by Diane Duane
Spaceflight was one of these areas of accomplishment, and perhaps the most tragic. The body of engineering talent that built the ships was one of the most astonishing collections of determined genius ever gathered on Vulcan, and the travelers tried hard to preserve the fruits of that genius. All the ships’ libraries were crammed full of technical information in every field known to the Vulcans. The ships’ librarians were aware that they were stocking “time capsules.” Each of the ships duplicated information found in all the others, and no one grudged the redundancy, which, considering the history of the journey, was wise.
But the one thing they could not stock the ships with, with any certainty, was talent and incentive to use the information preserved there. The brilliant minds that designed the ships’ systems, for the most part, went along on the journey. But many of them died, in the various tragedies that befell the travelers, or later on of old age. More specialists in navigations, space science, and astronautical engineering were trained in the process of the journey, of course, but there is no forcing a person to be brilliant at a science—especially one that the children of the time tended to think of (in the early years) as something of a nuisance. They either remembered Vulcan, and were ambivalent about having been forced to leave it, or they were born on the journey and were full of stories about the wonders of living on a planet, in the open air. Some of them were understandably bored or annoyed with the whole issue of ships.
This, unfortunately, was the generation that finally landed on ch’Rihan, and knowingly or unknowingly went about setting the course of the planet’s civilization for the next thousand years or so. The government that came into power after the accession of the Ruling Queen acted, by inaction, for the whole generation. Their general feeling was that they were still getting the world on its feet, and had no time to start designing new starships, or (worse yet) devoting the then-scarce cash or venture capital of the planet to large building efforts. That they did find fairly large amounts sometime later to spend on wars in the south continent and in the east on ch’Havran was a fact pointed out to the Senate on several occasions. But very few voices made this complaint, and little notice was taken. The majority of people in the Two Worlds felt that they had thought enough about space for a while. The past two hundred years had been devoted to it. It was time to settle down, get some crops yielding properly, and find out who their neighbors were, and their enemies. If anyone needed to worry about it, let it be the Ship-Clans.
Unfortunately, the Ship-Clans had problems of their own. They were dwindling. The travelers in general had little interest in keeping up the populations of the ships, with a new world underfoot to live in, and there were defections from the Ship-Clans as time went on—people who saw no particular reason to stay inship, among metal walls, while there was green grass to walk on and green-gold sky to walk under for the first time in almost a hundred years.
There were other problems. At first funding and material support from ch’Rihan were fairly munificent: but after the reorganization of the Praetorate and Senate, the assistance began to taper off slowly as the loyal voices in the government became preoccupied with other concerns, or died out and were replaced by people who cared less. The hydroponics gardens on the ships were the first to go, then data storage and processing, as valuable spare parts were shipped on-planet, and no replacements made. There had been agreements that a priority of manufacture, once it got going, would be semiconductor and transtator technology to support both the ships’ needs and those of the telecommunication and defense networks that would have to be built. But for the first century and a half these needs were almost completely ignored in favor of farm manufactures—agricultural machinery, fertilizer, and food-processing equipment. It was ironic that the gardens of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran flourished as never before, while the vast shipborne flats that had kept so many Vulcan plants alive to see the new world now lay barren, and the computers that had so successfully calculated what species could fit in where in the new ecosystem were down now half the time and uncertain of operation the rest of it.
What it all added up to was a slow slide in space technology, so that by around 250 A.S. the Rihannsu would not have had the ability to get quickly off-planet if they had needed to. True, there seemed to be no need. By accident (if there are such things, which Rihannsu religion generally doubts), they had found the one good spot in a backwater, an area of the galaxy ignored as a “desert” by most of the spacefaring species in the area. It would be some seventeen hundred years before the Klingons and the Federation found them, which was just as well, for they were woefully unprepared. Other than the ships, only a few heavy transports were built to handle food shipments from ch’Havran (whose drier climate proved more conducive to the Vulcan grains they had brought with them; the north and northwest continents of ch’Havran became the “breadbasket” of the Two Worlds). Once the transports were built, there was very little further interest in space, and one by one the ships were allowed to fall. They were obsolete, it was said. Something better and newer could be built. There was no need for them anymore—there were no signs of alien presence out this far. The few voices lifted in protest, the people who said the ships should be kept at least for history’s sake, were ignored. Never has the classical Rihannsu character flaw, that of deadly practicality, proved more fatal. The Ship-Clans slowly left the ships as their engines were shut down and their orbits began to decay. Between 300 and 400 A.S. they all fell.
The Rihannsu at least decided to build a planetary “defense” system—though critics pointed out that if the system noticed anything coming at the planet, it would not be able to carry the battle to it. What kind of defense was that? But this, too, fell on deaf ears, especially since several key Praetors of this period had significant political and financial involvements with the guilds building the defense systems.
To do them justice, the network they prepared to build to warn them of incoming alien craft was an ambitious and forward-looking design, and would have been an effective one had it not been scaled down to almost nothing over later years by Praetors filching the funds dedicated to it for “more important” pet projects. When it was finished in 508 A.S., it consisted of a network of chemically fueled and solar-powered defense satellite/platforms armed with particle-beam weapons and solar-output lasers connected to an outer “warning network” of twelve satellites in long hyperbolic orbits around the Eisn system. The coverage of the warning satellites was incomplete—by rights there should have been about fifty of them—and because not enough money was spent on the code for the computers running the inner defense satellites, they had a nasty habit of firing at the few friendly craft that used local space. The original outer satellites are still there, their atomic batteries and cesium clocks ticking faithfully away though their computers have long since crashed. The close orbital platforms have fallen into ch’Rihan’s atmosphere and burned up, except for the one preserved as a museum. For the next fifteen hundred years or so, no one would much care. Later, they would care a great deal indeed, and Houses would rise and fall because of money “reappropriated” into private pockets for hunting lodges, banquets, and the occasional murder. But in the meantime, the Rihannsu, rich and poor alike, settled down each after his or her own manner to cultivate their fields, their families, and the arts.
War was counted as an art, perhaps the chief of them. The mindset of the Rihannsu at that point regarding war was that it (and, in its turn, peace) should be practiced in extremis. The simple delights of home and household, and the greatest luxury available according to one’s means, should be shared with friends and enemies alike in time of peace. War, when it was needed, should be brutal, swift, fierce, and enjoyable. Noble pleasures should accompany the army into the field. There should be fine food and excellent wine and discussions of epic poetry the night before the battle. In the morning there should be blood in green rivers, and single combats of note between both champions and the lesser knights: no pity or quarter granted save t
o the properly prostrated foe—to him or her, courtesy, honor, and the extraction of a fat ransom after the victory dinner.
Honor was the heart of it all, and grew more to the heart of Rihannsu culture as time went by. In war was often its best example, since there more than elsewhere the Rihannsu (as other species) had an “excuse” to forget about it in the heat of the moment. To their credit, they did not often forget. The given word was kept. They still sing of besieged Ihhliae, that great city, ringed around with the troops from neighboring Rhehiv’je, and how the Senator from the city came out and begged the Rhehiv’jen to have mercy on her starving people. The answer was no surprise, especially since the Rhehiv’jen had been there since the beginning of the year, in the foulest weather in memory, and it was now high summer, and their crops not in. The Ihhliae were told that there was no help for it—all their men were going to be put to the sword. But as a courtesy to the ladies of the city (it was one of the very few regions where women did not fight), they would be allowed to come out the next morning, and to leave with whatever they could carry that was of value to them. There was chagrin and considerable surprise when the women came out the next morning, each carrying her husband on her back. But the word had been given, and when the men came back and besieged Rhehiv’je the next year, it was all taken in good part.
Arts of other sorts were also practiced. Few species have been so fond of the pleasures of the table, without turning entirely into gluttons or food critics, than the Rihannsu. Ch’Rihan in particular was rich in foods that they could adapt. There were several hundred species of fowl, numerous flightless lizards, and several flying ones that made very tasty roasts, as well as various large herd beasts that could feed whole Houses for days, and endless fruits and grains.
There was also ale, and wine. Vulcans knew about wine—the pre-Reform joke was that it was discovered just before the very first war, and caused it when the first man pointed at the second, drunk, and laughed at him. But the poor dry fruits of Vulcan were no match for the lehe’jhme of ch’Rihan, that grew in rich rose-colored clusters on trees three hundred feet high, in unbelievable abundance. The first Rihannsu saw the herds of wild hlai staggering and croaking their way across the southern veldts like a mass migration of sozzled giant ostriches, and they knew they were onto a good thing. They followed the herds in the deeps of summer, through the blue and emerald grass, and found that they had been drinking from waterholes into which the lehe’jhme had fallen in great numbers and fermented. From the drinking-holes, courtesy of the inebriated hlai of past centuries, come the more than five thousand Rihannsu wines that are coddled, blended, and smiled over around the planet today.
Ale was another story, a “poor man’s drink” (or northern Havranha’s drink—most fruits do not grow there) coerced out of roasted Vulcan kheh grain and “malted” native Havranssu breadmake, the whole first brewed and fermented for a month or so, then distilled and recarbonated. People drink Rihannsu ale for the same reason they drink Saurian brandy—to prove they can.
There were other arts than eating and drinking. The “plastic arts” were always highly developed on Vulcan. Their abstract sculpture and painting were particularly fine. During the journey (with its scarcity of materials to work in), the pictorial and sculptorial arts became more concrete, not less—an unexpected development. Or perhaps not, in a situation where people in general and artists in particular were looking most definitely forward into a future they hoped would be better than the past they had—and looking with equal intensity at a present which they had created themselves and which they were, to put it mildly, stuck with.
The stark, clean, conceptually advanced, mathematically derived concepts and images formerly reserved for “high art” in the old days began to turn up everywhere—on clothing, in furniture and hangings, personal effects, sprayed or painted on walls of the ships. Later, on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, they expanded to cover whole mountainsides (e.g. the Mural Chain in west-continent ch’Rihan). No home, however poor, was complete without “pictures” of one kind or another. Everybody made them, and most of them were stunning, and the tradition has continued unchanged for fifteen hundred years. Rihannsu art, especially the painted, sculpted, and woven, is treasured all over the worlds for its vitality, tenderness, ferocity, clarity, and sheer style—often imitated, but the spirit of it rarely if ever caught, and only approached in a cool manner by the Vulcans. The Rihannsu culture has the highest artist-per-capita ratio in the known galaxy. No one knows why. “Perhaps,” tr’Ehhelih said, “giving up your world enables you to see the one you finally wind up with.”
The nonphysical arts and humanities did as well. They had fifteen hundred long and comfortable years to mold themselves, and the changes in philosophy, religion, literature, and poetry were greater than tr’Ehhelih would have liked to admit.
Vulcan religion before the flight was, to put it mildly, haphazard. Most worlds have two or three or five major religions, sometimes mutually exclusive, sometimes not, which arise over a millennium or so and then contend genteely (or not so genteelly) with one another for almost the rest of the planet’s existence. Vulcan had about six hundred religions pre-Reformation: a vivid, noisy, energetic, violent sprawl and squabble of gods, demigods, animae, geniuses, demons, angels, golems, powers, principalities, forces, noeses, and other hypersomatic beings of types too difficult to explain to Earth people, who, by and large, are spoiled by the ridiculous simplicity of their own beliefs. The phrase “the one God” would have brought the average Vulcan-in-the-street to a standstill and caused him to ask, “Which ‘One’?” since there were about ninety deities, protodeities, holy creatures, and other contenders for the title. Some planets never discover Immanence: Vulcan was littered with it.
The travelers came of a wild assortment of religions, but one “major” professed faith began slowly to sort itself out among them as the journey progressed. Perhaps at first it was not so much a religion as a fad or a joke. “Matter as God,” that was where the idea started, with some nameless traveler in Gorget who left a dissertation on the subject in the message section of the ship’s computer net.
“Things,” she said, “notice.” It did, in fact, begin as a joke, one that other species share. Have you noticed, she said, that when you really need something—the key to your quarters, a favorite piece of clothing—you can’t find it? You search everywhere, and there’s no result. But any other time, when there’s no need, the thing in question is always under your hand. This, said the nameless contributor, is a proof that the universe is sentient, or at least borderline-sentient: it craves attention, like a small child, and responds to it depending on how you treat it—with affection, or annoyance. For further proof, she suggested that a person looking for something under these circumstances should walk around their quarters, calling the thing in question by its name. It always turns up. (Before the reader laughs, by the way, s/he is advised to try this on the next thing s/he loses. The technique has its moments.)
The initial letters in the contribution were naturally humorous ones, but the tone grew increasingly serious (though never somber: jokes were always part of it). There was something about this philosophy that seemed to work peculiarly well for the travelers, who had “made” their own worlds and their own language, and had come to exercise a measure of control over their own lives that few planetbound people do, or ever become conscious of. The “selfness” of matter became an issue for these people: the (to us) seemingly mundane observation that the physical universe had existence, had weight, hard edges, “the dignity of existence,” as one contributor called it. Things existed and so had a right to nobility, a right to be honored and appreciated, as much as more sentient things that walked around and demanded the honor themselves. Things had a right to names: when named, and called by those names, of course they would respond positively—for the universe wants to be ordered, wants to be cared for, and has nothing to fulfill this function (said another contributor) but us. Or (said a third person) if
there are indeed gods, we’re their tool toward this purpose. This is our chance to be gods, on the physical level, the caretakers and orderers of the “less sentient” kinds of life.
More than nine thousand people, from Gorget and other ships, added to this written tradition as time went by: they wrote letters, dissertations, essays, critiques, poems, songs, prose, satire. It was the longest-running conversation on one subject in the history of that net. The contribution started two years after the departure from Vulcan, and continued without a missed day until seventy-eight years thereafter, the day the core of the computer in question crashed fatally, killing the database. However, numerous people among the remaining ships had hardcopy, and over a thousand of the travelers contributed to restoring the database. It was as if it were something that mattered profoundly enough to them that their precious private time—for everyone worked on the ships—was still worth contributing to the preservation of the thread.
Names became a great issue for these people. Many of them already had rehei, “nicknames” (like the “handles” of Earth’s early nets) in the computer network. Many of them adopted these as “fourth names,” thus identifying themselves as people participating in the contributors’ net. Over several hundred more years, fourth names became commonplace, then slowly began to be kept private, shared only with one’s family or most intimate friends. A fourth name was not given you by someone else: you found it in yourself—it was inherent in you, as a “proper” name was inherent in a well-named physical object. You just had to look for it, and if you looked carefully enough, you would find the “right” name. It is perhaps because of this tradition, exercised on things as well as people, that the names given places, animals, vegetables, and minerals on ch’Rihan when the travelers arrived have rarely been surpassed for vigor, humor, appropriateness, and a sort of affectionate quality. It was if the travelers were naming children. And by and large, the Two Worlds were kind enough to their colonists.