Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  And the tops of the trees flashed into flame, and everywhere the song stopped, and people stared upward in dumb astonishment—while the heat grew and grew, and the tops of the trees burned away and let in the light, the terrible light, and the trees themselves caught fire. Screaming, the people fled, and the Wanderer looked up betrayed, betrayed by his song, and by the Other, for certainly no one had been given to understand anything aboutthis. Shocked, uncertain what to do, he turned toward the edge of the forest, toward the mountain—

  Not many stars are prone to solar flares, and they tend to happen quickly, when they happen. This is probably a mercy: better the sudden incineration of a planet’s surface than a slow scorching like the expansion of a red giant. The fossil record on Vulcan shows plainly enough how quickly the star flared, and how violently, growing ten percent in size as something went radically wrong with the fusion reaction that had gone on so steadily inside 40 Eri A for so many millions of years. It took no more than ten or twenty minutes to burn almost all the forests: a day to boil the oceans again, leaving seventy percent of the ocean beds turned into bare, scorched sand and mud. The deserts were charred, melted to glass in some places. Metal, where it lay close to the surface, ran molten. Trace gases in the atmosphere ignited: a great deal of oxygen and nitrogen was ionized and whirled off the planet in the terrible heat. Mountains slumped. The polar caps vanished. Seleya’s snows flashed into steam, and her wooded slopes into slag studded with the burning sticks of trees. When T’Khut rose, she came up like a demon, reflected flarefire turning her a burning, blinding, violent red like the fires that had burnt everything. She was scorched herself, and volcanoes spoke with bright and silent rage on her dark side.

  Most of the living creatures on Vulcan died.

  There were some fortunate ones. Creatures that were on the far side of the planet when the first flare hit were usually able to hide; and those that did, lived. Those early Vulcans who lived near caves, and took refuge in them, lived to emerge days later into a world terribly changed. Many of them died in the terrible storms that followed the flare, or else they died of lack of food and water, or because they could not stand the change in the atmosphere. Some simply died of the shock of the change of the world.

  Only the very toughest survived that time. Vulcan was done with being kind. Some of those who survived were ones who used words; but after the flare, they began to make words that were about anger, and pain, and betrayal; and for a long time, there were no songs. The world had betrayed them—that was the word passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind: and the word got into the words, into the cast of the language itself. The world is alive: the world is angry. Beware trusting in the world, beware when its face smiles, for then it will reach out and make you and Death familiar. Flee, rather; beware the strange and new; beware any light in the sky that you do not know; drive it away, and live. Fight the world, fight what it does, strike the world while you may. Sooner or later it will strike you.

  The Other became silent; or perhaps, in anger, was no longer listened to. Many words, too, were lost, as the language worked and reworked itself over the ensuing centuries; the words for fruit, for rain, for peace and leisure to do nothing. Now there were words for blown sand, for blasted stone, for whole forests found charred, for hot dry winds and a sun that had become quiet again but could not quite be trusted; words for despair and loss and being alone, and for the desperate union of minds that seemed the only way to survive in the hell the world had become.

  But the word for “mountain” remainedheya …

  Enterprise: Three

  “You know,” McCoy said from behind the helm, “this place gets a lot of bad press about its climate, but it’s a lot prettier than you might think. Kind of grows on you.”

  “Wait’ll you get down there to say that,” Jim said, stretching in the center seat. “You’re the one who’s always going on about how much better dry heat is. Until you get down into it. Then it’s ‘Where’s the damn air-conditioning?’ for hours at a time, until we get you back up to the ship and toss you in the pool.”

  McCoy folded his arms and looked blasé while the chuckle ran around the bridge. “Status, Mr. Sulu,” Jim said.

  “Approach control has us, Captain. Standard orbit in about three minutes.”

  “Very good. All hands,” Jim said, hitting the button on the arm of his chair. “We have planetfall at Vulcan in three minutes. Normal standdown procedures. Shore leave is approved for all departments: check your heads for the rotation.”

  “I envy them,” McCoy muttered under his breath, leaning on the helm. “A nice vacation in the sun.”

  “While you’re going to have to spend all your time in a conference room somewhere. Poor Bones.” Jim leaned back and watched the image of Vulcan swell in the viewscreen.

  Bones was right, of course: there was something lovely about the place, though to the eye trained in looking at things from space, it was one of the more forbidding landscapes imaginable. Still, Vulcan was not quite the intolerable aridity that the popular press painted it. There was some surface water—not a great deal, but a couple of respectable small seas, each about the size of the Mediterranean on Earth. And one never tended to think of Vulcan having much in the way of weather—at a distance. Jim tended to think of it as southern California with less rain. But swirls of weather patterned the planet as completely as they usually patterned the Earth. The clouds simply released very little moisture to the surface, and they were usually too thin to provide much but a thin, hot haze over the area they covered. White clouds above, and below, the dun and red and golden surface: here and there a meteor crater or a great dry sea bed, and in many places, chains of ancient mountains, worn by millions of years of wind and sand. It was a beautiful place, and a desolate beauty. The last times he had been here, he had had little time to admire the planet for itself. Maybe this time there would be some leisure to do that.

  And you’d better do it now,he thought,because if things don’t go well, this is going to be the last chance you get….

  “Standard orbit,” Sulu announced. “Fourteen thousand miles, hephaistosynchronous.”

  “Maintenance impulse, then, for station-keeping. Helm and Nav on automatic. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  He turned to Spock. “I take it that from here we go through the immigration formalities as usual, and then—?” He made a questioning look.

  “Various of the Vulcan authorities will be expecting us,” Spock said. “They will doubtless want to discuss scheduling of the debates with you. Then we are free until tonight, when there will be a reception for many of the attending dignitaries at the Vulcan Science Academy. Tomorrow is unscheduled time for us. The day after, the debates begin.”

  “Good enough,” Jim said. “Let’s get on with it. Uhura, please have the transporter room stand ready, and see if Sarek and Amanda are ready to accompany us. No rush: we’ll meet them later if they’re not.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  But they were already in the transporter room when Kirk and Spock and McCoy got down there, standing by the pads with their luggage in place. Sarek looked placid as always—or almost always; Jim could not quite get rid of the image of the pain that flickered across that fierce face last night. But Amanda looked openly excited, and she flashed a lovely smile at Jim as he nodded to her.

  “We’ve been away so long,” she said quietly, as Jim got up on the pads next to her. “Two Earth years this time, almost. I’m looking forward to seeing our house again.”

  “One point nine three years, my wife,” Sarek murmured, as the transporter effect took them.

  The transporter room sparkled out of existence, and another room came into being around them, as Amanda said something to Sarek that the translator refused to handle except as a stream of fricatives. Sarek blinked, then said calmly, “You may have a point.”

  One side of Amanda’s mouth quirked in a smile, and Jim glanced away, suddenly convinced that he had just seen a Vulcan be successfully te
ased in public.He may have a point too, Jim thought.He doesn’t seem to find it odd to respond to illogical behavior every now and then. It’s true what he says: I’ve spent very little time with Vulcans other than Spock. We may be a lot more alike than we think we are. And that may be good…or bad….

  The room where they materialized was not as bleak as one might have expected an immigration facility to be. Apparently Vulcans felt that efficiency in performance didn’t necessarily require clinical barrenness. The room was sparsely furnished with computer terminals and seating, and nothing was there that didn’t need to be; but the seating was comfortable and pleasing to the eye, and in one corner a graceful plant that looked like a cross between a prickly pear cactus and a weeping willow was perfectly silhouetted in graceful curves against a window. Outside was a garden of sand and stones so perfectly smooth and subtly symmetrical that no monk in a Zen monastery could have improved it.

  Behind one of the computer podiums was a grave-faced young man in Vulcan civil-service livery who took their ID chips and slipped them into the computer, then handed them back with a slight bow. When Jim handed his over, the young man looked up from the chip—apparently having read Jim’s identity directly from the interference patterns encoded in the chip’s surface, no mean feat—and looked at Jim with a cool, steady expression. “You are very welcome to Vulcan,” he said.

  Jim was good at trusting his feelings, but he had no idea whether to believe this or not. “Thank you,” he said. “I have looked forward to returning here, though I would have preferred not to do so on business.”

  The young man put the chip through the computer, handed it back without another word, and bowed to the group. “That concludes all necessary formalities,” he said. “Please proceed through that door to the staging areas.” And he vanished through another door, without any further ado.

  The group headed for the door, and Jim turned to Sarek as they walked. “Sir,” he said, “one thing I discover: my instincts for reading people seem to fail more often than not down here. Did that young man mean what he was saying, just then?”

  “Well,” Sarek said, “it is said that a Vulcan cannot lie.”

  “But they can exaggerate,” Jim said, “or leave the truth unspoken—or sometimes even prevaricate.”

  Sarek got a wry look as they headed out into the staging area, where the various local and long-haul immigration transporters were arranged around the curve of the big circular room. “This is true enough. Captain, here again our people are not of a piece. Those of us who practicecthia find lying offensive because it perverts the purpose of speech, to accurately describe the world; and there are other reasons less logical, more founded in the emotions. But some practicecthia more assiduously than others, and some hardly at all. And even those who practice parts of it most vigorously are prone, on occasion, to ignore other parts of the philosophy.” They paused for a moment in front of the transporters for the regional capital, tu’Khrev. “I remember a time some years ago, on Earth,” Sarek said, “when I was invited to attend a religious gathering as part of a cultural exchange program. The people at the gathering were professing their belief in one of your people’s holy books, and stating that the only way to be saved—I am still unclear as to what they felt they needed saving from: we never got as far as an explanation—the only way to be ‘saved’ was to follow the book’s directions implicitly, to the letter. Now that book is a notable one, in my opinion, and filled with wise advices for those who will read them and act on them wisely. But some of the advices have less bearing on the present times than others; at least, so it seemed to me. I asked these people whether they felt thatall the book must be obeyed, and they said yes. Then I asked them whether each of them then did indeed, as the book said they must, take a wooden paddle, when they needed to evacuate their bowels, and go out the prescribed distance from the city where they lived and dig a hole with the paddle, and relieve themselves into the hole and cover it over again? They were rather annoyed with me. And I said to them that it seemed to me that one had no right to insist that others keep all of a law unless one keeps it all himself. I am afraid,” Sarek said, mildly, “that they became more annoyed yet.”

  “The ‘rag’ infoservices ate it up,” Amanda said, with a mischievous smile. “ ‘Demon Alien Pursued By Lynch Mob.’ ”

  Spock looked at his father with something like astonishment and then subdued the expression quickly. McCoy’s expression was of someone delighted and trying to keep the fact to himself. Sarek shrugged. “They were not behaving logically.”

  “It was the ears,” Amanda said.

  Sarek looked at her curiously. “You have said that before. Now tell me, my wife, what it is about my ears that made those people so angry.”

  Amanda began to choke with laughter. “Let me,” McCoy said, and he started to explain about demonography and iconography and pitchforks and pointed tails until Sarek was snaking his head in wonder. “They thought, then,” he said, “that I was a personification of entropy. Or resembled one.”

  “That’s one way you could put it,” Jim said. “Are there any such in Vulcan legend?”

  “Yes,” Sarek said, “and theyall have pointed ears. We know ourselves well enough to know that entropy needs no image but our own to do its will. All the same—” He looked at McCoy with an expression of mild concern. “All the same, Doctor, I would recommend that you not mention this peculiarity of some of your species to any of mine. There could be…misunderstandings.”

  “Could there ever,” McCoy said. “No problem, sir.”

  The transporter cleared, and they stepped up onto the big pads, while Sarek slipped his diplomatic credential chip into the accounting slot on the terminal and began tapping out settings. “This will take you to the consular and embassy complex,” he said, “where I will leave you gentlemen in the care of the people you need to see. Amanda and I will stop at home first: then I will proceed to the meetings I have scheduled. Too many of them, I fear. And we will see you at the reception tonight. The officials at the consulates will give your ship the coordinates for the Academy, Captain, or will be glad to handle transport themselves, if you desire.”

  “I’ll have them call the ship,” Jim said. “Ambassador, thanks again for your kindness.”

  “Courtesy to a guest is no kindness,” Sarek said calmly. “Energizing now.”

  The world dissolved in sparkle again, leaving Jim and Spock and McCoy standing in front of a building designed by an architect whose family Jim suspected of owning a glass factory. It was an astonishing piece of craftsmanship, a group of delicate-looking towers seemingly welded together by bridges and buttresses of glass; and the surface of the glass was everywhere iridescent, golds and greens and hot blues all melding into one another up and down the shimmering surfaces.

  “That’s gorgeous,” Jim said.

  “And I bet the coating is a sunblock,” McCoy said.

  “It is our way,” Spock said; “art and science combined. There is no reason that function should not be beautiful—in fact, beauty usually makes it more effective. It does come as a surprise to those who think everything on Vulcan is either utilitarian or made of stone and sand, or both.”

  They headed toward the building. “Your father,” Jim said, “is a little unusual sometimes. An ambassador doesn’t usually go out on a limb, the way he did that time, in the place where he’s assigned. ‘Softly, softly’ is usually the rule.”

  “My father is not the normal sort of ambassador,” Spock said, as they came to the building and its doors dilated for them. “A fact for which we may yet have reason to give thanks.”

  The afternoon would have been something of a bore, except that Jim found himself in the company of someone whom he immediately and wholeheartedly disliked.

  The man’s name was Shath, and he was one of the senior officials in charge of the debates. He was small for a Vulcan, barely five foot nine, and he was blond, which caused Jim to look at him with great interest when he and McCoy
were first introduced to the man in the offices at the consulate. The fair hair was a surprise, since blond Vulcans were rather rare: also a surprise were the blue eyes, a vivid dark blue like Vulcan’s daytime sky in clear weather. Nearly as much of a surprise was the coldness in those eyes. Not the cool reserve that Jim had grown used to on an everyday basis in Spock, in the old days, or in Sarek now: but a genuine shutting out, an assumed coldness, purposeful and uncaring of the response.

  Spock had been escorted off by another consular official, a slender older woman; Shath had led Jim and McCoy into a side office and left them sitting there alone, with nothing but a table and a computer console to keep them company, for almost twenty minutes. At first they simply chatted and assumed there was some kind of bureaucratic tangle going on outside: but then Shath came in at last and made no excuses whatever for the delay. He simply began interviewing them as to their schedules and their intended itineraries, with an air about him as if he were being forced by his job to be polite to monkeys.

  Jim answered Shath’s questions politely enough, but next to him McCoy stirred several times, as if about to say something and stopping himself. Jim suspected what was going through his mind.What am I going to make a fuss about? I’m a starship captain and not being treated with the proper respect?—Well, yes. But Sarek hit it. Not all these people are of a piece, and not all of them like us. If I allow myself to be nettled by that, I’m giving them the satisfaction of letting them see me prove myself to be what they think I am. I won’t do it—