Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  They saw to nothing. They bled their lives out green on the sand as soon as Kesh judged they were far enough out of sight of the camp, for she had heard of the Mother’s whispering while doing her own. And she and the warriors and hunters buried the bodies and shouldered their loads of food and water and headed off across the sand toward the upward-pointing finger of Phelsh’t, from which had come the wind that had killed Tes. And as they walked, Kesh thought of the reckoning that would now be required of that mountain, and the smile never left her face.

  It was a slaughter. The clan of Phelsh’t lived like any other clan, out in the open, tented over with skins to protect them from the sun. That they lived on the knees of the mountain was only a slight complication. In the heat of the day, when it was well along, silently the hunters and warriors climbed the stones and looked down on the sleeping clan: and were astonished. They were few—they were barely more in number than the clan of the Eye.

  Kesh looked down on this, and her heart was full of bitter thoughts, for if they had come this way in the Wind and taken this place, Tes might still be alive. She hefted her spear, and pointed down at the camp. It was the signal.

  The closest hunters knocked the poles down, taking the shading skins with them. The slaughter thus began in confusion—bodies rolling under collapsed hides, voices raised to shout in surprise—and then turned to terror as the hunters of the Eye leapt down and wielded their spears to terrible purpose. Surprise did much of the work: the sun did the rest, beating down from a frightfully clear sky, making eyes not shielded from it wince and water, making the Phelsh’t hunters stagger helplessly. The stones ran green, and more frightening to the Phelsh’t people than the slaughter, almost, was the sound of a woman laughing, and laughing, and laughing, through the cries and the blood.

  Three-quarters of the Phelsh’t died, but not their Oldest Mother. Her Kesh took aside, and laid her sharp flake of knife-stone against her throat and let her see her people die—let her see the hunters bind the women and the children. And to her Kesh said, “Your clan is mine now. If you resist us, I will kill you all. But if you accept us, we will teach you our art by which we see in the day; your clan will become great as ours is great. And in return for this favor, you will serve us: and we will live among you and share your water: and we will be as brothers and sisters to you.”

  And Kesh smiled.

  The Oldest Mother agreed to all she said. Kesh left her, then, and went up the mountainside, past the place where the ironwood grew in wild abundance, and the trees grew as tall as a man: but she had no eye for them. She climbed up among the rocks to the place where the cleft in the stone was deep, and the water ran down. And there she found it, the cold water, the sweet water, welling up in a hollow as deep as she was tall, as wide as her arms could span; spilling over, spilling out like light, running down the stone, whispering, singing softly as it ran. She reached down and plunged her face in, plunged in the whole upper half of her body, stood up cold and wet all over, shaking the wet hair out of her eyes. She went down so to her people, and none of them could tell, with the water running down her face, how much of it was tears.

  They took Phelsh’t for their own, did the clan of the Eye; they took the other Oldest Mother to be second Oldest to their own, but Kesh spoke for both for many years. Tribe after tribe heard of their gift, or of the well, and came to try to steal one or the other from them: but those that came were driven off with a ferocity they could hardly understand, or were taken captive and offered the same bargain that the Phelsh’t had been offered. The Eye slowly began to spread itself through the Vulcan gene pool, and the clan made it plain that other gifts were welcome too: the long sight, the ability to dream true, the touch on the shoulder that sends a foe asleep, or kills—they traded the Eye for these and grew great. The effects of this amateur eugenics program were many, down the years, and sometimes strange. It became traditional for clans to marry out their sons and daughters in exchange for children of another clan who possessed some desirable trait. Many thousands of years later, a Starfleet officer’s career was saved by the Eye; a little thing, in a long history of careful or savage changes that shifted the nature of the Vulcan species.

  But Kesh would have cared nothing for it all. Her they feared and respected for many years, never daring to question her ways. She would go off on long journeys and come back pale and haggard from weeks in the sand, and none dared ask her where she had been. When they finally found her in the well, head first, drowned, they took her as far out in the sand as they could and buried her there; and then many of the clan of the Eye felt they had peace for the first time in many years. And indeed they were better off than they had ever been—there was no denying that.

  But when T’Khut rode high, and her copper face gazed at itself in the well, some clansmen claimed they heard weeping, or terrible laughter. They were laughed at by others, of course. But nevertheless, at such times, the clan went thirsty till the moon went down….

  Enterprise: Four

  Jim sat in his cabin on theEnterprise the next morning, gazing at the small data screen in annoyance.

  FROM: Bugs

  DATE: 7611.01

  SUBJECT: Our Friends in the Federation

  From an editorial published on one of the major Vulcan information services:

  …this bloody sword hanging in our skies, this machine of war, should be ordered away immediately by our government. Yet no action is taken. Creatures who solve their problems with bloodshed rather than reason now orbit our planet without hindrance. Why is it that, though they declare their missions to be peaceful, their ships nonetheless are equipped with weapons that could crack a planet open? Can they not perceive even this most massive evidence of illogic? There can be nothing but disaster in dealing with such creatures as if they were civilized. Indeed, we have been trying to civilize them for almost two hundred years, but the result of our efforts is apparent in the skies over ta’Valsh and Seleya….

  Hmm. Yellow journalism? Or green?

  Jim fumed quietly. On one hand he was very glad to have seen the message—it certainly confirmed what T’Pau had been saying—but on the other hand, he wanted more and more to know who Bugs was.

  Not that he could find out, of course. Here was one of the places where the crew’s privacy had to be respected utterly: otherwise the whole system of the BBS lost its value. Speech here, at least, had to be free.

  And pretty free it is,Jim thought, annoyed. He kept paging through the messages. There were many agreeing with Bugs, annoyed at being considered a “bloody sword.” There were some who refused to take the quote seriously at all, and others who suspected it had been taken out of context, and one who pointed out that Bugs was probably in violation of copyright by transcribing the message from the Vulcan information service without obtaining permission. But the last reply to the message brought Jim up short:

  FROM: Llarian

  DATE: 7611.72

  SUBJECT: Re: Our Friends in the Federation

  A skillful leader does not use force.

  A skillful fighter does not feel anger.

  A skillful master does not engage the opponent.

  A skillful employer remains low.

  Even four thousand years ago they knew it: don’t believe everything you read.

  How about that,Jim thought, and gazed at the screen with interest.

  Llarian. Now who would that be? And what’s the reference? It sounds familiar somehow.Jim chewed absently on the one knuckle of his folded hands.But he or she or it has a point. “A skillful employer remains low.” Who in Vulcan has enough power and influence to get something like that into the information services?

  He started to shut the screen down, then paused for a moment and reached out to touch the communicator toggle on his desk. “Bridge. Communications.”

  “Communications, Uhura,”came her cheerful voice.“Good morning, Captain!”

  Jim rubbed his head ruefully. He still had a touch of headache from the party last nig
ht: the high gravity seemed to have that effect on him. “More or less, Nyota,” he said. “Screen dump coming in to your station. Have the computer run a check on it. I want to know which Vulcan news service it came from, the name of the author, the date, any other information you find pertinent.”

  “Aye aye, Captain. Ready.”

  Jim touched the key to instruct the desk screen to dump its contents to the Communications board. “Got it?”

  “It’s in. Will advise, Captain.”

  “Good. Kirk out.”

  He stood up, stretched, rubbed his head again. His knees still ached, too.I could always have Environmental get me a grav neutralizer, he thought…then rejected the thought immediately. Vulcans probably thought Earth people were weak and delicate enough as it was: why help the image along by showing up in a neutralizer? He would take their gravity with the best of them, and be damned to the whole lot of them.

  Still, his head hurt. He reached down to the communicator toggle on his desk. “Sickbay.”

  “Sickbay,”said a cheerful voice.“Burke here.”

  It was Lia Burke, McCoy’s head nurse since Chapel had started working full-time on her doctorate. “Lia,” Jim said, “where’s the doctor?”

  “He’s gone downplanet already, Captain. Said he was looking for something.”

  That made Jim blink: McCoy was not exactly an early riser by preference. “Did he say what?”

  “He said if you called and asked, I was to tell you he was going to buy a gross of paperweights with snowflakes inside them. Sir.”Lia sounded mildly bemused.

  She’s not alone,Jim thought. “All right. Listen, I need something for my head.”

  “High-grav syndrome,”she said immediately.“I can prescribe you a little something for that. Come on down.”

  Jim put an eyebrow up. “Nurses can prescribe?”

  There was a brief silence on the other end, and then a laugh.“Are you living in the twentieth century? Sir. Of course we can.” There was a brief, wry pause.“We can count,too.”

  “Noted,” Jim said. “I’ll be right down.”

  When he got to sickbay, Lia was scribbling something with a lightpen on a computer pad. She was a little curly-haired woman, very slender, almost always smiling; it took something particularly grave to remove that smile. “Captain,” she said, putting down the pad and picking up a hypospray. “Here you go.”

  “Am I allowed to ask you what it is?”

  “Would you ask Dr. McCoy?” she said.

  Jim considered. “Probably not.”

  She gave him a cheerful shame-on-you! sort of look. “Well, then. It’s just hemocorticovilidine; it thins your blood out a little.”

  “Thins it out?When I’m going to Vulcan? Get away from me with that thing.”

  “Too late,” she said, and it was: the spray hissed against his arm. “It simply changes the density of your blood plasma slightly, on demand from the air pressure on the outside, or lack of it. The problem on these high-grav planets is similar to high-altitude syndrome some ways.” She put the hypo away. “But you should drink extra water while you’re down there.”

  “Lieutenant,” Jim said patiently, “there’s a problem with drinking extra water on a heavy-gravity planet…. ”

  She raised her eyebrows at him. “Tell me about it. But unless you want your head to ache, you’d better do it.”

  “All right,” he said, and thanked her, and headed back to his cabin.Well, I should head down to Vulcan and stir around a little, see some people and things. Then go visit with Sarek and Amanda. They’ve only invited me to their house about ten times.

  …But paperweights? What’s Bones up to?

  Leonard Edward McCoy was a researcher at heart. The tendency had almost kept him out of active practice, when he first got his M.D.: the year of pure research he had done at Cornell had come close to spoiling him. But when it came down to the crunch, he liked people better than papers and test tubes and lectures: and he had dived into practice and never looked back.

  But every now and then a nice juicy piece of research came his way, and when it did, by God he got his teeth into it and didn’t let go until he was satisfied with the answers. And a nice one had fallen right in his lap yesterday. It had that perfect feeling about it, the kind of feeling he had when as a kid he would be out in the north forty and find a big flat rock that heknew had lots of bugs under it.

  It was Shath that did it to him. Not that the son wasn’t just the most irritating thing he had come across in a long time: but the man’s body language was wrong, completely wrong. On seeing himself and Kirk, the guy had actually had to leave the room for many minutes to regain his composure. It would have been unusual in a human: it was positively shocking in a Vulcan. And the reaction was not to him, McCoy felt certain, but to Kirk.

  He had considered going up to the consulate and demanding to see the man again, fabricating some story about a change in schedule or something, to talk to him a bit longer and make sure of that aversion reaction, or the lack of it. But then Bones considered that it would probably be wasted effort: likely enough Shath would be able to cover up the effect this time. No, McCoy would get his information in other ways.

  He spent a little time in his cabin that morning calling up detailed maps of shi’Kahr, the little city nearest the Science Academy, and found what he wanted—the electronic equivalent of the public library. He could have gotten into it from the ship, via downlink from the main computers, but he had no desire to attract quite that much attention. Discreet inquiry was what he wanted, not an electronic snatch-and-run mission that might leave the librarians feeling annoyed.

  He then indulged himself in a little bit of subterfuge and went rummaging in the packages he had brought home from his shopping trip yesterday.A word or two in Spock’s ear was a good idea, he thought, as he took out the somber tunic and breeches and boots he had picked up. They were all in a soft tan beige color, very inconspicuous, and Spock had told him that the cut was such as a student or scientist might wear for either work or relaxation. McCoy slipped the clothes on, tapped one of his closet doors into reflectivity, and turned from side to side to admire himself. He really did look rather good: the slight cape hanging from the shoulders somehow made him look about ten pounds lighter, which he didn’t mind at all. And this suit of clothes would definitely attract less attention than a Starfleet uniform. Most people knew his face best in conjunction with his uniform anyway. But in this getup he was just one more Terran on Vulcan, out for a day’s research—there were quite a few Earth people working at the Science Academy.

  He stopped in to check sickbay, found everything well, and then beamed down to the streets of shi’Kahr. It was just past dawn there, and the town was getting lively: the very early hours, before things got too hot even for the Vulcans’ liking, were when much business and marketing were done. Depending on the nature of one’s work, one might start at dawn, work through till noonish, break till three for a siesta, and then start up again and not leave work till well after dark.Or, he thought as he strolled through the streets,being Vulcans, they might just work for four days without stopping, and then take a day off, and then —back to it. The stamina of these people! You have to admire it—and wish you could have some yourself….

  The town reminded him, in some ways, of some university towns he had been to in upstate New York: but there was also a strange resemblance to the roofed arcades of Berne in Switzerland—thick stone walls with wide arches cut in them, sheltering the windows and doorways of shops and houses. In places the arcades were two-tiered, and most of them were of a handsome golden stone with a wide grainy texture: McCoy suspected it was a very effective insulator. The pathways under the arcades were wide, and there was room to stroll comfortably, sheltered from the sun and wind, and look out through the arches at the little parks and plazas one passed. The Vulcans seemed to be great ones for tiny parks, each one always with its fountain; and never the same kind twice. Little whispering waterfalls, fine misty s
prays, strange carved beasts with water pouring out of them, once even an ancient millstone with water bubbling up out of the hole in the middle, he saw them all on his way to the library.

  This turned out to be a noble building of the same golden stone as most of the rest of the town, but this one had a portico borne up on tall smooth pillars, all of which had the slightest swelling at their centers. The effect was actually to make them look straighter than if they had been built perfectly straight. The trick was one with which McCoy was familiar from ancient Greek architecture, and he smiled at the familiarity as he passed into the shade of the portico and into the library.

  Inside everything was utterly modern—computer carrels and voice accesses were everywhere. The floor looked like the same golden stone as the walls, but McCoy was fascinated to find that it appeared to have been treated with something that made it spongy-soft: sound fell dead in it. He nodded a greeting to the librarian at the front desk and headed on past him toward the carrels.

  He did not trust his typing in Vulcan. He stopped by one of the keyboard carrels and peered at the keying area: it had more keys and levers and switches than he wanted to see, so he passed on to a voice-activated carrel and sat down. Softly he cleared his throat, praying that his accent wouldn’t be too outrageous for the machine to understand.

  “General query,” he said in Vulcan.

  “Acknowledged,” said the machine. Bones winced. Its accent was the Vulcan equivalent of BBC Standard Received: pure, cultured, and somewhat intimidating.

  “Public events,” McCoy said. “Cross-index to registry.Koon-ut-kalifi. Familial name uncertain. One participant for cross-index: Spock cha’Sarek. Go.”