Vulcan’s Soul Book II - Exiles Read online

  Control.

  Even on the shuttle from Shavokh to Rea’s Helm, it was not as if Karatek had no work to do. First, he needed to review Shavokh’s status reports with T’Partha, a final check before the meeting. Then, he could review his latest research project. The last time they had stopped to mine duranium, he had received a gift from the head of mining operations—a peculiar sort of crystal that had the property of directing power in such a way that ships could be propelled nearer and nearer to the speed of light. It should be possible, Karatek thought, to refine these crystals, to modulate them, perhaps adjust their refraction so that, one day, the ships’ engines might be adapted to his great dream of faster-than-light travel. Provided that they could withstand matter–antimatter collisions without cracking and producing catastrophic explosions.

  Admittedly, Karatek’s ability to experiment with these crystals had been extremely limited due to the need to preserve his ship’s physical integrity. But the next time they made planetfall for any length of time, he intended to request the opportunity of the council to test his theories in the safety of a world.

  “You realize,” T’Partha’s voice, wry and a little wistful in his ears, brought him back to the here and now, “they will never get around to discussing pure research today.”

  Karatek allowed himself to sigh.

  He glanced away from the temptation of his report, staring instead out the shuttle’s viewscreens. They were filled with blackness, lit only by the dim lights within the ships and the faraway stars. The shuttle felt small, much more precarious than Shavokh, adrift in a prodigious emptiness. He might have felt more in control if he could have piloted. As he told himself every time he had to take one of the wretched things, it was illogical to dislike an entire class of ship, and even more so to resent those ships for their function—but there it was. Karatek did not like shuttles.

  Therefore, he was one of the few who did not resent the fact that their use was now restricted to official business: transportation to councils, mining, or surveillance of the very few planets they had found in this sector of the galaxy. Nevertheless, Karatek would order that a shuttle be prepared to unite N’Veyan and his intended bondmate once T’Partha found her.

  Something about the incident troubled Karatek. Why hadn’t N’Veyan entered the Fires earlier? If Karatek were not Shavokh’s commander, that would have been a vastly improper, almost obscene question for anyone except family members and healers. Perhaps he could make discreet inquiries at this council about how other ship commanders had handled this situation.

  Perhaps, as the great ships’ engines strained closer and closer to the still-unbreakable barrier of light speed, the rhythm in their blood that told fertile males when it was the time of mating was delayed. Even back on Vulcan, necessity did not come regularly every seven years.

  Perhaps the blood fever truly did take longer to kindle here in the darkness and the cold. Perhaps that meant that their biological cycles would be delayed or permanently deranged.

  None of that mattered: what would be, would be, and must be endured. For now, what mattered was that N’Veyan suffered, which meant that his betrothed suffered too. Lacking an adept’s control, N’Veyan would die, although his pledged mate might not.

  That death must be prevented. They could not risk further limitations on their genetic pool. Even if N’Veyan was te-Vikram.

  So. Karatek had made his decision now, and he knew it. It would take some few tedious hours of argument, plus additional time to ready the shuttle, but if all went as intended, N’Veyan would meet his betrothed at whatever the appointed place was, here, where there were no circles of Koon-ut-kal-if-fee.

  And that would be one positive thing accomplished on this Fifth of Tasmeen.

  “Preparing to match course with Rea’s Helm,” the pilot’s voice echoed over the communications system.

  Finally.

  Karatek drew his first unfettered breath of the day, then another and another until his breathing was as focused, as centered in his body as when he meditated. Soon, he would be able to escape the shuttle for what was, to him, the far greater security of one of the great ships. With S’task present, Karatek could lay down the burden of command, at least for the duration of the council, in favor of aiding S’task to judge wisely.

  Like Shavokh, Rea’s Helm was on envirosave. Karatek promised himself that he would learn how this ship’s engineers had managed to keep the docking bay warm, relatively speaking. He could recall one evening during his kahs-wan as particularly cold. As the Forge had blackened into night, he had dug into the sand. Heated all day, it had warmed the chill from his hands and feet and preserved him until dawn.

  Rea’s Helm possessed no drifts of reddish sand, no scarps and glints of obsidian, but the ship’s light was the right color, and their weight felt right. The officers who received them led them to S’task’s consort, who blessed them, then offered water and fire in the old ways that had almost disappeared from shipboard use.

  Karatek was glad to kneel and inhale the incense from the burners she had had set up in the reception bay. The blue-gray smoke spiraled up from replicas of the ancient flanged bronzes that weight restrictions had caused many in his ship’s company to leave behind. Someone had painted murals of Seleya’s ablutions pools, with their stand of kylin’the blossoms, on the wall behind the lady’s chair. The sight of them, as well as the memory of that wealth of water below the mountains of awe, eased his soul.

  The journey had left Karatek’s mouth dry. He drank deeply, as was proper for a guest, politely ignoring the taste of the chemicals Rea’s Helm used to purify the recycled water. For good or ill, the taste was different from the recycled water on board Shavokh. But the cups in which the water was presented were ancient, much like the set carved from fossilized wood that T’Vysse had once used to welcome Surak. He drank to absent friends, and the grave courtesy with which the lady received back the cup made him think that his sorrow was shared.

  The conference room to which courteous, helmed guards led him and T’Partha reminded Karatek poignantly of the seminar rooms at the Vulcan Space Institute. Even the badge check for radiation, toxins, or disease possessed a welcome familiarity.

  This room, like the VSI’s halls, contained a conference table, glowing screens set in at every place. But there was no acerbic Torin to raise a white, sardonic eyebrow in silent reprimand that Karatek was late again, and what excuse for it could he possibly have this time?

  Torin would have taken the seat at the head of the table. Here, indeed, there stood a chair, but it was occupied only by a great sword. Karatek had seen the bared blade before in this room. As always, he wondered what in the way of vital supplies someone had sacrificed in order to bring that thing on board.

  Today, however, was the Fifth of Tasmeen, and for the first time, the blade’s presence on board made sense to him. It looked ancient, priceless, the sort of thing that should have been preserved in a family shrine or the Vulcan Science Academy. It reminded him of one of his journeys to the artisans near the Forge. He started toward it, hoping to see the master’s mark stamped somewhere along the sword’s length.

  “Karatek,” T’Partha warned as the ship’s officers tensed.

  Fascinating. When had a sword, even a great heirloom, been transformed into some sort of talisman? Most illogical.

  Would you let just anyone handle the coronet Surak gave you? he asked himself.

  Karatek turned his gesture into a nod of respect, and hastened toward the seat marked with his name.

  T’Partha seated herself quietly next to him. “The sword is an heirloom of Surak’s House,” she whispered.

  Trust T’Partha to know, and to produce that information at need.

  Rea’s Helm’s commander walked in, accompanied by S’task. A quiet man with thoughtful, poet’s eyes, he had disclaimed responsibility for the entire fleet. Nevertheless, the fleet, or at least most of it, looked to him for leadership. How thin he was, as if his responsibilities
had fed on him!

  Feeling far younger than he had a right to be, and untutored, Karatek began to rise, eager to show respect. S’task raised an eyebrow, in a gesture so like T’Kehr Torin’s that Karatek’s heart twisted in his side as he remembered.

  He nodded at S’lovan, the ship’s commander, realizing that the structure of his name revealed a kinship with the older man. Old loyalties persisted even this far from Vulcan, mingling with philosophy and even politics. Karatek had chosen what he considered exile for the good of the homeworld he renounced. In that, if little else, he shared some commonality of thought with the te-Vikram, many of whom had never intended to leave the desert at all. He knew, however, that S’task and those of his House and extended clan considered their journey not exile, but a quest for a new home. As for the technocrats, for all Karatek knew, they probably saw it as an opportunity—a prejudiced observation, but one he could not shake off. Surak had been the only man he ever knew totally without factional loyalties, and yet, he had split the Mother World as no other philosopher or prophet had ever done.

  “We have a long agenda today,” S’lovan said, activating his screen.

  Karatek could see it: everything from crop blight to techniques for strengthening ships’ hulls to a debate on whether they should even continue with the journey.

  If the meeting went on as long as it would have to in order to deal with all those topics as thoroughly as they deserved, he should have been told, so he and T’Partha could pack food and water in order not to be a drain on the resources of Rea’s Helm.

  Could the tradition of guest-friendship extend this far into the darkness? Karatek wondered, and knew it for an illogical question. The years of wandering had tested his resolve. Surak should have tried deep space, rather than the mere desert, Karatek thought to himself, and knew, as he thought, how absurd the notion was.

  S’task raised a hand so pallid that only the ship’s lights, reddish like the sunlight of the Mother World, lent it any semblance of health.

  “Your pardon,” S’lovan interrupted. Taking up the water flask at his place, he walked around the table and poured for each person seated there, even if they had already been formally welcomed on board.

  By the time he finished, only drops remained in the flask. Nevertheless, he poured them into his own cup and raised it in silent remembrance not just of the people lost in exile, but of the world lost to them forever. Then he sat again and looked toward T’Vria, seated to his left.

  “Your report on hydroponics?”

  T’Vria rose. She was still quite young. Karatek recalled that her earliest training at the VSI had been overseen by T’Raya, who had not managed to scramble on board any of the shuttles bound for one of the great ships. The loss of her teacher must have come as a blow, but the botanist’s voice was sure as she explained new procedures for containment of hydroponics areas. They could not afford another crop failure, she said into an ominous silence.

  Avarin, from off the Forge, rose next. He nodded respect at S’task, then smiled faintly. “As most of you have heard, far too often, I spent several years in the Guard. One of the habits of the Guard—those deemed fit to mention in public—is debriefing, specifically what we called ‘lessons learned.’ We have learned, once again, the lesson of redundancies. Where there are no people, there must be machines. Where resources are scarce, the machines, like their masters, must be more efficient. Where neither is possible, we must do without or devise new machines.”

  He gestured, and schematics of generators came online, followed by computer systems that Karatek saw instantly were smaller and more efficient than anything he had ever imagined. And to think he still called himself a scientist! He was no scientist now, but an administrator with an absorbing hobby. But self-recriminations and regret were unproductive in the face of Avarin’s excellence. The other man was speaking once again.

  “Before the exile began, the Vulcan Science Academy had begun a study of artificial intelligence. It occurs to me that we might use this as a sort of force multiplier, to extend the capacity of surviving crew members—”

  “How?” Iria rose to her feet. If not for the authority that emanated from her, and the robes of a Seleyan underpriestess that she wore, she might still have been mistaken for a girl. Even standing, she was only as tall as the men and women still seated, but her eyes blazed even more brightly than the gem that glowed on her brow.

  “I know you, Avarin. I know you have been speaking with Vortal about cybernetics. You know that technology is proscribed,” she said. “You would do better to work with those new crystals.”

  With what felt like a flicker of Karatek’s inner eyelids, he remembered the high priestess in the Halls of Ancient Thought, holding out the coronet Karatek now treasured to Surak himself.

  “Before thee departs or the world we have known ends, may I present thee with a gift? It was taken from thine enemy, a product of the arts of their hands and their mind. To us, it restrains the mind from its final destiny and is therefore abomination.”

  “But I may wish to study it?” Surak lifted both his slanted eyebrows. “And, incidentally, serve thee by removing blasphemy from thy presence? What can I do but obey?”

  One of the unbonded had brought Surak the coronet. It resembled the headpiece the high priestess wore, far more elaborate than Iria’s bloodmetal headband with its beaklike white gem that blazed at Avarin like a third eye able to pierce his soul.

  Avarin coughed delicately. Iria’s brows came up, as if she studied him for signs of illness. S’lovan turned in his chair, clearly alarmed for S’task.

  The cough had the additional advantage of drawing people’s attention back to Avarin from whatever trails of memory they had wandered.

  The man held up a hand. “The physicians—secular physicians, not healers of your order, Priestess”—he bowed respect at her—“are concerned not with fusing man and machine, which I agree is blasphemy, but with preserving our people’s genetic heritage by establishing a bank of…reproductive material.”

  He glanced politely away and down, deliberately not meeting the eyes of a woman not bound to him when speaking of such a matter. T’Partha stirred in the way Karatek knew meant she had observed something worthwhile and wanted him to pay attention. In this case, she showed him a critical truth about Avarin: he might be able and urbane, but he was ultimately evasive. Although averting his gaze from an unbonded female, or even a bonded one who was not his mate, was simple courtesy when speaking of the Time of Mating or any reproductive matters at all, it was characteristic of the man. Avarin never looked into people’s eyes, making his own thoughts harder to discern.

  He spoke of lessons learned. Evasions, Karatek told himself. But then Avarin had never concealed his political ties to the technocrats. What was it he had said once? “I build tools. I build bridges between groups. Those too are tools.”

  Once, Karatek had seen water spilled, wasted, on the deck near Shavokh’s hull, where the cold was greatest. The water had solidified. Although he knew that ice existed at Seleya’s peak, and that some of the richest, rashest houses on the Mother World had occasionally consumed water in that fashion, it seemed extravagant, wasteful. Someone had stepped on the water and fallen. The man had managed to stand up and made light of the mishap. The water had been chipped from the deck into a container, then reintroduced into the ship’s water supply. And Karatek had forgotten the episode until now.

  Slippery. That was the word defining the quality of that solidified water, the ice, on his ship’s deck. Avarin was slippery.

  Karatek forbore making a note. Who knew what Avarin’s eyes might be taking in as he flicked them about the room, never meeting anyone’s gaze like a man of honor? It would be better to allow the man to underestimate him as a scientist past his prime, his mind in his memories, or his circuits.

  Now, Avarin was looking around the table. After the barrage of delta waves that had killed half of one ship’s population, physicians—what Avarin had called secul
ar physicians—had suggested creating a bank of sperm and eggs, in case the population on board the ships fell below critical levels. Then, the suggestion was greeted with such outrage as un-Vulcan that it was abandoned. Now, Avarin repeated it, as he did every time council met. Still, he kept his eyes down. It concerned Karatek that he could not read whether the man expected his resolution to be passed this time, next time, or not at all.

  “I might ask whether my team could receive daily transmissions about ship’s radiation levels,” Avarin spoke directly to S’lovan.

  “You might indeed,” said S’lovan. The man was no fool. He knew that Avarin had just moved a le-matya on the game board, taking a warrior and placing the priestess in jeopardy. He would not let go of this idea, and everyone on the council knew it.

  T’Partha stirred in her seat. “Surely,” she said, attempting to draw the consensus about her like a warm cloak, “it would be more logical to adjust the ships’ present course to avoid concentrations—forgive my imprecision; I am no scientist, but only an administrator—of radiation?”

  S’lovan rose. “If we shift course, we will be forced to travel through regions less densely populated with stars of sufficient age that they might have viable planetary systems.” He might regret it, but he spoke the truth.

  “Viable!” a tall man with hair still scorched from Vulcan’s sun scoffed, drawing a reproving glance from S’task. “After all, we have done so well in finding systems that can support life,” he added with quiet but bitter sarcasm. Intriguing to see one of the te-Vikram adopt the controlled hostility that Surak’s followers could wield with such great effect.

  “Is it the wish of the ships’ commanders that we consider turning back?” Avarin asked.

  S’lovan again turned toward his kinsman. S’task barely raised a brow.