Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (41 page)

But might-have-beens were no use to the travelers. They spent the next eighty-five standard years of relative time—nearly four hundred and fifty, out in the nonrelativistic universe—hunting desperately for a world, any world, that might suit them. Now they would be glad to Vulcaniform a planet, if they could only find one at all suitable, but most of the stars in deep Trianguli space were older Population I stars that had long before lost their planets, or were too unstable to have any to begin with. The planets they did find were uniformly gas giants or airless rocks that nothing could be done with in less than a couple of centuries.

The desperation was even worse because the ships had been built with hundred-year “viability envelopes.” No one had expected the search for a new world to take much longer than fifty years, and their supplies, systems, and facilities had been designed with this timing in mind. Food was beginning to be scarce in some of the ships, systems were breaking down, and almost all the replacement parts were used up.
Warbird
was lost to a massive drive system malfunction; she had no adept left who could bootstrap her, and she fell into 114 Trianguli trying to slingshot around the star to pick up more boost.
Memory
went the same way, trying to use a black dwarf. The pulses from the small X-ray star produced after the collision are still reaching Earth.

The remaining ships—
Rea’s Helm, Gorget, Sunheart, Vengeance,
and
Firestorm
—kept going as best they could. It was never easy. Odd diseases began to spring up in all the crews. There was speculation that radiation exposure was causing new mutagenic forms of diseases to which Vulcans were normally immune…since the symptoms for some of the “space fevers” resembled already-identified Vulcan diseases like lunglock fever, though they were more severe. The medical staff of all the ships had been attenuated by deaths from old age as well as from the diseases. They were able to do little, and before the epidemics began to taper off, from fifty to seventy percent of each ship’s complement had died.

These diseases only aggravated—or, one might also say, “ended”—a problem that had been worsening with the decay of the ship’s viability envelopes. There were no more psitechs. Those that did not die bootstrapping the ships now died of disease, and there were no completely trained techs to replace them—partly because much of the oldstyle Vulcan psi-training required “circles” or groups of adepts to bring a psi-talented person to viability. There were no longer enough adepts to make up the necessary groups.

The documentation available—though quite complete—was also too objective: people who tried to teach themselves the mind techniques “by the book” never became more than talented amateurs. The direct “laying on of hands” was necessary to properly teach telepathy, mind-meld, and the other allied arts. So they died out as the ships voyaged, and the sciences of the mind became the matter of legend. The Vulcans believe that present-day Rihannsu possess the raw ability to be trained in the mind sciences, but the actual experiment will doubtless not happen for quite a long while.

Meanwhile, the diseases took their toll everywhere. S’task’s wife and children all perished within days of one another during
Rea
’s epidemic of mutagenic infectious pericarditis. S’task himself came very close to dying, and lay ill for months, not speaking, hardly eating. It was a very gaunt and shaky man who got up from his bed on the day
Rea
’s chief astronomer came to him to tell him that they thought they had found yet another star with planets.

The star they had found was 128 Trianguli, one of the group 123–128 Tri: a little rosette of dwarf K-type stars so far out in the arm as not to have been noticed by even the Etoshans. It would require
Rea
some ten years of acceleration—all their bootstrap adepts were now dead of old age or jump syndrome—and another ten to decelerate. This was the worst possible news: the period was well outside of
Rea
’s viability envelope.

“We may all be dead when we get there,” said the chief astronomer to S’task.

“But we will have gotten there,” said S’task. Still, he took the question to Council, and the surviving population of
Rea
agreed that they should take the chance and try to reach the star. The other surviving ships concurred.

They began the long acceleration. Other authors have covered in far more detail the crazed courage and dogged determination of these people as they bent their whole will to survival in ancient, cranky spacecraft that had no reason to be running any longer. But the spacecraft had, after all, been built by craftsmen, by Vulcans who loved their work and would rather have died than misplace a rivet out of laziness, and the workmanship, by and large, held. Nine years into deceleration they came within sensor range of 128 Tri and confirmed the astronomers’ suspicions: the star had six planets, of which two were a “double planet” system like Earth and Earth’s Moon…and both of the two were habitable within broad Vulcan parameters.

There were, of course, major differences to be dealt with. The two worlds had more water than Vulcan did, and their climates were respectively cooler. In fact, both planets had those things that the Vulcans had heard of from the Etoshan data but never seen, “oceans.” Some people were nervous about the prospect of settling on worlds where water was such a commonplace. Others entertained the idea that in a place where water was so plentiful, one of the major causes of war might be eliminated. S’task, looking for the first time at the early telescopic images of the two green-golden worlds, and hearing one of his people mention this possibility, was silent for a few moments, then said, “Those who want war will find causes, no matter how many of them you take away.” This proved to be true enough, later. With survival needs handled, the Rihannsu moved on to other concerns, matters of honor, and fought cheerfully about them for centuries. But that time was still far ahead of them. Right now they were merely desperately glad to find a world, two worlds, in fact, that looked like they would serve them as homes instead of the tired metal worlds that were rapidly losing their viability.

The year immediately following starfall was spent in cautious analysis of the worlds and how they should be best used by the travelers. The larger of the two worlds had the biggest oceans, and three large landmasses, two with extensive “young” mountain ranges. The third was ninety percent desert, though its coastlines were fertile. The other planet, the one “frozen” in orbit around the larger body, again like Earth’s moon, had five continents, all mountainous and heavily forested. Both worlds revealed thousands of species of wildlife, a fact that astonished the travelers: Vulcan has comparatively few, only three or four phyla with a spread of several hundred species, mostly plants.

The ships’ scientists were fascinated by the fact that the species on both planets were quite similar, and there were several near-duplications. Arguments immediately began as to whether these planets had been colonized or visited by some other species in the past, or whether this astonishing parallel evolution had happened by itself. No artifacts suggestive of any other species’ intervention or presence, however, were ever found. The question has never been satisfactorily answered, though there are possibilities: the 128 Tri system lies in the migratory path of the species known to Federation research as “the Builders,” who played at “seeding” various planets with carbon-based life, predominantly hominid, some two million years ago. There is no ignoring the fact that ninety percent of the wildlife on the Two Worlds is compatible with Vulcan biochemistry, even if only by virtue of being carbohydrate. Levorotatory protein forms, common on almost every “nonseeded” planet, were almost completely absent in the ch’Rihan/ch’Havran biosystems.

Research went on, while the travelers, eager to stop traveling, decided the questions of who should live where. No logical method could be approved by everyone, especially since there were several pieces of especially choice real estate that one or more groups had their eyes on. There was also concern that people should be sufficiently spread out so as not to overtax the resources of any one area in the long term. After several months of extremely acrimonious argument in ships’ Meetings, S’task wearied of it all and suggested that the ships merely choose areas to live in by lottery. To his extreme surprise, the complements of the other ships agreed. Some ships preferred to go into the lottery as entire units, others divided up along family or clan lines, so that septs of clans scattered among the four surviving ships would all go to one area together.

The two planets were duly named ch’Rihan (“of the Declared”) and ch’Havran (“of the Travelers”). It was rather odd that the results of the lottery left many of the more “reactionary,” Vulcan-oriented houses living on ch’Havran, since the name more recalled the journey than its end, as ch’Rihan did, and ch’Rihan became the home of the more “forward-looking,” secessionist, revolutionary houses (S’task’s own house was placed on ch’Rihan by the lottery). Notice was taken of this, perhaps more notice than was warranted, perhaps not. A people who have come to speak an artificial language will naturally be preoccupied with the meanings of words and names. The results of the lottery were taken as a sort of good omen, that the language fit the people, and vice versa, that this was indeed the place where they were supposed to be, the place to which they had been meant to come. Who the Rihannsu thought was doing the “meaning” is uncertain. Vulcan religion had changed considerably over the years of the journey, and would change further.

It is also interesting to note that the “troublemaker” groups, those clans and tribes who had been pressured by one faction or another to make the journey, almost all ended up on ch’Havran, and on its east continent—remote, rugged, and poorer in resources than the others. There have been suggestions among both Rihannsu and Federation historians that the lottery was rigged. There is no way to tell at this remote period in time. The computers in which the lottery data was stored and handled are long since dust.

If the lottery was, in fact, rigged to this effect, then evil would come of it later. The cultures that grew up unchecked on the east continent, mostly out of contact with those on ch’Rihan and the other parts of ch’Havran, grew up savage, exploitative, and cruel, even by Rihannsu standards. Those east continent factions would later instigate and finally openly provoke the Rihannsu’s first war with the Federation, and the crews of ships from the Kihai and LLunih nations would commit atrocities that would adorn Federation propaganda tapes for years to come. It is mostly these nations that the Rihannsu have to thank for horrors like the abandonment and “evacuation” of Thieurrull (tr: “Hellguard”) and the capture and rape of innocent Vulcans—atrocities that the Senate and Praetorate would have severely punished if they had known they were being planned and carried out by eastern-based and easterner-commanded ships, and secretly backed and funded by eastern praetors. Punishments there were, indeed, but much too late. The whole business was later taken, by people who believed that the lottery was rigged, as more evidence of the desperate correctness of Surak’s statement that beginnings must be clean.

Other peculiarities set in as a result of the scattering of the populations of the many ships across two planets. Vulcan society has always had a distinctly matriarchal cast: this tendency came out strongly in several of the nations on ch’Havran, and most strongly in the Nn’verian nation on the north continent of ch’Rihan. It was the nation in which S’task came to live (the short while that he did), and by virtue of that the seat of government and the seat of the first and only Ruling Queen of the Two Worlds. T’Rehu (later Vriha t’Rehu) seized power and set her throne in the newly built Council Chambers, in front of the Empty Chair; she spilled the first blood in those chambers—regrettably, the first of much—and declared the rule of women (or at least woman) over men returned again. The Vulcans had tried this some thousands of years before, and had only indifferent success with it: women were generally not interested enough in war for the Vulcan nations of that time to support such rule for long. T’Rehu was cast down, and the council returned to power after ch’Rihan’s first war. But from then until now women have held more than seventy percent of all positions in the government, and about sixty percent of those in the armed forces.

Another interesting thing happened over which sociologists are still arguing: Rihannsu women began to get interested in war. Many of the high-ranking east continent officers responsible for the Hellguard atrocities were women. The etiology of this change, and the question of why it should happen so soon after the end of the journey, is still a puzzle. Of the other “matriarchal” or female-oriented species in the galaxy (some seventy-five percent), only one other, the Bhvui, has done anything similar, and the histories of the two species are too different to make comparisons meaningful. But in any case, Rihannsu women warriors have become almost as much of a legend as pre-Reformation Vulcan, and there are countless gossipy stories of “Romulan”-dominated worlds ruled by suave and sophisticated warrior princesses with harems full of good-looking men. The only thing to be said about these stories is, if they were true, the Rihannsu would not have had to enter into so many destructive deals with the Klingons to keep their economy afloat. They could have done quite nicely from the female tourist trade.

But again, these developments were in the future. The eighteen thousand remaining travelers slowly left the ships over some three years, cautiously establishing support bases for themselves, until there were very few people still living in the ships. Some did choose to remain, mostly those people who had become agoraphobic over the long journey, or had been born in the ships and wanted nothing to do with open skies and planets. The Ship-Clans, as they came to be known, lived quite happily aboard their great echoing homes, looking down on the Two Worlds around which they coasted in asynchronous orbits.