Dwellers in the Crucible

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  No one else was mad enough to go scaling the ruins in the heat of the Vulcan noon, Cleante decided, not even bothering to ask any of her classmates to accompany her. She would go exploring on her own.

  She had been at the settlement for several weeks and had yet to find time to visit the ruins. After her morning classes on a half-day schedule, she slipped out of the city in the briefest of walking shorts, the most minimal of halters, and a staunch pair of hiking boots. Her backpack held a ration of water and some dried fruit, a magnifier, a minitricorder, and some soft brushes to gentle the sand away from any inscriptions or fine work she might want to study.

  Winded from the long hike, Cleante rested in the shadow of the first of the mammoth colonnades marching in silent witness almost to the horizon, letting the breezes cool the sweat from her body. There were no birds here, she realized, no desert creatures. The silence, accentuated by the arid wind, was awesome.

  Vulcan ruins were an endless source of puzzlement to the young human. In her part of the world great pains had been taken to restore the relics of the past; she herself had been one of the student volunteers responsible for the discovery of the long-lost tomb of the mad pharaoh Akhenaton, whose body had been stolen by his enemies four thousand years before. For all its drive toward modernism, Terra had at last come to recognize the need to preserve its past.

  Yet the Vulcan, for all their preoccupation with what they called "the time of the beginning," let these archeological treasures stand untouched, prey to the ravages of wind and sand and the killing sun. In the heart of the Old City many ancient buildings had been rebuilt into the structures of newer edifices, but here on the outskirts all was ruin, and silence.

  Cleante knew enough of Vulcan history to date much of the architecture to several millennia before the Cataclysm, but later additions indicated that they were in use up until that time. There were no "lost civilizations" on Vulcan; new cities were always integrated into older ones. Yet the ruins remained, wounded and profoundly disturbing.

  Why would a species so concerned with aesthetics, with order and harmony, permit such a wasteland of broken columns, crumbled facades and tumbled statues to exist untouched for so long? Cleante knew that as a newcomer, an outworlder on probation as it were, she risked a breach of Vulcan propriety in asking too many questions. Yet she asked her professors, as indirectly as she could, about the ruins. The answer she was given only raised further unanswerable questions.

  "The ruins serve their purpose," she was told, and knew enough not to inquire further.

  Rested now, she meandered among the columns that remained, broken, wounded-looking things, stroking their carved sides lovingly with her fingertips as if to derive some knowledge from them in that way.

  "Why?" she asked, not knowing that she spoke aloud. "What is your purpose? Why have they left you here like this?"

  The ruins gave no answer.

  "I wish you'd stop sulking," Jasmine alFaisal said to her daughter the night before she left for Vulcan. "It's very unattractive. And since you've gone to all the trouble of decking yourself out like a Maypole—"

  "I'm not sulking, Mother," Cleante replied, too languid from her day in the City of the Dead (one last look at her childhood's growing place, macabre playground, which she would not see again for four years) to really argue. "I'm brooding. There's a difference. And I'm no gaudier than you."

  Jasmine alFaisal, newly-elected High Commissioner of the United Earth Council, looked at herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in Cleante's suite in the manse in Sadat City and had to admit that her daughter was right. She removed a few strands of native beryl stones from her neck and dropped them carelessly on the dressing table. She tugged at the waist of her formal ensemble in mild despair. If her physician's latest combination of injections couldn't keep her weight down better than this …

  It's middle age, Jasmine thought with resignation. She was sixty-five, exactly midway into a human lifespan according to current longevity studies. Her jet-black hair had yet to be touched with gray, but there were lines around her eyes and mouth, a certain sagging about the jaw, that did not please her. Was that why her daughter's lithe beauty served as a constant irritant?

  Of course not! Jasmine thought, annoyed with herself. Cleante is as much entitled to her years of beauty, with all the joys and sufferings such beauty brings, as I was to mine. What she is not entitled to do is to threaten my status in the Federation with her whimsies, her inability to settle on a career, and her blatant recklessness with the male of the species.

  Isn't that last item the real issue here? Jasmine asked herself. Aren't you jealous of the way Cleante so casually attracts men, while you must work around your age, their awe of a High Commissioner and the fact that you're five kilos over your ideal weight? Isn't it the specific incident on Earth Colony Seven, that damned Rico Heyerdahl, that really galls you?

  Well, four years on Vulcan will cure my proud beauty of all her bad habits, Jasmine decided, smiling a little cruelly. And with a little luck and my usual perseverance I may be reelected and she'll have to stay for eight. If only we can get through tonight's diplomatic reception without scratching each other's eyes out.

  "I don't understand you," Jasmine sighed. "You're either dressed to the nines or covered with dirt from the excavations. Either way you're like a child. You play at everything, Cle, whether it's study or archeology or sex. When will you grow up?"

  "When I'm thirty, Mother," Cleante laughed. Her laugh was artificial and clattered falsely against her own ears. "I do solemnly promise I'll become instantly mature as soon as I complete the next decade. I'll stop playing the perpetual student; I'll settle on a career. I may even get married."

  She said this last with no small amount of irony. Her mother had married four times, finally abandoning the formalities and selecting lovers at random. Cleante's father had been a man she'd never met.

  "Mother …"

  Cleante felt a sudden tenderness toward this hard, glittering woman whom everyone else on this planet held in such enormous reverence. She would not see her mother for four years, possibly twice that. She was going to become a different person on Vulcan, Cleante promised herself. She was leaving on the interplanetary ferry early tomorrow, long before Jasmine awakened from her beauty sleep. There was so little time to assure her mother that she need no longer add her wayward daughter to her list of planetary burdens.

  I'm sorry about Rico, Mother! she wanted to cry. I'll admit I went after him at first because I knew you wanted him, but it got complicated later, out of my control. Mother, I didn't mean to.

  "Mother, when you were my age you knew what you wanted," she said instead. "It's taken you forty years to get it. Scratching, struggling, denying yourself everything except that goal, but here you are. Don't fault me if I haven't found anything I want that badly."

  Except love, Cleante did not add. Hasn't it ever occurred to you that I seek solace in the arms of strangers because those who are supposed to love me don't? I have no father, but that hurts less than having a mother who resents me. You can't disguise it, Mother. I know I've always been the setback in your career, the little baggage that held you back all those extra years, the one mistake you've ever made or will admit to making. Shipping me off to Vulcan will make it so much easier for both of us. No more keeping up appearances.

  "I promise not to nag you," Jasmine alFaisal said, resting her hands on her daughter's shoulders and contemplating them both in the mirror, though the comparison made her uneasy. "After all, this is our last night together. And I'll have no unhappy faces at my first official reception. Only the Vulcan delegation will be forgiven for seriousness. I want you to be happy. Just think of the notables gathered in that room tonight—Shras of Andor and Sarek of Vulcan and—"

  "Wonderful," Cleante said with little enthusiasm. She did want to meet the mighty Sarek and his Lady Amanda, but she didn't care a fig about the rest of them.

  Our last night together, Cleante thought bitterly. Wit
h a supporting cast of half the Federation!

  "What is your purpose?" Cleante asked the great and silent columns at T'lingShar, so far from her beloved Egypt and yet so near in spirit. "Why have they left you here like this?"

  "To remind ourselves of that which we once were," said a soft and somber voice.

  Cleante turned sharply. She had thought she was alone, had not seen the slight figure more shadow than the shadows, had not heard her Vulcan-quiet approach even in this awesome stillness. T'Shael seemed at one with her environment, seemed to detach herself from it reluctantly to stand in the sunlight so that the human might see her better. Cleante smiled spontaneously, strangely moved.

  "I don't understand," she said.

  "Such as this serves to exacerbate the Vulcan's need for order," T'Shael said, making an elegant gesture with one long hand to encompass everything that surrounded them. She was about to speak more words in a moment than she usually spoke, beyond the limits of the classroom, in an entire day. "We would prefer to correct, to restore, to return this to a place of beauty as it once was. We come here instead to acknowledge that these ruins must always remain, as penalty for the violence of our past. The death of a city is preferable to the death of a living being. The Vulcan must never revert to what was, and this reminds us."

  "Memento mori," Cleante murmured wonderingly, not certain if the idea pleased or repulsed her. She looked long into the solemn dark eyes that appraised her. "A hairshirt."

  "Your pardon?" T'Shael recognized the Latin; it was common enough. But this other expression was new to her.

  Cleante shook her head.

  "Nothing. I was thinking out loud. I didn't mean to disturb you. Were you meditating?"

  She realized as she said it that such a question was a breach of Vulcan etiquette, and covered her mouth with one hand, a nervous habit she had whenever she was acutely embarrassed.

  Was it that gesture that caused T'Shael to open out of herself in the presence of a stranger, to speak where she might ordinarily have kept her silence? Had she known, she who spoke of levels of meaning expanding outward toward a spiritual horizon, the ramifications of this moment, would she have dared?

  "I'm sorry," Cleante said, blundering along. Humility was hardly her strong suit, but there was something here that humbled her. Was it the sense of place, the soaring columns emphasizing her smallness as their antiquity emphasized her youth? Was it the imbuing sense of history, the voices of the ancient ones such as had whispered to her in the City of the Dead, here speaking a language she did not know, but speaking nevertheless? Was it the disapproval she was certain she saw in those solemn eyes? Disapproval of what? Of the clothing she wore, or rather didn't wear (the Vulcan was swathed from throat to ankles, but surely humans were allowed to compensate for the heat), or her intrusive human questions which were a violation of the Vulcanness in the very air? "I didn't mean to be rude—"

  "No matter," T'Shael replied, and though that was all that propriety required of her, she said more. "That you have come here indicates a curiosity about our old places. That you ask forgiveness indicates respect for our ways. You have not disturbed me. Meditation was not my purpose here this day."

  "I see," Cleante said, and did not know what to say next. Again she caressed the stone, cool on the shadowed side, torrid in the sunlight. Every square centimeter was covered with carvings as far up as she could crane her neck to see. Cleante could only assume that with their race's integrity the ancient artisans had continued their designs to the very top. She puzzled over them. Hieroglyphs, runes, complex equations and merely decorative fine work wove about each other and intertwined their way about the columns, soaring upward. If she studied the Vulcan tongues for the rest of her life she could never begin to understand. "In my part of Earth there are ruins similar to these. Just as old, but not nearly as complex."

  "The City of the Dead. Cairo, Old Egypt, Pan-Semite Union, Terra. Though you make your home in Sadat City of the same national division," T'Shael reported. "You are called Cleante alFaisal."

  Would she ever be able to keep from laughing in the face of the Vulcan passion for accuracy and detail? Cleante tried masterfully, and was almost successful. Her sobriety returned when she realized her desire to remain relatively anonymous among all the other VIP offspring at T'lingShar was being threatened. She wished to be known for herself alone, not for being the daughter of a famous mother. Yet the Vulcan had made no mention of the celebrated High Commissioner.

  "How did you know who I am?"

  "I instruct at the settlement. New students are known to me. I am called T'Shael."

  "T'Shael," Cleante repeated carefully, trying it out on her tongue. "It's soft, yet strong. As I suspect its owner is—oh, wait a minute!" she cried, sensing T'Shael's drawing into herself though the. Vulcan's demeanor did not alter. Cleante's humility was shortlived. She was a diplomat's daughter, and could be persuasive or imperious as she chose. "You don't have to retreat into one of your Vulcan distances, I know all about those, and I'm not going to ask any personal questions like some blundering outworlder. Look, I'm new here. I'll be here for four years, and I'm not going to spend that time hiding in some little human enclave. I want to learn about your world. Will you teach me, T'Shael?"

  I am by definition a teacher, T'Shael thought, though the directness of the request disquieted her. It has been given to me to serve.

  "If you wish it," she replied carefully.

  "But do you wish it?" Cleante demanded incisively. "I don't want you to do it only out of a sense of duty."

  "I am here to serve" was T'Shael's answer.

  Cleante thought about that for a moment. It was not the answer she had wanted.

  "I guess that's the most enthusiasm I can expect from a Vulcan," she said. T'Shael's eyes were hooded, unreadable. "And I promise to dress more appropriately, and conduct myself properly, in the future."

  If T'Shael had an opinion, she kept it to herself. On this tenuous ground a friendship was about to take form.

  "Come," T'Shael said shortly, moving away and indicating that Cleante was to follow her if indeed it was her desire to learn. "To learn about a world, one does well to start with its beginnings."

  Cleante swallowed, squared her shoulders beneath her backpack as if setting out for a long journey, and followed.

  In the evening of the day which had proved to be like no other she had ever experienced, T'Shael had activated the small teaching-aid computer in her solitary flat in the settlement.

  "Computer," she had said softly, and it hummed its readiness. "Terran Standard, Dialect Subdivision Anglish. Definition and etymology of the term 'hairshirt.'"

  The computer's response had been food for thought.

  "It is a matter of acceptance of responsibility," T'Shael tried to explain. "A species which employs the term 'hairshirt' surely understands this."

  "If you look at the history of Earth you'd think they'd forgotten," Cleante said wryly.

  "Perhaps. But the Vulcan does not."

  Moving among the friezes in a public building, T'Shael was translating the pictographs, pausing from time to time as the fading of the symbolic colors made her question her accuracy.

  Cleante kept her tricorder running, unable to tear her eyes away from the epic snaking its way about the octagonal walls or the intense figure who explicated it, voice almost hoarse from so many words, eyes acquiring a kind of mystical light as she receded further into her race's past; those eyes, like burning coals concealing whatever she held inside. Oh, T'Shael! Cleante thought. How deep you are! Is it only duty that keeps you instructing a butterfly like me?

  "Please go on," she urged her Vulcan companion, coming out of a sort of trance of her own. T'Shael tilted her head, not understanding. "Responsibility."

  "Indeed." T'Shael nodded, framing her words. "It is to say that every action has its—one might call it 'ripple effect'—meaning that there is no action which is without significance. One's slightest gesture creates incalculable actio
ns and reactions, possesses ramifications which cannot be foreseen, therefore—"

  "If you tried to live by that you'd be paralyzed," Cleante argued. "Carrying the weight of the universe on your shoulders. You'd never be able to move."

  Indeed, T'Shael thought but did not speak.

  "You looked it up," Cleante said into her silence. "Hairshirt."

  "Of course," was T'Shael's answer.

  "The ruins at Gol are vaster," T'Shael had said on another occasion. Statuary was their field of concentration this day. Headless, faceless, limbless grotesques lying on their sides and flayed endlessly by swirling sand. Cleante had told T'Shael as much as she could remember of the poem about Ozymandias, and T'Shael made a mental note to discuss it with her computer. "And the statuary more refined. The best of the sculptors dwelt at Gol. The best of everything dwelt at Gol, which is why it is the place of the Sim're', the High Masters, now."

  "Were they gods?" Cleante asked absently, crouching to touch one disembodied face lying like a gigantic Halloween mask at her feet. She knew they couldn't be; their features were too exactly drawn. They were Vulcans, true Vulcans. They could almost speak.

  "Never," T'Shael said. "That is a curious difference between the Vulcan and most other intelligence. Perhaps it was our telepathic gift, but we never mistook natural phenomena for small pieces of divinity. We knew the All. We had no little gods, not even in the prewritten time, except of course the Others, and though we knew they were superior to us, yet we also knew they were not omnipotent.

  "Our error was in attempting to deify those we knew to be mortal. An excess of honor perverts itself. Thus the Cataclysm. Thus these statues, erected to Vulcans who would be gods. And thus their destruction."

  "It is called a bloodstone," T'Shael said on yet another day. She had brought her human companion to a vast courtyard on the very edge of the ruins which Cleante had somehow not discovered on her own. "There are many such extant in the old ruins. This is actually smaller than most, yet it has its distinction. It was here that Surak, Father of All We Became, came to meet his death."