Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  The sand started to slip away from the great shape it covered, as the Underlier arched its back against the night, huge as a house, as a hundred houses. It blotted out Seleya, it blotted out T’Khut, and the sky. The low rumbling of its voice would have blotted out a real earthquake, had one had the temerity to take place right then. Terror was a poor word for what possessed Surak in that moment. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he shook all over. He had not thought that his death could be sobig —thatanything could be so big.

  And then his death spoke to him…and he found that he was mistaken about it being his death.

  The song was of incredible complexity and depth—the kind of melody you might expect a mountain, or perhaps a geological stratum, to sing. The thoughts that came with the song, that blasted into his head and crashed through him like a continent collapsing on him, were immense, wide, old—and so strange that he could not even begin to say what they were about. But he got a clear sense that this immensity, this ultimate power, was looking at his smallness, his delicacy, his tiny precision, with astonishment.

  And with delight at his difference.

  And suddenly everything shifted for Surak. The fear abruptly became awe, and the greatest possible pleasure to feel. How delightful to be so different from something: how wonderful that there should be creatures so huge in the world, so strange! No need to understand them, particularly: that might come with time, and would be an added delight. But it was enough to accept their difference, to celebrate just that, without anything added. Creation, in itself, was joy. The difference was joy, the celebration of it was joy. There was nothing that could stand against that joy: sooner or later it would triumph. All evil, all death, was a tiny, fretting, posturing thing that knew its own defeat was coming, and might rage and destroy as it liked. It was doomed. Celebration would win, was winning, had wonnow. Everything was one moment, and the moment was nothing but triumph and joy.

  As best he could, Surak looked up at the Underlier and gave it to understand as much.

  It roared. The sand shook, the earth trembled; the echo came back from Seleya until it seemed that a voice answered, many voices.

  Joy!said the roar. And nothing else needed saying.

  It fell silent, then, and slipped into the sand, silently, easily. The sand shook a little as it went, rippled, as water ripples when a fish slips into it. Surak watched it with calm delight, knowing that it was not going away, not really. Nothing could ever go away, not completely: not after what he knew now.

  The sand grew still. It was as if nothing had ever been there.

  Surak sat for a few breaths: then got up and brushed the sand off himself in a businesslike manner and headed back for the aircar. He had a lot to do. He knew now what needed doing. He knew what would finally kill fear: the wonder, the appreciation, the delight in the Other.

  It would work. It might take a long time, but he knew it would work. He knew it.

  And to his astonishment, he had the strangest feeling that the Other was looking over his shoulder, and knew as well.

  “Here is the first part of the secret,” Surak would write, much later, when people started to pay attention to him. “Cast out fear. There is no room for anything else until you cast out fear…. Now, do not mistake me when I speak of ‘casting out.’ Some people will immediately think this means rejection of fear, by pretending not to be afraid. They are not the same thing. Pretending there is not alematya in your house will not make it go away if thereis one. You must first admit to yourself the fact that thereis alematya —you must first accept its presence. Then you can call the animal control people and have them come and take it away. But until you first admit that it is there, you are going to have alematya in your bed every night. It may save your pride not to admit it is there, but your bed will be increasingly crowded.

  “So it is with fear as well. To cast it out, you must first accept it; you must admit it is there. Is there anything a person would rather doless? The last thing you want anyone to hear is your voice saying, ‘I am afraid.’ The last thing you want to hear your enemy say before you kill him is ‘I am afraid,’ because—in our culture—it means he has been reduced to total helplessness. What our culture must learn is thatthat point, total helplessness, is potentially the most powerful in our lives. Just past it is the great leap to true power: the move through the fear and the helplessness, accepted at last, to what lies beyond fear. So many things lie beyond it that pen and keyboard are helpless to write of them…but as more of us learn to move past that point, more will be written. Not that what is written matters so much as what onedoes with it.

  “And the rest of the secret,” he concluded, “is that all of us fear one another more than anything else in the world. The fear of the Other, of what the Other will do if he finds out we are afraid ofhim —that is what has brought us to this pass. We must turn and realize that the Otheris afraid—and then say to him, ‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ in such a way that he knows it to be true. Another thing we have no desire to say! Each of us secretly desires to keep the Other in some slight fear of us, so that he will not harm us. But if we can only bring ourselves to say those terrible words, and have them be true, then the Other will become what he should have been from the earliest days—the constant companion, the source of delight in all his differences.”

  They did not listen to him for a long time, of course. Nor did he begin speaking for some time after that night in the desert. Surak went home and quit his job, much to his parents’ dismay. He asked for, and got, his share of the family properties and banked them safely, and then went off into the desert and was not seen or heard of again for several years, except remotely, through the communications nets.

  He took with him nothing but a small portable terminal and an aircar, and spent much time alone. Some time he spent with various members of this or that holy sect. There were many on Vulcan, at that time, perhaps more than there ever had been. Vulcan had always been rather infested with religions, a fact that has surprised some species that never discovered Immanence. Vulcan was littered with it: as far as the Vulcan mind was concerned, gods, demigods, animae, noeses, golems, angels, devils, powers and principalities, and every other possible kind of hypersomatic being, were thick on the ground. Various specialists in comparative religion have pointed out that this proliferation made it seem as if perhaps the Vulcans were looking for something they had lost. Whatever the truth of this, there were religions aplenty, with priests and priestesses and holy people and hermits and votaries and nuns and eremites, and Surak went and talked to quite a few of them, over the five years of the Withdrawal, as it is called. There are not many records of what he said to them, or what they said to him: and the conversations often seem to have nothing whatever to do withcthia. One tape, lovingly preserved for centuries, is of a conversation with a hermit who lived near a lake by the Lesser Sea, and seems to be concerned entirely with the art of fishing with a rod.

  At any rate, after five years Surak came out of the wilds, took a small apartment in the capital, near his parents’ house, and began to write for the information networks. There was some interest, at first, in the strange writings from the man about whom there had been such a stir, those years back, when he was first not kidnapped, and then vanished. For a while it was a fad to read his work. Then the interest died out somewhat.

  Surak was not concerned by this. He kept writing about this strange way of life that all Vulcan needed to live, to save itself from itself. The basics have been codified many times, in many translations of theGuidelines, but Surak’s initial notes on the subject, still preserved, are perhaps the best summation of them.

  “Ideally, do no harm. Harm speeds up the heat-death of the Universe, and indirectly, your own.

  “More practically, do as little harm as possible. We are creatures of a Universe in which entropy exists, and therefore see no way of escape, but we do not need to help it.

  “Harm no one’s internal, invisible integritie
s. Leave others the privacies of their minds and lives. Intimacy remains precious only insofar as it is inviolate: invading it turns it to torment. Reach out to others courteously: accept their reaching in the same way, with careful hands.

  “Do no murder. The spear in the other’s heart is the spear in your own; you are he. All action has reaction: what force you inflict, inevitably returns. The murder of the other is the murder of your own joy, forever.

  “As far as possible, do not kill. Can you give life again to what you kill? Then be slow to take life. Take only life that will not notice you taking it. To notice one’s own death increases entropy. To die and not notice it increases it less, but still does so.

  “Cast out fear. Cast out hate and rage. Cast out greed and envy. Cast out all emotion that speeds entropy, whether it be love or hate. Cast out these emotions by using reason to accept them, and then move past them. Use in moderation emotions that donotspeed entropy, taking all care that they do not cause others pain, for that speeds entropy as well. Master your passions, so that they become a power for the slowing of the heat-death.

  “Do no harm to those that harm you. Offer them peace, and offer them peace again, and do it until you die. In this manner you will have peace, one way or the other, even if they kill you. And you cannot give others what you have not experienced yourself.

  “Learn reason above all. Learn clear thought: learn to know what is from what seems to be, and what you wish to be. This is the key to everything: the truth of reality, the reality of truth. Whatiswill set you free.”

  There was of course more, much more. Surak wrote steadily for years, submitting his material to the nets, and more and more people began reading it. Eventually some of them began to seek him out: often angrily, demanding how he dared dictate such rubbish to the whole planet, which had been around for millennia and doing quite well withouthim. Surak welcomed these people into his house calmly, gave them food and shelter for as long as they felt they needed it, and let them watch him write.

  After a while some of them went away and began writing themselves, about the astonishing philosopher living in the third-floor apartment: the man who, though seeming a perfectly normal person—a good listener with an unpredictable sense of humor—still conducted himself with such secret, joyful calm, as if he knew something that they didn’t, a delightful secret. Some of them later wrote that there was often a feeling about Surak as if someone else was in the room with him, even when he seemed alone.

  Surak did not react much to this: he kept writing, knowing that there would be a fair number who came to scoff and stayed to learn. But it was when one came to learn, and Surak realized that this was the one he was waiting for, that things got interesting, and the writing stopped for a while.

  S’task records something of that first meeting in the memoirs he left before he went off-planet. Surak looked up from his writing, as the young man came in, and put down the fruit he was eating. “Who are you?” he said.

  “S’task,” he said.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Teach me what you know.”

  S’task says that Surak put the fruit down and said to him most sincerely, “I thank you very much indeed. Please leave.”

  “But why? Have I done something wrong?”

  “Of course you have,” Surak said, “but that is not the point I am making. You are about to get in a great deal of trouble, and I would save you that if I could. Entropy will increase.”

  “It will increase anyway, whether I get in trouble or not,” S’task said.

  Apparently it was the right thing to say. “You are quite right,” Surak said, nodding. “That is why you should leave.”

  “You are not making a lot of sense,” S’task said, somewhat nettled.

  “I know,” Surak said. “Logic is a delight to me, but there are some things it is no good for.” And he shook his head regretfully. “But I must cast out sorrow,” he said. “And you too. Please leave.”

  S’task thought he would stand his ground, but a few seconds later, he says, “I found myself sitting on the pavement outside the front door, and he would not answer the signal. I never met anyone that strong, from that day to this. But I was determined to work with him, so I sat there. For four days I sat there—there wasn’t a back door to his apartment—and I was determined to catch him as he went in or out. But he did not go in or out, and I became very angry and decided to leave. Then I thought, ‘What am I doing sitting here, being angry at him, when I came all this way to learn how not to be?’ So I sat there longer. I don’t know how long it was: it might have been another seven or ten days. And finally someone came in from the street and stood over me, and said, ‘What about windows?’ It was he. He opened the door, and we went in, and I stayed and studied with him for the next three years.”

  They were busy years. Surak’s message was being increasingly noticed. It was not, of course, immediately accepted: there were many false starts, renunciations, debunkings, persecutions, and attacks of what seemed massive inertia. But slowly, slowly, first as a sort of fad, then more seriously, the logical life began to spread. One of the chief councilors of Lhai called in Surak, as a last desperate measure, to talk to the emissaries of Irik, at a time when it was feared that full-scale war was about to break out. Surak went gladly, went among the emissaries, shut himself in with them for a day and a night, and then sent them on their way. Two days later they returned, to the utter astonishment of the Lhai councilors, with the entire High Council of Irik. “Now come,” said Surak to the Lhai councilors, and they went up into the council room and shut the doors and did not come out for a week. When they did come out, a peace had been signed, each nation had made major concessions to the other, and all involved were slightly dazed, except for Surak. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said one of the Lhai; and one of the Irik said, “We have been fools. He told us so often enough. But somehow whenhe says it, it is as if he is doing you the greatest kindness, and having a joke with you. Or someone.” The peace held, and held straight through to the unification of the planet, despite the occasional efforts of the power-blocs of both nations to restart the hostilities.

  So it went.Cthia continued to spread, however slowly, however much in fits and starts. And then came the signals from space. Surak looked up on hearing the news, S’task said, and smiled. “Now I know I have been doing rightly,” he said, “for now entropy will bite back. Here is the great test. Let us see how we deal with it.”

  It did not go well, by his standards. Surak was scheduled to be among the dignitaries welcoming the aliens to shi’Kahr, but an aircar mishap at the port facility at ta’Valsh held him up. While he was waiting calmly in the port for the problem to resolve itself, the Duthuliv pirates fell on the Vulcans waiting to welcome them, killed many, and took the rest as hostage: against massive payments by the various governments who had sent them. When the news reached Surak, he immediately offered to go to the aliens and “deal peace” with them. No government on the planet was in a mood to listen to him, however, since half of them were at that moment mourning their leaders, and the other half were fuming over massive and extortionate ransom demands.

  Thus war broke out:’Ahkh, “the” War, the Vulcans called it, thereby demoting all other wars before it to the rank of mere tribal feuds. No ransoms were paid—and indeed if they had been, they would have beggared the planet. But the Vulcans knew from their own bitter experience with one another that once one paid Danegeld, one never got rid of the Dane. The Vulcans’ trading ships were still unarmed, but they did not stay so for long. The chief psi-talents of the planet, great architects and builders, and technicians who had long mastered the subleties of the undermind, went out in the ships and taught the Duthuliv pirates that weapons weren’t everything. Metal came unraveled in ships’ hulls; pilots calmly locked their ships into suicidal courses, unheeding of the screams of the crews: and the Vulcans beamed images of the destruction back to Duthul and Etosha, lest there should be any con
fusion about the cause. The message was meant to be plain: kill us and die.

  Surak was greatly disturbed, no less by the fate of the aliens than by the loss of his disciple. S’task was at the meeting at shi’Kahr and was one of those taken hostage. This was the sowing of the seed of a great trouble between him and Surak, for it was S’task who organized the in-ship rebellion that cost so many of the pirates their lives. He was the one who broke the back of the torturer left alone with him, broke into and sabotaged the ship’s databanks, and then—after releasing the other hostages safely on Vulcan—crashed the luckless vessel into the pirates’ mothership at the cost of thousands of pirates’ lives, and almost his own. Weeks later he was found drifting in a lifepod in L5 orbit, half starved and almost dead of dehydration, but clinging to life through sheer rage. They brought him home, and Surak hurried to his couchside—to sorrowfully rebuke him. “I have lost my best pupil to madness,” Surak said.

  Much else he said, but that is lost to us, along with S’task, who spent the rest of his life on Vulcan fighting his old teacher on the subject of the uses of violence, until with many Vulcans he left the planet to peace. Perhaps the invasion of the Duthuliv pirates, which continued over the next fifty years and was beaten back every time, was a blessing in disguise for Surak; perhaps nations threatened from without felt more like quickly resolving their conflicts with one another, lest the aliens should find a divided planet easier to conquer. Or perhaps the changes were wrought entirely by Surak and the people who took up his way—the people who increasingly said they felt another presence encouraging them, or at least justthere, whether it encouraged them or not. But whatever the cause, slowly,cthia took the planet. Those who most resisted it—S’task and his followers, determined to keep at least some of the old ways, along with some logic—left the planet on the long journey that would take them at last to the worlds where they would become the Rihannsu, or as Federation usage has it, the Romulans.