Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  He dealt with the aches and pains as best he could, while wondering at the oddness of it all. That he should be the alien to another species: that someone else should translate the name of their planet as “the world,” “the earth,” and call themselves human beings—and then givehis planet and his people names of which he didn’t know the meaning or derivation…. It was all very strange. But he must do something about that, must find out what the name meant, when he got to Terra.Earth, rather, he thought. If he was to be a diplomat, however junior, he must begin acting and thinking diplomatically. And as T’Pau had said, it would be a fascinating diversity to study. He must do it properly, must miss nothing. As one of Surak’s line, it was his business to follow the Guidelines as closely as he could, and be, as it were, his ancestor’s eyes and hands in that time and place.

  He gazed at T’Khut. She was a wonderful color on a morning like this, when the sky was clear: her ruddiness took on the blue of the bright air she shone through, and went a rich violet, shading to lavender in her maria and scarred places. She was gibbous: on her dark side a few volcanoes could be seen, erupting desultorily in the palest gold tinged with blue. Sarek’s heart turned in his side, and he breathed out in pain. Had he been far enough away from anyone, he would have said aloud,When will I see you again? I do not want to leave!

  But he was within eyeshot of the walls, and the thought of his own self-pity abashed him. He turned around and headed back into town to catch the transport for the ship.

  It was more than fifty years before he came back.

  In the fifty years, many memories did not so much precisely fade as have to be filed far back, out of the way. His landing on Earth, for example: stepping out of the shuttlecraft into what had to be the coldest morning he had ever experienced, surely no more than (in the strange new system of temperatures he had been learning) sixty degrees Fahrenheit. He had stood and looked about him there, for a moment, on the alien concrete: at ships standing berthed, and small vehicles driving and flying everywhere, and the smell of burning internal-combustion chemicals in the air—T’Pau was quite right,he remembered thinking, in total amazement. And then looking up to the sky—it was night—and seeing the stars, and being amazed even more to find them so much the same: their patterns a little bent out of shape, but otherwise little different than at home. And high up, small and silvery, a moon. A tiny thing, but bright, bright, like a beacon. That finally convinced him that he was on an alien world. Until he saw it, he had wondered, in a moment’s bemusement, whether some with a tricksterish turn of mind might not change Vulcan’s climate, take away the familiar technology and substitute something else, intricate and bizarre, like the technology here. But the stars, and that burning silver disk,those told him that this was indeed another world, full of people who did not think like him, and doubtless thought a tiny, rather pitiful silver moon was part of the proper order of things….

  That memory had been filed away over years, along with many others, to make room for business. He could of course still look at them, when he chose to. A spring morning in Paris, one of his first holidays, when it rained softly, actual rain out of the sky, as he strolled the Rive Gauche. Standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon, nearly drowning in the beautiful, sandy, stony immensity of it, and thinking that this piece of Earth was actually rather like Vulcan, only (treason!) even better. An evening in Reykjavik, spent sitting on a boggy hillcrest, watching the volcanoes bubble and mutter a quarter mile away, and watching the sluggish lava meander like snakes of hissing fire down the cracking hillsides….

  And the people. T’Pau had been right: they were astonishing and uncontrolled: noisy, irrepressible, difficult, devious, untruthful, hyperactive, shallow, dissembling, incautious, maddening, and most of all, wildly illogical. But he would not have missed them for anything, for they were also cheerful, often wise, courteous, welcoming, eager to learn and understand, gallant, surprisingly prudent, clever—

  It had taken him a while to find all this out. Sarek was about ten years in the embassy as technical attaché. He spent his time in consultation with Terran computer people, mostly, talking code and software, getting into the guts of their hardware and being continually amazed by the elegance of parts of it and the crudeness of others. He was delighted to discover how very much like him they were: they would find nothing odd about being awake for three days at a time, hammering away at a recalcitrant piece of code, though their frail constitutions were hardly up to such abuse. All they cared about was the art of their work, and doing it right. It was hard not to admire such dedication and love of computing for its own sake. The programmers were the first Earth people he came to understand as being really human.

  He sent reports home to T’Pau on a regular basis, and as she encouraged him, he widened the focus of the reports and made them about anything he saw and enjoyed. (He was careful to moderate his use of the word, lest she suspect he was going native on her: but ‘enjoyed’ was the truth, however straight he kept his face while “researching” them, and however he rewrote his reports.) One of them dealt almost entirely with the World Series race in the fall of 2180, the year the Mets and the Giants spent the late season struggling to the tops of their respective leagues, and then savaged one another with such memorable elegance, in a series every game of which went into extra innings. Another had to do with littoral biology of the Mediterranean, and (marginally) with bouillabaisse, and a small fish calledracasse, and the people who fished for it, and the old-fashioned way they made their livings in a world where ion-drivers came to pick up their catch. Another report was about the restoration of St. Basil’s in Moskva: another about research into whale language. Late and happily Sarek came to realize the truth that T’Pau had somehow seen in him—that he was a tourist at heart, and as such a potentially sympathetic eye on the planet, though wholly Vulcan: an eye which might see things that the more diplomatically inclined would miss. When he came to realize that she had sent him more for this purpose than for his computer skills—though those were certainly useful—he was annoyed for a day, then put it aside and never gave it a thought again. There was too much to see and do here, and too many people to meet, and too much to tell about.

  It was not too long before Sarek’s keenness for and with Earth people began to be noticed at the embassy. The staff there, despite all their specializations, began to realize that if there was some aspect of Earth culture that puzzled them, Sarek was the one to call: if he couldn’t explain it immediately in terms that made sense to a Vulcan, he would simply nod and go away, and a day or so later hewould be able to explain it. About ten years into his posting—he never really seemed to have time to go home to Vulcan—the senior ambassador, Sasav, called him in and promoted him to cultural attaché. Sarek protested gently, but Sasav told him that there was no logic in it; the computers needed almost no maintenance in terms of their programming—or any that they did could be handled by the young Vulcan assistant Sarek had trained—and hardware support could be handled locally. It was time he used his talent with Earth people to help the many who came to the embassy seeking advice about tourism or immigration.

  Sarek did as he was bid, of course, though he found it a little strange at first to do some other work on a computer besides writing programs on it, or the daily letter to his parents. He found himself handling paperwork, visas, and advice, which he was able to give with extreme efficiency, having gotten an idea over his travels of the kinds of things Earth people could deal with. As more years passed, and the embassy grew, he found himself with a growing staff, people whom he taught to handle the details of trade delegations and package tours and cultural exchange programs. He became a familiar face around the planet, not least because of his fluency in the various languages. To Sarek, who had been master of at least twenty different programming languages, the spoken kind were a hobby he had studied happily, especially since they had early proved to be the best way to find out the truth about bouillabaisse, or the people who ate it. His grasp of dialec
t and idiom was amazing for anybody, off-planet or on. He once reduced the President of the United States—then a ceremonial post, but one much loved by people who lived within the old borders—to tears of laughter at a state dinner, by delivering a learned dissertation on computer data storage technology in a flawless Texan accent. The lady was later heard to propose an amendment to the Constitution to allow off-worlders to hold high public office, so that she could have him for her running mate in the next election.

  It was just as well he was as good at languages as he was, for this was before the universal translator was perfected, and misunderstandings were, if not rife, at least commonplace. People began to notice that the one office in the embassy thatnever had context problems was Sarek’s, and he was moved from cultural to diplomatic, around twenty-five years into his posting. There he spent the rest of the time until his return to Vulcan: for there he found his great love, and the art for which all the rest of his life had been practice.

  It was no simple art. Diplomacy on Vulcan (sincecthia, at any rate) mostly consisted of telling the other person what you wanted, and hearing what they wanted, and then working out some solution that would work for everyone. But on his entrance into the diplomatic service proper, Sarek found that he had been thrown into a sort of timewarp, back to the kind of diplomacy that must have taken place in the old turbulent days before Surak—and complicated by the fact that there were few mindreaders on this planet to assist one in finding out what the otherreally wanted. The base cause of the problem was that these people were not committednot to lie to one another…or to him. This added a dimension to diplomacy that he was not entirely sure he liked.

  It helped a little that Sarek was surprisingly high-psi, even for his training—there had, in fact, been some disappointment in his youth that he had not gone to Seleya to take the training for full-adept status. But Sarek was too much in love with the active life at that point. He did the usual training in psi, when young, that any Vulcan did—how to handle the mindtouch; bonding technique, for when he should need it; bearing the Sense of the Other (for even now, all these years after Surak, there were still people who found the Sense, and its implications, difficult to handle); and of coursena’Tha’thhya, the Passing-On, the investiture of one’s self-that-has-been inkatra mode, so that it might not be lost to the Other. When he had completed his psi training—for that was always the last thing one learned—Sarek had gone away unconcerned about the end of his days. Now, under this little yellow sun, he sometimes wondered what would happen to him if he died outside the embassy—what he would do with hiskatra. He had finally sighed to himself and made a resolve to be careful crossing the street.

  But his other psi training held him in good stead, here. Business executives and various Earth officials might come to him and lie, but there was no point in it: Sarek could hear a lie coming a week off, and he learned to ask the gentle questions that would shame the truth out of hiding sooner or later. In the course of his diplomatic work he ran into much greed, some cruelty, much dishonesty, but it did not disillusion him. He knew that Surak would have been as right about the Terrans as he had about Vulcans: they were simply afraid, afraid of one another, and more so of him, because of his strangeness; but assist them in casting out fear, and truth and agreement would always slip in to fill the gap. He eventually heard about the stories that grew up around him, that it was not so much that a Vulcan could not lie, but that he could not be liedto. Sarek would smile, privately, when he heard as much. He did not mind the legend, if it kept the people who came to him from wasting their and his time with lies. Life was too short, and there were agreements to be made, and the prevarication only slowed them up.

  He made a name for himself as a negotiator. The Vulcan-Terran Interstellar Comprehensive Trade Act of 2192 had Sasav’s name signed to it, but it was Sarek’s handiwork, and various members of the Federation Council noticed it—a tightly woven document, scrupulously fair to everyone concerned, and as closely reasoned as a computer program. There was no surprise in this: after many years of studying Earth with a student’s delight, from up close, Sarek knew what the industries and the industry executives wanted, almost better than they did. Various people in the Federation government began to notice Sarek.

  He was interested by the notice, but not flattered: there was too much to do. He still wrote to his parents daily; he still sent T’Pau reports, though these days they were more often about the fine details of moving and shaking the diplomatic world than about fish soup. Not that Sarek was usually seen to move or shake anything. His style was more subtle: situations seemed to calm themselves on the sight of him, or arrange themselves tidily in the shape he wanted them before he got within arms’ length. It was an art much envied by his fellow diplomats, both on the Federation side and among the Vulcans.

  It was summer of 2212 when he returned to Vulcan. It was not a recall. Sasav was retiring, and he asked Sarek to come back with him and assist him with the debriefing to the Council, and assist him and them in the choice of a replacement.

  Sarek’s feelings when he stepped out into the port facility were mixed. Everything looked strange, everything had been changed since he left. The sight of so many Vulcans all around seemed odd, suddenly, and the fact of the oddness struck him to the heart. But this far on in his life he was beyond showing such a reaction openly. He went on his way with Sasav’s party, not noticing the heads that turned as he went by, as people looked with interest at the ambassador, whom everyone knew, followed by the tall, broad-shouldered presence, dark and intent, the personification of a brooding, keen-eyed calm. People wondered who he was.

  They found out soon enough. The debriefing with the council was long and boring, though Sarek never showed it, and his mind was often on Earth during the proceedings. The dry realities and recitations of pacts and relationships were shouldered aside in his mind by the memory of the events that accompanied their forging—some abortive shouting match with a union leader, or a dinner at which wine and some delicate mind-probing unlocked some of his erstwhile adversaries’ desires to him and made a solution possible that he might not otherwise have found. He did not speak of such things, naturally: it would have violated the humans’ privacies, as well as his own.

  Sasav’s retirement was a sorrow to him, though he concealed that as well. Over the fifty years, the relationship had gone from a distant sort of superior-worship to a warm and cordial working relationship with a man both wise and clever. But Sasav was almost a hundred and eighty, and was certainly entitled to spend the last third of his life in comfort at home after his long service. Still, Sarek found it difficult to conceive of an Ambassador to Earth who was someone other than Sasav.

  So his surprise was forgivable when the council chose him as Sasav’s successor.

  He was tempted to argue the point with them, pleading excessive youth, but he knew there would be no point in it. They would have their reasons in logic marshaled, and those reasons would be correct. His long experience there from a young age, his fluency in Earth languages, the relationships he had built up with officials there, the results he had produced in negotiations—All he could do, with Sasav’s eyes on him, and T’Pau’s, was bow slightly, and accept the posting.

  He made a resolve to see T’Pau again, before he left. The diplomatic briefings that followed, with Sasav and the High Council, made it plain to Sarek that there was much more to keeping a relationship with Earth in place than he had thought. The government’scthia was mostly in place, but there were slippages: they were afraid of the Terrans, of their strangeness, their expansionist policies, their energy, their capacity for violence. To many Vulcans they seemed very young children, running around the Galaxy with dangerous weapons. By comparing what he was hearing now from the government with what he had heard Sasav say in the embassy, Sarek now discovered the careful and sympathetic way in which his superior had been portraying the Terrans to the council, to avoid panicking them where no panic was necessary. Many other situations,
viewed in this light, now made it apparent to him what a fine line Sasav had been riding, keeping the two governments in communication, preventing misunderstandings, avoiding anything that might inflame the Vulcans’ xenophobia. For such it was. More than ever Sarek doubted his ability to do this job this well…but his determination increased toattempt to do it this well.

  That night he saw T’Pau for dinner. She was older.Illogical, he thought to himself.Did you expect her to go into stasis when you left? But that fierce face was calming a little. The fierceness was very much there, but the wisdom that had always been there was beginning to make itself more obvious. He had some things for her—some data solids from Earth, literature mostly, and music and film, including those World Series games, about which T’Pau was highly curious.

  They talked about a great number of things, and when they were at the end of the meal Sarek was surprised to hear her say in the formal mode—actually the mode of the Eldest to one of the family—“There is one thing I must discuss with thee. Thou wast never bonded as a child, as the bonding on our family has been elective by tradition. Thee is now well of age to be bonded. What are thee doing about this?”

  It was a topic that had been in his thoughts oftener than he liked, over fifty years, with some slight sorrow. But the sorrow was long behind him. “I have put that option aside, T’Pau. I have no close relationship with any Vulcan woman: and if I did, I am not sure I would ask her to accompany me to Earth. It can be hard, being a Vulcan there. They are not far along in their version ofcthia as yet, and their attitudes toward strangers are sometimes imperfect…. ”