraht merely looked up—at least Jim felt he was being looked at, though he was unsure as to how—and said, “Respectfully, sir, I think I would need something a little bigger. There was some distortion showing up in the commcircuits, that was all, and Mr. Spock asked me to assist him in isolating it.”

  Jim nodded, seeing the point: there were certain advantages in having a crewman who could make direct “neural” connections with solid circuitry andfeel what was wrong with it as an itch or a tic, rather than as a string of numbers. But one who could feel the problem and then translate it into the numbers as well—thatwas someone invaluable. As usual, half the departments in the ship were fighting over Naraht’s services. Biochemistry, geology, xenoarchaeology, they all wanted him—Naraht could do detailed chemical analysis, or even carbon- or selenium-dating, by merely eating a piece of the object in question and reporting on the “flavor.” As far as Jim knew, Naraht’s only complaint about being on theEnterprise was that he was gaining weight at a shocking rate and didn’t know what his mother would think when she saw him….

  Jim glanced over at Spock. “I could have sworn that Mr. Naraht had almost given you more data than you needed.”

  “There is no such thing as too much data,” Spock said calmly, “but thereis such a thing as unnecessary detail. Nonetheless, the job is adequately completed. Thank you, Mr. Naraht.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” said the Horta, and slipped down out of the helm onto the floor with his usual speed and silence, always surprising in someone so massive. “Captain? Your conn?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Naraht,” Jim said, and sat down. The seat was very warm—not surprising: McCoy usually referred to the liquid-mineral complex that Naraht used for blood as “fluorocarbonated lava with asbestos hemocytes.”

  “Sir,” Naraht said, and shuffled off into the lift to be about his business. Jim sat back in the command chair, and Spock stepped down beside him, holding out a padscreen.

  Jim glanced down it, tilted the pad slightly to scroll through it. It was a very condensed, compressed version of the ship’s schedule for that day, parts of it flowcharted where an activity of one ship’s department was dependent on some data or action by another. Most of it he had already seen, at Fleet, when signing for his orders andEnterprise ’s “sailing papers” and authorizing the usual too-numerous vouchers, invoices and inventories.

  “We’re ready to go,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Spock. “All transfer personnel are aboard and all assigned personnel are at post or accounted for. Our two scheduled rendezvous, withSwiftsure andCoromandel, are estimated on-time in one-point-one-three and one-point-six days respectively.”

  “Fine.” Now Jim’s eye lighted again on the listing that scheduled the senior officers’ briefing, and he glanced up at Spock.

  Spock bowed his head slightly. “I will be doing the mission situation analysis,” he said.

  “Thank you. You do seem better qualified than anyone else…. ”

  Spock got an expression that would hardly have seemed like anything on a human face, but on a Vulcan was a most astonishing look of irony. “I am certainly considered by some to be part of the problem,” he said. “It seems only appropriate to attempt to be part of the solution.”

  Kirk nodded, scanned farther down the list. “Crew mixer’s starting a little late.”

  “I would suspect this is so that the senior officers can attend,” Spock said.

  “Right.” OnEnterprise, as on many another ship, there was a tradition of a first-night-out “mixer” party for the crew, so that people could get together and debrief about what they had done on leave and catch up on personal business before getting down to the serious business of working on a starship. Some civilians had considered this frivolous, when they found out about it—until surveys done by the Fleet Surgeons General proved that if the debriefing didn’t happen formally, first night out, it tended to stretch out across the next month of travel time, impairing the crew’s efficiency as it did so. With the release of that data, the complaining stopped. And theEnterprise always threw a very good party. “It had better be good,” McCoy would say, only half joking, since Recreation was considered a part of Medicine, and the chief of Recreation reported directly to him.

  “Captain,” Uhura broke in, looking over her shoulder at Jim, “a private message has just come in for you—the computer just finished decoding it. Shall I hold it?”

  “No need,” Jim said. “Put it here.” He held up the padscreen.

  Uhura touched a couple of controls to dump the material to the commlink in the pad. Jim hit the combination of shorthand-keys for “newest,” and the message came up. Spock politely looked the other way.

  “No,” Jim said. “Take a look at this, Spock…”

  TO: Cpt. J. T. Kirk, cmdg NCC 1701 USS Enterprise

  FROM: T’Pau, ac. affil. Vulcan Science Academy/shi’Kahr/ a’Shav/Vulcan

  Captain:

  You will have noted that your First Officer has been requested to give testimony in the proceedings regarding the Referendum on repeal of the Vulcan Articles of Federation. Logic dictates that due to previous close association with Vulcan and Vulcans, you should be asked to speak as well. This matter is left entirely to your discretion, and no onus will rest specifically or generally on the Federation or Starfleet if you elect to refuse. Please notify us as to your intention. T’Pau

  “Well, Captain?” Spock said.

  Jim stared at the pad.Lord, how I hatepublic speaking…. Still, this is something worth speaking about . “Uhura,” he said, “send a reply. My great respects to T’Pau, and I will be delighted to speak—no, make that honored. Respectfully yours, signed, etcetera etcetera. Copies of the message and the reply to Starfleet, as well.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Uhura said.

  Jim brought the ship’s schedule back up on the screen of the pad and looked up at Spock.

  “Anything further here that needs my attention?”

  Spock reached over Jim’s shoulder and tapped the pad: it cycled ahead to one entry. “A discretionary. Ship’s BBS has asked for the release of more core memory.”

  Jim looked at the already substantial figure in gigabytes that the ship’s bulletin board system was using already, and
the fat increase being requested—almost double the present memory storage. “What does Dr. McCoy say?”

  Spock glanced momentarily at the ceiling, as if it might assist him in his phrasing. “He says that the Rec chief thinks it would be a good idea, and in general he agrees, especially as regards the message net—but himself he thinks Mr. Sulu has already blown up more of Starfleet than is good for him on the ‘damn bloodthirsty war games machine.’ ” Spock glanced mildly at Sulu’s back: the helmsman was chatting with Chekov about a restaurant somewhere. “Apparently he has been experimenting with Klingon ship design in the BBS’s ship exercise simulator. Improving both their design and their performance, if the comments of the people from Engineering are any indication. The Klingon ships in the simulation are apparently doing much better after ‘Sulu refits.’ ”

  “How have Mr. Sulu’s efficiency ratings been?” said Jim, very softly.

  “All above point eight and rising steadily,” Spock said, just as quietly.

  “And Bones hasn’t scheduled him for a psych profile of any kind.”

  “No, sir.”

  “So basically, Bones is just grouching off.”

  Spock looked at the captain as if he had announced that space was a vacuum: his look said both that the statement was obvious, and one about which a great deal more could be said. “In other regards,” Spock said after a moment, “message traffic on the BBS has been up significantly in recent days.”

  “Are you recommending the augmentation?” Jim said.

  “Logically,” Spock said, “it would be a reasonable assumption to expect crew stress levels, and therefore volubility, to increase over the mission ahead of us. And it would be illogical to withhold what will be a valuable ‘safety valve.’ ”

  Jim cocked an eye at the pad, then tapped in an authorization code on the shorthand keys at the bottom. “Give them half again what they asked for.” He let the pad scroll to the bottom. “I want a look at those refits, though. People elsewhere may be having the same ideas, if you get my drift.”

  “Affirmative. Mr. Tanzer has installed one of the optimum refits in the small simulation tank in Rec One.”

  “Tonight, then, at the party.” Jim got up, handed Spock back the pad. “I’m going to get something to eat. I’ll see you at the briefing.”

  The communicator whistled.“Sickbay to Bridge—”

  Jim nodded at Uhura. “Bridge,” he said. “What is it, Bones?”

  “I just got the most interesting piece of mail—”

  “From T’Pau?” Jim said. He glanced at Spock. Spock put an eyebrow up.

  “You too, huh?”There was a moment’s silence, and then McCoy said in an aggrieved tone,“Dammit, I’m a doctor, not a—”

  “Belay it, Bones. What’s your answer?”

  There was another pause, then a sigh.“Dammit,” McCoy said,“when did I last turn down an argument with a Vulcan? I can hardly pass up one with the whole planet.”

  “Noted and logged,” Jim said. “We’ll talk about it later. Bridge out.”

  He turned toward the helm. “Mr. Chekov!”

  “Sir?” said the navigator, turning in his seat.

  “Plot us a course for Vulcan, warp two. Mr. Sulu, take us out of the system on impulse, one-tenthc, then warp us out.”

  “Sir!”

  “And if you see any Klingons,” Jim added as he paused at the bridge entry, waiting for the lift doors to open, “for pity’s sake, don’t stop to sell them new warp engines! No need to make your job harder than it is…. ”

  Sulu’s chuckle was the last thing Jim heard as the lift doors shut on him.

  The officers’ mess was one of the more enjoyable parts of the ship, and not merely because it was for the officers. One could make a case that numerous parts of recreation and the arboretum were much nicer. But there was no faulting the view from the officers’ mess. It was on the leading edge of the disk, with real windows, not viewscreens: floor-to-ceiling windows that gave the illusion of sitting at the twenty-third century equivalent of a ship’s prow. At sublight, the stars naturally didn’t seem to move, but Sulu was apparently opting for the scenic route out through Sol system, the so-called “Grand tour,” which more than made up for it. Jupiter swam slowly into view, a huge striped-candy crescent, then grew gibbous, then full, as Sulu slipped theEnterprise around the planet’s curvature, slowly enough to pick up a little slingshotting from gravity, swiftly enough not to let the impulse drivers disturb or be disturbed by Jupiter’s radiopause. Various moons whipped or lazed around the planet like thrown ball bearings asEnterprise passed her. Saturn was a yellow white star in the distance, growing in the darkness as Sulu made for her.

  Jim pushed his plate aside, having finished with his steak, and pulled the table screen close again on its swinging arm. Holding on it, amber on black, was a page of data.

  Msg: 2003469

  Date: 7416.664

  Sec: WANTED/BUY/SELL/EXCHANGE

  From: Cally Sherrin/spec4:sci

  Subj: USED B’HIVA

  Origin: XenoBiology Lab IV/term:1154/606

  FOR SALE

  Best Quality Andorian B’hiva

  One Careful Owner

  No Dropouts! No lost meaning!

  Warranty still in force

  180 cr or best offer

  Leave msg in BUYSELL or email area 6

  Now what the devil is a b’hiva?Jim thought, and kept reading.

  Msg: 2003470

  Date: 7417.903

  Sec: WANTED/BUY/SELL/EXCHANGE

  From: Nyota Uhura/Cmdr:comms

  Subj: Taped Dictionaries

  Origin: Communications/term: 181/53

  While on leave planetside (Terra or Luna), did anyone happen to pick up one of the taped or solid “tourist dictionaries” of local languages sometimes sold in souvenir shops, etc? Want to dump the thing? I’ll trade you classical music, third-stream jazz, exotica, drama (BBC, RSC, Bolshoi a specialty). Looking particularly for Romanian, Kampuche, t!Low, Eurish (Dalton recension if possible), and other artificials (Anglish, Neolangue, Sino-Francaise, Cynthetic). Thanks! N.U.

  Still working on her doctoral thesis,Jim thought. Uhura was busy working on improving universal translator theory, mostly by taking the old theory to pieces and putting it back together in shapes that were causing a terrible furor in academic circles on various planets. Jim vividly remembered one night quite a long time ago when he had asked Uhura exactly how she was going about this. She had told him, for almost an hour without stopping, and in delighted and exuberant detail, until his head was spinning with phoneme approximations and six-sigma evaluations and the syntactic fade and genderbend and recontextualization and linguistic structural design and the physics of the human dextrocerebral bridge. The session had left Jim shaking his head, thoroughly disabused of the idea (and ashamed of how long he had held it) that Uhura was simply a sort of highly trained switchboard operator…. And as regarded her doctoral thesis, he could have found out simply enough that she was still working on the Earth-based algorithms, just by asking her: but this was a more interesting way of finding out.Cynthetic? he wondered, and made a mental note to ask her about it at the party.

  He scrolled down through various replies to Uhura’s message—apparently quite a few people had picked up dictionaries that were now (or had immediately turned out to be) useless—and finally determined to leave these messages for later. “Change area,” he said to the screen. “Common room.”

  The screen flickered and gave him another page.

  COMMON ROOM

  OPINION, INFORMED AND NON-

  RANTING AND RAVING PERMITTED

  NAMES NOT NECESSARY

  It was one of the places he came to find out what his crew was thinking. Messages did not have to be attributed to a name or terminal, but they could not be private. The office of common room system operator rotated through the crew, offered to various members on the strength of their psych profiles in areas like calm reaction to stress and anger. The common
room sysop tended to be close-mouthed and dependable, the kind of person that others refer to as “a rock.” (Once it had actuallybeen Naraht, to the amusement of just about everyone.) Here tempers could flare, awful jokes be told safely, suspicions be aired, rumors be shot down. The common room was sometimes a peaceful place, sometimes a powder-keg. Jim never ignored it.

  He scanned through the most recent messages, and one caught his eye:

  FROM: Bugs

  DATE: 7412.1100

  VULCANS: WHO NEEDS ’EM?

  They can’t take care of themselves anymore. They can’t even take care of a starship if you give it to them—and now they claim that they’re not good enough for us? Well, **** ’em and the sehlat they rode in on.

  Just fooling.

  Jim breathed out.Serious? Or not? The statement mirrored some that he had heard on Earth, as this crisis had built and brewed. He scanned down the page.

  Farther down, other people came in and maligned Bugs, whoever he or she or it was. Remarks appeared along the lines of “Maybe they’ve got a point: maybe wearen’t good enough for them. Or goodfor them, anyway—.” Other people said, “We need them. Someone has to tell them so. Let’s hope that someone here can get it through those thick Vulcan skulls of theirs…. ”—and Jim would heat up slightly under the collar: he was sure they were thinking of him. The problem was, so did Starfleet. Somehow they expected him to pull this rabbit out of the hat.

  The problem was, the rabbit was asehlat …and he didn’t fully understand the shape of the hat. He thought he might never fully understand it, even if he lived to be as old as, well, as a Vulcan. And if he didn’t come to understand it, pretty damn fast…then there would no longer be Vulcans in the Federation to be as old as.

  Not to mention that he would suddenly be bereft of one of his two best friends. And Starfleet would come down very, very hard, right on his neck. He refused to try to choose which of those options bothered him more.

  Jim scrolled down through the messages. They were not all about Vulcans: some of them were about investing your pay, or relationships that were going well, or going sour, or the nature of God, or the awful way the meatloaf from Commissary Five tasted lately, was the computer there having a crash or something? But Jim read right through them, the complaints, the hello’s, the nattering, until he came to the one message that made him simply stop and stare at the screen.