by Diane Duane
The dwarf pair and the white giant were distant neighbors at best. They each would be a very bright star or pair of stars in the other’s sky by night, and perhaps occasionally by day, but none would ever be so close as to show a disc to the other’s worlds. They would spend the rest of their lives tumbling about one another, around their major and minor centers of gravity, if nothing catastrophic happened to them. Certainly such things had often happened before, to other multiple stars. One of a close pair might be too big, might burn blue white awhile, then go unstable, explode through its Schwartzchild radius and collapse into a black hole—and afterward spend millennia sucking the plasma out of its neighbor in a long deadly spiral, leaving one primary a lightless gravitational tombstone, the other a husk. Or other stars might break up a happy couple or threesome, pulling one or another off by tidal forces. But in the case we’re considering, this didn’t happen. The tidal effects of the red dwarf and white dwarf on the white giant were minimal, and the member stars of 40 Eridani passed a long and uneventful partnership while their planets condensed.
This process had started while the three stars themselves were barely beginning to collapse. Now it swiftly gained impetus from the solar winds generated by the increased magnetic fields in the stars’ early stages of fusion and from the intensified gravity of the collapsed bodies. The spiral-arm clouds of dust around them had already sorted themselves into wide bands; now they became narrower ones, then clumps. Some of the clumps, those farthest out from 40 Eri A, the white giant, tended toward the lighter elements and became gas giants. Four of the planets—three close to the big star, one farther away—had acquired sufficient heavy and metallic elements to develop the standard iron-nickel core and silicon-dominant crust of a “hard” planet. On none of these did life ever arise. The nearest three were too close and hot, the farthest too cold. But in the fourth orbit out from 40 Eri A, odd things were happening.
Usually when clumps occur, one is sufficiently large to draw other clumps to it by gravity and consolidate all the matter in one spot, eventually sweeping the band of dust clean and incorporating it all in a single planetary mass. There can be variations to this process. Two clumps of a fairly balanced size may start orbiting one another within the band: or a cloud of dust within the band may begin to eddy around itself, developing two foci within an elliptical boundary, and matter will accrete to both foci. The actual mechanics of the formation are still obscure. But the final result of this sort of variation is the same—two bodies orbiting one another, sharing a common center of gravity, both achieving planetary or at least near-planetary mass. This is a double planet system.
Such systems are commoner than one might suspect. The Earth and Moon are one such system, though even in this day and age, few people seem to realize it. The popular assumption is that the Moon is Terra’s satellite. But the Moon fails the most basic test to find out whether a body is a satellite or not: namely, as it orbits, it falls onlytoward the star it and the Earth jointly circle, and never away. A true satellite or “moon,” completely in the gravitational grip of its primary body, would occasionally fall away from the star at the heart of the system. The poor misnamed Moon never does…leaving us with the astronomer’s laconic statement that while a satellite may sometimes be a moon, the Moon is not a satellite.
And the Earth and Moon give a good indication of how delicate the balance can be while such a system is forming. If one partner gets too much of the heavier elements, “cheating” the other, the other body of the pair may never develop an atmosphere—or may lose it, as some astronomers think the Moon did, long long ago. There are pairs in which the balance abruptly changes in mid-formation due to the influences of other passing bodies, causingboth planets to lose their gaseous elements. And without an atmosphere, at least on planets suitable for carbon-based life, there is no chance of that life arising. When a double-planet system is forming, the balance can be turned by a hair.
The pair that formed in the fourth orbit out from 40 Eri A was luckier than some. One planet, the larger one, kept its atmosphere: though what it kept was thin and hot, even then. It also kept almost all of the water…which was as well, since if the division had happened more fairly, life might never have sprung up on the larger planet at all. The larger world kept a significant fraction of the nickel-iron available from the primordial cloud, though almost all of it was buried in the seething heat and pressure of the core: the tiny fraction that remained was erratically scattered as iron oxides in the planet’s crust.
The other planet, shortchanged on the denser elements, was able to settle into an orbit with its partner that would seem, to those unfamiliar with the physics and densities involved, to bring it dangerously close to Vulcan. It rarely fails tolook dangerous, especially when a Terran used to a small, cool, distant, silvery Moon, looks up at dusk to see a ruddy, bloated, burning bulk a third of the Vulcan horizon wide come lounging up over the edge of the world, practically leaning over it, the active volcanoes on its surface clearly visible, especially in dark phase. “Vulcan has no moon,” various Vulcans have been heard to remark: accurate as always, when speaking scientifically. “Damn right it doesn’t,” at least one Terran has responded: “it has a nightmare.” T’Khut is this lesser planet’s name in the Vulcan—the female-name form of the noun “watcher”; the eye that opens and closes, but that (legend later said) always sees, and sees most and best in the dark. “Charis,” the Terran astronomers later called her, after the ruddy, cheerful goddess, one of the three Graces, who married the forge-god Vulcan after Love jilted him for War. No one really knows what the Vulcans think of the name—any more than we know what they think of the name “Vulcan” itself. They were polite enough about accepting it as standard Federation nomenclature. But they have other names for their world, and at least one name that they tell to no one.
But all this is long before names, or those who give them. Both planets swung around one another and around their blazing white primary for many, many centuries, and their star and its tiny companions dragged them away through the new Galactic arm, while orbits settled down, continental plates ground against one another, and quakes and volcanoes tore everything. For this while, the planet looked like the popular images of Vulcan, a red brown desolation, full of lava and scorching stone and fire. But a change was (quite literally) in the air, as Vulcan’s atmosphere slowly filled with smoke and vapor, and eventually with cloud and rain. Standing on Vulcan at present, it is hard to imagine the rain streaming down in its first condensation from water vapor—years-long, cataclysmic falls of water, relentlessly washing away the slow-weathering volcanic stone, mingling unexpected combinations of minerals in the first sea beds. But the fossil record is clear: Vulcan, now ninety-six percent dry land, was once ninety percent water—a few islands, and nothing else anywhere but the new hot sea. T’Khut would rise for thousands of centuries to be paced by the reflection of her sullen, fiery face in the wild waters. It was a period that, on the cosmic scale, would not last long: but it lasted long enough for the miracle to happen.
The exact nature of the miracle, as usual, is as obscure as the manner of the formation of the double-planet system itself. By conjecture, of course, we can seem to see what the laboratory tests have proved possible: the right elements present in the water, the right nucleic acids ready to come together to form one more complex: the long seething incubation, the waters hissing with near-boiling warm rain, shuddering under the thunder—and then the lightning-strikes, one or many. That would have been all that was necessary. Remnants of those earliest sea-bed strata indicate that Vulcan’s was more a primordial stew than a soup: sludgier, but far richer in nucleic acids, than the initial mixture present on most carbon-life-form worlds. Great variety existed there in terms of available molecules, and there are theories that the present Vulcan analogues to DNA and RNA show signs of having been the result of arguments, or agreements, among several rival strains that sorted out among themselves, by attempted and successful recombinations, whic
h one was the most likely to survive in the murky waters. Some have since found it ironic that even here, at the earliest point in life’s history on Vulcan, warfare of sorts seemed to be going on.
But after the initial combination of DNA settled down, and the face of the waters grew still, peace seemed to reign for a long time. It was illusory, of course: the analogues of algae and plants, and many life-forms which have no analogues on other worlds, were jostling one another with innocent and primitive ferocity under the water’s surface. But the illusion held for a long time. Many thousands of centuries went by, and the climate shifted radically, before any creature had need to crawl up out of the shrinking, blood-colored waters to burrow into the red-brown sand, or take its chances under the naked eye of day. Until that happened, the world that would be Vulcan dreamed huge and silent under its seas, with T’Khut gazing down on it. Together the two of them tumbled around their burning white shield of a sun, and the sun around its tiny white red and white jewel-partners, as all danced through the expanding arm of the Galaxy: life going to meet life…with who knew what consequences.
Enterprise: Two
The style of crew mixer that a ship threw to “debrief” after refit or extended leave was always very specifically its own. Some of the ships in Starfleet were known for classy meetings, heavy on protocol and fine food; some of them had formal dances; some of them (especially on ships running more decorous variants of command, like the Vulcan or Andorian patterns) had what amounted to panel discussions. And then there were ships that threw unashamed wingdings.Enterprise was definitely one of these. It put something of a strain on the chief of Recreation, but he didn’t mind the occasional strain.
Harb Tanzer was of Diasporan stock. That is to say, he came of a planet which one of the first waves of colonists from Earth had settled in the early twenty-second century. They tended to be tough people, and handed down that toughness, of both looks and constitution, to their children. There had also been some minor mutations, since some of the earliest generation ships had not been as well shielded against radiation as they needed to be, and the children of the Diaspora tended to lose their hair early, or if they kept it, to be startlingly silver-haired. Harb was one of the latter, and that thick, slightly unruly silver mane was the first way a new crewman would come to recognize him at a distance—that, and his stocky, solid build, a function of age, for Harb was (as he put it) “pushing three figures.” Later they would get to know the broad, friendly face, mostly unlined (that was another of the mutations) except for smile lines, and laugh lines around the eyes.
Harb stood in Rec One, theEnterprise ’s main recreation room, and surveyed the crowded, noisy place with immense satisfaction. This was his “stomping ground,” the place where the chief of Recreation did most of his work. It wasn’t all easy, helping people play: there was a lot of setup to be done, but the results were worth it…always. Getting the place ready for this party, for example: working out the best arrangement for the furniture, and which kinds of furniture would be needed, in what amounts—it was a job. After all, a Denebian, half a ton of supple invertebrate, used to sitting in something that resembled a salad bowl, would find an Eames chair fairly useless. And what about the Mizarthu crewmen, half dragon and half python, and twenty feet long?—or the Irdesh, silicon-based and so delicate and crystalline in their structure that a hasty move could shatter one like a pane of glass? Their usual Starfleet-issue gravity neutralizers were all right for everyday duty, but in a crowd an accident might happen. For the Mizarthu Harb had stolen (well, temporarily appropriated) several sets of parallel bars from the ship’s gyms: they could coil up on those to their hearts’ content and discuss philosophy with all comers while they got tiddly on ammonia-and-water. For the Irdesh, Harb had laid hands on enough inertial neutralizes from the people in the Physics labs that all the Irdeshi crewpeople could float around like the big animate snowflakes they were, and never fear a brush from an elbow or a stumble by a dancer, since the neutralizers would sop up the inertia of any blow without transmitting it to the Irdeshi in question.
With questions of comfort handled, there was nothing to do but worry about the catering.
No oneelse was worrying about it, that was certain, since the tables where food was laid out were completely surrounded by crewpeople eating, drinking, and talking at a great rate. Some functions, like this one, were still handled in the old-fashioned buffet style: it was a nuisance to have to call up a plate of hors d’oeuvres on a terminal and wait for the thing to be beamed in. Besides, the orders tended to come in so thick and fast that the computers sometimes got a little confused…and a transporter accident involving both people and food was something that didn’t bear considering. So Harb did it the old-fashioned way and put low-grade stasis fields over the cold cuts and the starch-based snacks to keep them from curling up. The drinks situation, fortunately, needed little supervision; the liquids synthesizer had only a little local transporter to worry about, which it used to produce glasses from stores, as well as cherries and paper umbrellas, things like that. It hadn’t malfunctioned since the last time someone tried to get it to synthesize buttermilk. Harb smiled slightly to himself and hoped seriously that no one would try it tonight.
Elsewhere around the room people were doing what they usually did in Rec One—playing hard—with the exception that there were a lot more of them than usual. On the night of the mixer, the usual three-shift crew rotation was laid aside to make it possible for as many people as wanted to take part. Crewpeople not scheduled for duty went out of their way to relieve other crewpeople who were on post, even if just for a little while, so that they could make it to the party; schedules were juggled until the personnel computers (those with sufficient personality) muttered about it. Now, the place was crammed. There was a big crowd around each of the games tanks, pointing and laughing and making helpful (or not so helpful) suggestions; and everywhere else, it seemed, knots of people, big and little, were talking and shouting and laughing and squeaking and hollering and singing in as many voices as the Federation seemed to possess. The language seemed the same whoever spoke, of course, due to the good offices of the universal translators; but the sound of the three-hundred-odd mingled voices made a cheerful cacophony that Harb wouldn’t have traded for any peace and quiet in the world.
The singing group was one of the largest: forty or fifty people had taken over one of the biggest conversation pits and were making some very peculiar but satisfying harmonies. Quite a few of them had brought instruments. There were guitars, both acoustical and synthetic, and velodicas, and a squeezebox, and Uhura had Spock’s Vulcan harp, as usual; but most noticeably, one corner of the pit was taken up entirely by the members of theStarship Enterprise String, Reed, and Banjo Band. The group played once or twice a week, for fun or for scheduled parties. It was comprised of three people on banjo—one of whom, an Alarshin, attracted a great deal of notice because of his three-handed strumming technique—a portable pianist, one tenor and one soprano sax, and a synthesized percussionist (the musician, not the instrument: Dethwe was a clone).
Harb watched them with some mild concern. They seemed cheerful enough—but perhaps a bit too cheerful, for people who had just come back from vacation. Their energy level seemed a bittoo high, and had a nervous quality to it. Harb recognized that twitchiness. He had seen it before, when the crew knew itself to be going into a dangerous situation that the ship might not be able to do anything about. And there was nothing to do with such a mood but keep an eye on it, and let it run its course, while being there to lend support if needed.
Harb began to stroll over toward the group, brushing through several different conversations as he did so, saying his hellos, eyeing the various tables as he passed them to make sure the food was holding up all right. “Harb,” someone said in his ear.
It was a rather sultry voice, the synthesized voice of the Games and Holography computer. Because of its complexity, it was able to have a personality, and Harb had had one inst
alled as soon as he could…to his occasional regret. His computer had a bit of a temper, and occasionally refused to acknowledge that she was “his” computer. This sometimes made his job interesting. “What’s the scoop, Moira?”
“We’re out of onion dip.”
He rolled his eyes a little as the voice, focused for only him to hear, followed him slowly across the room. “So make some more.”
“Can’t. Stores say they’re out of the culture for the sour cream. It doesn’t seem to have been reordered.”
Harb muttered something rude under his breath in Yiddish.
“I’ll tell Seppu you said so,” Moira said. “It should be fun to watch him grow upside down on his head in Hydroponics.”
“Snitch. Look, just use what we use for yogurt, but do it with cream rather than milk, and accelerate the batch. You know the recipe.”
“It won’t work,” Moira said. “The yogurt usesLactobacillus acidophilus, and the sour cream calls forLactobacillus bulgaricus.”
Harb stood still and thought a moment. Behind him, several people in happy conversation drifted by. One of them said admiringly to another, “I love your new skin color, where did you get it?” Harb chuckled, and then the idea hit him, and he missed the reply.
“Moira, where’s Harry?”
“Your yeoman,” Moira said sweetly, “is watching Mr. Sulu rebuild another Klingon cruiser.”
“Why shouldn’t he be? It’s his party too. Do this for me. Whisper in his ear and tell him to run down to Biology with one of the empty bowls. My compliments to Mr. Cilisci, and tell him if he’ll clone me about half a pound of the organism in the bowl and get it back up here in an hour or less, I’ll get Commander Wen to put aside a cubic meter of greenhouse space in Hydro for his basil. He’ll have enough pesto to keep him going for the whole mission.”