Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  FROM: Llarian

  DATE: 7412.301

  REPLY: to BUGS, 7412.1100

  You’re not thinking any more clearly than they are. It’s not a question of whether we’re good enough for them. Or not. They don’t even know who we are…and they’re going to judge us. But we’ve been judging us for thousands of years…and we don’t know who we are, either.

  So why all the noise? It won’t matter. Until it’s too late.

  Jim looked up. Uranus slid into sight, slid past on the port side, glowing dim jade, its moons caught climbing topsy-turvy up one side of it asEnterprise passed. In a little while the ship would go into warp: in little more than two days, they would be in orbit around Vulcan.

  It won’t matter.

  “Log off,” Jim said after a pause, and spent some time gazing out into the darkness.

  “Secession,” Spock said, “is not the most accurate term for the act which the Vulcan planetary government is being asked to consider; but for the moment, it will serve.”

  The main briefing room was empty except for the department heads of theEnterprise, sitting around the table in the places that tended to become traditional over long periods of time. Spock, as department head of Science, sat at the “corner” that held the main table reference computer, the one that sent images and data to the subsidiary screens set around the table in its surface, at each place, unless the people sitting in front of them chose to override. Next to him sat Scotty, for the Engineering department: behind him was one of his sub-heads, Lasja Ihirian, who managed most routine maintenance and repair aboard ship. Lasja looked bored, but then he always looked bored in meetings—fixing badly broken things was his metier and chief joy. A big, dark-skinned man in a Sikh’s white turban, he sat and toyed with the hilt of his knife and looked just a hair from yawning.

  Next down the table was Uhura, as head of communications: next to her, Lt. Meshav, who handled Data Management for the ship. What with routinely overseeing and programming the ship’s computers, regularly rewriting or debugging their software, and making sure that the many complex interlocking computer systems didn’t interfere with one another, it was the kind of job that almost required eight hands and four brains: and since Meshav effectively had both, s/he was very good at what s/he did. Meshav was a Sulamid, who looked like nothing more than a seven-foot-tall pillar of pink violet tentacles, with a waving rosette of stalked eyes on top…at least, when s/he was feeling like being pink, or feeling expansive enough to wave the eyes around. S/he had an octocameral brain, which meant s/he might manifest up to eight personalities. S/he tried to restrain herself from doing this too often, citing (as Jim had heard it put it) “pity for the poor single-mindeds.” All the same, a poker game with Meshav was an interesting experience, especially considering that one personality was completely capable of hiding the contents of one’s hand from all the others…not to mention from any opponent.

  Next to Meshav sat the head of Security, Ingrit Tomson, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall, icy-looking woman with close-cropped blond hair and a deceptively gentle look about her; and down at the end of the table, next to Tomson, was Dr. McCoy for Medicine, and behind him, his sub-head, big silver-haired Harb Tanzer, for Recreation. Round the far corner of the table, the quartermaster, Seppu Visti, a small slender dark man with Finnish blood in his background and a computer in his head—literally: he was testing the new Second Thought accounting implant for Starfleet, and could tell you theEnterprise ’s tonnage at any moment of the day or night, down to the last gram, depending on where and when you were in a voyage. Jim found it unnerving: one Spock should be enough for a ship.At least his ears are the right shape…. And then came Defense, with Sulu sitting in as departmenthead—the headship shifted back and forth between the chiefs of Navigation and Weapons Control. And at last, at the head of the table, sat the captain.

  He sat a little uneasily today, concerned by Spock’s unusually somber look and tone. Jim glanced down the table and saw McCoy twitching slightly; he seemed to have caught the mood too. “I take it,” Jim said, “that there have been no major new developments in the past few hours.”

  “Nothing major,” Spock said, “but the situation is such that even very small changes in the equation, as it were, may have widespread effects.”

  He keyed up a string of commands on his console as he spoke. “One could say,” Spock said, “that this situation had its roots in the first meeting of our peoples, when the UNSSAmity found a disabled Vulcan spacecraft adrift in Sol system in the year 2065 old Earth dating.” He glanced up at Jim, a casual look, except that Jim knew Spock’s differing memories of that first encounter, and shared them. McCoy’s eyes were hooded: he too had a different experience of that early history than the one offered by the history books, but he gave no sign of that at the moment—he merely sat listening in the head-bowed position that so often caused Spock to ask drily if would care to interrupt his nap and comment on something.

  “That first encounter was lively enough, but peaceful, by human standards,” Spock said. “The inhabitants of Terra had had a chance to lose their xenophobia somewhat, by meeting the Andorians peacefully, earlier on in that century: so the existence of Vulcans, and Vulcan, came as less of a shock to them than it might have. Diplomatic relations were opened within several years, and the trade and data exchange agreements followed very shortly thereafter. They have continued, and grown, over the past hundred and fifty-six years. Doubtless from this side of the Terran-Vulcan relationship, matters have seemed settled enough.”

  The screens came alive with the annotated time line that Spock had called up. “However, this easy relationship has largely been an illusion, the nature of which is little understood except by those who have some knowledge of Vulcan’s history. The time line before you matches Vulcan’s and Earth’s developmental history, scale for scale, over the last six thousand years. Please direct your attention to the marked period starting around Vulcan old-date 139000. This corresponds approximately to Earth old-date 900 B.C.—”

  “Approximately?” McCoy muttered.

  “I would not like to disturb your rest with unnecessary pedanticisms,” Spock said gently, “but if you insist—”

  McCoy opened one eye, cocked it at Spock, then closed it again, as if deciding against another verbal passage of arms. A soft chuckle ran around the table: Meshav rustled its tentacles in amusement. “You go right on, there, Spock,” McCoy murmured, “I’ll wake up if you say anything interesting, believe me.”

  Jim restrained a smile. Spock flickered an eyebrow. “At any rate,” Spock said, “if you look at the evaluation of technological advancement, you will see that the first landing on the Vulcan neighbor-planet Charis took place late in that millennium, approximately three hundred years before the birth of Surak. Exploration and exploitation of the 40 Eri star system by Vulcan industrial and scientific interests continued through those three centuries without major incident. But here”—a marker flickered into existence on the screens, tagged with a date, 139954—“an incident occurred indeed. Vulcan hadits first contact with another species, and the encounter was more than enough to set the planet into a xenophobic reaction that not even the influence of Surak, then alive, would be able to stop.”

  The time tine went away, replaced by a map of part of the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy—the arm that Vulcan and Earth shared. But on the scale of this map, both of them were tucked away far down in a corner, and mapped-out zones of contrasting colors, one large, one small, tangled through one another like amoebas having an argument. “You will recognize from your history,” Spock said, “the area of influence once controlled by the interstellar empire our historians call the Inshai Compact. The compact was an association of thirty-six hominid- and nonhominid-settled starsystems in the Galactic-northward part of the arm: a very old association, quite stable, quite resistant to the economic and military pressures of the only other major force in those spaces, the ‘non-aligned’ planets of the southern Orion Congeries. At
least, the compact was resistant to the Congeries until someone put a sunkiller bomb into sigma-1014 Orionis, and thereby destroyed the hearthworld of the compact, the planet Inshai itself.”

  “I thought they had never proved that it was a bomb,” said Tomson, frowning.

  “The odds are exceptionally high,” Spock said. “The star was not of a flare type, and the old records of its spectrographic history are quite complete and unremarkable. It should still be there now…but it is not. With it gone, and Inshai and all its subsidiary planets in that system—the heart of the Inshai bureaucracy—the power and restraining and protective influences of the compact fell apart in a very short period. The result was a reign of terror in those spaces, as the worlds of the Orion Congeries swept in and began the piracies they had long desired. Wars, and economic and societal collapse, destroyed planetary populations: starvation and plague finished most of those who managed to survive the invasions. And the great interstellar corporations of the compact, long decentralized but also held in check by Inshai’s rule of law, now took the law into their own hands or became—the law, by fiat. The company ships went out armed with planet-cracker weapons to fight over the trade routes and raw materials they felt they had to have: they blackmailed whole planets and destroyed those that would not submit. In the power vacuum, even the more scattered compact worlds, formerly peaceful places like Etosha and Duthul, fell into this kind of piracy. They could not otherwise maintain their influence, or their technology, much of which derived from Inshai. They entered into deals with the corporations, or with other planets equally desperate, and made terror and rapine their industry.” Spock’s eyes were shadowed; Jim felt a slight chill, having his own suspicions of what a Vulcan thought of such behavior.

  “Those worlds and corporations later degenerated into the guilds and companies that were the direct ancestors of the Orion pirates of today,” Spock said. “But the Vulcans of that time knew nothing of that—just yet. Suffice it to say that after the pirates had exhausted the richer and closer prizes and settled old scores with the remnants of Inshai, they turned their eyes farther afield. Estimates are that the first notice of electromagnetic signals from Vulcan was taken around the time of the birth of Surak. It was about the same time,” Spock said drily, “that the light from the novaed sigma-1014 Orionis reached Vulcan. Some later claimed that it was a sign in the heavens acknowledging Surak’s birth. It came as something of a shock to discover differently, some forty-five years later.”

  Spock turned away from the computer, folding his hands reflectively. “There had been discussion since spaceflight began of what the first contacts with alien life would be like,” he said. “Generally, it was anticipated with pleasure, or at least great interest. The earlier Vulcan tradition lacks ‘the fear of the stranger.’On old Vulcan, there was no need to fear the stranger who came out of nowhere: to him, one offered hospitality without stinting. The one to be feared was the one who habitually competed with you for water and food and shelter. Your enemy was your neighbor, and vice versa. So other life was by and large perceived as a marvel, and possibly economically exploitable. By Surak’s time, research had already been in hand for a century or so on the physics and psi-technologies that would be needed to take generation ships out to the nearest stars.”

  Spock let out a long breath. “However,” he said, “the Duthulhiv pirates who were the first to arrive had no intent to be satisfied merely with the Vulcans’ hospitality. They had spent some time developing their technique for first-contact of a planet they wished to loot, and it worked perfectly on Vulcan. They surveyed the planet covertly, from well out of sensor range, and then made properly stumbling first radio contacts from several light-weeks outside the system. To reduce the story to its shortest form, they were invited into the system as the planet’s guests, and a party of dignitaries agreed to meet with them regarding diplomatic relations. But the Duthulhiv arrived with an invasion force, and the treaty group was taken hostage or killed. From such a point of perceived advantage, the pirates usually went on to subdue the planet in question by extortionate ransom and outright destruction.”

  Spock got a wry look. “However, they had made the mistake of assuming that the unity of their reception, by all the planet’s nations, meant that the planet was unified and at peace, and therefore mostly disarmed. Their observation of the Vulcan merchant fleet, which from agreement in earliest times has never carried arms, seemed to confirm this. What the Duthulhiv pirates didnot clearly perceive was that the planet was in probably its most violent period of many—and that in fact several wars had been postponed so that the Duthulhiv ‘negotiations’ could be handled. The pirates were driven out, most bloodily, but with dispatch.” Spock paused. “There were many terrible aftereffects of that episode, but the rift that the first arrival of aliens drove into the Vulcan people was one that almost tore the planet apart. Many said that the only way to handle a universe that held such species was to go out in power and subdue them—to become a terror ourselves. Others said that such vileness did not need to contaminate us—we should shut ourselves up in our planet, with our own wars, which we understood, and let no one ever come near us again, whether potentially friend or foe. Only Surak was able to bring the planet through that time.” Spock bowed his head. “And he died of it.”

  “I dare say the aliens are blamed for that as well,” Meshav said in its soft fluting voice.

  “By some, yes,” Spock said. “Insofar as a Vulcan of today will admit to an emotion as crass and debasing as blame. That is the context in which the rest of this information must be viewed.”

  He brought up the time line again. “This kind of time scale seems very remote to Terrans, I suspect,” Spock said. “Rather as if an Earth person of our time were insisting on reacting adversely to something that happened while the pyramids were being built. But the racial memory of the peoples of Earth is a mercifully vague and sporadic thing compared to the precision, and intimate nature, of racial memory as a Vulcan experiences it. Those old memories are closer to us than any dream: they are more accessible than the Terran subconscious. They are not archetype. They are experience, passed down via direct and indirect engram implant, through a psi talent of which, by tradition, I may say little. But every Vulcan experiences Surak’s time, and its events, to some extent, as if he or she was there—and rarely with any guarantee of homogeneity of reaction.”

  “But with logic,” Harb Tanzer said.

  “You hope,” McCoy muttered.

  Speck nodded. “The doctor is, unfortunately, correct. Logic is not a disease that all Vulcans have somehow managed to catch, though sometimes Terrans like to pretend it is so. It is a taught way of life, one that affects some Vulcans more profoundly than others; just as one religion or another, or one philosophy or another, will affect a given Earth person more or less profoundly than another. We are not of a piece, any more than the people of Earth are. Some of us will regard the Terrans, and the Federation, with logic in place…and others will not.”

  “I suspect,” Jim said, “that it’s mostly those others that we have to fear.”

  “Not necessarily,” Spock said. “It is some of the most logical who appear to be spearheading this move to have Vulcan leave the Federation.”

  He tapped at the keyboard again. “Here is the English-language text of the official communiqué that was sent to the Federation High Council,” said Spock. “You will note the wording. This is a statement of intent to consider withdrawing a prior legislation…that legislation being Vulcan’s Articles of Association with the Federation. The document comes from hr’Khash’te, only one of the three legislative bodies which handle Vulcan’s planetary legislation. The other two bodies—their names translate as the ‘Proposal Group’ and the ‘Rectification Group’—put forward and pass or amend legislation. But the hr’Khash’te, the ‘Expunging Group,’ exists only to veto or remove laws. And it is the easiest to drive a change through. The other two bodies require a large majority to pass legislatio
n. Expunction requires only one-fourth of the body’s two thousand six members to remove a law…the idea being that a good law should require a fairly large consensus—avoiding the proposal of frivolous or unnecessary statutes—and a bad law should be made easy to stop or change.”

  “Very logical,” said Scotty.

  “Also exploitable,” said Spock. “There has been a considerable dependence on the rule of logic to keep good laws from being illogically removed, or bad ones from being illogically passed. It happens sometimes. Vulcan is not quite Heaven, I am afraid.”

  “News tome,” McCoy said under his breath.

  Spock flicked him a glance, no more. “At any rate, the system can be subverted, and has been. There are numerous parties and groups on Vulcan who find the planet’s association with the Federation, and Terrans in particular, distasteful or unethical for a number of reasons. Some—many—hold the view that there should be no association with a species that goes through the Galaxy armed: such association, they say, is inevitably a corrupting influence on the rule of peace and logic. These groups point at the increasing number of Vulcans affiliated with Starfleet—and at the fact that they are sometimes required by their oaths to handle weapons or perhaps to act violently in the line of duty—and they claim that this is the beginning of the corruption of the species and a potential return to the old warlike ways that almost doomed the planet.” Spock looked, for eyes that could see, just mildly embarrassed. “For a long time my father was one of the staunchest adherents to this theory, and I understand from him that he has been called back to the planet to give evidence on its behalf. He will be a powerful proponent.”