Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  “Thy logic is in abeyance,” she said, which was about as severe a reprimand as anyone had given him these fifty years. “I know thy reasons. Nonetheless, thee should keep thy options open. Cast out fear.”

  He nodded, and thought no more of it. They finished the meal and said their farewells.

  Sarek completed his business with the council, collected the necessary documentation, went to visit his parents for a moonround, and then at the end of the month, took ship for Earth again. Two days later he was presenting his credentials to the United Federation of Planets as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from Vulcan. He did not feel particularly extraordinary, but there was something exhilarating about walking into the upstairs office in the embassy, afterward, and sitting down in the chair behind the desk, and knowing that he spoke for his people here. He would do it well.

  Quite shortly thereafter, he met Amanda Greyson.

  It was, of course, in the line of business. She was involved with a Federation program intended to develop a universal translator, and Sarek was happy to have his linguistics department assist her: such an instrument could only be a tremendous breakthrough, in a world where until now wars might be caused or averted by the mistranslation of a term. She did not make any particular impression on him when he saw her first—a handsome woman, tall for her people, with wise eyes. Later, he found that she reminded him of T’Pau, in some odd fashion, though he had trouble identifying exactly what the likeness was.

  His people down in Linguistics kept him apprised of their work with her (she had begun to help some of them with their English), and the reports began to be very glowing indeed. Sarek began to take some interest in the woman. She had, it seemed, traveled to Vulcan and lived there for several years while studying language, semiotics, and kinesics at the Science Academy. He made it a point to drop down to Linguistics, once or twice, when his people had told him she was expected there. Their meetings were cordial: more than cordial, when she found how fluent and idiomatic his Vulcan was…and how fond he was of Szechuan food. That was what brought them together the first time. She had found a Hunan place in the city that she wanted him to try—that was when the embassy was still in London—and they sat down over homestyle fried noodles and a word list and spent the whole meal conversing in Vulcan.

  It was refreshing in a way he found difficult to understand to hear his own language coming so easily from the lips of an alien. Perhaps easily was not the right word. There were problems with her pronunciation—she had picked up a very peculiar Lesser-sea accent somehow, which amused him, since in the old days the Lesser accent had a country-bumpkin connotation to it, and to hear it coming from this polished young woman was droll, to put it mildly. But her vocabulary was strong in the sciences, and her translations were surprisingly accurate for the most part. Most to his surprise, she had studiedcthia.

  “It seems to make such sense,” Amanda said to him over the green tea. “But that kind of thing always does, when enlightenment comes suddenly out of nowhere, and you look at it and wonder what took it so long…. I suppose our obtuseness is so much greater than we think, that it always seems surprising…when in fact the Universe has been hammering at our heads, trying to get the answers in, forever and ever…. ”

  He nodded. “I think you may be right. Your planet’s various enlightenments have the same effect on me.”

  “I wonder what we would have done with Surak?” she said softly. And then she laughed, a rueful sound. “Now that I think of it, probably what we have done with various other of the great enlighteners. Nailed them up to crosses, or chased them across deserts, or shot them. We are not a very enlightenable people, I’m afraid. But sometimes the light breaks through…. ” She tapped the word list with one chop-stick. “That’s what this is for,” she said.

  “To the light,” he said, and raised his cup of tea to her.

  They met fairly often after that. Sarek’s Anglish was more flexible and idiomatic than any of his staff’s: that was the excuse. But increasingly he found himself delighting in having a friend. He had had few, on Vulcan: from a very young age, his work had possessed him. During his earlier posting here, he had been on the move all the time, even when working—gathering data, rarely staying mentally in the same place for very long. But now, in his early maturity, he felt a little more settled, and that settlement found great satisfaction in the expression of friendship.

  They frequently quarreled. The quarrels were genteel—he kept them that way, since mostly he was right—but when Amanda became annoyed over what she perceived as his smugness about being right, her eyes would flash and she would become splendidly insulting, usually in bizarre Anglish idiom that Sarek found as refreshing as it was annoying. She caused him to laugh out loud for the first time in many years when she told him, after a disagreement over the translation of a word for war, that he should only grow headfirst in the ground like a turnip. Later that month, when he was right about something again and made the mistake of not immediately down-playing it, she issued him with a formal malediction, wishing that the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind orphan children might pursue him so far over the hills and the seas that God Almighty couldn’t find him with a radio telescope. Sarek laughed so hard at that that he entirely lost his breath, and Amanda panicked and started to give him cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which was useless, because his heart was somewhere other than the spot on which she was pounding. It took him nearly an hour to recover: he kept laughing. He had never been cursed like that before, not even by union leaders, and it was very refreshing.

  There came a time when the day seemed somehow incomplete if she had not called him and asked him about something, or told him what she was doing. There came a time when it seemed odd not to have dinner together at least one day of the weekend, if not both. There came a time when it seemed quite normal that he should visit her at her house, and have dinner with her, and stay late, talking about everything in the world. The worlds. Now there were truly more than one, and he felt as if he was living both of them. The word lists had started the process: it was the word lists that finally put the finishing touch to it.

  “You have mistranslated this,” he said, sitting on her couch and tapping the printout. “I thought we had discussed this. Do you mean to tell me that this revision of the list went to the committee?”

  She frowned at him. “I told you it was going to. What’s the problem?”

  “This word.” He pointed atarie’mnu. “It doesnot mean elimination of emotion. That is not what we do, by and large.”

  “But all the earlier—”

  “If you will pay attention to all the earlier translations, you will perpetuate their mistakes! Nor, what is this, down here, nor is it ‘suppression.’Control is wrong as well. Mastery, it is mastery. There is a difference!”

  She shrugged and sighed. “It’s going to be hard to get it changed now. It’s just one word, we can catch it in the next translation—”

  “And leave everyone who hears the word for the next ten years thinking that wehave no emotions? Doyou think we have no emotions?”

  “Doyou have emotions?” she said, arching her eyebrows at him. He was being teased, and he knew it.

  And instantly he knew something else, as well.

  “You will have to judge,” he said…and drew her close.

  And showed her that he did.

  And found that she did, too.

  Some time later, a small, soft, lazy voice spoke. It was astonishing how her voice could change, sometimes.

  “You know, it’s funny…. ”

  “What is?”

  “Well, everybody wants to know if Vulcans are…”

  “I do not think I shall ask you to complete that. Well? And are we?”

  She laughed. “Let them catch their own Vulcans and find out.”

  “Catch? That implies that I ran away…. ”

  More laughter. “At least you did it slowly.”

  He smiled. “Was that a pun
?”

  “No.” She giggled. “Goodness, though…how this is going to look in the papers.I Married An Alien!”

  “So will I have,” he said wryly, “and I suspect the response may be similar, at first.”

  “Has it ever been done?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  A thinking silence. “And shall we have a child?”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes. Canyou?”

  “I suspect so.”

  She thought a moment. “The question is…canwe?”

  He thought too. “All we can do,” he said, “is find out.”

  The marriage was a quiet one, but the news was still greeted with astonishment on Earth. Sarek took it calmly. One particularly annoying newspaper, which published a slight alteration on Amanda’s headline—“I Married A Little Green Man!”—received an interesting riposte from Amanda, when she was interviewed on one of the broadcast news services shortly thereafter: “There is nothing little,” she said with great dignity, “about my husband.” Sarek did not at first understand the amused ripple that went through the crowd of reporters standing around. Certainly he was tall by Earth standards. He had to have it explained to him, and afterward laughed harder than after the radio-telescope incident.

  Things quieted down eventually. After a few peaceful years on Earth, Sarek requested a sabbatical on Vulcan, which was granted him without question. He and Amanda were granted a ride on a starship—their first one—and were on Vulcan the next day. The day after that they had their first of many appointments at the Vulcan Science Academy.

  There are of course people who will claim that “crossbreeds” between species are impossible. In nature, they are. But the Vulcans were at that time the best geneticists in the Galaxy, having been practicing the art, one way or another, almost since before their history began. It had never been done: but there was no reason why it should not be done, for both parents were hominids, in their right mind, and of sufficiently similar physiology that a compromise could be designed.

  “Designed” was the most accurate word. The process started with extensive genetic mapping of both of them. The geneticists at the Academy took their time—there was no room for mistakes. After a year, every gene on Amanda’s and Sarek’s chromosomes had been typed and identified and assessed for viability.

  Then the design began—working out how the body should work physically, for Vulcans and humans each had organs that the other did not, and all the necessary vital functions needed to be covered. Differing chemistries had to be reconciled, differing means of ATP and ADP synthesis and interaction: the basic bodily cell structure had to be redesigned from the mitochondria up. Differences in metabolism had to be handled. Neural chemistries had to be carefully juggled. There were thousands of similar details. And then every change had to be “programmed” into the template chromosomes, by computer-controlled or manual microsurgery.

  It took four years.

  Finally the technicians were ready. They called Amanda in and borrowed an ovum from her, to use for its membrane. The other genetic tissue they needed, they already had. With great care, in an operation taking three days, they scooped the original genetic material out of the ovum, replaced it with the material they had tailored from Amanda, introduced the equivalent material from Sarek, closed the little cell up…and waited.

  It sat thinking for about half an hour, and then divided.

  And divided again.

  And again.

  They did not cheer: they were Vulcans. But there was an insufferable air of satisfaction about the Parturitic Genetics lab for days. About a week later, Amanda went in and officially got pregnant. It was an office procedure, and took about five minutes.

  Then began the long wait to see whether the embryo would implant properly, whether the placenta would hold.

  It did. Amanda showed no ill effects, except that in her second month she lost her appetite for everything but sour foods, and found herself (to her utter disgust) wanting to eat nothing but pickles. She complained bitterly that she felt like a cliché. Sarek laughed, and got her pickles, regardless of the expense.

  The child came to term after nine and a half months, and was born in an easy delivery, without incident. Amanda had been instructed in Vulcan pain-control techniques well before the delivery and was awake and lively all through it. At the end she was tired, but she breathed a sigh of relief as they brought her the child, and Sarek stood by her, looking down at him.

  Their son looked like most Vulcan babies: rather green, very bald, his head a little pushed out of shape from the stress of delivery misshaping the soft fontanelles at the top of the skull. That would straighten itself out after a day or so. “He’s gorgeous,” Amanda said happily.

  “I should think he would be,” Sarek said mildly. “The designers would hardly have ignored the outside, after working so hard on the inside. But I think you are biased, my wife.”

  “You are right as usual, my husband. What are we going to call him? An S-name?”

  “It would seem appropriate,” Sarek said. “So many others have done it to honor Surak: it would be looked at askance if we did not. We will think of something.”

  “And then he’ll go to the Academy, like his daddy,” Amanda said, a little sleepily. “And then…”

  “There is time to plan that yet,” Sarek said, and put a gentle finger down to the little fist that grasped and held it, hard. “My son.”

  They took Amanda out, and Sarek followed, glancing through a window as he went. It was near dawn, and T’Khut was setting. He had never seen her look quite so real, so fierce, before: and behind her, the stars glittered fiercely too, as if in rivalry.

  We shall see,he said silently, and went after his wife and his son.

  Enterprise: Eight

  Jim beamed out with Sarek from outside the hall. When the glitter died down, they were in a large room done in warm colors and filled with unobtrusive machinery. Several parts of the room were concealed by the soft opaque glow of positionable, non-sound-permeable forcefields, and quietly dressed Vulcans passed through the room checking the various pieces of the machinery or looking into one or another of the field-shielded cubicles.

  McCoy put his head out through one of them, as if looking around for something—a bizarre effect, as if he had put the front half of him through a wall—and seeing Jim and Sarek, beckoned urgently to them. They stepped through the field after him.

  T’Pau lay there unconscious in a Vulcan-style diagnostic bed, with Amanda and Spock on either side of her. Next to Amanda, a woman in a soft brown tunic, with long dark hair, was looking at the diagnostic panel: her face suggested nothing about what she thought she saw. “How is she, Doctor T’Shevat?” Sarek said.

  “She has been slipping in and out,” said the doctor. “This is normal for her condition, but it is not a good sign.”

  McCoy nodded, and looked over at Jim. “Liver failure,” he said. “She’s past the point where even the healing trance would do her any good.”

  “She has forbidden it to be initiated,” T’Shevat said, looking around at them all. “Her declaration of refusal of ‘heroic measures’ has been on file with us for ten years. She has specified the medications she will allow herself to be given, and the procedures she will allow us to perform. But beyond those, we are helpless to take action.”

  She looked at McCoy, and he nodded in agreement. “It would need more than heroic measures,” he said to Jim. “She would need a liver transplant, and her immune system isn’t up to it, even with retroviral immunosupport.”

  “I will be within call if I’m needed,” T’Shevat said, and she slipped out through the field.

  Jim looked down at T’Pau sadly. She looked extremely thin and worn, the skin tight against the bones of her face, the eyes sunken: even the piled-up hair seemed to have lost its gloss. “They could at least have given her a private room,” he said softly.

  “That kind of privacy—has never been my concern,” said the ti
red, cracked voice. T’Pau’s eyes opened, and she looked up at him. “So,” she said.

  She looked around at the others: the motion made it plain that even that little movement cost her. Her eyes came to rest on Sarek. “I regret—my lapse in timing…” she said. “I was attempting to forestall this collapse as long as possible. It seems—there are things—”

  Her breath gave out: she lay there a moment, getting it back. “You are not to think of that,” Sarek said to her. “Matters are going as well as they can be expected to.”

  “They are not,” she said. “There is this small matter of T’Pring.”

  “Do not think of that now—”

  “If I do not do my thinking now, it will do you little good later,” T’Pau said, and there was a touch of the old snap in her voice. Then she lost her breath again. McCoy looked concerned: Jim noticed that her color was changing slightly, shading into a darker green. It made him nervous.

  “Now,” she said. “Sarek, you have asked my counsel about what should be done with this material. Your plan is subtle.” She breathed hard. “It is too subtle. Subtlety and acts hidden in the dark were the root of this plan. If you feed it on more darkness, it will only prosper. You must tell the truth about it, and at once.”

  “Simply give the information to the media?” Sarek said.

  “Sometimes simplicity—is best,” T’Pau said. “Do as I bid!”

  Sarek bowed to her.

  “The truth—is able to care for itself,” she said, and ran out of breath again. “But it must be set free. Release the information immediately.”

  “I will do so.”

  But Sarek did not move. T’Pau was looking at Spock and Kirk, standing together by the side of her bed. Jim looked at her and had one of those sudden odd visions that one sometimes has of another human being. Sometimes one looks at a friend and sees them as they will be when they are old. But Jim gazed at her and saw her when she was young…and breathed out, slightly glad he had not met her. They might have killed each other, or been the best of friends: there was no telling.