by Diane Duane
S’task also used the article to suggest something slightly radical: the idea that a largish planetary migration might be the tool necessary to curtail the planet’s violence. If the whole planet’s population were lessened, then the whole place would better be able to support the people who remained, and wars might be fewer. He never even mentioned the question of any philosophical disagreement, which was the root of the matter, and in truth it would have been inappropriate, in the context of the journal in question, to do so. As it was, the argument he used smacked of a priori reasoning, but its end product was something that too many people wanted to hear. This, too, is difficult to explain to humans—that despite their violent history, the Vulcans did not like violence, war, terror, or death. They simply had it…rather like the populations of many other planets that did not seem able to stop fighting. They wanted it to stop, or at least to slow down…and anything that seemed likely to do that seemed very good to them.
In any case, the article served to found the context for the flight: the idea that not only could many thousands of people leave Vulcan, but they should. Rather than having people trying to stop them from going, the travelers found pressure on them to go. There were, of course, some factions pressured into going against their will, and they made their belated displeasure known in the counsels of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran much later, to the intense annoyance of the majority of the Rihannsu. Several of these “forgotten” factions are the reason that there sometimes seem to be numerous different versions of the “Romulan Empire,” all espousing different aims and behaving in different ways. More of this later.
So the context was established in the popular mind that a sort of “New Vulcan” should be established somewhere far from the decadent excesses and “liberalism” of the old. Support for this viewpoint grew across the board during the fifteen years or so that the argument officially lasted. But the part of the “board” hardest to convince was, of course, industry, and S’task had to concentrate his efforts on them for some years before achieving the results he needed.
S’task knew quite well that finding venture capital to build fifteen ships of a kind that had never been seen before—generation ships—was not going to be possible. So, as usual, he went around the problem to an unexpected solution.
The mindtrees and networks had for some years been discussing the question of who should go. By 139970 the number of the seheik, the “declared,” was approaching twelve thousand. Into this context S’task inserted the suggestion that perhaps only those should go who were willing to give nearly everything they had in support of it. The suggestion was a risky one, but also wise: it began functioning to “shake out” those who were not completely committed to the move because of the philosophy behind it. Subscriptions began to pile up in the escrow accounts established by S’task’s followers, and as they did so, concern built in the Vulcan financial community.
It was at the point where about eight thousand people had made contributions varying from ten percent to a hundred percent of their estates, and construction had begun on Rea’s Helm and Farseeker, that the community first began to seriously discuss what should be done about the flight. Their concern was understandable…since the travelers’ movement was growing with a speed unprecedented until then. It had seemed only a fad until the 139980s, but by the end of that decade something like five percent of the population had committed to the journey. Within the close order of eighteen years, as much as twenty to thirty percent of the total capital wealth on Vulcan might be completely removed from the banking and credit systems. The Vulcan financial ecology could not withstand such a blow: any withdrawal of funds and labor potential greater than eighteen percent would cause a depression too deep for the planet to ever recover from. Yet such a withdrawal was certainly coming, unless something was done to halt or slow the spread of the traveler movement. At that time the question of financing enough ships to carry everyone was constantly in the nets, and attracting a great deal of attention to the issues of the traveler cause itself, which in turn was causing more and more Vulcans to contribute their time and money to the cause.
The major banking cartels conferred over this problem for nearly a year, and then took the only action possible to them: one that cost them the equivalent of billions of credits, but both saved Vulcan from a depression and made them a great deal of money later. They financed the building of the starships themselves, as well as much necessary research and development. Crookedly, in a way S’task himself had not expected, his twist on the Heinlein principle began to prove itself. The technologies born in the shipbuilding paid for themselves many times over, since all the major patents were owned by the banking cartels. It is true that the banks gained a measure of control over the journey by limiting the number of ships, and therefore of travelers, and with the problem of transport solved, some of the attractiveness of the journey as a “desperate cause” was lost, and the number of new subscribers to the journey dropped off. But S’task was willing to accept this, and to grant the banks their small measure of control. He had what he wanted from them. Also, he, too, had been worrying about the economic impact of the journey on Vulcan: he was angry at his homeworld, but not so much so as to want to reduce it to poverty.
Some have pointed out an unforeseen and unfortunate side effect of starting an interstellar colonization effort by subscription. Many fortunes large and small, many “nest eggs” and hoards of family money, went into the building fund even after the banks began financing the journey. Many a family was bitterly divided over the issue, and much Vulcan fiction of this period revolves around the Sundering. Among those making the journey, a peculiar mindset began to form, born of the poverty and scarcity that many of the travelers had to suffer while waiting to leave Vulcan. Many of the travelers came to feel that possession of more than one’s daily needs was an evil, that one should share as necessary with those others also making the journey and otherwise eschew personal possessions and wealth. Some cultural sociologists have stated the opinion that this “foundation context” of privation and scarcity as a thing somehow good and noble came to affect the Rihannsu later in their development. These sociologists suggest that had the journey not started this way, the Rihannsu would not have had the problems with poverty and scarcity that they had later. But then again, neither would they have been Rihannsu as we now know them.
With design and construction, funding finally available for the ships, serious consideration of where they should go could begin, had to, since this would influence the ships’ design at every level. Mass interferometry and spectrometry of neighboring stars had been fairly encouraging. The area around 40 Eri contains several large congeries of stars, one a group of Population II blue and blue-white giants, and the two others both large collections of Pop I stars ranging through types G through M, with the occasional N, R, and S “carbon stars.” There were at least twenty stars within five light-years of Vulcan, another eighty within fifteen light-years, and of both these groups, the mass interferometer indicated that some twenty had planets. The astronomers involved in the journey had a merry time arguing over the optimum course, but finally agreement was reached on an initial twelve-year tour of the most likely close stars, with an optional fifty-year tour of the less well-scanned outer ones. There were five very likely candidates in the first sequence, three of them type M stars like Vulcan, the others a type K and a G9, rather more orange than yellow. All five had planets, several of them large ones Vulcan’s size or larger, and the Vulcan version of Bode’s Law indicated that each system had at least one planet at what (for Vulcans) was the right distance from its sun.
To help (or some said hinder) them, they also had some information salvaged from the computers of the crashed or captured Etoshan pirate ships, concerning the locations of populated planets. This data the Vulcans were generally inclined to mistrust, since the Etoshans had already lied to them. However, they did use the information in a negative way: they kept far away from any star mentioned in it. The trave
lers did not want to be found by aliens again. All the courses plotted were to take them far from space known to the Etoshans.
With all this in mind, the ships built were designed as fairly short-term interstellar shuttle ships, with an option for use as generation vessels should both the first and second tours prove barren. Each ship was meant to carry about five thousand people in an arrangement of six cylinders clustered and bound together by accessways and major “thoroughfares.” The design of these craft closely approximates those used for some of the L5 colonies around Terra, except that gravity was provided artificially rather than by spin. Drive for the vessels was conventional iondrive with the Vulcan version of a Bussard ramjet (a piece of design they did not mind stealing from the Etoshans). Later on, when they discovered it during the journey, the psi-assisted “bootstrap” method was also occasionally used, by which an adept instantly accelerated the whole vessel to .99999c, and then allowed the ship to coast “downhill” to the next star. This method was used only when there was an extreme emergency threatening the vessel; it tended to kill the adept performing it, and only a jump-trained adept could train others in the technique. Whichever method was used, the ship could use a given star’s gravity well to slow it down, and then move on subdrive to the primary’s planets: or if the star’s planets looked unpromising, it could pick up momentum again by using the gravity well for the acceleration phase of a “slingshot” maneuver.
Ships were not the only thing being built, however. Many of the travelers had realized that if they were going to truly become their own world rather than a sort of retread of the failed Vulcan, they would have to discard a great deal of their culture, and invent new institutions as replacements. The matter of choices took the whole fifteen years between the Statement of Intent and the launching of Rea’s Helm, and to this day the controversy about some choices has not died down.
The records of the arguments on the nets, and transcriptions or paraphrasings of the discussions on the mindtrees, fill some six hundred rooms in the archive on ch’Havran, and some hundreds of terabytes in the Vulcan Science Academy’s history storage. Vulcan foods, literature, clothing styles, weapons, poetry, religions, social customs, furniture designs, fairy tales, art, science, and philosophy all were endlessly examined in a fifteen-year game of “lifeboat.” Only the best, or the ideologically correct, were to be taken along on the journey. No one person or committee was ever set up as the arbiter of taste: the roughly eighty thousand minds participating in the nets and the travelers’ mindtrees would argue themselves to a rough consensus, or to silence, and in either case each traveler would decide for himself what to do about a given issue. Mostly they agreed, and it may be astonishing to Terrans how often these people did so. They were possibly more like-minded than we, or they, would like to admit, or else they were terrified by how closely their previous disagreement had brought their planet to disaster.
One thing they agreed on quickly was that they could not stop being Vulcan while they still spoke the language. A team of semanticists and poets, S’task among them, began building the travelers’ new language just after the ships’ keels were flown. They did not, of course, try to divorce it completely from Vulcan, but they went back to the original Old High Vulcan roots and “aged” the words in another direction, as it were—producing a language as different from its ancient parent and the other “fullgrown” tongue as Basque is different from Spanish and their parent, Latin. The new tongue was a softer one, with fewer fricatives than Vulcan, and many aspirants; long broad vowels and liquid consonant combinations, both fairly rare in Vulcan, were made commonplace in the new language. To Terran ears it frequently sounds like a combination of Latin and Welsh. The language came strangely to Vulcan tongues at first, but its grammar and syntax were grossly similar, and over the years of flight, the travelers spoke it with increasing pleasure and pride. From it they took what was to be their new name, which by attachment became the language’s also. Seheik, “the declared,” became rihanh in the new language. This, in the adjective form, became rihannsu. The building of the language is often overlooked in studies of Rihannsu culture. It deserves more attention than there is room to give it here—the only “made” language ever to be successfully adopted by an entire planetary population.
But though this and many other good things were added to the Rihannsu culture, many things were also lost. The matriarchal cast of the civilization remained, though power would come to distribute itself rather differently from the council-of-tribes structure under which Vulcan had been operating for thousands of years. Much literature was condemned as “decadent” or “liberal” and left behind. A considerable amount of science scavenged from the Etoshans was relabeled as Vulcan. The encounter with the Etoshans itself, the trigger of all this, was retold as the foundation of the persecutions that caused the travelers to leave the planet, and the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” When one looks at this bit of revisionist history, the xenophobia of “Romulans” becomes entirely understandable. Fifty generations of Rihannsu were taught that anything alien was probably bad, and vice versa. Earthmen saying “we come in peace” were not likely to be believed. The Etoshans had said the same thing.
For good or ill (though meaning good), the travelers decided to rewrite history for their children and teach them all the same thing. Mostly it came to the idea, as stated above, that aliens were dangerous, that even their own people had once made a dangerous choice, but that they (the fortunate children) had been saved from it; they must take care not to let the same thing happen to them, or their children. And indeed to this day there are two words in Rihannsu for fact: “truth” and “told-truth.”
There were, of course, cultural and artistic “smugglings.” Not even the Vulcan-trained can police the thoughts of eighty thousand fiercely committed revolutionaries (or counterrevolutionaries). Bits of non-approved culture, science, and law sneaked in here and there. Some of them were the source of endless anguish. Some were afterward cherished as treasures.
One of these was S’task’s own, and not even his own people could much blame him for it. As poets often are, he was a swordsman as well, and besides his wife and daughter and the clothes on his back, the only things he brought with him on the journey were three swords by the smith S’harien.
S’harien was the greatest of all the smiths working by the edge of the desert that other species call Vulcan’s Forge, and he was also something of an embarrassment to everyone who knew him. He lived for metal: beside it, nothing mattered to him, not his wife, not his children, not eating or drinking. He was usually rude and almost always unkempt (in Vulcan culture, the most unforgivable of bad habits), one of those people who is always being taken places twice…the second time to apologize. He was almost always forgiven, for this cranky, perpetually angry creature could create such beauty in steel as had never been seen before. “He works it as a god works flesh,” said another smith, one of his contemporaries. Petty kings and tribal chieftains had often come offering everything they had to purchase his swords. He insulted them like beggars, and they took it. They had to: he was S’harien.
He was also a diehard reactionary. In a time when so many other Vulcan men were taking the five-letter names beginning with S and ending in K in token of their acceptance (or at least honoring) of “reality-truth” and its chief proponent, S’harien purposely took a pre-Reformation name, and an ill-omened one, “pierceblood.” S’harien loved the old wars and the honorable bloodshed, and hated Surak’s name, and would spit on his shadow if he saw it—so he told everyone. On his hundred and ninetieth birthday, hearing that Surak was nearby, he went to do so. And everyone became very confused when, a tenday later, S’harien very suddenly started buying up all his swords and melting them down, in ongoing renunciation of violence. Even Surak tried to stop him from doing this: a S’harien sword was a treasure of gorgeous and dangerous workmanship that even the most nonviolent heart could rest in without guilt. But S’harien was not to be dissuaded.
/>
There was consternation late one night when a flitter docked outside S’task’s quarters in the orbital shipyards, and the short, dark, fierce shape in the pressure suit stepped through the airlock with a long bundle in his arms. The security people stared in astonishment. It was in fact Surak. They took him to S’task and made to leave, though very much desiring to stay: master and pupil had at that point not seen each other for six standard years. But Surak bade them stay, and handed the bundle to S’task. “Keep these safe, I pray you,” he said in the Old High Vulcan of ceremony. And S’task, stricken by the formality of the language—or perhaps by the worn look of his old master—took the bundle, bowed deeply, and made no other answer. When he straightened, Surak was already on his way out.
The bundle contained three of the most priceless S’hariens on the planet, two of which had been thought to belong to kings, and one to the High Councillor, himself a bitter enemy of Surak’s. How Surak had come by the swords no one ever found out, though various Vulcan families have (conflicting) tales of a shadowy shape who came to them around that time and begged them for “their sword’s life.” There was argument about keeping the swords, at first—they had after all come from Surak, and there were sore hearts who wanted no gifts from him: gifts, they said, bind. But S’task said a few quiet words in the swords’ behalf in meeting, some nights before the ships left, and put the issue to rest. In time the travelers came to treasure the S’hariens greatly, as a gift from their most worthy adversary, and as beautiful things in their own right, but most of all as a symbol for the ancient glory they were leaving behind.