Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  Spock stared at Jim, and Jim at Spock, and both of them at McCoy. He leaned back, looking casual.

  Sarek looked stunned. “Doctor, I should want to see substantiation of such claims before I or my government could comment.”

  “Sir,” McCoy said, “I await your convenience.”

  And the room went mad.

  Vulcan: Six

  He was born the night the da’Nikhirch was born, the Eye of Fire: the sudden star that appeared in the Vulcan sky, blazing, looking over T’Khut’s shoulder. T’Leia, his mother, did not notice the star. She had her work cut out for her, for her child was overdue, and very large. In fact, she quiteliterally had her work cut out for her: the child was delivered by the technique known on Earth as caesarean section. The pun exists in Vulcan as well as in Anglish, and she was teased gently about it before the delivery, and afterward, when they placed the baby in her arms…. Also born that night were two bush wars and the final attack on one nation’s central city by another. T’Leia paid little attention to those, either.

  There was nothing whatsoever unusual about Surak as a child. He teethed at the usual time, ate normally, learned to speak and write and read at the normal rate: he clamored for toy swords and guns at the same time other children did (and as often happens, right after he saw a particularly nice one that another child had). His schooling was uneventful: he did well enough at all his subjects (though there are records that suggest he did not do as well at math, which must have been the despair of his mother, one of the most prominent chemists and mathematicians on the planet). He was popular, made friendships easily, and many of those friendships remained in force until the end of his life. His home life was apparently a model of normalcy: T’Leia his mother, and his father Stef, seem to have cherished him and one another with astonishing steadfastness. When Surak had completed his schooling, his father invited him into his business—a consultancy which served several of the large corporations in de’Khriv, which had become the chief city of the Lhai nation. Surak was glad to join his father, and for years, until he was forty-six, they worked together amicably and made the business a success.

  And then something happened.

  He was working late. It often happened, and Surak was not bothered by it: he considered late working hours one of the things that his people’s stamina had been designed for. He was deep in a costing exercise for one of the psi-tech companies, which had found a way to produce mindchange adepts on the assembly line, by cloning brain and other neural tissue and administering various processed byproducts of the cloned tissue to people who had not actually been bred to the trait. It was going to be very expensive—the recruitment of the sources of the clone material, particularly so—but Surak was working busily at it, certain that the company very much wanted the technique. Mindchange was popular—having your enemy, or your friend, suddenly change his mind about something important to you, was a great advantage. But it was very much a seller’s market at the time: trained adepts were expensive to hire, and often too demanding. The company wanted to be able to put mindchangers on staff and wanted to be free to fire them without fuss if they got out of hand. Surak had wondered, at first, why the company didn’t simply have one mindchanger change the mind of another one who had become a problem. But the mindchangers themselves were not vulnerable to the talent.

  He sat there in the office, tapping at the computer as he wrung the cost analyses out of it, adding variables, removing the more unlikely ones, inserting market projections and probable effects on other affiliated firms of the company. Finally he kicked the computer into report mode and sat back, sighing, leaning back in his chair.

  He was a striking figure, even then, so young: very much of the typical “Vulcan” somatype, tall and lean and dark haired, with an unusually delicate face for the raw-boned body, and deepset eyes. He looked around and saw that the office had darkened around him while he was busy: the big place, all done in charcoal and black, to his father’s tastes, was shadowy, and outside the wall-to-ceiling glass windows, he could see T’Khut coming hugely up, her phase at the half, shedding ruddy light over the sand of the garden outside. It was a handsome office, and like the rest of the house, reflected the firm’s success. Surak stretched, enjoying the sight of the place, the thought of himself inside it, working hard, helping make it work. Someday it would be his, of course, but he didn’t think of that: he enjoyed working with his father, enjoyed the teamwork and the laughter, and even the occasional argument, that always bound them together more closely afterward.

  The computer sat silently doing its thinking, and Surak reached out to a control for one of the wall screens, took it out of data display mode, and flicked it to the one of the information channels that showed nothing but news. They were in the middle of a general news roundup, the one that usually came before the update on the hour. He left the picture on and killed the sound and got up to open the window-doors to the warm wind off the sand, then watched the screen idly while walking around the room to work the kink out of his back.

  The pictures were the usual: fighting, skirmishing, people marching on large buildings in this city or that one: shots in the streets, robberies, ceremonial murders, politicians waving their arms about this or that. A few smaller pieces about someone’s public bonding, a feature about the old temple on Mount Seleya, then a prediction of the planet’s weather for the next day. Cloud here and there, but no rain, naturally: it would not be time for that until nearly the end of the year. He planned to go take a trip to the North, to watch it rain. He had never seen it do that in person, only in pictures. Surak looked out at the garden and wondered what it would be like to see it rain there.Water falling from the sky: how strange….

  He glanced idly up at the screen, then froze at what he saw.

  Desolation. There was a picture of land, or what might have been land once, but now was only a vast glassy crater. The scale of it was difficult to grasp at first, but then the camera taking the picture seemed to back away, and he realized that the scale was much larger than he had thought. The crater filled one third of the entire Yiwa peninsula, one of the largest markings on the near side of T’Khut. Hurriedly Surak gestured the sound back on, staring at that horrible hole, easily five hundred miles across and ten miles deep. The bottom of the hole had cracked, and was smoking gently as heat escaped from the planetary mantle below.

  The reader talked calmly about a test of a new matter-antimatter technology by the Lhai nation, on some of its testing-ground property on T’Khut. And a few seconds later the picture shifted to something else, some story about an assassination in some government official’s office on the other side of the planet. But Surak had no eyes for it. All he could see in his mind was that desolation, that utter blasting, the glassy ground, cracked, smoking, with further destruction waiting beneath it, and barely restrained from bursting through.

  Antimatter,he thought.A new technology, indeed —Until now, the use of matter-antimatter weapons had been confined to the outer planets and the space colonies. There had always been concern about the superluminal effects of such explosions, and people were worried about possible effects on the Homestar, if they happened too close, or to the planet’s electromagnetic communications media. But now—And on T’Khut,he thought in horror.Not a test of someone’s new technology. They never said what technology —not something for power stations, or spaceships, the way they keep saying, but a warning. To whom? Irik?For Lhai’s and Irik’s areas of influence were contiguous, and the two nations continually rubbed and fretted against one another; their borders were never quiet anymore—always some argument about who had owned what territory how long, or which people had been removed from some one piece of land once, and now wanted it back. That huge, terrible crater—that was a warning.This is next, it said. And ifthis kind of weapon got out of hand—

  But weapons never really got out of hand, on Vulcan. Look at atomics, how carefully they had been confined to such kinds as did not leave dirty radiation all over the pl
ace—

  Such as will merely kill everything in a given area, and leave the resources undamaged. We cannot have the waste of resources, can we—

  He sat down at his desk again, staring at the screen, oblivious to the computer telling him that it was finished with the report, and did he want it transferred? Surak stared at the screen, which was now showing some sumptuous room with well-dressed people talking earnestly, and only saw the devastation. It would have taken a fairly small device to produce such an effect. Someday such small devices would no longer seem so threatening. Someone would make a bigger one. And bigger. And then one that, quite accidentally, would crack straight down deep into the mantle, or perhaps, to the planet’s core—

  He looked out at the window-doors, and T’Khut looked back at him, looming, and both her dark face and her light were bright with troubled volcanoes, that had felt the sting in her side, and now roared.

  Surak watched T’Khut, motionless, until she rose out of sight, and then got up and went out. The screen sat and babbled quietly to itself about war and business, crime and war and trivia, until the sun came up and Surak’s father came in to look at the reports for the previous evening.

  Surak had gone missing. His parents were alarmed: he had never done such a thing before. The authorities were alerted. It was feared he had been kidnapped, to put pressure on one or another of the firms for which their own small business did research: or perhaps another company had done the kidnapping, to acquire confidential information about one or another of them. There was little chance of that—Surak and his father had had their mindblocks installed by highly paid experts, and not even a mindchanger could do anything about them…or at least it would take several working in concert. But that fact made it that much more likely that Surak would be killed out of hand, and his body simply dumped somewhere. Such things had happened many, many times before. Surak’s mother sat in her offices at the university in great pain, unable to take any refuge in the cool bright corridors of mathematics; and Surak’s father stormed and threatened and bullied the local security forces, and pulled strings and generally made prominent people all over Lhai hate the sight of his face on a commscreen.

  But Surak was not dead. Much later, he would say, “That day was the day I came alive.”

  He went out into the darkness, took one of the family’s aircars, took it up, put it on auto, and told it, “Drive.” He had no idea where he was going and hardly cared. To him it seemed as if the world had already ended, and such things didn’t really matter. All he could see was death, death everywhere, death unregarded; death that had become a casual thing, that was reported on the news without horror, that seemed to have been accepted as part of the natural course of Vulcan life. What real joy did one see, as a rule, on the information channels? If any crept in, it was by accident. The information was all about death, one way or another: either about the little deaths that people inflicted on one another every day—lies, greed, crime, negligence, cruelty, pain—or about the bigger ones, the more obvious ones: the explosive bullet in the gut, the pumped laserbeam through the eye, the bomb in the trashbin, the battlefield strategic N-weapon glazing the ground, the trained adept wreaking destruction in the undefended mind. And now this last, most horrible sight. Death, it was all death, there was no escape from it. Destruction was very near, the death to end all the deaths, unless something was done.

  But what?

  He spent the day flying. The car had enough fuel, and managed the business itself without consulting Surak: it conferred as it needed to with the various air traffic control computers, each of which thought briefly about what to do with a pilot who had given no concrete driving instruction, and then, with a faint electronic sigh of relief, shunted him off to the farthest possible fringe of its control area. So it went all that day, while Surak sometimes wept, sometimes sat staring at the face of desolation and despair: so it went till the evening came, and T’Khut began to lean up over the edge of the world again.

  The sight of her shocked Surak back into some sort of sanity. “Land when convenient,” he said to the aircar.

  It took him at his word, being then in conversation with yet another landing control computer, which headed him for the nearest landing area marked with a beacon that the aircar could find. In a storm of dust and sand it settled toward what was obviously a small provincial port on the edge of a desert. The port was on automatic: there were no lights in the tower. Everyone had apparently gone home for the night.

  That was fine with Surak: the last thing he wanted to see, just then, was another Vulcan—the cause of all this trouble, and soon to be the end of it. He did not land, but overrode the controls and paused on hover-jets to look down at the little town by the port. It was the kind of desert settlement built by people who want to get away from it all with a vengeance. Everything was very plain and simple—small houses built of the usual heat-reflecting stucco or foamstone, small windows to let in light but not too much heat, thickly glazed in small panes, when they were glazed at all, to resist earthquake damage. Some of the houses had cracks in them, not yet replastered: there had been a quake here recently.

  He did not want to be near houses, though. He guided the aircar on into the desert, a good ways on, and out into a great sea of sand without so much as a foot-print. That suited him well. In a storm of dust and sand he landed and killed the engine: then got out wearily, scrubbed at his face, muttered a little at the stiffness of his joints. He looked around him.

  He was distracted by a sudden jolt as the world shifted under his feet. Just a bump, repeated once, then all was quiet; but the shock was still enough to make him grab the aircar for support and gasp a little. It seemed no wonder, at that point, that not many people lived out here.

  When things had settled again, Surak turned away from the car, toward the desert…and saw it, something he had been too busy to notice while landing. T’Khut was looming up behind it, as if to show him the way. Silhouetted against her, against the coppery light and the dark side with its uneasy volcanoes, was the peak: tall and slender in its top two-thirds, slumped down a bit toward the foot of the cone, as if from some old melting—black, silent, huge enough even at this distance to block out a third of T’Khut’s immense bulk. Mount Seleya stood there, precisely dividing T’Khut’s brightness and darkness, one from the other. The image, or perhaps the mountain, seemed to say:Here is your choice. The light, or the darkness with its fires. It has always been your choice. It is late. Choose now.

  Never had anything in the world, not even his parents, spoken so directly and imminently tohim. Shocked, Surak simply sat down in the sand where he was and gazed at the mountain, while the moment seemed to stretch itself impossibly long around him.Choose?

  Choose what?

  The mountain said nothing, merely looked at him.

  You mean, choose for everyone?his mind asked, whirling with confusion.What right do I have? And choose what?

  The mountain said nothing, merely looked at him.

  He looked back at it, looked at the bright side, the warm innocent light; looked at the darkness, and the fires. The fires had quieted somewhat since last night, but they could be awakened again easily enough. Such fires lay and broiled beneath the skin of Vulcan as well. They were usually quiet, but they too could be easily awakened by the desolation that Surak had seen the night before. He began to despair again.Someone has to do something —

  Then do it.

  He gazed at the mountain and breathed fast.

  He saw his death, at that moment. Not the manner of it, merely the fact. He had seen it before, on occasion, but never had he realized that it washis and no one else’s, to spend as he liked. Much could be done, with a death. He was going to have one anyway.

  He might as well do something with it.

  Yes,he said.I choose.

  The moment broke. T’Khut seemed to hesitate, as if giving a sort of sigh, and then continued to slip upward in the sky, breaking the perfect positioning of the mountain bet
ween its two halves. Surely it had been an illusion, that hesitation, that seemingly endless moment in which everything hung poised and waited for him.

  Surely.

  But what do I do now?he thought.

  He sat there all night, wondering that. Somehow he had to stop people from killing each other: that was plain. Or rather, had to stop them hating each other: the killing would take care of itself, after that.Nothing really difficult, he said to himself, finding it funny to be so earnest and dry, even sarcastic, over an impossibility…one which he was nonetheless committed to bring about. He had chosen, had chosen life, and he knew, somehow, that even the simple fact of thechoice mattered; if he died right now, it would matter not a whit less. But it would matter much more if he found some way todo something about this problem. There were several small earthquakes, mutterings in the sand, while he sat through the night thinking about this: while T’Khut stood high, and the Red and White Eyes rose to look at him. The earthquakes were not frightening: in his weary state, they felt like a friendly hand trying to shake him awake when he nodded. He wished hecould awake, could simply wake up from this wondering and find the answer, and start doing something about it.

  And the earth quaked again, rather harder this time than before. “Ah, come on, now,” he said, for he was becoming inured to this, “stop that.”

  The quake got worse. Surak became uneasy and started to scramble to his feet.

  And subsided, as the earthquake rose up before him.

  With frightened calm he watched the sand vibrate, heard it drum like a hundred ancient war-parties all around him.Well, he thought, as the bulge came up and up,I chose, and I suppose that was enough. And now I die —