Vulcan's Soul Book II

by Josepha Sherman

  “The High Command, I know, has said that the speed of light cannot be exceeded in normal space. But the High Command is back on Vulcan, and there is much we have done already that the High Command would say was not possible.

  “A disturbing accompaniment to this latest discovery of metals is an unprecedented alliance in council between the last of the Seleyan adepts and the politicians who, back on Vulcan, we would have called technocrats. I remember them from my days in the Vulcan Space Institute: they are wily, intelligent, and very patient. It is these last two qualities—which I must consider virtues even in a technocrat—that may have earned them the adepts’ cooperation. Last year, when pirates attacked our fleet’s rear guard, we were boarded, but two adepts, working in concert, projected a fear at the intruders. I do not know what they saw: the underpriest to whom I spoke said it was their version of the Eater of Souls. We might have sustained even greater damage except that Rea’s Helm was able to turn and, using the weapons systems that had already received intermediate improvements, rout our enemies. We had to halt engines to make repairs. We must now make up that lost time.”

  When the priestess on Seleya had given the coronet to Surak, she had intended that someone who had not taken the oaths that governed her life and the lives of the order at Gol might study what had been, at the time, a blasphemous fusion of psionics and technology. As much as anyone could, while retaining independence from the machine, Karatek understood the device he used to make what was probably the most enduring history he had ever heard of. At least, he understood it enough to keep records of the Exile without becoming drained by or addicted to the device. Like the s’gagerat’s thorns, its neural filaments carried their own endorphins. But Karatek had learned to pace himself: when he thought “pause,” he could pause. And he could take the thing off and walk away.

  One day, he realized, he would have to do so. Permanently.

  The question was: Whom should he choose to inherit the coronet and the responsibilities of fleet memory and conscience that it entailed?

  Should another of the elders receive it, for whatever time remained? Or should it go to T’Vysse? She was already exhausted. What about one of Karatek’s children? All were worthy. One of the pilots in the fight against the pirates had been Karatek’s own son, Solor, while his elder son, Lovar, and daughter Sarissa had formed part of the tactical team.

  It was illogical to be proud of his children for satisfactory performance of their tasks, he told himself. But then, it was illogical for him to scold himself for behaviors he planned to repeat.

  Best to turn back to the task at hand.

  “We have diverted 11.5 percent of the hull scanning emplacements to seek potential adversaries’ ion trails and, having extrapolated from the pirates’ trajectories, altered course to avoid what might well be their home star systems. This is regrettable; had our attackers been people with whom we might have waged peace, we might have learned of habitable planets. Now, however, some of the ship’s complement tends to regard any outsider at all as a potential enemy. Consensus leans toward avoiding any star system that contains inhabited planets, further restricting our search.

  “Because of the loss to our gene pool from the pirate attack, the adepts and the technocrats have agreed to cooperate on a study of weapons techniques. I have agreed that augmenting ships’ weapons systems is logical. However, I think that the adepts would do better to focus on training our most recent generations than on seeking technological means of enhancing their mental focus. There are, they say, too few of them to work in concert and train the next generation. Although I deplore their priorities, I was voted down, and now I no longer lead. But the technocrats are not the only individuals on board Shavokh who can exercise patience to achieve their goals.”

  Karatek paused again. His nightmare still weighed heavily upon him even if his undermind had already begun to process it. Dreams had been easier to contend with in the days before Surak. One went to Seleya or some other shrine; one spent the night in the temple, sleeping, meditating, or a combination of the two; and, at dawn, one went to one of the priests or priestesses and had the dream interpreted.

  Now, however, a dream represented not a question that must be answered, but a puzzle that must be solved or dismissed.

  Logically speaking, Karatek could not oppose the goals of the adepts on board Shavokh without opening himself to charges of inconsistency at the least and hypocrisy at the worst: moral qualms were not a subject much discussed these days. Not in council, where he had no voice beyond that of any citizen.

  Should they be? Back on the Mother World, the arts of the mind had always been the products of long study at Gol or Seleya. Before Karatek had followed Surak to Seleya, the limits of his experience with those arts was the time when the visiting priestess had reached out and allowed his mind to brush that of T’Vysse during their betrothal and the times when a healer officiated at the birth of those of their children born on Vulcan, enabling T’Vysse to reassure them during labor.

  As the adepts that were born on Vulcan grew old and died, it was only logical that they would wish to pass on the arts of the mind. But that they chose to use technology to do so—No, Karatek thought. No. He knew from his use of the coronet that a technological application of the mental arts was possible. For example, concerned with the decline in the ships’ populations and attempting to ensure that their knowledge did not die with them, ships’ engineers had created ways of automating the ships’ systems in case some illness wiped out much of their complements, so the survivors could run them themselves. This said nothing about the viability of the gene pool that survived, but a good deal about the engineers’ skill.

  During the recent battle, they had become impressed, for the first time, with the skill of the adepts who had repelled boarders. If this new-fledged partnership with the adepts succeeded even in preliminary attempts to turn the arts of the mind into science, or at least, technology…

  Karatek had reservations that he now realized were severe. Without the lengthy period of apprenticeship, which carried with it training in ethics and history as well as psionics, Karatek was concerned that, in the wrong hands—or minds—any device such as the one he had kept as a nearly sacred trust could be used for coercion, not the extension of knowledge.

  “I understand now that my logic failed when I remained silent when accused of hypocrisy,” Karatek allowed himself to record. “It is my duty to serve, and to serve what logic tells me is the truth. And I have known from the moment when this artifact was presented to Surak that it was as much a two-edged sword as it was a memory device. Let me go on record here, before I speak at council, to say I oppose the mass production of any device that substitutes technology for the arts of the mind or that can be adapted for coercion.”

  “My husband?”

  T’Vysse waited outside the tiny meditation alcove, preserving the illusion, at least, of privacy with years of skill.

  Karatek shuddered, bringing himself out of the deep concentration required to use the coronet, and removed it. Over the years, he had learned how to seal off the capillaries as the filaments withdrew. Over the years, T’Vysse had learned to glance away.

  Once the coronet was set back in its storage case, Karatek reached out to touch his wife’s hand.

  “The child sleeps?”

  “Now, she does,” T’Vysse replied.

  Would she have left the baby’s side otherwise? A rhetorical question. Neither of them had been scheduled to report to their own workstations before the end of this watch. They would have time, Karatek thought contentedly, alone together. And they could share each other’s warmth.

  But T’Vysse was shaking her head as she led Karatek out of the meditation alcove, beyond the tempting warmth of bedcoverings, into their quarters’ living area.

  “Sarissa sits with her sister,” she said. “She came in and told me that you were wanted. She will join us shortly.”

  A child might intrude on its parents’ privacy; an a
dult daughter studying her choice of potential mates was more reticent. Especially if the daughter was Sarissa, who Karatek knew had been on duty during the last watch. Karatek remembered how she had acted as a mother to Solor. And now, though she was of an age to have children of her own, she lavished the same dedication on her newest siblings.

  “Why did Sarissa leave her post?” Karatek asked. The last watch had 2.6 hours remaining. He might not be on active duty, but he remembered schedules.

  “We were both dismissed,” Solor said. He had been eating with more rapidity than decorum. Seeing his father, he set down his bowl and rose with old-fashioned courtesy. “Messages have arrived from Firestorm, asking us to scan for one of the shuttles that went missing during its prospecting expedition.”

  Karatek walked past the brazier, savoring the instant of warmth, toward the small heating element in which tea was steeping. Solor had added the savory leaves he favored, especially when he wished to be alert. The familiar scent both refreshed and invigorated him. Forestalling him, T’Vysse poured tea for all three of them into the delicate stone cups she had always prized.

  “The other message came from the shuttle itself,” Solor told him. “Sarissa heard it first.”

  Sarissa had served as Shavokh’s communications officer for a hundred-day rotation, part of ship’s officers’ training here, so far away from the Mother World. She found communications “most absorbing,” she had told Karatek. It was a way of ensuring that she heard everything, on and off Shavokh. It gave her a power that, he realized, the child she had been, lost in the ruins of her home, her birth parents and betrothed slaughtered, she must crave.

  “She says the message came from the shuttle’s crew. From its surviving crew,” Solor corrected himself. “Father, they carried new communications devices that were designed to show geological formations to the ship’s chief scientists. When I saw…” He drained his tea and set down the cup with none of the ceremony he ordinarily knew better than to omit. “Father, they used these handhelds to send images. There’s trouble, sir. Our people are being used as hostages or slaves. And they’re being forced to fight.”

  Sarissa then slipped into the room, half closing the door behind her and nodding to her parents. Karatek sat upright with a feeling akin to excitement. That too was illogical: boredom meant no accidents, no impending catastrophes—but no home found, either.

  “Thee is late,” Solor told her.

  “I stopped to look in on our sister,” Sarissa said. If Karatek could take leave from his duties, he supposed his daughter could spend a few quiet minutes watching T’Alaro, her sister. Her sense of kinship with the child was all the stronger because the little girl was named after her betrothed, who had died so many years ago on the Forge.

  But had Karatek set her a good example?

  She seated herself and drew the folds of the tabard she wore about herself off duty for warmth over her shipsuit.

  “I was dismissed to come and find you,” she said. “The council told me to tell you there will be a meeting when the watch changes and to request your presence.”

  “Solor came to tell me too,” Karatek said.

  She expects trouble. And if the council had recalled him from retirement, they too must be concerned.

  “We should launch a shuttle to rescue our people!” Solor broke the silence.

  Karatek turned to her and steepled his fingers. “The entire story, my daughter.”

  “Since the beginning of my rotation as ship’s communications officer, I have received transmissions that turned out to be from Firestorm.”

  “Excellent!” said Karatek.

  “As communications officer, I was responsible for decrypting these communications and bringing them up to a speed at which they are comprehensible.”

  Given the distance that had grown among the ships, of course, the transmissions suffered time lag. “The first transmissions spoke of a mining expedition that took a shuttle to an uninhabited planetoid. It was not Minshara-class, but an initial scanning assay revealed lodes of pergium that were judged economic to exploit. When the shuttle landed, it discovered what its science officers and engineers believed to be some sort of technical installation. From all indications, it had been abandoned for many years.”

  “Why were we not told of this?” Karatek demanded. Meaning, of course, Why was I not told of this?

  The answer was self-evident and a reproach to his judgment.

  Sarissa looked down. “The word came from Rea’s Helm. I had not the authority. More: since it would take us approximately 3.2 years to reach the ship’s apparent position, there seemed no possibility of a face-to-face confrontation with that ship’s crew. Finally, I became…curious. When I checked ship’s records, I found several communications entries encoded, concealed from ship’s officers. I said nothing to anyone else, but it has taken me this long to decrypt them and bring these data to you. Here is what I have been able to learn: When the shuttle crew entered the installation, they disappeared. Instantly. That was when transmission broke off.”

  Karatek pushed himself forward in his chair. T’Vysse met Karatek’s eyes and shook her head minutely. He took three deep breaths.

  Perhaps the sleeplessness that was the logical result of having an infant in their quarters once again had eroded his control. Sarissa knew her duties as well as she knew her own mind. And she had been able, since childhood, to keep her own counsel.

  His eldest daughter raised an ironic eyebrow. “It was only ten days ago that we learned Firestorm attempted to locate its missing crew. The shuttle remained on the planetoid. So they dispatched two people in a scoutship. One of them flew the shuttle back with what rock and technical samples its crew had been able to assemble before it…disappeared. Then, Firestorm reported, at the farthest limits of its scans, a trail of ionization. It led to…”

  She handed Karatek a data crystal that he plugged into a monitor. Before he could activate it, Sarissa held up a hand to stop him.

  “We are approximately 2.3 hours away,” he said. “So Firestorm sent a distress call to Shavokh?”

  Sarissa shook her head. “No.”

  “Get to the point,” Solor ordered her.

  “Calmly,” she replied. “As I have always told you, it is only logical to present the information in an orderly fashion from start to finish. This message came from Evoras, an associate of Avarin, on board Firestorm to Avarak. You may recall he had been communications officer until the system of job rotation began. There is no way that Firestorm’s command crew, much less its passengers, could have known that.”

  “Avarak?” asked T’Vysse.

  “Son of Raelyek and T’Lyrae. Cross-cousin to Evoras and Avarin.”

  Karatek inclined his head. “I knew the family,” he said.

  Solor’s mouth tightened, remembering earlier difficulties. Avarak had considered himself a suitor of T’Olryn; had he not been a technocrat, disdainful of what he called anachronisms like the Kal-if-fee, blood might have stained the marriage ceremony. However, since their marriage, both Solor and T’Olryn had sometimes found their schedules disarranged, their housing shifted to less desirable quarters. It would have been coincidence if it had not happened quite so frequently.

  T’Vysse looked down.

  They had both known Raelyek, who had studied weapons systems back on Vulcan with Varekat, from the Vulcan Space Institute. In bringing Surak to speak at the VSI, Karatek had been responsible for introducing the weapons scientist to Surak. After listening to the advocate of peace, Varekat had reconsidered his life’s work and concluded that it meant a life wasted. So he had resigned his position, destroyed his notes, and suicided in a blast that took ShiKahr’s major weapons plant with him.

  Karatek always believed Raelyek had chosen to go into exile because he had nowhere else to go. Attempts to speak with him, to counsel him had drawn only the enraged response, “Do you have to take this from me, too?”

  After Raelyek had lost his mentor, his livelihood, and m
ost of his faith, exile had taken the only other thing he had prized: his family. Raelyek’s consort, T’Lyrae, had not merely refused to accompany her husband and young son Avarak into exile; she had annulled their bonding and retreated to Gol.

  After the ships left Vulcan’s system, Raelyek had gone very silent. He had done his work, raised a son almost as silent as he, and died attempting to bring weapons to bear on pirates. After Raelyek’s death, it seemed as if his son kept his political allegiances to the technocrats.

  “Once I understood that, I brought it to council. You do recall that S’task sent Commander S’lovan over from Rea’s Helm when you retired? He has been a most satisfactory officer,” Sarissa said.

  Her dispassionate observation stung, as she had no doubt intended.

  “The commander ordered me to keep silent, while monitoring the situation. This last watch, the following message came through unencrypted and in real time. The entire command crew watched. Before Solor could display how spectacularly he could lose control”—Sarissa’s eyes flashed at her brother—“Commander S’lovan personally dispatched us to find you, brief you, and bring you to council as soon as you received the information. The commander wants you there, at least as institutional memory, although I think he would wish you to rejoin the council.”

  She reached out and touched Karatek’s wrist in a rare gesture of affection. Then she activated the recorder.

  A brief flurry of static gave way to an image of five young Vulcans, three males and two females, clustered beside a low bench on one side of what looked like the sort of miniature arena in which Karatek and, indeed, every young Vulcan had trained in the physical components of the disciplines as well as hand-to-hand combat. But where the arenas of Karatek’s early training were round and filled with sand to make it easier for combatants to fall, this one was badge-shaped and paved. In the center of the arena was a symbol he had never seen before, a three-pronged emblem that filled the entire pavement. The triskele’s prongs, as well as its core, were a virulent yellow.