Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (37 page)

Naturally one does not just say good-bye to one’s planet, build a fleet of starships, and take off in them…though this is often the image of what happened on Vulcan during the Reformation.

S’task showed some canniness about handling Vulcan psychology when he slipped the concept of a massive off-planet migration quietly into the Vulcan communications nets and mindtrees rather than making an open, hard declaration right off the bat. “When people think an idea is theirs,” he said later in his writings aboard
Rea’s Helm,
“they take it so much the more to heart than if they think they got it from someone else, or worse, followed a great public trend. There is nothing people want to do more than to follow great trends, and nothing they want less to
seem
to be doing.”

The declaration itself, the document to be known much later as the Statement of Intention of Flight, appeared first in the journal of the Vulcan Academy of Sciences—then an infant body of the Universities—under a title that translates approximately into Terran academic-journalistic idiom as “A Study of Socioeconomic Influences on Vulcan Space Exploration.” It was a sober and scholarly investigation into the economic trends that had moved the various Vulcan space programs over a thousand years, and it discussed in depth one recurring trend with disquieting correlations to the aggressiveness taking place on the planet at a specific place and time. When a given part of the planet grew too crowded to adequately support its population with water, food, and shelter, said this theory, then wars broke out there as the neighboring tribes or nations fought for resources. When wars broke out, technology, both physical and nonphysical, flourished during the “war efforts” of the various sides. And after the war in question was over, the technology was spun off into the private sector, with a subsequent substantial increase in the ability of a given part of the planet to support its population…until the next peak in the cycle.

S’task was therefore the first Vulcan to manage to introduce into Vulcan mass consciousness a statement of what on Earth has come to be known as Heinlein’s Law. The idea had, of course, occurred to many people at many times over Vulcan’s history, but S’task was the first to spread the concept so widely, into that “threshold number” of minds necessary for a culture to begin working change on itself. And, whether on purpose or accidentally, S’task framed the concept as the conclusion of an exercise in logic—asking, at the end of the article, whether it would not be more logical simply to have the increase in technology and subsequent spinoff and omit the war.

Many who read this saw in the article a potential reconciliation between S’task and Surak, but the old teacher knew better. He is said to have wept after he first saw the presentation of it, knowing that his student, whether in spite or cunning, was using logic, Surak’s great love and tool, as a weapon against him.

It is sometimes hard for humans to understand that logic as a way of life did not instantly descend upon the whole Vulcan people immediately after Surak announced that it would be a good thing. Very quickly, by historical standards, yes: but not overnight. There were many false starts, renunciations, debunkings, persecutions, and periods of what seemed massive inertia; and the idea of the logical life went through many of the stages that other, less sweeping popular phenomena do. Around the time of the Statement of Intent, “reality-truth” was still truly only a fad among Vulcans, an “up-and-coming trend.” This is something else that people, particularly humans, find hard to grasp. The difficulty is understandable, susceptible as we are to our own blindnesses to fads like the scientific method, and the various ways in which each new generation tends to twist the sciences to fit its own
zeitgeist.
Surak could see the time when reason would be truly internalized in the behavior of a whole population, and would guide the whole planet. But despite its validity as a tool, at the moment logic was only an easy gateway into people’s minds because of its novelty status—and S’task was not ashamed to use it as such.

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 travelers 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.