Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  “Yes,” she said. And she smiled a little: an astonishing look on that face, that usually seemed if a smile might crack it. “When first I saw thee two together, I thought that I should see one or the other of thee die. Now see how incorrect thought traps us in the end; for I little thought that I should see thee two together again, but that the death should be mine.”

  Jim wanted to say something like “You’re not going to die,” except that it would have been so patently absurd, and besides, it seemed like an insult to refuse to acknowledge what was going on. “I would have liked to know you better,” he said. “I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance.”

  “I too,” Spock said: and then reached out and took her hand.

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said. And she looked around at them all, and said, “I shall go now. There is no use waiting to see when it will happen.”

  Sarek took a slow step forward. “No,” T’Pau said. “You do not need this gift, son of my house. You will be Head of House now, and you would have difficulty dealing with mykatra, I think. No.” She turned her head, looked up at Amanda. “I think we will do well together, my daughter. You have the necessary training from Seleya to manage the Gift once I have left it to you: and it will qualify you as Eldest Mother of the house, whatever others may say. Best to so manage matters. If you consent—”

  Amanda’s eyes were full of tears. “Of course I do,” she said, her voice quite steady. “Let it be done so.” And she leaned close.

  T’Pau reached up one shaking, wrinkled hand to Amanda, who took it and pressed it gently to her face. For a moment, both their eyes closed. The withered lips whispered something inaudible. Amanda nodded.

  Then there was no movement, but they knew she was gone.

  Slowly her breathing stopped.

  Amanda let go the hand, laid it on the coverlet, straightened up slowly. “It’s done,” she said.

  The doctor looked in, looked at them.

  “She is with the Other,” Sarek said.

  T’Shevat nodded. “I grieve with you,” she said. “All Vulcan will grieve with you.”

  “Did she leave instructions with you?” Sarek said.

  The doctor nodded. “She is to be cremated and the ashes scattered on the sands of the Forge,” she said.

  “We will see to it, then.”

  The doctor bowed and left. One by one, they all stepped through the field and stood outside it a moment. “Now what?” McCoy said.

  “Now we carry out her instructions,” Sarek said. “But first…we tell her world that she is gone.”

  “No, my husband,” Amanda said, very firm. There was an odd note in her voice, and everyone looked at her.

  “What?” Sarek said, surprised out of politeness.

  “No. You must tell them about T’Pring’s plotting first…and you must tell them who has been notified.Then tell them about T’Pau. She would not want—would not have wanted it otherwise: she would not like it, to have her personal life take precedence over the proper running of the government.”

  Sarek looked at Amanda as if he had never seen her before…then nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Let us be about it.”

  They left the clinic, Jim and Spock last of all…and Jim was wondering a great deal about the small, odd smile on Amanda’s face.

  The first piece of news threw the planet into an uproar. There were accusations, counteraccusations, denials, carefully worded protestations of innocence, and much dust thrown up to confuse the issue by people who wished to seem as if they knew nothing about it. The debates went on: Jim declined a second session of testimony, feeling he had already said what he needed to.

  The second piece of news brought the planet to a standstill. The streets grew silent, and mostly empty of people; the news services did little but talk, in a muted way, about her life: some shut down entirely. Her will was read later that day, including the request for cremation.

  Jim went with the family, that night, to the Forge. The cremation had been handled earlier in the day, and when they beamed out, Sarek was carrying a small, pale green porcelain container, exquisitely made, which Jim had seen in the house and not recognized.

  What none of them were expecting, when they arrived, were the three million Vulcans gathered around the edges of the Forge. They went on around the miles-wide curve of the desert seemingly forever, the largest single gathering of people in the history of the Federation, all silent, all waiting. Jim was staggered. He looked over at Spock, who shook his head, wordless, and at Amanda, who smiled, slightly and gently, and shook her head too.

  Sarek stood there awhile, in the silence, listening to the wind blow: and finally came the sign he was waiting for. There was a bulge of light against the horizon, a curve, a dome, growing, ruddy, shining.

  Sarek stepped forward. “Here is what is left of her,” he said to the night. He did not raise his voice, but all the hairs stood up on Jim’s neck as he had a sudden sense of the sound of that voice being passed from mind to mind, at faster than lightspeed, right around that great desert, held in every mind at once, and echoed so that he heard Sarek’s words in millions of individual voices, but all silent. It was overwhelming: he found it hard to bear. He glanced at his fellow humans. Amanda seemed untroubled, and McCoy was standing there with his eyes closed, perhaps in prayer.

  “We give her remains to the night from which we arose,” Sarek said, opening the porcelain container to the light wind that had sprung up. “Surely we know that this is not she; she and the Other know it well. And we wish her well in whatever may befall, till the Moon is no longer, and the Stars are no more.”

  The wind carried the dust away into the silence. T’Khut slipped upward in silence, flooding the ocean of sand with light.

  “Light with her always,” he said, “and with us.”

  And he turned away.

  They all went home.

  “Number twenty-three,” said the voice. Again, it was not Shath.

  “I am Spock,” he said, standing still and erect in the middle of the stage. “I hold the rank of Commander in the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets; I serve as First Officer of theStarship Enterprise. And as regards the proposition, I say: nay.”

  The room was quite still. Spock said, “My family are in mourning today, and we are grateful for the many expressions of support which have come to us. But meanwhile, the one whom we mourn would desire that we do the business which has brought us here, and so I have come to see it done.”

  He turned a little, to favor another part of the auditorium. “I am in a peculiar position, for many of you will know that I am a son of the tradition that now debates casting Earth out, and also a son of Earth itself. Many voices have been raised against Earth here. I could not allow that to influence me. What matters is doing right, not merely blindly defending what is attacked. That iscthia in its true form: and whatever my heritage, I was trained incthia, and hold it dear.”

  He looked around the auditorium. “Much has been said,” he said slowly, “about the tendency of humans to emotion, or our own mastery of it. Little has been said about thepurposes of emotion. It has many—primarily to guide one toward one kind of behavior or away from another. Doing good, brings joy: doing evil, sorrow; and all these emotions we possess, and master, so as not to contaminate others’ mastery with them.”

  Spock took a long breath. “We are much concerned,” he said, “with the damage our emotions may do one another. We are right to be concerned, perhaps. There have been many millions of people killed on this planet, over the millennia, due to the lack of management of emotion. But it is possible to overdo this concern: to be overly concerned over what damage our emotions (or management of them) may do others: sometimes even over what damage others’ emotions may do us.

  “I am a Vulcan, bred to peace,” Spock said. “Many of us have said that, after S’task, who said it first, even though he was of the first generation of that breeding. I think that breeding was more robust than most of us allow our
selves to believe. It seems too much like ego, like self-aggrandizement, to say openly, ‘We are strong’; and so we pretend not to be, and do ourselves, perhaps, more harm than if we simply admitted our strength and moved on.

  “But that pretense betrays our great secret to those who can see: and the secret is that,cthia or not, we are still uncertain about our mastery. We are still, as Surak said, afraid of one another, and of ourselves: afraid that the emotion we so carefully manage will somehow break loose and doom us again.

  “The trouble is, it is doing so now. It is doing so, most perniciously, disguised ascthia, as concern for the other’s well-being.” Spock lifted his head. “For some years now I have been privileged to serve with some of the finest beings that any Vulcan could imagine. I came among them most concerned for mycthia, and their safety, due to what seemed like rampant emotion: I saw them as unstable, illogical, potentially dangerous. It took time to find out otherwise. I spent years watching humans wrestle with their emotions: and from their wins and losses alike, I discovered something—that those who wrestle with emotions, learn far more about mastering them than those who seek to hide their emotions, or suppress them. The humans never stop this wrestling, and as such they have mastered emotions for which we may as yet not be prepared.

  “We therefore have a great deal to learn from them. But it is entropy’s way to push us away from what will benefit us, and the fear that we should have cast out is once again attempting to betray us. That fear makes us look so hard at the entropic nature of emotion, its power to drive us apart, that we ignore its ability toresist entropy, its power to draw us together. As we were drawn together last night.”

  Everything was silence. “It is illogical to ignore such a power,” Spock said. “It is illogical to turn away from another species which has taught us so much about our own fears, and our own hopes, and has shared so many of its fears and hopes with us. I shall not turn my back on such a species. I may not: I am of them. My choice is made.” He looked around the auditorium again. “For you, perhaps, there remain only decisions. I would remind you, though, that the word for ‘decide’ is descended from older words meaning to kill; options and opportunities die when decisions are made. Be careful what you kill.”

  And he stepped down from the stage, to silence.

  An official stepped up right after him, a slender little woman with the first curly hair Jim had seen on a Vulcan. “I must inform you now, you here and the audiences on the various nets,” she said, “that the threshold number of notifications to stop debate has now been received. Voting on the motion will begin immediately, and conclude in one solar day, or twenty-two point one Federation standard hours. Thank you all for your attention.”

  Jim got up from his seat as many other people did. Beside him, McCoy stretched lazily, and stood up too. “Now what?” Bones said, as Spock came up to them.

  “Now,” Jim said, “we wait.”

  They spent the night at Sarek and Amanda’s, eating and drinking and talking, and occasionally bringing up the news on the computer to look at it. There was nothing about the vote: there were no “returns” as such. All the information was correlated in one central computer at shi’Kahr, and would be released only when the vote was complete, late the next afternoon.

  But there was quite a lot of other news, mostly relating to T’Pring’s undercover smear campaigns. “I see that she and Shath are ‘assisting the authorities with their inquiries,’ ” Jim said, sounding faintly satisfied.

  “You mean she’s in the clink,” McCoy said. “Serves her right.”

  “Doctor,” Spock said, sounding faintly offended, “it has been a long time since any form of custody here has gone ‘clink.’ ”

  Bones laughed. “I still can’t bring myself to be particularly upset,” he said. “The poisonous little creature. I hope she doesn’t bite anyone while she’s there. They’d probably have to have something amputated.”

  “Doctor…”

  “All right, all right.”

  Amanda and Sarek were out sitting in the garden together, talking in low voices; Spock was toying with the computer keyboard. “You look nervous, Spock,” Jim said.

  Spock looked at him sidelong. “Emotion again…. ”

  “And after your wonderful defense of it today.”

  “I was not defending it,” Spock said. “Whatis, and is valid, does not need defense.”

  Jim chuckled. “All right. Listen, can you get me an uplink to the ship from there? I want a look at the BBS.”

  Spock thought a moment. “That should be no problem. Wait a moment.” His fingers danced over the keys.

  McCoy was looking at a watercolor hanging on one blackstone wall, a beautiful semi-abstract of spring flowers native to Earth. “Sweet peas,” he said. “How long has it been since I saw real sweet peas?”

  “Talk to Bio,” Jim said. “They have some seeds, I think.”

  “No…I mean a whole field of them. Waving in the breeze and smelling wonderful. That beautiful sweet scent.”

  “Talk to Harb Tanzer. He may have something on file.”

  McCoy rolled his eyes.

  “Ready, Captain,” Spock said. “It will be wanting your password.”

  Jim sat down and tapped at the keyboard for a moment, giving the command to find out whether he had any messages waiting.

  The computer screen said:

  (1) COMMON ROOM

  Jim changed areas. He typed:Read message.

  FROM: Llarian

  TO: Jas. T. Kirk

  DATE: 7468.55

  SUBJECT: Further Advice

  Those bold in daring, will die:

  Those bold in not daring will survive.

  Of those two, either may benefit or harm.

  Nature decides which is evil,

  But who can know why?

  Even the enlightened find this difficult.

  The Tao in Nature

  Does not contend,

  yet skillfully triumphs,

  Does speak not,

  yet skillfully responds,

  Does not summon,

  and yet attracts,

  Does not hasten,

  yet skillfully designs.

  Nature’s network is vast, so vast.

  Its mesh is coarse, yet nothing slips through….

  “Now what the devil do you make of that,” Bones said from behind him.

  “Do I readyour mail over your shoulder?” Jim said, amused. He sat back in the chair. “I’ll tell you what I think of it. I think someone’s telling me to have a quiet night, because everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Hmf,” Bones said, and wandered off. But Jim rocked a little, there in the chair, and smiled.

  The next afternoon found them all in the living room together again, waiting for the announcement about the vote. The news was practically blathering, in the meantime, full of the details on the corruption investigation and revelations of the briberies; but none of them had any ears for it. They waited.

  Finally, at exactly one Vulcan day after Spock had stepped down from the stage, the image in the tank flickered, and they found themselves looking at a simple 3D display of letters and numbers. Jim couldn’t read them, since the translator worked only on the spoken word. But McCoy read it out loud.

  “For secession: five billion, four hundred million, three hundred eighty thousand, six hundred five.

  “Against secession: nine billion—”

  Jim whooped. Sarek leaned back in his chair. Amanda grinned, and McCoy grinned too, and squeezed her hand.

  Spock looked over at Jim and put up one eyebrow. “I seem to have won my side bet,” he said.

  And he turned to McCoy. “I believe the correct phrase is, ‘Ante up.’ ”

  Epilogue

  “T’Pring has asked to see you,”Sarek said to Jim.

  Jim was on board theEnterprise, in Sickbay as it happened, sitting and talking to McCoy—his usual off-the-record debrief with the Chief of Medicine, after a particularly trying
time. He looked over at the screen, now, and said:

  “What brought this on?”

  “I have no idea,”Sarek said.“You are certainly not required to see her if you do not desire to.”

  I don’t,said Jim’s look aside to McCoy;most emphatically I don’t! To Sarek, though, he said, “Was it me specifically she wanted to see?”

  “Spock and McCoy as well.”

  Jim tilted his head toward McCoy. Bones nodded slowly, though he had a dubious look on his face. “We’ll be there,” Jim said then.

  “So Spock said,”said Sarek.“I have left the coordinates with your communications officer, Captain.”

  “Then we’ll be down shortly. We’ll see you tonight, sir?”

  “You will indeed, Captain. Out.”

  Jim sat back in his chair. “ ‘So Spock said’?”

  “He knows you too well,” said McCoy. “Correction: he knowsus too well.”

  “Logic?”

  “I doubt it,” Bones said.

  Jim reached out for the communicator button again, punched it. “This is the Captain. Mr. Spock to the Transporter Room, please.” He punched the button again, and stood. “Let’s go.”

  The room they beamed into was possibly the most pleasant one Jim could remember having seen while on Vulcan: it was practically a jungle of native Vulcan plants, all spiny or leathery, but all in flower, and some very sweetly so. McCoy wandered around poking and sniffing the various specimens while Jim explained to the handsome young woman sitting behind a desk what they had come for.

  He was astonished when she actually made a small curl of smile at him: a reserved look, but a charming one. “A pleasure to meet you,” she said. “May one thank you for saving us from some of ourselves?”

  Jim was so astonished that he could do nothing but bow slightly, in a manner he had seen Sarek use to his advantage at times. The young woman bowed back, then said, “I will ask T’Pring if she will join you,” and with great suddenness she beamed out.