by Diane Duane
“What Spock told us about this morning,” Jim said, “should be quite enough, for starters.”
“No,” McCoy said. “There’s something else…. ”
Vulcan: Two
There were no words, yet. Thought was enough.
He had no name: at least, none that he was able to tell others. Certainly the others had ways they thought of him; the big one, the one with the black hair, the one who caught the beast, the one who knew where the firestones were. But he did not see that these thoughts about him were really him, or even accurate descriptions of him, not thehim inside. Sometimes he wished he could think of his own name for himself, but it never seemed to matter, not for long. He was himself. The Other knew.
He spent most of his time in the daytimes doing as did the rest of the ones he lived with—wandering among the trees, eating when he was hungry, drinking when he was thirsty, lying down to rest when he was tired. There were other urges, but they came less frequently. It had been years since the Rapture came upon him, and others of the ones he traveled with had pursued him, or been pursued, through the shadows of the greatest trees, there to do strange deeds upon one another. They had no idea where these urges came from and would not have thought to question them, any more than they would have thought to wonder why one got hungry or thirsty. What did it matter? There was always food and drink and ground cushioned with green things to sleep on. Sometimes, after the Raptures, others came, after strange pains and pleasures; but there was always food for them as well. No one understood the sources of this nourishment, why it suddenly came from bodies, why it went away. It did not matter. The Other knew.
While they stayed among the trees, food never failed them. The fruits came and went—sometimes one fruit being in season, sometimes another one. During the cooler weather there were the great sweet gourds, and the flat flowers that grew on the stones and were good to eat, and the long pods that hung from vines, and the hard fruit like stones that had to be cracked, but were full of small tender fruits and sweet juice. There was almost nothing that wasnot good to eat, except the rocks. Some growing things simply tasted better than others, had a different savor or a more interesting fragrance. The group often experimented, one of them calling others to see some new plant or fruit that the group had never seen before, passing it around to taste. There was admiration for the ones who did this the best; they were touched, surrounded by others who wanted to learn to do as well. They slept warm and woke again to wander the endless forests, and eat, and look around them in wonder. There was nothing else for them to do. Sometimes they died, without understanding what was happening, without knowing what death was at all. It did not matter. The Other knew.
They were hominids, of a kind that would have been familiar to any modern xenopaleontologist; perhaps “seeded” on Vulcan by that strange peripatetic species called the Preservers, perhaps not. They looked enough like paleolithic Earth-humans, at that point, to have been easily mistaken for them; a young species that had come to be stocky, strong-armed and strong-limbed, the braincase rapidly expanding to handle an environment rich with stimuli. It would have taken close examination to determine that these were in fact not human. The cast of skin under the shaggy hair and the unconsciously and cheerfully worn coat of grime would have given away the most obvious indication—would have led an examiner eventually to the blood that was green, not red, and to the molecule that betrays so many species’ kinship to the plant life of their worlds. On Earth there is only one atom’s difference between the molecules of chlorophyll and hemoglobin: manganese at the heart of the compound for the chloroplasts of plants, iron for the blood cells of beasts and men. On Vulcan there was not even that much difference: vulcanoheme and cuproplast alike each had a copper atom at the center of the compound. Few planets have been as verdant as Vulcan was in its lush and beautiful youth—whole continents covered with mighty forests of trees, some a thousand feet high; oceans in which weed as high as trees reached up and bent against the sky-ceiling of the surface, from root-stalks hundreds of feet deep. The lesser animals were more like plants than anything else: the greater ones broke away from being plants only with difficulty. It was a kindly world, in the evolutionary sense, and there was far less reason to struggle than on Earth or many another world—less reason to push an organism into becoming. Being was easier.
There were places where it was not so easy. The wanderers tended to avoid them without specifically naming them or thinking about them. There were places where the trees grew sparser, where fruit was not so easy to find, where water was scarce and did not flow down from every high rock, or sometimes even from the trees themselves. They came upon these places, did the wanderers, and felt vaguely uncomfortable and unsatisfied with them, and drifted back to where the fruit was sweet and the water poured down without having to seek for it.
At least, most of them did.
He was an exception. If he had not been so good at finding the sweetest fruit, the coldest water, they might have drifted away from him and left him on his own long since. But he had that gift of finding, because he looked harder and better than the others; and so they tolerated (without knowing it) the other gift that was part of the first, the tendency to look further ahead, to wonder whether a fruit a little further along might be sweeter, or stranger, than the last. Sometimes he did indeed leave his group alone, though it tore his heart to do so—even then, even though he could hear their minds somewhat, still aloneness hurt—and he would spend long weeks wandering under the great leafy canopy, listening for new sounds, tasting, touching, wondering at what he saw. Sometimes he found nothing. Sometimes he came back weary with the burden he carried from great distances, strange new fruits and leaves. Sometimes he came back with nothing but tales he could not tell, except in the halting picture-speech of the mind—and the pictures were incomplete, fragmentary, from the undiscipline of a mind that leapt from one image to another, delighted past control. Images were all he could share, and increasingly this upset him. There had to be a way to make the others understand, understandeverything. He would hunt for it.
And so he did. More and more he was away from the grounds where his group habitually wandered. Odd it was how he defined himself in terms of them, but the group, when he was gone, tended not to wander too far, so that “their” strange one would find his way back to them. Their thoughts went after him, but being as untrained as his imagery, they reached him only rarely: so that sometimes in the middle of a wet dark night, or a day’s climbing and scrambling, he would feel a brush against his mind, like a wing—the concern of one of them. He would go about his business, or back to sleep, feeling curiously reassured. They knew him, as the Other did.
It was a world for wandering, if ever there was one; a warm summery world, moist and twilit under its trees even by day, the endless sea of treetops and the wide waters sheened with coppery light by night as T’Khut slipped up over the edge of the planet. Vulcan’s year was a touch shorter than the year of Earth would come to be, but it lacked the severe axial tilt that caused cold winters and fierce summers on other worlds, and the eccentricity of its orbit was so slight as to make it nearly a perfect circle. Summer was forever, and mild. The warm oceans, now long calmed from their boiling, and green as old bronze, watered the landmasses liberally with long soft rains all year round; the atmosphere, richer in oxygen than the norm because of the abundant plant life on land and in the sea, held the heat of the white sun close. There was ice in two tiny circles, at the poles, and hardly anywhere else, ever. Even there at the farthest north and south the surface of the ice melted and grew warm, sometimes, and turned green for a season with the tiny temperature-tolerant algae that had first colonized the planet on behalf of everything else.
Through this quiet world the wanderer made his way, without a direction, without a set purpose. He only knew that he was looking for something. The life of the forests went on around him as he passed through, and the wanderer paid it as much heed as he usually did, no more. There wer
e many other forms of life in those forests, some of which preyed on one another, rather than on the fruits of the trees. The wanderer did not fear them, any more than any other of his people did. One sometimes died of them, but no particular notice was taken of that. That strange stopping, that change, always happened sooner or later, and it was no great sorrow. The stopped ones could still be heard in the others’ minds, and there was something indefinablymore about the ones who had been stopped, so that though they spoke rarely, hearing them was a joy. No one knew the whys of the Change: no one gave it much thought. The Other knew.
The wanderer made his way under the great trees, eating and drinking and sleeping, for a long time. Time itself did not matter to him, or would not have, if he had had a concept of it. It would have seemed folly to make a business of counting one’s breaths when the days were so full of wonder, and there were other things to do. What the wanderer finally began to notice was that food was becoming a little harder to find. He rejoiced in the knowledge, the way one might rejoice to see an unusually large fruit hanging on the branch. He knew that he was coming close to what he sought: the places where things were different. He kept going.
Soon there were fewer kinds of tree, and then, eventually, only one kind of fruit: and the other trees around were not the sort that gave water when you broke their branches. The streams that came from the stone were becoming fewer. The wanderer stopped for a while and considered this, sitting by one of the streams, munching a gourd and dabbling his hands in the water. He knew enough to know that if one went without water long enough, one stopped: and he had no desire to become a voice in anyone else’s ears, no matter how well and glad the voices sounded. It occurred to him that he was going to have to go back to his group again, if he could not find more water on the way that he was going. He decided to drink deep and make one long walk, and if there was no water at the end of it, to turn again for the place where his people were.
The wanderer drank until he thought he would burst, and then walked. As probably the most experienced traveler that his little group had ever known, he had learned to read certain signs about the land that he was hardly aware of reading. One of them was that going downhill was likely to take you to somewhere strange faster than going uphill; indeed, all along this long journey, he had been aware of going slowly downhill. Now he purposely chose that path: chose, too, the way in which the great trees seemed thinnest. He walked.
He walked for nearly a week, without another drink, without more food. Then as now, Vulcans were tough, and perhaps, in that distant morning of their world, tougher than they are now. The trees grew few: the white sunlight came through them in great patches. The wanderer looked up at the sky, a rich blue green in those days, and wondered at it. Only rarely had he seen it, and at those times he had suspected it was somehow part of the trees. Now he began to wonder whether it might in fact be the other way around, and the trees actually some darker, closer part of this overarching brilliance that hurt his eyes. Doubtless the Other knew: perhaps one day he would ask. In the meantime, he walked on.
Around the time he first began to be thirsty, the trees very suddenly disappeared entirely. The wanderer saw this sudden end of greenness ahead of him, saw the belt of brightness, the horizon, for the first time, and had to stop and hold on to a tree for the terrible vertigo it gave him. The world was not walled with the trees’ shadowy greenness everywhere, after all: it was flat. The flatness of it stretched out before him in a shorter, tougher greenness than that of the trees, all starred with bright color like the flowers that grew from some of the trees of home, but brighter, frailer. And past the long flat stretches of green was another flatness stranger still, a bright pale color that threw the hot white sunlight back into his eyes until they squinted. The wanderer was the first Vulcan to look upon a desert.
There was certainly no fruit there, certainly no water. But he had to know whatwas there. He walked.
The thirst came to be with him constantly now. Only once did he manage to break it, when a rainstorm caught him by surprise, far out of its normal purlieus; he lay with his mouth open to the torrent of it, no matter how astonished he was by the vast racketing of the thunder out in the open, and afterward he supped up every drop of water from every blade of greenery he could reach before the warmth of the day sucked the precious droplets back up into the brazen sky. Then he began to walk again.
The greenery gave way to stones, and hills without dense groundcover—nothing but dirt and barren scree and gravel. All his life he had scarcely walked on anything harder than moss or soft herbage. His feet left green footprints behind them now, but he did not notice. He only had eyes for the eye-defeating whiteness ahead. He walked into it, to the edge of it, where even the gravel stopped, and there was nothing but sand. And there he stopped.
The dunes went on forever. White, white, burning white, they rolled away into impossible distances in perfectly sculptured knife edges of sand, and over them the wind rode in toward him and flung the sand off the crests of them into his face in occasional gusts. He stood there, his eyes tearing in the almost unbearable light, and stared at a world that had edges instead of walls: edges too far away for him ever to reach.
And beyond the edges…something reached up to the sky, and he saw it, and fell to his knees.
It was a mountain. It was alone: it rose out of the distance unchallenged by other peaks, impossibly high, forested almost to its summit. And its summit was a pure white that glanced the light back at him clear and sharp as pain. So it seemed in its youth, Mount Seleya, rearing up tallest of the mountains of Vulcan, in those ancient times when its lone crest still speared up virgin-sharp and uneroded, and still knew snow. Numinous enough it seems to Vulcans in the present day, that ancient and inviolate mountain at the edge of Vulcan’s Forge, the unmoving point around which so much of their history has stormed. But to the wanderer, there at the lost beginnings of things, it was the tallest thing in the world, the thing that must surely reach up to heaven as even the trees did not: the center of the universe. And the wanderer fell down on the sand and yearned for it as no Vulcan on the planet ever had yearned for anything. There had never beenneed, on Vulcan; not until now. Now one Vulcan needed, and that need would change almost everything.
The wanderer rose up, at last, and sat down on the hot sand, and looked across at the mountain with something other than the eyes of longing. There was no accurately judging its distance, even for as expert a traveler as he. He was used to worlds that had walls, and pillars of trees near at hand, rather than this pellucid visibility that went on seemingly forever into an infinity of clear blue-green air. It would take a long, long time to walk there, he was sure. And if that thing was as far off as he thought it was, and the height it seemed to have would change the same way that the seeming height of a tree changed when one came close to it or went away from it, then the great wide stone tree—so he thought of it—must be very tall. He might climb it, as he had climbed some trees before: and if he got to the top of it, he would touch the heavens. And then—But there his thought failed him.
A long, long way away: that was the problem. But there was no food here, and no water, and probably no food or water there, either. To climb to heaven, he would have to solve that problem. And he was already desperately hungry and thirsty; and another hunger had been added, the hunger for the mountain, which no one else had ever suffered, and which was thus doubly terrible.
At last the sun went down, and with its setting, as was proper for that time of month, T’Khut leaned up slowly over the edge of the world and looked at the wanderer. He had no doubt he was being looked at. Until he saw the mountain, nothing but the others with whom he wandered had seemed to have that ability—to look, to see. Now the great shape stretched itself up past the horizon, its shape shifting and changing through strange oblatenesses, warped by the lens of atmosphere, and the wanderer gazed at this apparition and was no longer so sure about the inanimate nature of the world. He and his people had caught th
e occasional glimpse of T’Khut through the leaves of the highest tree canopies. But they had only seen her in fragments, flickers through the parting veil of leaves; and most often as a vast perfect roundness, serene, unchanged, seemingly unchangeable. Now the horizon and the heat-wavering atmosphere carved her into a new shape every moment, and she seemed a live thing, slipping up over the edge of existence, breathing, changing, growing like the shes’ bellies after the Rapture. T’Khut’s outlines trembled, she swelled, she grew round, though still flattened—a gravid-looking shape, swollen with promise. Fire flickered in the dark sliver of crescent she still carried on her new limb.
The wanderer trembled and hid his eyes. If the Other knew about this enormous beauty, this strangeness, it had never given the fact to be understood.
But the trembling went away after a while as T’Khut resumed her wonted shape, and the darkness fell, and the Eyes came out, first the white, then the red. The wanderer realized that he had to go back before he could go any farther forward.
The return journey was much longer than the journey outward, for the wanderer had pushed himself to his limits to reach the edge of the desert, and several times on the way back he had to simply lie down for a day or so in the shade of some fruit-bearing tree, moving nothing, merely breathing. Shade at first was a precious thing; when the trees were many again, he wallowed in shadow as if in some forest pool…then, astonishingly, began to sicken for the sight of clear turquoise sky. When he re-found the first (or last) stream springing clear from its rock, he drank from it and rolled under it and lay in it and fell asleep in it; and the next morning he sat eating the sweet gourds that hung about, and then drinking, drinking, as if there were to be no water left in the wide world the next morning. He stayed for several days by that spring, eating the gourds, regaining his strength, thinking of the long way back, the long way to the mountain, and how there was no water….