Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  “Wait a minute there, Spock,” McCoy said, and this time he looked wide awake, though there was no telling from his face just what he was thinking. “You aren’t tryin’ to tell me that anyone can tell your father what to say if he doesn’t want to say it. Even I know Sarekthat well.”

  “There are forces moving that it would take a long time to explain, Doctor,” Spock said. “I doubt even I understand them all: I have been away from home too long. But if T’Pau calls a Vulcan in to testify, she has considerable power to exert to see that just that happens. Not that she would stoop to mere power, when doubtless she considers that she has marshaled reasons in logic sufficient to produce the result she desires. Unless my father can produce a logic more compelling than hers, and reasons that cause her to change her mind, he will do exactly as she bids him. And of his own free will.”

  That caused a brief silence.All of Vulcan in one package, Jim had once called her, and correctly. The only being ever to turn down a seat on the Federation High Council when called to it, T’Pau was immensely old and immensely powerful, in ways that humans found difficult to understand. He still didn’t understand her, not really. His one brief encounter with her, on the sands of the mating-place of Spock’s family, had been quite enough. He still could feel it on him like hot scorching sun, that fierce, old, dry regard—eyes that looked on him as impersonally as on a stone, but with intent and calculation eternally and sedately going on behind them…calculation that would make a computer ask for shore leave. “Is she behind this movement to get Vulcan out of the Federation?” Jim said.

  “I do not know,” Spock said. “It is one of many things we must discover. But this much I know: the matter as it stands now could not have gotten so far without her approval…at least her tacit approval.”

  Jim nodded at Spock to continue. “As I mentioned, these groups have been in existence on Vulcan for, in some cases, hundreds of years. The groups who want us out for fear of Vulcan being contaminated are in the ascendant in numbers and popularity, but there are also groups who believe thatwe are infringingyour rights—your human rights, you might say—to be Terran; that our life-style should not be allowed to influence yours to the detriment of your own.” McCoy’s eyebrows went up. “Before you approve, Doctor,” Spock said, “I should perhaps mention that these groups also consider logic and reason to be out of the grasp of humans. Some of the more extreme of them suggest that humans would be better off swinging in trees, as they did long ago, before they learned about walking upright, and fire, and genocide.” McCoy opened his mouth, then shut it again. “What they suggest for Vulcans,” Spock said, “you may imagine. Or perhaps you had better not. But the one piece of this situation that I find most interesting is the fact that never have all these groups, large and small, come together to coordinate their efforts. They always seemed to have too many points of disagreement. But many differences seem to have been resolved…and the number of resolutions, and the speed of them, has made me suspicious.”

  “T’Pau?” McCoy said. “And why?”

  “Unknown,” Spock said. “But unlikely, by my reckoning. She is indeed in many ways the embodiment of our planet—both ancient and modern—but for the past two centuries she has been content to let matters take their course, through much worse times than these. It seems illogical that T’Pau would take so extreme a course against the Federation, and so traumatic a course for the planet, at so late a date: it argues a most shocking series of flaws in her logic not to have seen the status quo coming and prevented it sooner.” Spock steepled his fingers, gazed into space for a moment. “I think we must look elsewhere for the architect of the secessionists’ unity. I hope to have time to reason out exactly where. But time is going to be short.”

  “How fast is whatever happens going to happen?” Scotty said.

  Spock tilted his head to one side. “Essentially, as long as the planetary population finds it interesting or edifying to listen to the arguments. It is safest to reckon no more than a week for this proceeding. The Expunging Group has agreed that the law making Vulcan part of the Federation should be removed from the statute rolls. Normally the law would already be void. But T’Pau prevailed on the Vulcan High Council, the senior legislators who put final approval on statutes that have passed the “lower” legislature, to offer this expunction to the planet for approval by plurality. She told them, I believe correctly, that the issue was too large a one to leave in the hands of mere legislators.”

  Jim’s eyebrow went up at that. “So we have a week to debate this issue, on the public comm channels, I take it.”

  “It may be a week. It may be more. A prior plurality of the Vulcan electorate will be necessary tostop debate before the voting on the Referendum itself begins.”

  “Are any of them really going to pay attention to all this filibustering?” McCoy said.

  “Doctor,” Spock said, “in the modern Vulcan language, the word for ‘idiot’ is derived directly from an older compound word that means ‘one who fails to participate in civil affairs.’ Ninety-eight percent of all Vulcans have held some sort of public office by the time they are two hundred. They will be paying attention, and participating.”

  McCoy looked slightly stunned. “Debate will go on until a threshold number of viewers have indicated they want it stopped,” Spock said. “Some two billion, I believe. The exact number is being determined at the moment. Then the electorate will vote. Many votes will be swayed by what is said in the debates, and who says it—though I suspect many minds of being made up already. Illogical though that may be.”

  “What areyou going to be saying?” Harb Tanzer said quietly. “Whose side are you coming down on?”

  Spock looked at him, a steady gaze. “I have not yet decided,” he said. “Logic must dictate my stance—most especially in my case, for I will be most carefully watched…as carefully as my father, or T’Pau. Or you, Captain.”

  “Noted,” Jim said.

  “If my credibility suffers,” Spock said, “so will the Federation’s cause. I must take great care. But the issues are complex…and it might be that the best way to support the Federation would be to argue against it.”

  There was a long silence at this. “So after the debates,” McCoy said, “come the votes. And if the vote is to stay in the Federation?”

  “Then we go back on patrol,” Jim said.

  “And if the Vulcans vote to secede?”

  “Then all public trade and defense agreements lapse. Private ones are subject to renegotiation if all involved parties desire. But all Vulcan civilians must either return permanently to Vulcan—or emigrate permanently, if they desire to reside elsewhere. All Vulcan bases and vessels in Federation service will be withdrawn; all Vulcan diplomatic personnel, starships, and starship personnel will be recalled,” Spock said. “Those who disobey the order will be stripped of their Vulcan citizen status and exiled. The Federation will cease to exist for Vulcan.” Spock looked up. “You will be dead to us.”

  The silence that followed was considerable. “Any further questions?” Jim said.

  There were none.

  “Very well,” Jim said. “A somewhat abbreviated version of this briefing will be given to the crew at large tomorrow: please note it in your scheduling. Dismissed, and I’ll see you all at the mixer later. Mr. Spock, Doctor, will you stay a moment?”

  The room cleared out. Jim stretched a little, trying to get rid of the crick that his back always acquired during a long briefing. When the door hissed shut for the last time, he said to Spock, “What are the odds?”

  “Of Vulcan seceding?” Spock said. “They are high. I have been running syntheses of the most pertinent data through the computer, on and off, for some months now. The odds are presently on the close order of seventy percent.”

  McCoy whistled softly to himself. “Not the best odds for a gamblin’ man,” he said.

  “Time to change the odds, then,” Jim said.

  McCoy looked at him. “How?”

 
“I haven’t the faintest idea. But this ship’s encounters with Vulcan never go quite according to the rules…you notice that?”

  Bones smiled. “You want me to slip the whole planet a mickey,” he said, “I’d better get cooking. What are you thinking of, Jim?”

  “I truly don’t know. Just both of you…keep your eyes and ears open and tell me anything you think I need to know. Spock, is there a chance of my having a quiet talk with your father when we get to Vulcan?”

  “Almost certainly. I believe he will have had the same idea.”

  “Good.” Jim stretched again in the chair, put his hands up behind his head. “We’re not going to let the best first officer in the Fleet go that easily…or the rest of the planet, either.” He brooded for a moment, then said, “Go on, you two. I’ll see you at the mixer.”

  They went. After a while Jim leaned forward to flick at the controls of the screen in front of him. The graphic view on it gave way to the darkness of space, and stars rushing past in it, a silent stream of threads of light. He put his head down on his arms and gazed into the darkness, thinking….

  Vulcan: One

  One of the mistakes people tend to make about their own planets, or others’, is that a world’s location is a fairly permanent thing. It’s true that we speak of planetary coordinates as if you could point at them on a map and find the planet there again in the same spot the next day. (You will, but only because the computer has obligingly updated the starmap to take into account the million and a half miles your planet has moved in its orbit since yesterday and the million miles sideways your star has pulled it in the same time, as the whole starsystem cruises off toward some other star whose company your primary has been covertly seeking for the past eight thousand years…. )

  These same people may tell you about the Big Bang a sentence later—making it plain that they’ve never considered the phenomenon past the fact itself; never thought about the kinds of changes that that picture of the Universe implies…the vast silent journeys, the terrible speeds. Star travel gives us back a sense of scale in terms of the Galaxy’s size, but (most especially since the discovery of warpdrive and its sidestepping of relativistic effects) it can do nothing about our perception of its scale of time. This is no surprise, considering. When a single rotation of ten million years will see all but a very few of our civilizations destroyed by the mere attrition of time, the galaxies seem to move with ponderous dignity, with awful grandeur. And this perception, for living creatures, is a true one. But just as true, and harder for us to see, is the way (in its own terms) in which a galaxy roars through the universe, hurling itself along, seething, churning, changing itself with every whirlpool rotation, changing all its stars and all its worlds: star systems caroming in and out of one another’s influence, clusters shifting shape, stars flaring, dying, being reborn from exploded remnants: a cosmic billiards game, run marvelously amok. Our Galaxy has hauled us, all unprotesting, along with all the myriad planets of the billion humanities, across untold and untellable light-years, at speeds that starships easily surpass but could never maintain…not for a trillion years at a time.

  With all this in mind, it is pointless to try to locate one bit of space and say, “Vulcan was bornthere .” The birth took three billion years, and was dragged across half that many light-years—a storm track, a cloudy set of possible loci, like an electron’s shell, rather than anything that could be pinpointed. Indeed computers could trace that track, but to what purpose? Many stars have streaked through that area: many more will plunge through it before the Universe goes cold and starts to implode. Right now there is an X-ray star there, used by the Federation as a beacon for navigation purposes. But by tomorrow the beacon will be three million miles somewhere else, and that space will be “empty” again. Everything moves: therein, in paradox, lies our only stability.

  We can postulate, though, a moving point of view—one that tracks along with that foggy stripe of probability loci, the long, broad, spiraling shape traced through those parts of space for three billion years. Not that a point of view would have had much to see but what seemed empty space for the first seventy percent of the stripe.

  The space was of course not empty at all. Unseen forces and pathways crammed it full—the shallow curvatures of gravity, the occasional immaterial Klein-bottle nozzle of a wormhole, the little-understood “strings” of nonmatter/nonenergy that define the structure of space itself. Matter and energy passing through those pathways responded to them, ran down them, converged in places, like raindrops running down a cobweb. This was indeed how the Galaxy’s first generation of stars had congealed out of the hurtling dark ghost-cloud of dust and gas in its earliest life, as the dust gathered at countless gravitational nexi, compressed itself, kindled slowly or swiftly to starhood.

  Few of those most ancient stars had any planets. Free energy in that early, formative galaxy was at a terrible premium, and very few stars “did anything” with what energy was available except kindle themselves. Even fewer of the ones that did have planets, as far as we can tell, ever played host to life. Time and the normal life cycle of the oldest stars have long destroyed almost all traces of the earliest sentience. Many stars vaporized their planets by nova-blast or wiped out all life and artifacts on them by starflare, and their humanities’ histories are silence to us. A handful of other worlds, more fortunate, still have histories nearly as oblique. Among them must be counted the worlds that were first homes to species like the Organians and the Metrons, who eventually became pilgrims among planets, outliving their worlds over millions of years—finally giving up bodies for existence, and becoming for being. How many of these creatures move still about the Galaxy, by our definition immortal, untroubled by space and time and physicality, no one can say they know.

  However, our concern lies not with the oldest stars, mostly now dwarfed or yellow-white with age, but with the second generation of stellar formation, what astronomers call Population II. The broad flat starry oval of the young Galaxy, traveling through patches and tangles of “strings,” began to stretch itself (or to be pulled out by the resisting tangles) against the old night. Helped by the oval’s own rotation, arms reached out of it: first as blunt bars from the ends of the oval, then curving back into the familiar long graceful glowing arcs of spiral arms, inexpressible tonnages of interstellar hydrogen and dust, all lit by the first-generation stars that had been swept into the arms by immense gravitational-tidal forces. The arms multiplied; the Galaxy became a pinwheel, a whirlpool of dust and light. The dust once again gathered and compressed itself in a billion nexi of strings and gravitation, a network even more complex this time because of the added tidal forces and gravitation of the spiral structure—gathered, and kindled, and burned with blue fusion-fire. Billions of these second-generation stars were born of the forces intermingling in the arms; and with the new stars, planets, almost everywhere that stellar formation took place. Here again, time-scale confuses us. We can choose which we see: a slow glow into burning, like the coals of a fire burning hotter as they’re blown on—or (from the Galaxy’s own viewpoint) a burst of celestial firecrackers, life leaping into being, light born and blazing in the time it takes to speak a word….

  Considered in large, the process was continual: but there were bursts of more rapid stellar creation within the larger steady progression. The same “creation cluster” produced many of the Federation stars, and both Sol and 40 Eridani, about eight billion years ago. Earth came later in the process. 40 Eri, as the astronomers call Vulcan’s starsystem in shorthand, came earlier by sixty million years, a difference barely significant on the planetary scale.

  But at the time we are considering, there was no sight of either world yet, much less either world’s star. Interstellar dust is as nearly invisible as anything that exists, especially without a nearby sun to excite it to a glow, or at least to silhouette it from one side, coal-sack style. Nonetheless, there were untold trillions of tons of dust, more than enough to make up five “hard” plan
ets, three gas giants, and a star…and thereby hangs a tale.

  In most ways the formation of Vulcan’s solar system was typical, the so-called “planetary formation” that every schoolchild knows. Dust and gas gather together in the dark, swirling about in tiny mimicry of the Galactic spiral structure. In the small mimic spiral arms, matter clots, gathers itself to itself in little hurricane swirls, hardens down to a core, begins to attract more. Slowly gravity becomes a force to be reckoned with, at least on the local scale, rather than (as it more usually is) one of the puniest forces known to science.

  You would have to bring your own light to see all this by, of course, for at the time we deal with, there would be nothing to break the old dark but the cool faint glow of the distant, dust-blocked galactic core. The Milky Way Galaxy was at this point just three billion years old. It had barely begun to develop the earliest stages of its present spiral structure, and from a distance (if anyone had been there to look) would have seemed a fairly tightly packed oval, all ablaze with that first crop of stars, the then blue white giants of Population I. But the tight-packed look was an illusion. Emptiness was almost everywhere, except in such vicinities as the one we’re considering—a track along which three stars were being born.

  They started out as huge, vague, quietly glowing orbs, warming slowly, shrinking as gravity compressed them through red heat, to yellow and white, and finally past mere moltenness to the point at which gravity overcomes atomic forces, stripping the atoms bare, reducing them to plasma, and atomic fusion starts. One, the biggest, flared white; the other two, much smaller, burned orange yellow and golden, respectively. They were a true triple star, or more exactly, a pair-and-a-half, all formed from distant segments of the same cloud and all influencing one another gravitationally, to differing degrees. The two smaller stars quickly came to orbit one another quite closely. This may have had something to do with their rapid aging, so that both rather prematurely collapsed into dwarf stars, one hyperdense and white, its companion rather light and diffuse, very red, and unusually small.