Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

T’Thelaih had her own ideas about that. She handled the accounts, after all. “Noble father,” she said, “surely there are other houses they might more profitably ally with.”

  He glared at her. Yes, he knew perfectly well that he was being condescended to.

  “Noble father,” she said, “how can this match be made? Do they not know about the—the other bindings?”

  “The Eldest of the House knows. Yes.” Her father breathed out. “You have nothing to fear from them if there is an accident.” He paused. “They will adopt you.”

  You are giving me away,she thought,and relieved you are to do it. Foul, ah, foul! “But noble father,” she said, desperate, “the young man—”

  “I care nothing for the young man,” he said angrily. “No more do they. And I’ll spare no tear if you make an end of him: it will rather please me if you kill something of theirs, than otherwise. So do your pleasure, girl. The match will be made when T’Khut is full. The young man comes to meet you tomorrow.”

  And that was that. She bowed her father reverence, and left, and sat long by her window that night, smelling the sweet white flowers, and contemplating the knife in her hand. It was very sharp.

  The crescent set late: watching it, she thought that there was time yet. There was no harm in seeing the young man, at least. The knife would not be any less sharp for a couple days’ delay.

  Then she saw him.

  They were left alone for the meeting, in the great hall of the house’s lower level. It was all barren, there being no great dinner or festival there, no reason to adorn or garnish the place with the old banners and the riches garnered from long years of trade. And indeed many of the rich ornaments had been sold, over time, or were the worse for wear. Some kindly person among the servants had brought out two couches, of the antique style, and each of them sat on one and looked at the other.

  T’Thelaih liked what she saw. The young man had a frank, calm look about him, and his eyes rested on her in a friendly way. “Well,” he said, “they say we’re going to be bound. I hope it’s something you desired.”

  “It’s not,” she said.

  He colored. “I’m sorry I don’t please you.”

  “Oh, but you do!” she said.

  They both fell silent for a moment: he was surprised at the remark, and she was surprised that it had slipped out, and equally surprised at how seriously she meant it. “I simply did not desire to be bound,” she said. “I have been bound before. I killed my husbands.”

  He looked at her with even more surprise. “Not that way,” she said, rather desperately. “It was the killing gift. You know—from the stories.” She bowed her head. “I have it. No one survives the binding.”

  He gazed at her a long time, and finally she had to turn her head away.

  “I think I would take the chance even if the choice were mine,” he said, very slowly, as if just discovering this for himself.

  T’Thelaih looked up in shock. “You must not!” she said. “You must flee! There’s still time for you to get away!”

  He shook his head. “You do not know my grandam,” he said. “She would have me hunted down and brought back. And besides, why would I want to disgrace our house? She is our Eldest. It is my duty to obey her.”

  “She sent you here to kill you! Sheknew!”

  He actually shrugged.

  “You are anidiot,” T’Thelaih said in wonder.

  He shrugged again. “That’s as may be. There’s no escaping, in any case, so I shall not try.”

  The argument went on for nearly an hour. T’Thelaih wondered what the eavesdroppers must be thinking of it all…for certainly, therewere eavesdroppers: she might be mindblind, but she was not so stupid as to think that every mind in the house was not bent in this direction at the moment. And once the thought crossed her mind,Why am I trying to talk him out of it? No worse blame will fall on me this time than has before. My father has practically given me leave to kill him. Why am I arguing the point?

  She could think of no reason.

  Finally the argument trailed off, and she found herself staring at her hands. “Come again tomorrow,” she said.

  “I will,” he said. And he paused and colored again. “I hate to say this,” he said. “They announced it when I came in, but I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “T’Thelaih.”

  “Mahak,” he said, and got up and bowed her reverence and left.

  She sat there shaking her head for a long time, and then went back to the accounts.

  He came back the next day, and the next, and the day after that, and they argued. The arguments always started about the binding itself, but then they began to stray out into more interesting topics—the relationships and interrelationships in their families, the politics that went on, and the doings of the kingdoms and lordships of the world; and finally, about themselves, or rather, each other. The arguments started early and ended late: it wasalmost improper.

  After about three days of this, T’Thelaih realized that she was going tohave to be bound to this man, just to have the leisure to argue properly with him.

  On the fourth day she realized, with a start, that she was in love with him, and he with her. He realized it, for his part, the next day. The argument that day was particularly noisy.

  Two days later, T’Khut was full.

  The public part of the binding was held with great splendor in the hall of the High House. Mahak had decided to take his grandam at her word: tables actually bent under the weight of the food, and drink ran more freely than water. Petty-kings and great lords and Eldest Mothers filled the galleries to look down on the formal touching, as the priest of the god of bindings took the hands of the two to be bound, put them each to the other’s face, and saw that the minds were properly locked together. Not even he saw how each pair of eyes, resting in the other’s gaze, told the other that the locking had already happened, perhaps a hand of days ago, while both parties were shouting at one another at the tops of their voices. Neither of them cared a whit for one of the things they had argued about, the exchange of mind-technicians taking place, just about then, elsewhere in the house. Neither of them paid the slightest mind to the cold, interested glance bent down on them from another of the high galleries, as Lady Suvin looked down satisfied on her handiwork. They completed the binding and spent the afternoon and the early part of the night celebrating it with the assembled dignitaries, not caring in the slightest who had just declared war on whom, or what border skirmish was taking place because of an insult or a strayedsehlat.

  They lay together that night and found that there was at least one thing about which they had no argument whatsoever: though afterward, there was some sleepy discussion as to who had a right to the most of the sleeping silks.

  T’Thelaih was the first to awaken. Without looking to the side where her husband lay, she reached over to the little table by the head of the couch and picked up the knife. It was as sharp as it had been when the moon was thin. She knew what she was going to see: she knew what she was going to do about it.

  She turned over and saw him sleeping quietly and breathing.

  And quite alive.

  The knife fell with a clatter to the floor and awoke him.

  They began to quarrel. It did not last long….

  “I am with child,” she said to him, quite shortly thereafter. He was so surprised that he forgot to start an argument about it.

  “All the good Gods be praised,” he said, taking her hands, “and bless the bad ones for staying out of it!”

  “Sit down, beloved,” she said, “and be calm a little. We need to think.”

  “About what?”

  “The child, for one thing.” T’Thelaih sat down on the couch in their chambers in the High House and looked at him keenly. “This child could be something that our houses have been waiting for for a long time.”

  “There are lots of children,” Mahak said, somewhat confused.

  “But none of both our houses. Mahak, listen t
o me. My father has as good as sold me to Suvin. I’m not bothered by that. Something like it was always bound to happen someday. But this child, depending on how and where it is raised, could be mistress of both my old House and my new one.”

  “Mistress—”

  “A girl, yes.”

  “My grandam is not going to like that,” Mahak said.

  T’Thelaih was silent for a moment. “We are going to have to find some way to stop her not liking it,” she said, “or to see to it that it does not matter. This child can be a bond, an end to the old warfare between our houses. Or the opportunity can die with us.”

  “Have you any idea how we are going to bring this to pass?” he said.

  “Have you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nor have I. But we must start thinking…whom we can cultivate, and how, to see that the child is brought up between the houses, not wholly of one or the other. Otherwise the child will be one more gaming piece, nothing more…. ”

  They sat quietly together for a moment.

  “We must be very careful,” Mahak said. “Otherwise this may be the death of us.”

  T’Thelaih nodded. “As you say.”

  He drew her close. “And in the meantime…”

  And they discussed at some length the subject on which there were no arguments.

  T’Thelaih woke up cold and alone. “Mahak?” she said, confused, and sat up on the couch, looking around for him. There was something wrong at the other end of their bond: he was upset—then she froze.

  Sitting at the end of the couch was the Lady Suvin. She looked at T’Thelaih, and the look was cold and terribly pleased.

  “You are a foolish child,” Suvin said, “but it does not matter. I have what I want of you.”

  “Madam,” T’Thelaih said, holding on to her manners, “what do you mean?”

  “The child,” said Suvin. “This will be your home now: you need fear no interference from your own house, poor thing though it be. I much regret that Mahak may not join you again until your confinement is done. But you will be given every care…so long as you take proper care of the child.”

  T’Thelaih felt her head beginning to pound. “What good can our child do you?” she said.

  Suvin leaned closer, looking even more pleased. “Fool. You have the killing gift. Imperfect, at best: you did not kill my grandson, for some reason. I suspect it is the usual problem, that one must feel her life to somehow be threatened. But did you not know? His great-grandmother had it as well. When two with the gift in their blood, so close in degree, engender a child, it will have the gift as well.”

  T’Thelaih shook her head, numbed. “A weapon,” she said at last.

  “Such a weapon as none will be able to defend against,” said Suvin. “Trained with the Last Thought technique, raised under my hand, obedient to me—those who resist me will simply die, and no one will know the cause. How much simpler life will become. I have much to thank you for.”

  She saw T’Thelaih’s glance at the table. “Forget your little bodkin,” she said. “You’ll not lay hands on yourself: if you try, Mahak will suffer for it. I shall see to that. Resign yourself to your confinement. It need not be uncomfortable.”

  “Bring me my husband,” T’Thelaih said. “Now.”

  Suvin’s eyes glittered. “Do not presume to order me, my girl. You are too valuable to kill out of hand, but there are ways to punish you that will not harm the child.”

  The pounding was getting worse. “My husband,” T’Thelaih said.

  “Folly,” said Suvin, and got up to go. “I will talk to you when you are in your right mind.”

  And from the courtyard below came the sound of swords, and the scream.

  “T’Thelaih!!”

  And nothing else…except, in T’Thelaih’s mind, the feeling of the bond, the connection, as it snapped, and the other end went empty and cold.

  “My husband,” she said. Suvin turned in shock, realizing what had happened. An unfortunate accident—

  She realized too late.

  T’Thelaih was getting up from the bed. The pounding in her head she had felt before, at her first binding, and remotely, in the heat ofplak tow, at the second. Now she knew it for what it was, and she encouraged it.Yes. Oh, my husband, yes —

  “Old woman,” she said to Suvin, getting out of the bed and advancing slowly on her, “beg me for your life.” Suvin backed up, slowly, a step at a time, coming against the wall by the door. “Beg me,” T’Thelaih said, stepping slowly closer. “Bow yourself double, oldlematya, let me see the back of your neck.” Her teeth gleamed. Suvin trembled, and slowly, slowly, began to bow.

  She didn’t finish the gesture: she came up with the knife, poised, threw it. T’Thelaih sidestepped it neatly and replied with the weapon that could not miss: slid into the hateful mind, cold as stone, reached down all its pathways and set them on fire, reached down through every nerve and ran agony down it, reached down into the laboring heart and squeezed it until it burst itself, reached down into the throat and froze it so there should not even be the relief of a scream. From Suvin she turned, and her mind rode her gift down into the courtyard, and wrought death there, death—left minds screaming as a weight of rage like the whole universe collapsed onto them, in burning heat, pain, blood, the end of everything. Her mind fled through the house, finding life, ending it, without thought, everywhere.

  Finally the rage left her, and she picked up the little knife that Suvin had taken, thought about it…then changed her mind. “No,” she said aloud, very softly: “no,he is down there.”

  She went to the window. “Child,” she said, “I am sorry.”

  The fall was too swift for there to be time to start an argument, even with a ghost.

  The extermination of the High House set back the first manned landing on T’Khut by some fifty standard years. Much of the psi-communications technology had to be rediscovered, and the gift bred for again, in the centuries that followed: it is still the least developed of the Vulcan arts of the mind, though the most broadly disseminated.

  T’Khut was mined later, of course, and colonized, and thereafter the Vulcans set off for the outer planets. Several small wars broke out on Vulcan at the first successful landing, in token of the shifting of balances, which are always feared. But other balances were shifting as well: love became increasingly less of a reason for a binding than eugenics. Lives were sacrificed, long wars begun, for the sake of some marriage which might or might not produce a talent of one sort or another. And the terrible example of the attempted union of the High House and the Old House dissuaded many another house from trying such a solution to its problems. Houses grew away from one another, as nations did: grew in enmity and pride, forgot working together for the joys of conquering separately.Fear the other, was the message of that time:keep to your own. Beware the different. Those too different should not seek union. Alone is best.

  Alone, T’Khut, her face now scarred with mines, took her way around the planet, and as the centuries passed, the fires that began to kindle on Vulcan’s surface mirrored her own. She had no clouds so strangely shaped as Vulcan came to have in later years: but the fires burned on and on….

  Enterprise: Five

  “Most disturbing,” Spock said. “It is indeed most disturbing.”

  He and Jim and McCoy were sitting in one corner of the rec room. They had beamed back up to the ship from Sarek’s and Amanda’s, after dinner with them, and none of them had felt able to go to bed, not yet.

  “That’s the understatement of the year,” McCoy said. “Spock, I thought she was the great logical one, after all that business at the Place of Marriage and Challenge. She seems to have changed her mind.”

  “People change, Doctor,” Spock said, “Vulcans no less than humans. But I will be very, very interested indeed to find out what the extent of her involvement with this business is, and what her motives might be.”

  “I have my suspicions,” Jim said. “Revenge for bei
ng ditched.”

  Spock looked at him mildly. “If so, it will be an epic revenge,” he said. “And I am curious, if she is indeed behind all this, how she has been managing it. She has held some minor government office for some time—that much I know—but nothing that would particularly assist her inthis.”

  Jim nodded. “Uhura came back to me with the information about that clipping from the information service,” he said. “It comes from one of the names on Bones’ list. The writer, Selv, who seems to be doing so much of this work.”

  Spock frowned slightly. “Selv,” he said. “I seem to remember that name from somewhere.”

  “Andyou can’t remember who it is right away?”

  “Doctor,” Spock said gently, “not even allfull Vulcans have eidetic memory. One must be trained to it, and I have not been so trained. I think I may be pardoned for knowing a lot of Vulcans, and not remembering all of them, any more than you remember all the people you have ever met on Earth.”

  McCoy nodded. “At any rate,” Spock said, “we will soon enough find out who he is. As for T’Pring—” He looked indecisive, a rather surprising expression for him. “Generally when one has a query to make of a bonded Vulcan woman, at least a query that does not have to do with her work, one makes it through her bondmate. Doctor, is Stonn’s name mentioned anywhere in your list?”

  McCoy flipped through to the first group of S’s—a considerable number, bearing in mind the traditions about Vulcan male names—and then to the rest. “I don’t see it,” he said, sounding cautious. “I’ll run a check with the copy I have on solid.”

  “Do so. I would find it very interesting if Stonn’s name were not somehow involved as well.”

  “Come to think of it,” McCoy said, “so would I.” He riffled through the list a little more, then chucked it aside.

  Jim stretched. “Best I should turn in, I suppose: it’s going to be a busy day.”

  “Captain,” Spock said, “are you comfortable with the briefings you have had on the debate format?”

  Jim nodded. “It’s not as structured as I’m used to—the interruptions from the floor are going to get fairly interesting, I suppose. At any rate, I think Sarek has told us pretty much what we need to know.”