Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  “Ah,” K’s’t’lk said, “the old dichotomy problem. Don’t you think that one or the other of those ‘lives,’ physical reality or theoretical unreality, might sometimes be senior to the other? More valid, shall we say?”

  “Indeed not,” said the Vulcan. “It is a classic error in thinking, particularly, if I may say it, of the human sort. The illusory or internally subjective nature of physical existence is perhaps its most important and revealing characteristic. When one remembers that, on most levels of consideration, one does not exist, such matters as the question before us today assume their properaaaaaaaiigh!”

  The gentleman had been so busy expounding on the illusory nature of matter that he had never noticed K’s’t’lk come softly down from the stage and walk down the aisle next to which he was standing. As for the rest of it—even a Vulcan will react when a silicon-based life form bites him in the leg.

  “Fascinating,” K’s’t’lk said. “For someone whom on most levels of consideration doesn’t exist, you scream with great enthusiasm. And Iheard you, too. Better have that looked into.”

  Jim’s eyes were wide as he glanced at Spock. “Is that kind of thing allowed?”

  “In the more formal forms of the debate,” Spock said, “everything is allowed up to ritual duels to the death.”

  “Remind me not to get into a fight with anybody here about science,” McCoy muttered.

  “Anything else?” K’s’t’lk said, as she resumed the stage. There was no response. “Now like the humans of Earth, I do come of a brash young race. We’ve only had space travel for, oh, about two thousand years. But speaking for myself, I throw in my lot with the Terrans. Their unpredictability and their ability to look ‘sideways’ and see through a problem makes them the perfect partners in the sciences; and for those who would exclude them because of youth or strangeness, I can only say that you should enjoy your universe…because we and they will someday be enjoying others, and we’ll miss you. I thank you, one and all.”

  There was some muted applause. K’s’t’lk got off the stage and walked up the aisle past them. As she went by McCoy, Jim could hear her chiming very softly, “…showedhim. Get all Zen withme …”

  Two more speakers followed—an elderly Vulcan woman and a handsome young Tellarite—and their statements were dry and calm, not interrupted as K’s’t’lk’s had been. Jim wondered whether this was because they were both supporting the secession, on the grounds of inequities of Federation funding to non-Terran research projects on Vulcan and elsewhere. Then there was a break for the noon heat: the debating would resume three hours later.

  “Is it all going to be this exciting, I wonder?” McCoy said as they headed out to see about some lunch.

  “I suspect it’ll heat up a little when we go on,” Jim said. “Spock, can you suggest somewhere around here?”

  “Yes,” he said; “theNakh’lanta in the Old City is very good indeed. I will give you the coordinates. But I will not be with you.”

  McCoy looked at him with concern. “Where are you going?”

  Spock looked amused, but there was something a little hollow about it. “I think you would say,” he said, “ ‘I need to talk to my ex.’ ”

  Finding her proved to be no particular problem, especially when Spock checked the sign-in list at the Hall of Voices and found that she was not there. Her commcode was a matter of public record: it was listed to a semirural community nearly a quarter of the way around the planet. He called theEnterprise and had them beam him over.

  The house was big, bigger than his father’s. More than that: it was ostentatious. It was built in one of the styles that had been popular just before Vulcan joined the Federation—partly buried underground, so that the landscape could be enjoyed with as little hindrance as possible. The gardens around it were full of exotics, many of them imports from other planets—tender plants that required an exorbitant amount of water to keep. Taken together as a whole, house and grounds said loudly to every passerby that the one who owned this place had all the money they needed, and few wants.

  Spock walked to the front entrance and touched the annunciator. “Yes?” said a voice.

  Very cool, that voice. Hers. He hesitated. “Spock,” he said at last.

  For nearly two minutes nothing happened: no reply, no movement inside that he could hear. He was about to turn away from the door—the “silent” response was a proper one to the privacy codes implicit in the Rules of Silence. But then the door opened.

  It was a cliché, and he knew it; but T’Pring was almost exactly as he had last seen her—cool, slender, tall, extremely beautiful. He studied her face for any sign of the years since their ceremony at Marriage and Challenge. There was none. The beautifully tilted eyes examined him too.

  “I did not think you would come,” she said.

  “Explain.”

  “I did not think you would have the courage,” she said. “Come in, if you like.”

  He followed her into the entry hall, feeling intensely uncomfortable. “May I offer you refreshment?”

  “Yes,” he said, but only because it was incredibly rude to refuse. One thing, though, was certain: he was not going to ask for water.

  T’Pring went off and brought two flasks of fruit juice. Spock saluted her with the glass, in the correct fashion, and drank it all off in a draft—a gesture that would be read as that of a person on business, or one who had no intention to spend a long time under the other’s roof.

  “Please sit down,” she said to him, sitting down herself.

  “Very well. I have come to ask you,” he said, putting the glass down, “what your involvement is in the debates presently going on.”

  “I caused them,” she said. “Surely your logic has led you that far, unless the humans have completely addled your wits.”

  “My logic led me that far,” Spock said. He was not going to give her openings for baiting him or respond to hers.

  “Stonn died,” she said.

  “I heard. I grieve with you.” It was not quite a lie.

  She sat quite still and erect on the bench across from him, her hands folded in her lap, meeting his gaze without flinching. “You will have gathered something of what was going on, then. When he took me after the Challenge, after you ‘defeated’ your Captain and released me, we lived well enough together for a time. But I was discontented. The matter had not gone as it should have, at theKoon-ut-kalifi. It did not go as I had planned.” This was delivered in utter coolness of expression, but T’Pring’s voice had something of the very small child about it: a balked child, angry because it did not get the sweet it wanted. “Stonn grew discontented himself, thinking that perhaps I desired you again, or some other. He attempted to induceplak tow in himself prematurely, to make me desire him.” Spock nodded: there were drugs that could be used for this. They were risky, but some felt it worth the risk. There were some Vulcans who felt that no joining was real unless it happened in the blood-madness.

  “He died of a hormonal imbalance, a form of ‘endoadrenal storm,’ ” T’Pring said. “I was not entirely displeased. He had made me mistress of his estates, and though they were small, they satisfied my needs. But then as time passed, I came to realize that once again you had robbed me, you and your captain: it was fear of your desire that had made Stonn take the drugs. Once again I did not have my desire, and once again it was your fault.”

  Spock held quite still.How shall I say what I am thinking? She cannot be entirely blameless in this —but he held his peace.

  “So I decided to take from you such things as you had taken from me,” she said: “your future life, your captain, and anything else I could manage that would cause you such pain as you have caused me. It would beashv’cezh, and my satisfaction would be great.”

  Spock nodded, numb.Ashv’cezh was literally revenge-worse-than-death: death would seem uncomplicated and pleasant next to the situation that this kind of revenge implied.

  “I looked about me,” she said, quite calmly,
“and found that there were many of our people, more than I had ever suspected, who feared the Federation, and especially against Earth. It seemed to me that my weapon lay ready to my hand. So I began first to invest the proceeds of Stonn’s estate with some care. I did very well, and made a great deal of money in the interstellar commodities markets.

  “Then,” she said, “I began making substantial donations to various small organizations and publications. You will have noticed them to have come to me so quickly. Through them, I found such other Vulcans as were willing to say the things about Earth people as make Vulcans angriest against them: appeals to logic, and to emotion as well, for some of us still have emotion.” Hardly a muscle of her face moved as she said it. “I took my time: it was worth taking. Slowly a groundswell of opinion started to build up: it fed on itself—for people will say things that they hear others say, whether they truly believe them or not. And if they say them often enough, they will come to believe them anyway. I used other weapons, as well. I bribed some government officials, who had found their posts increasingly diminished by the influence of Terrans on Vulcan. I suborned various media and data network personnel to add emphases to certain stories and downplay others. And slowly the public came to perceive a problem with Terra, and slowly the government came to feel the public’s unease, and they grew uneasy themselves, fearing for their positions. When it became plain that what the electorate wanted was a chance to secede from the Federation, the government complied quickly enough.”

  She smiled, just a little. It was a wintry look. “And so we find ourselves where we are today. If all goes well, the vote will be taken quite soon, and we will be out of the Federation: and it will be forever beyond your power to take anything from me again, for you will either stay here and lose your starship and your captain—without which you are nothing—or you will go into exile with him, and your father and mother will become exiles as well, and I shall be well avenged indeed.”

  It was almost a minute before he could speak. Then all he could say was what he had said before:

  “Flawlessly logical.”

  “I thank you,” she said. “Is there anything else I can tell you?”

  Spock shook his head.

  “Then I will ask you to leave,” she said. “I have some calls to make. I think perhaps you will see me once more, before the end; I shall come to the Hall of Voices to watch you and your captain plead for leniency for Terra. I shall find it most amusing.”

  “I dare say you shall,” Spock said, and got up.

  She saw him to the door.

  “Farewell, Spock,” she said.

  “Live long,” he said—and the rest stuck in his throat.

  He left the house, walked out to the quiet, dusty road, and called theEnterprise: and beamed up, feeling, for the first time in his adult life, faintly sick to his stomach, for a reason that had nothing to do with McCoy’s potions.

  Vulcan: Five

  Darkness, and stars. In the great silence, nothing moves: or at least nothing seems to, in this old emptiness, except the shadows of superstructures as the ship turns toward the distant Sun or away from it. Peacefully it slips through the long night, the slender dark hull, spinning as it goes; silently it drifts past, the picture of peace.

  Fighting continued in ta’Valsh for the eighteenth day as the Mahn’heh Protectorate defied the claims of neighboring Lalirh for debated territory in the Tekeh area.An image, in her mind, of running figures, a bolt of blue fire being shot out of a smoke-stained window, the sound of glass shattering: and dirt stained green by the body that lay on it, one arm cauterized away, the head half-missing from someone’s explosive charge. A whole street of what might once have been pleasant suburban houses, now burnt, their windows blown out, all the ground before them blasted and scorched, pavings upturned or cracked asunder.Representatives for the Lords of Mahn’heh and the King of Lahirh said today in statements to the nets that there were no plans for talks at this time. Images of well-fed men and women reading their statements in quiet rooms full of newspeople.The Lords of Mahn’heh claim that the Tekeh area was settled in 164330 by people of their lordship and have been demanding the immediate cession of the territory and payment of reparations, including as an additional reparation the hostage-exchange of one of the sons of the Lahirhi King. The Lahirhi deny these charges and have stated in the past that any further movement against them by the Mahn’heh may cause a nuclear exchange like that with which they brought down the government of neighboring Ovek two decades ago. An image of craters, nothing but craters—a stretch of land, perhaps farmed once to judge by the rural road running through it, now devastated by low-yield packed neutron charges.

  The hostilities between Duveh and the Lassirihen provinces show some signs of settlement, but a minor terror and kidnapping guild has threatened to destroy both ruling houses if their demands for a part in the negotiations are not met within a tenday.Images of richly robed people coming with great gravity down the front stair of a shattered, bombed-out palace, much patched and repaired.The Night Alliance, an offshoot of the old Mastercraft, now disbanded since the death of its leader T’Meheh in a hovercar accident, has demanded marriage into both the Duveh and the Lassiriheh royal houses, and bride- or groom-payments in excess of five million nakh—

  She sighed and let her mind drift away from the images. They bored her. It seemed there was nothing else on the news these days but all the fighting at home. At least there was peace here.

  Alieth shut her eyes and saw the image again of the battered palace, while the inreader went on about divisions of lands and money. She sighed again and did the change in her mind that took her into one of the entertainment channels, changed again for first the hall, then the room she desired. Idly she scanned around for mind-IDs. No one she knew was around, not even Mishih, who was usually in the net whenever he was awake. Alieth supposed that it was night where he was, wherever that might be. She seemed to remember he was somewhere up near one of the poles—Retakh, that was it, a frightful place to live, out in the middle of nowhere.

  Rather like here, actually: but at least here, no one was likely to drop a selective chemical bomb on you suddenly in aid of a herdbeast raid.

  Alieth scanned around. Scanning was what one called it, though what it looked and felt like was an effortless drifting through a geometrical landscape, filled with vague solid-geometry shapes that contained messages. Their outsides were tagged with ID information, so that by brushing up against one, you could get a feel of the mode of the mind that had sent it: angry, affable, interested, informational. If you were interested, you reached in and grasped the message: perhaps added to it. She brushed a few as she passed them, found nothing that interested her. Increasingly she had no interest in touching the frozen messages, only the live minds. Hanesh complained about this, but then Hanesh complained about everything, and he hated the nets.

  I might as well come out,she thought. There was no telling what was going on in the ship at this point; though it was true that Pekev was supposed to be coming back at this point, from that survey. But Alieth was sure that there would be nothing interesting. There had not been anything interesting for months.

  That was the problem.

  Ah,she thought,why come out? And she sank back into the net, changing rooms, and went looking for someone to talk to. Someone who breathed real air, who walked on the world, someone who might have a bomb dropped on them at any moment. Alieth drifted gently through the colored landscape, under a firefly sun, and wished there was some other state of mind than peace or war….

  Pekev swore softly in the spacesuit. There was a soft hiss inside it that was not the air processing system, and a whisper of outgoing breeze tickling his skin, low down, near the leg seam. It had to be leaking again.I don’t need this, he thought, but there was nothing he could do at the moment. It would cost much more than a suit’s worth of air to get back in the ship, repair the leak, and get back out again: and his father would not be pleased. There would be viol
ence at mainmeal again.

  Then again,he thought,when was my father last pleased at anything? He wobbled a little in the hard cold starlight as he wrestled with the specific gravity apparatus he had attached to the rock.

  It was not a particularly large asteroid, but theoretically they did not have to be large to be good, and this one had the right look: that sootiness about the outer shell, or the hard glassy glint, that spoke of a high carbon content. You learned to recognize it after a while. It took time: the carbon-matrix asteroids were not all that common—they comprised only about a tenth of a percent of all asteroids—and the iron and nickel ones, so much commoner, were useless for the family’s purposes.

  The spec-grav apparatus was big and unwieldy. It had to be: it carried its own small thrusterpack, suitable either for maneuvering an asteroid close to the ship—and even the smallest of them were fairly massive—or for holding the rock stable while the pack’s core drill drove itself into the asteroid and took a sample. It was all sampling today, for Pekev. Yesterday he had spent some eighteen or twenty hours with the long-range pack on, rounding up several promising-looking rocks: the usual routine—scan, lock on, spend an hour or two or three in transit, find the rock and examine it; if it was any good, bring it home. Or near home, at least—match its intrinsic velocity with the ship’s (often another two hours’ brutal work with the thrusterpack), make sure its course was stable, and then go out again after the next one. Pekev could still feel the ache in his back from the insistent push of the thruster against his mass, and his leg was still bothering him where the first rock, the one that had since turned out to be worthless, had pinned him briefly against the thruster—a tiny miscalculation of thrust, but one that he was lucky hadn’t killed him. Probably that was where the seam leak had come from.

  But today was easier: the pack used for the core samples was a little more tractable, not having as heavy a framework and as much mass as the big long-range rock mover. All Pekev had to do today was go from one rock to another, sample them all, and take the samples back for analysis. That would take him another few hours: if he was quick about it, he could get to sleep early. Then tomorrow, back out with the long-range again. It was his routine. Sometimes he thought it would drive him crazy: sometimes he thought it was the only thing that kept him sane. At least it was quiet, when he was out here and the family was back there.