Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

“Aha,” McCoy said, looking out in that direction and shading his eyes. “Long life and prosperity to you—though I doubt you’ll attract much prosperity with that kind of world-view. Still, maybe wishes count. But it might help if you went to Earth some day and checked out what you talked about so blithely—”

  “The data about Earth speaks for itself—” Selv’s thin, angry voice came back.

  “Nodata speaks for itself,” McCoy said, forceful. “Data just lies there.People speak. The idiom ‘speaks for itself’ almostalways translates as ‘If I don’t say something about this, no one will notice it.’ Sloppy thinking, Selv! You are dealing with second- and third-hand data. You have never been to Earth, you don’t understand our language—and this is made especially clear by some of the material you claim to be ‘translating’ from Earth publications: an Andorian spirit-dancer with a Ouija board and a Scrabble set could do a better job. Though I must admit I really liked the article on the evolution of the blood sacrifice in Terran culture. That isnot what major-league football is for…. ”

  McCoy let the laugh die down, and then said, “Anyway, where was I? Agreements as bandages.Every species in this galaxy that bumps into another one, bruises it a little. Some of them back off in terror and never come out to play again. Some of them run home to their mommies and cry, and never come out again without someone else to protect them. That’s their problem. I for one would like them to come out and play—”

  “And be exploited? The Federation’s record of violations of the Prime Directive has been well documented—”

  “Selv, I love you. How many violations of the Prime Directive have there been?”

  A brief, frantic silence. “Well documented,” McCoy said, good-humored, “but not well enough for you to have seen it. Too busy reading about football? Anyway, don’t bother looking it up,” McCoy said, “I’ll tell you myself. In the last one hundred and eighty years, there have been twenty-nine violations. It sounds like a lot…except when you consider that those took place during the exploration of twenty-threethousand planets by the various branches of Starfleet. And don’t start with me about theEnterprise,” he added, “and her purported record. There have been five violations…out of six hundred thirty-three planets visited and physically surveyed over the last five years.”

  “And all those violations have taken place under a Terran’s captaincy—”

  “Oh, my,” McCoy said, and it came out almost in a purr, “can it be that Vulcan is leaving the Federation because someone heredoesn’t like James T. Kirk? What an amazing idea! Though it would go nicely with some rumors I’ve been hearing.” Bones strolled calmly around the stage for a moment, while Jim and Spock looked at one another, slightly startled. “Well, no matter for that. Still, Selv, your contact with the facts about things seems to be sporadic at best. If I were the people who’ve been reading your material in the nets—and a busy little beaver you’ve been of late—I would start wondering about how much of what I was reading was for real. That is, if I were logical—” McCoy lifted his head to look up over the audience’s heads, and Spock glanced meaningfully at Jim. McCoy knew perfectly well where the cameras were.

  “You may say what you like,” Selv said, “but even five violations are too many! And your use of your data is subjective—”

  “Of course they’re too many!” McCoy said. “Do you think I would disagree on that? And as for my data, of course it’s subjective! So is yours! We are each of us locked up in our own skull, or maybe skulls, if you’re a Vulcan and lucky enough to be successfully bonded. If you start going on about objective reality, I swearI’ll come down and bite you in the leg!” There was some chuckling at that.

  “Though I hope you’ve had your shots,” McCoy added. “If not, I can always give them to you afterward. I’ve become pretty fair at taking care of Vulcans over the past few years. At any rate, I was talking about bandages—”

  “The doctor is tenacious,” Spock said softly.

  “The doctor is a damn good shrink,” Jim whispered back, “and knows damn well when someone’s trying to give him the runaround.”

  “—There’s no arguing the fact that Vulcans and Terrans, or the Terran-influenced functions of the Federation, have had a lot of bumps into one another over the course of time,” McCoy said. “There have been arguments about trade, and weapons policy, and exploration, and exploitation of natural resources, and the protocol of running a Vulcan space service, and everything else you can think of. And every one of those arguments is a bandage over one of the other species’ hurts. Now,” he said, “you would destroy all that hard-built cooperation at one blow: rip off all the bandages at once, yours and ours together—”

  “We can bind up our own wounds,” Selv said angrily. “And when two species are no longer going to be cooperating, what does it really matter about the other’s?”

  McCoy gazed up at him. “ ‘The spear in the other’s heart is the spear in your own,’ ” he said: “ ‘you are he.’ ”

  A great silence fell.

  “So much for the man who claims, in the net media, to speak for a majority of all right-thinking Vulcans,” McCoy said, glancing up over the audience’s heads again. “You see that there is at least one Vulcan he doesnot speak for. Surak.”

  Jim and Spock looked at each other in utter satisfaction.

  McCoy strolled about calmly on the stage for a moment, as if waiting to see whether Selv would come up with anything further. “Can’t have Vulcan without Surak,” he said: “most irregular. At least, that seems to be most people’s attitude here. But a few of you seem quite ready to throw him out along with us.” He kept strolling, his hands clasped behind him again, and he gazed absently at the floor as he walked. Then suddenly he looked up.

  “Weare what he was preparing you for,” McCoy said. “Don’t you see that? Along with everything else in the universe, of course.Infinite diversity in infinite combinations! That means people who breathe methane, and people who hang upside down from the ceiling, and people who look like pan pizzas, and people who speak no language we will ever understand and want only to be left alone. And it meansus! A particularly hard case. An aggressive, nasty, brutish little species…one that nonetheless managed to get out into space and begin its first couple of friendships with other species without consultingyou first for advice. A species that maybe reminds you a little too much of yourselves, a while ago—confused and angry and afraid. A hard case. Probably the hardest case!…the challenge that you have been practicing on with other species for a while now! And you met us, and welcomed us, though you had understandable reservations. And since then there have been arguments, but generally things have been working out all right. We are proud to be in partnership with you.

  “But now…now comes the inevitable reaction. There’s always a reaction to daring to do the difficult thing, day after day. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction: this is reaction. The temptation is arising to chicken out. It would be easier, some people are saying. Cleaner, nicer, tidier, without the messy Federation and the problems it raises just by being there. And you are backing off, you are panicking, you are saying, No, we can’t cope, Surak can’t have meanteverything when he taught the philosophy of IDIC: he actually meant everythingbut the third planet out from Sol.

  “COWARDS!!”

  McCoy paced. The Hall of the Voice was utterly still.

  “Pride,” he said finally, more quietly. “I keep hearing about Vulcan pride. An emotion, of course. One you were supposed to have mastered, those of you who practicecthia: or something you were supposed to have gotten rid of, those of you who went in for Kolinahr. Well, I have news for you. The stuff I’ve been seeing in the nets lately, that ispride. Not to be confused with admiration, which is something else, or pleasure in integrity, which is something else entirely. This is good old-fashioned pride, and it goes with fear, fear of the Other: and pride and fear together have gone with all your falls before, and the one you’re about to take now, if you’re not ver
y careful.” McCoy’s voice softened. “I would very much like to see you not take it. I am rather fond of you people. You scare the hell out ofme sometimes, but it would be a poor universe without you. But unless you move through your fear, which is the emotion Surak was the most concerned about—and rightly—and come out the other side, the fall is waiting for you: and you will bring it about yourselves, without any help from our species or any other. This,” he gestured around him, “all this concern about humans, and indirectly about the Federation—this is a symptom of something else, something deeper. Trust me. I’m good with symptoms.”

  He took one more silent turn around the stage. “If you throw us out—for what you’re really doing here is throwing the Federation out of Vulcan, not the other way around—beware that you don’t thereby take the first step in throwing out Surak as well. We are, after all, just a different kind of alien from the sort you are from one another: the first fear he taught you to move through was the fear of one another. Unlearn that lesson, and, well, the result is predictable. Ignore the past, and repeat your old mistakes in the future.”

  McCoy gazed up over the audience’s heads one last time. “Surak would bevery disappointed in you if you blew up the planet,” he said. He bowed his head, then, regretfully:

  “And so would we.”

  McCoy straightened after a moment and lifted the parted hand.“Mene sakkhet ur-seveh,” he said, and walked off the stage.

  There was a long pause, and then the applause. It was thunderous.

  McCoy found his way back to his seat between Jim and Spock and wiped his forehead.

  “I take it the deep breathing worked,” Spock said quietly.

  McCoy laughed out loud, then looked at Spock a little challengingly. “That,” he said, “was just about every argument I’ve ever had with you, rolled into one package.”

  “Then I would say you won,” said Spock.

  McCoy shot a glance at him and grinned. “Thanks.”

  “Pity you weren’t on last,” Jim said softly. “You would have brought the house down.”

  “I would have preferred that placement,” McCoy said, looking up.

  “Number seven,” Shath said from the stage.

  Sarek stepped up.

  “Sarek,” he said. “I hold the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Terra and to the United Federation of Planets from the planet Vulcan. And as regards the proposition: I say yea.”

  He stood there, immobile, in the shafts of sunlight, and they struck down on his darkness and could not lighten it. More than ever, to Jim, he looked like a carved statue of a Vulcan rather than a living man whom he had heard pleading against this eventuality the other night.

  “This is a bitter duty for me,” he said. “Yet it has not been my way, in my career, to fail to do as my government has asked me. It must be understood by all that the government of All Vulcan has asked only that I speak as I feel I must speak. Many will not believe this. I cannot, however, allow that fact to influence me, either.

  “There are numerous considerations that make this duty even more distasteful for me personally. Some of you will know them.” Sarek looked around the great room. “My personal affiliations with Terra are well known. There have been some who have said before that those affiliations have made me unfit for my duty, I will not deal with that now.” He looked toward where Jim and Spock and McCoy sat, and Jim shivered at the pain in the regard. It was that look again, though it sealed over quickly.

  “I rejoice to follow the doctor, an old acquaintance,” Sarek said, bowing slightly in McCoy’s direction, “and rather than rebutting his statements, I should like to note something very specific about them: the facility with which he quotes Surak, for instance. On Earth there is a saying that ‘the Devil can quote scripture to his purpose.’

  “We have never claimed that Surak’s truths were meant for any species other than our own. He was Vulcan: perhaps quintessentially Vulcan, speaking to his own. We have never desired that other species should necessarily adopt his teachings. Nevertheless, especially on Earth, this seems to have happened.”

  “We know a good thing when we see it,” McCoy remarked, meaning to be heard.

  “Terrans,” Sarek said reluctantly, “have seen many good things—or rather, things that they perhaps prematurely conceived of as good for them—and adopted them wholeheartedly. But at the same time they seem to throw away large parts of their own culture. For example, many ancient languages of Earth have been lost, stamped out over time by other languages that were somehow convinced they were better simply because they were new: people died, sometimes, for speaking their own ancient tongues.

  “There are other examples of this kind of behavior, and enough to make us wonder whether it is wise for a culture such as ours to have much contact with Earth, when its people and institutions so easily throw away their own nature, to adopt that of another species. We are concerned that our culture may already have done Earth’s culture irreparable harm and turned it away from courses which it was meant to follow, determined by its own structure. Whether it will ever find those courses, now, is difficult to tell, since Earth’s cultural structure has been irreversibly altered by ours. If this sounds like an application of the Prime Directive, perhaps it should be considered as such. The government of Vulcan is not certain where the Prime Directive should stop—for the Federation, or for us. There is the possibility thatany species, no matter its advancement, may easily and innocently damage another, no matterits advancement. There is enough Vulcan blood on our hands: we have no desire to add human blood to it, no matter how figuratively. This, most definitely, would be in contravention to Surak’s teachings.”

  Sarek took a long breath and turned to face another part of the hall. “We are not sure that Earth people really benefit much from contact with Vulcans. Concern for the sciences is all very well, but scientific information has a way of being discovered in many places at almost the same time: it is unlikely that discontinuing our affiliation with the Federation would cripple its sciences. Ethics are another situation. We are not sure that Vulcan ethics work for humans. Despite their statements that they desire peace—and we do not discount the sincerity of these statements—many of us have noticed that theresult of Terrans’ involvement with almost anything is turbulence, difficulty, and strife. While not wishing to impugn the doctor’s statements regarding the necessity of enjoying the infinite combinations of the species of this Galaxy in all their infinite diversity, still it is said, again by Surak, that one can best judge what a personreally intended by the result they produce. Speaking simply, the turbulence which ensues from most dealings with Terra ought, for the good of our own people to be avoided if possible—and it would often seem wiser to enjoy the Terrans’ diversity from a distance.

  “Which brings me to the main concern. I wonder often whether we are not in fact destroying the Terrans’ diversity, and that of the Federation, by too close contact with our own. The Terran culture, the planetary culture as a whole,has a right to be what it is without outside interference —especially interferences and influences which it is not strong enough to resist, or against which it lacks the data or experience to have any resistance to, to begin with. Vulcan logic is of a different sort from Terran, for the most part: there are similarities, of course—the basic texture of logic remains the same regardless of the species mastering it—butwe are not the same species, and nothing can, or should, make us so. Our mental contexts are, and need to be, vastly different. Our sociological and ethical structures are built on the science of the mind, rather than that of the hand: such structures go deep. To change them would be unwise, unless we could find something that we knew was better, to replace them. We know of no such substitute or compromise structure that would work.

  “And there is an additional ethical concern. While not precisely in violation of the Prime Directive—which the Federation Council and other affiliated decision-making bodies in Starfleet formulated themselves, taking only
minimal advices from other bodies—the Federation frequently, in our government’s view, takes actions which can be read as attempting to influence other species for political means and advantage, rather than for the ‘good’ of the species in question. Not thatthat is an adequate reason at all. We hold that no species has the right to impose its ethics or beliefs on any other species, forwhatever reason. And despite the fact that the Federation makes this same statement in its own founding Charter, under this fair appearance it becomes plain that the political decisions of many planets are decided in terms, not of what the electorates of those planets desire, but what the Federation wants—and how the decisions of a planet’s people will affect its Federation grants. We deplore this; we have long deplored this and protested against it in the Federation Council, to no avail. And we are no longer desirous to remain in association with an organization that behaves in such a manner…thereby indicating our tacit support. We wish the Earth well, and all the peoples of the Federation. But we must quit their society. The Government does not specifically request such a vote of the electorate. It merely asks that you consider the topic well before you decide.”

  Sarek sagged a little. “With that said, I must add something personal. My loyalties as a servant of my government are clear-cut. But I now find that my loyalties to my family have entered into such conflict with them that I have been forced to choose between them. Therefore I must step down from my post, effective immediately: and I thank you and the government for your support of me in the past and wish that you may all prosper and live long.”

  The stir went right around the room and would not quiet. Sarek stood in the middle of it all and did not move. But then a voice was raised.

  “Sir, before you go any further,” McCoy said, “would you mind telling us one more of the government’s opinions? What do they think of the scheme to sell off formerly Federation-owned property on Vulcan, after the secession, to secret buyers with strong anti-Federation leanings, who have already made substantial payoffs to Vulcan officials to ensure that the property will be sold to them at ‘lowest bid,’ before anyone else hears about it?…Just curious,” McCoy added.