by Diane Duane
Its self-diagnostics satisfied with its hold on the rock, the core drill started up: he could feel the vibration of it through the thrusterpack’s framework. Pekev sighed a little, looked over his shoulder atRasha. She’s getting old, he thought. It was a sad sort of thing to say about a ship that you had loved from when you first moved into it as a child. But there it was: Pekev was almost fifty, now, and so was the ship, and she was near the end of her effective life. Unfortunately, the family didn’t have the money to buy another one.
The drill whined through the framework. Pekev breathed out. There had been a time, long ago—he could barely remember it—when there had been enough of everything: whenRasha was only one of seven ships, a small but respectable fleet, and the family had been doing well. They had been numerous, then. The biggest of the clan ships,Urekh andGelevesh, had held a hundred people each. He had some faint far memory ofGelevesh with its huge shining corridors. He could hardly have been more than a babe in arms then: now, from looking at the old specs, he knew that the ship had not been the vast cavernous thing he remembered. But nonetheless it was enough to keep a subclan of a hundred people comfortable and well for a year’s mining in space.
But they were all gone, now: all of them butRasha. Urekh had been caught on the ground and blown to dust in the five years’ war between the Teleiw and the Nashih, andGelevesh had been taken by the Nashih as a prize of war and recommissioned as a scoutship or somesuch. Pekev’s father still muttered threats of disembowelment at the memory of the petty little voucher the Nashih had given him as they turned him and the family out: “payment,” they said, “compensation”—but they sneered at him as they said it. No other ship of the clan was big enough to take them all:Gelevesh ’s original complement, whole subfamilies, were forced to scatter across the planet and find work on the ground or in someone else’s ship—a bitter thing. And the clan head, Pekev’s father, was forced to move from ship to ship of the dwindling fleet—for one after one they had to be sold, to service the still huge debt owed for the building ofGelevesh. Finally there was nothing left butRasha, meant for a long-range seven-person ship and now holding eleven.
The core drill stopped. Pekev checked the sensors to make sure the drill had completed its punch and not simply aborted—though sometimes an abort was good news: sometimes it meant diamond—and that was what the family had always mined for. Let others handle the large mining operations like nickel-iron. Indeed, they had to let others do it. Not even at its most successful had the family had capital enough to buy a ship of the size needed to handle the really big rocks, which you had to handle to make the enterprise pay off. But diamond, especially the industrial kind, was plentiful enough in asteroids to pull in a fairly respectable income…at least, plentiful enough to keep a small ship running. And sometimes, where there was industrial diamond, there was gemstone as well. Sometimes. But that was mostly a dream….
He touched controls on the thrusterpack, and the core came back out of the drill-head. Pekev pocketed it and touched more controls: with small thunking vibrations that he felt through the framework, the pack turned itself loose of the rock and drifted gently toward him. In instant reaction he pushed it, shoving it and himself away at the same time—the thing had more inertia than he had, and could push fairly hard if you didn’t take care. He had seen his father Nomikh pinned against theKasha ’s hull more than once by it: a mistake that could kill under the wrong circumstances. It was a shocking mistake for his father to make…but his father was not quite what he had been anymore.
The leak sighed away against his leg. There was only one more rock to do. Pekev maneuvered himself around the framework, hit the rear controls for the forward thrusters, checked his sensors for the radio beacon he had put on the last rock waiting for him, and programmed the pack for a three-second burst. Little pencils of blue chemical fire stood out from the edges of the framework in four places, then went out. Pekev hung on to the framework, and it and he began to drift away through the dark.
He never once looked at the stars.
The Vulcan historians’ name for the period was always the Age of Expansion. Only much later did it begin to be referred to as “the pre-Reformation” period. It was the time in which many of the petty kingdoms of the old world had been unified—mostly against their will. This process had, of course, been going on for a long time. There are historians who will point out that from the time of Earth’s Bronze Age, around 10,000 B.C., and the fall of the Spartans at Thermopylae, there was only one period of ten standard years during which as much as ten percent of Vulcan wasnot at some kind of war, economic or political. But in the so-called Age of Expansion, the process of “unification” sped up considerably.
It was actually consolidation, rather than unification: larger territories and tribes swallowing smaller ones, either by annexation or political blackmail. Vulcan technology, especially weapons technology, was becoming more and more advanced. Atomics had been achieved, were used a few times with results similar to those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Earth…but the result was not the eventual disarmaments that Earth achieved. Instead, the Vulcans retailored their atomic weapons to be less “dirty”—neutron bombs were an early “happy” solution to the problem—and there was also much research into chemicals, and artificial amplifications of such psi talents as the killing gift. The latter was refined until it could strike down thousands at a distance of thousands of miles. It usually also killed the adept, but since most of those with this talent were using it under threat of harm to their families, it did nothing to stop the gift, or the governments who bred for it.
Nor were conventional weapons abandoned: guns and bombs and particle weapons of all kinds continued to proliferate in endless variety. And more to the point, the angers of the annexed, and the outrage of the great nations that the annexed should attempt to resist their will, proliferated as well, until nearly the whole planet was a patchwork of ancient grudges, constantly being avenged on the “wrongdoers”—and countervengeances were taken, endlessly. It perhaps says more about the time than anything else that the Vulcan language included no less than severalthousand words for terrorism and its applications, each precisely describing or defining a different kind of violence as to degree or type.
The terrorism spread into space, but not as quickly as it might have, since Vulcan merchant ships by tradition were never armed, and military ones, oddly enough, had not yet been conceived of. (Earth historians who find this astonishing should also remember that, until fairly late in its history, Vulcan did not have the concept of the standing army…simply because for thousands of years, there were not the resources to support such a thing. There was no way to feed such a monster, or give it water, and usually nowhere to keep it. Technology changed this, much later…but mercifully, it did so very late.) Space stayed peaceful for a while, and many people who were able to, chose to live there full time, rather than on the turbulent surface of the planet.
Their only mistake was in believing that they had left the warfare behind them.
When Pekev came in and unsuited, he found his father where he usually found him—sitting at the common-room table, his head in his hands, looking at a computerpad that lay before him, with the ship’s accounts on it. There were times when Pekev wondered whether his father actually looked at the numbers there, or was merely trying to be awake, but at the same time trying not to think about anything, while seeming to.If that’s so, I wish he wouldn’t, he thought.He ought to go hide in the nets like Arieth. At least we wouldn’t have to stare at him all day.
Nomikh raised his head and looked at Pekev when he heard the sounds of the spacesuit seals being undone. “How did it go?” he said. It was what he always said.
Pekev pulled the core samples out of his pocket and tossed them, one by one, to his father, who caught them out of the air expertly enough and peered at them. Even by naked eye, two of them had the faint dark sparkle that spoke of enough industrial diamond content to make them worthwhile. “Nothing big
,” he said softly. His voice was very deep.
“Nothing big, Father,” said Pekev, and breathed out. Sooner or later that question always came out.Anything big? His father had been looking for the big one, the rock of the gods, ever since Mother had died. Before that, he had not cared about such a thing…or if he had, he would have given it to his mother. But Mother was dead forty years, now.It must be terrible. He thinks he should have been rich forty years ago. Instead, he’s spent forty years breaking even, just barely….
“Going to get them in tonight?” his father said. It was just sunset, by ship’s time.
Pekev didn’t look at his father. “It’s late,” he said.
“Early yet,” said his father. “You could get one of them in before you go to couch.”
“Father,” Pekev said, “I’msehlat -weary, and my suit has a leak in it.”
“Carelessness,” his father said, and his voice began to scale up. “Carelessness! Do you think these things can be dug out of the sand? What do you take me for, a man with hundred-nakhpieces coming out of his pockets? I’ve told you again and again, you have to take better care of the equipment! We can’t afford to waste—we don’t haveanything to waste! Not air, not water, not suits, not—”
Pekev shut him out as best he could and kept on unsuiting. There were few days when he did not hear a variant on this lecture. He was rather hoping he might have been spared it today, but apparently there was no chance of that. “And you’re getting as lazy as your sister, you won’t even go out for one more run before you eat your meal, not that you’ve earned it—”
Pekev was much tempted to take the leaky seal between his hands and pull it right apart, so that he would not be able to go out until the adhesive that would be needed to patch it had cured, and that would take a couple of days. But he resisted the temptation, though the flexfabric was smooth under his fingers and it would have been easy enough to do. “Not that you’ve earned your food for the last moonaround, let alone this week, the hours you’ve been working, or not working. When I was your age—”
Pekev went off down the cramped little corridor, into the workshop area, and slung his suit over the worktable, then spent a moment looking up at the hanging board for the electric sealing tool he needed. His father’s voice was diminished, but there was no escaping it. That was always the problem: on a ship this small, there was no way for anyone to escape from anyone else—except perhaps in Alieth’s manner, in the telepathic networks. Pekev was not sure he approved of that method at all: and Alieth’s tightbeam charges were a constant drain on the ship’s income. But at least it kept her out of the way when she had no rock to work on….
Pekev found the sealer, thumbed it on, and rustled the suit around until the seal was properly exposed, then ran the sealer down it. His father was still going on about the hours he had worked when he was a boy. To hear him tell it, he had builtGelevesh with his own hands, in his spare time, after wrestling asteroids into the ship he was working with his bare hands, and nothing but a tank and a tube to breathe from.I wonder if other people have this problem with their fathers, he thought.
Along the bond in his mind, she said,I did with mine. But yours is worse, I think, I almost pushed him out the airlock in his singlet this morning.
Beloved,Pekev said, and looked over his shoulder, feeling the nearness of her. T’Vei came in from the coreside workshop, holding an assay dish in her hands. It was full of what remains after an asteroid has been crushed and the good parts extracted: in this case, nearly a threeweight of granular black diamond, the crystals very perfectly separated, and large.
“There’s more where that came from,” she said, and smiled at him. “Nearly three hundred times as much.”
“From that wretched little rock this morning? You are a genius!”
She tilted her head at him. “Possibly. I suspected the presence of a couple more pockets than the ultrasound showed. I was right.”
“That’s our next week’s fuel paid for, then. I was beginning to worry.”
“With me around?” she said lightly, and went off to show the diamonds to their father.
Pekev shook his head and went back to the sealing. T’Vei was the one who handled the actual “dismantling” of an asteroid. It was delicate work, though one might not have thought so: many people thought that all you had to do was crush the thing and take the diamonds out. But crush it how? Do so incautiously, and if there were any gem-quality stones inside, they might be destroyed: even the value of the industrial diamonds could be destroyed if too many of them were fractured or powdered. There were machines of all sizes in the coreside lab for the handling of rocks—from huge magnetically driven hammers to tiny things that took off no more than a flake at a time—but it took a specialist’s sense for how a stone would fracture, and what was inside it, to use the tools effectively. T’Vei was the specialist, though Pekev would never have suspected she would become so expert, when they were bonded. It was in fact something of a joke in the family—though not in her hearing—for T’Vei had been bonded into the house to pay off a debt that House Balev owed Pekev’s father. Pekev didn’t care. Their love was one of the only truly good things in his life, and that she was as good at processing as she was only made things easier.
He heard his father’s tirade break off short for the moment, heard T’Vei’s sweet voice murmuring to him about payload percentage and bulk discounts. “Well,” his father said, “if your husband were as good at what he does as you are, we might become something again, this family might, but he won’t even go out and bring in one more rock before he settles down to his evening of sloth—”
She came back in with the assay dish, and her eyes were annoyed, but there was also pity showing in them.He’s not well, my love, she said along the bond.You know how it is with him when these moods strike. He’s been thinking about how much he misses Yiluv, that’s all, and when he’s like this, the sun would look black to him. I’m done up there: let me just get into my suit and I’ll go in and fetch that last one into close orbit.
“No,” Pekev said, wearily, though he really didn’t want to, “I’ll do it.”
No, truly,she said.You’re tired.
“Not that tired,” he said. He turned the sealer off, checked the seal to be sure it was tight, and started to put the suit on again.One more won’t kill me, he said in the bond.You be off. We’ll bring it in ahead of the others and show it to him to make him happy. Maybe that’ll buy us a night’s peace.
She smiled at him and went back to the corelab.
Pekev swore softly, trying to keep it out of the bond, and headed for the airlock again.
Exotic music fills her ears: the sound of deep trumpets and martial gongs. Their sound lures her along through the landscape to one of the “experience gates.” She has not tried one of these for a long time. She allows herself to drift through it, borne along on the music.
Viewpoint dissolves into day under Vulcan’s burning sky. Sand stretches out everywhere: and far in the distance a point of stone rears up, terrible, a dark shape in the bright day. Viewpoint pushes in on it. It is Mount Seleya, and the awful stair carved up it, ten thousand steps cut around and through the ancient weathered stone. Effortlessly she drifts with the viewpoint up those stairs, sees the great desert spreading out below her, the Forge, a place of old dread, where powers move that men do not understand, and there are hints of great incomprehensible voices speaking secrets in whispers under the sand. But no matter for that. She goes to her destiny at last, to find her fate.
They are there waiting for her, all of them, robed and solemn: the priests and priestesses of the secret arts of the mind. As she approaches she drifts no longer: she is a body, has a body, that of a young woman, armed and armored. But she has no sword, and a great anger burns in her heart.
I have come for what you owe me,she says. She has no idea from where the words come to her, but she speaks them as if they are her own, and the anger in them her own as well.
The
chief priestess stands forth and raises her empty hands.We have it not, she says.The evil one, the mind that resists, has taken it from us. You must win it yourself.
This was not in the pact,she says, and steps forward wrathfully.
The chief priestess looks at her coolly and moves not an inch.You speak true. And so we give you something that was not in the pact as well. Know then the name of the sword: that this is indeed Nak’meth the Great, forged of these sands by the Mastersmith, three thousand years agone, and with a virtue set on it that one who holds it shall achieve their dream and their right. And know too, the priestess says, paying no attention to her gasp,that your right is a mighty one, for you are no peasant’s child, as you were told, but castoff child of the Lady of Yiliw, and heir to all the lands of Yiliw, which now lie under the evil one’s dominion. Go, then, and take the sword, and take back also what is your own —
“Arieth,” someone said in her ear, “we need you.”
She opened her eyes. She hated opening her eyes.
Her room. Her tiny room, after all that space, after the fresh hot smell of the sand, the scorch of the sun beating down. Her bed, her chair, her clothes. A little box, a tomb such as one of the ancient kings would have been embarrassed to use to bury his petaalth in.
She got up angrily, pulling the commlink away from the neural contact at the back of her neck. It was T’Vei’s voice, the hateful thing. She had her Pekev; why couldn’t she leave other people alone? Hadn’t Arieth been up all this morning doing assay on cores while T’Vei was slugging abed? Useless, bought-in—
