by Diane Duane
sseikea—a scavenger, analogous to the Terran hyena Crocuta crocuta and employed as an insult in the same way.
ssuaj-ha—“Understood!” (Inferior-superior mode.)
ssuej-d’ifv—“Do you understand?” (Superior-inferior mode.)
sthea’hwill—“I request (an action) be done at once.” (Superior-inferior, courteous mode.)
ta krenn—“Look here, look at this.”
ta’khoi—“Screen off.” Usage for voice-activation equipment and (if used to another person) very explicit superiority.
ta’rhae—“Screen on.” (See above.)
th’ann, th’ann-a—“a/the prisoner.”
thrai, thraiin—predator, analogous to the Terran wolverine Gulo luscus; and possessed of similar legendary traits for persistence, vengeful stubbornness, and ferocity.
tlhei—“my word”; occasionally as in “my (given) Word” but more usually “my command/order/bidding.”
urru—“go to…” A non-mode imperative, which (if circumstances permit) can be used from low to high as well as the more usual vice versa.
vaed’rae—“Hear me/attend me.” More imperative than “listen,” and more formal.
vah-udt—“What rank?” “Who are you (to be asking/doing this)?”
vriha—highest, most superior.
yhfi-ss’ue—“travel-tubes”; the public transport system, of five rail-mounted cars, powered by electromagnetic linear motors, carrying 20 persons in an enclosed weatherproof tube.
AFTERWORD
To tell you the truth, as regards the Rihannsu…it all started with Coriolanus.
I have dearly loved Shakespeare since I first stumbled on his plays as one of the first books I was “allowed to read” after I’d read through everything in the basement children’s section of the library in the town where I grew up. (Though, to tell you the truth, I was already reading the upstairs stuff anyway, whether they allowed me to check it out or not; the librarian upstairs was usually too busy to notice when a kid crept up the cellar steps and into the stacks to liberate a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird or Hamilton’s The Roman Way.)
I still reread the plays at least once a year, straight through, to reground myself in a very special part of the English language and its history. I was rereading the plays again just after finishing my first Trek novel, The Wounded Sky, and at the time making an attempt to get friendly with some of the material I’d read years before but hadn’t much cared for. One of these plays was Coriolanus. On first reading, I liked that one about as much as I’d liked Titus Andronicus: not very. On earlier readings, the protagonist had seemed like an idiot, so desperately hung up on his own class-oriented sense of honor that he could turn against his native city, even his family, primarily for the sake of assuaging his pleb-bruised ego. On the post–Wounded Sky rereading, that opinion had deepened a little, but the play still didn’t particularly jump onto my top-ten list.
There were also other things going on. Having finished Sky and having been promptly invited by my then-editor at Pocket to do another Trek book if I liked, I’d been thinking about exactly what to do. The Klingon language had been making its first splash in the public consciousness around then, and I mentioned the possibility of taking on another of Trek’s favorite species in that idiom: the Romulans. My editor shook his head and suggested that there wouldn’t be much of a demand for a Romulan dictionary, as the initial Klingon one seemed to be running rather slow in terms of sales. “But if you want to do a novel about the Romulans…” he said.
I’d thought about that for a while, principally in terms of the challenge. From canonical first-series Trek, we knew little enough about the Klingons; we knew far less about the Romulans. “Can I do some culture building,” I said, “the way John M. Ford’s done with the Klingons?” My editor checked with Paramount, and a while later came back to me to say, “Sure, go ahead, knock yourself out.”
So I started thinking about what that people’s history might look like. There were some hints in the episode “Balance of Terror” (reinforced later in “The Enterprise Incident”) about a possible connection to the Vulcans, but beyond that, little to go on except a sense—as much conveyed by the actors’ performance as by script content—of an honorable people, dignified, private, even secretive, and somehow with an air of being strangely threatened; dangerous and powerful enough, but also seeming to prefer remaining in the shadows. That whole patchy gestalt began to churn around in the back of my head, in company with the basic question that every wise psychiatric nurse learns to ask herself about the motivations and actions of a client: How do you raise someone so that they turn out like this?
It was in this context that I was immersed while I was reading Coriolanus. The connection I was hunting for, however, the key to the book I was about to write, didn’t happen immediately. After a few weeks I finished up with Shakespeare and went on to other reading, including a very favorite book, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. And everything was going along as usual in the chilly and familiar territory of the planet the Terrans call Winter until the disgraced and exiled “prime minister” of the nation of Karhide, Estraven, finds himself in a situation where he thinks: “I knew it was time to turn to my enemies, for there was no more good in my friends.”
Click!
Sometimes a book will not coalesce properly in my mind until a core appears around which it can form. I had been looking for my main character, the one who could best express why Romulans were the way they were—tough work, when I wasn’t myself sure as yet. But suddenly the character was there, in generalities if not in detail: someone who was going to leave the Romulan Empire behind and turn to the Federation—and someone who would ironically be doomed forever after, even under the best of circumstances, to be considered a traitor not just by one side, but by both. And not too long after that, the character quite abruptly coalesced around the likeness of another of my early Trek editors, Mimi Panitch—a small, slender woman with long dark hair and sharp eyes.
That was that. That was Ael—though I didn’t know her name for a good while, as her world started building itself around her. Echoes of Coriolanus swiftly began to run all through that book as I outlined it—a sense of someone forced to turn her coat and change her loyalties, not because of ego issues or a desire for vengeance, but by her culture’s steady drift away from the certainties that had once made it a noble thing, despite the unease and fear that had driven it (as I pretended) from its original home.
I found myself with other problems, though. I have to admit right here that I hadn’t originally thought her character would be female. But there Ael was, and sitting in the center seat of the vessel which would oppose her and Bloodwing—on and off—was a man with something of a reputation among the ladies. How was James T. Kirk going to react to being thrown together with a woman who (for maximum effect) had to have come close enough to killing him at least once or twice? How was he going to like her sitting in his center seat, while he sat in the Enterprise’s brig? I kept finding myself muttering, as I wrote, “There’s gonna be trouble…!” Yet at the same time, there was the temptation to increase that trouble, to make Ael give him as difficult a time as possible. Too few women in Trek’s history had ever at that point given Kirk a real run for his money, either tactically, intellectually, or emotionally. It would be a lot of fun to see how it worked out….
So in that book went, and a while later, there came a request for a sequel. That was the story that became The Romulan Way, a novel famously written extremely late (I really hadn’t expected to get involved in story-editing a cartoon series that year, but it had happened; nor had I expected to wind up writing an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that happened too…) and written at great speed, during my honeymoon (I really hadn’t expected to have marriage provide me with a fellow writer who could so accurately ace my style; there are still people who aren’t sure which parts of that book Peter wrote and which I did, which suits both of us fine. The out
line was mine—that’s all you really need to know). The title probably makes it plain that Edith Hamilton’s great cultural examinations The Greek Way and The Roman Way were still on my mind. As a sort of homage to Hamilton, I threw in another female character, Terise Haleakala-LoBrutto—a lady willingly immersed neck-deep, and perhaps dangerously deeper, in an alien culture she has come to love.
After that book went in, there followed something of a hiatus at the Rihannsu end of things, partly due to relocation overseas and an increased concentration on book and television work on the European side of the world. While I had long planned the end of Ael’s story—and after TNG, was already thinking about ways in which her worlds could be reconciled with the image of the Romulan worlds which was then becoming canon in TV Trek—I’d come to assume that there would be no particular interest at either Paramount’s or Pocket’s end in continuing the series. It came as something of a shock, therefore, when yet another Trek editor, John Ordover, emailed me and asked me to come in one more time and finish Ael’s story. I started that process, but once more life intervened: film work yet again threw the wrench so thoroughly into all my other writing that it was a number of years before I could get back to grips with Ael, Bloodwing, and the significantly escalated problems of the Rihannsu Star Empire. I do at least have something to show for that interference: the miniseries that Peter and I were working on almost constantly between 1999 and 2005, Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King, will have aired on the Sci-Fi Channel by the time anyone reads this. But I want everybody who waited so patiently (and sometimes not so patiently) to understand how thoroughly I regret the long delay between the publication of Swordhunt and Honor Blade and the story’s conclusion in The Empty Chair. Lennon was absolutely right, and would probably forgive me the paraphrase: life is indeed what happens when your publisher’s made other plans. I just want to thank Marco Palmieri once again for his help and thoughtfulness while he took one arm and I took the other and we dragged Ael (figuratively, at least) kicking and screaming into the Senate chambers and her people’s history.
So now, with regret, it becomes time for me to say my last goodbyes to these characters. They’ve been excellent companions through many hours spent in that dark place in the back of the writer’s brain, where drama plays itself out in a hundred different forms before finally suffering itself to be pinned down on paper. I’m going to miss them. But it’s time now for them to be out on their own…so keep an eye on them for me.
And the only thing that remains to be said is this:
No, I will not tell you what “Jim” means. Because if you just spend a little time thinking about it…you’ll know.
Diane Duane
County Wicklow, Ireland
the Nones of March, 2006
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Diane Duane has been making her living writing fantasy and science fiction for more than a quarter century, and has written for Star Trek in more media than anyone else alive. Born in Manhattan, a descendant of the first mayor of New York City after the Revolutionary War, she initially trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse; then, after the publication of her first book in 1979, spent some years living and writing on both coasts of the U.S. before relocating to County Wicklow in Ireland, where she settled down with her husband, the Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood. Her work includes more than forty novels—a number of which have spent time on the New York Times bestseller list—and much television work, including story-editing stints on the DiC animated series Dinosaucers and the BBC educational series Science Challenge, a co-writer credit on the first-season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Where No One Has Gone Before,” and (most recently) another on the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King, written in collaboration with her husband. When not writing, she conducts an active online life based around her weblog (http: dianeduane.com/outofambit), her popular “Young Wizards” novel series (http:www.youngwizards.com), and her European recipe collection (http:www.europeancuisines.com), while also stargazing, cooking, attempting to keep the cats from eating all the herbs in the garden, and trying to figure out how to make more spare time.
Peter Morwood was born in Northern Ireland, and has been writing fantasy and science fiction for more than twenty years, with one solo Star Trek novel, Rules of Engagement, to his credit—this possibly making him the only Trek novelist with fighter-pilot training. His first fantasy series, The Book of Years, was reissued in the U.S. in 2005; his first live-action miniseries, Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (co-written with wife Diane Duane, in association with director Uli Edel) aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in March of 2006. He’s currently working on the fifth volume of The Book of Years, the third in The Clan Wars series, as well as a new fantasy-historical novel and screenplays for a feature film and a second miniseries.