Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [16]
“I doubt the latter will be necessary,” Uhura said, moving away from the mirror wall and indicating that Tuvok should do the same. “But she came to me from the other side of the Zone, and the person who sent her used the code words ‘Pandora’s box.’ “
This was a reference Tuvok recognized. “Indeed?”
“I’m not saying she’s a security risk, but I’m asking you to debrief her with your usual thoroughness, and take her in hand for the course of this mission. Not so that it’s obvious, but-“
“Understood. Now, as to the nature of the mission-?”
Uhura motioned him out of the anteroom and let the door lock behind them. “In my office,” she said.
She offered him coffee, real brewed arabica, not synthesized, ground fresh every morning from beans grown on the slopes of Mount Kenya, not far from her grandparents’ summer house. Tuvok accepted, tasted, nodded appreciatively. Uhura put her own cup down and got to the point.
“Tell me what you know about something the Romulans call the Gnawing.”
“An ancient illness,” Tuvok said carefully. Vulcans were always careful in addressing anything to do with their distant siblings and the reasons for their separation. “Rumored to have arisen among those who chose to leave Vulcan at the time of the Sundering. I know no more than that.”
“It killed upwards of fifty percent of those who settled on Romulus,” Uhura told him quietly.
“Indeed?” Tuvok’s eyebrow went up. He seemed about to question the number, but decided against it. “Nevertheless, to my knowledge, it is an ancient illness. There have been no serious outbreaks since the Sundering.”
“There are now,” Uhura said.
Chapter 3
History, it is said, is written by the victors. But what of a war where there is no victor? Who writes the history then?
The pundits refer to the split between Vulcan and Romulan, between the followers of Surak and those who could not accept his teaching, as the Sundering. As if it were as quick and clean as an amicable divorce, the two parties deciding that, no longer having anything in common, it was time for them to part. Or, perhaps more likely from the Vulcan perspective, as if severing a diseased limb from a healthy body and casting it aside.
It is no dishonor to the memory of Surak to say that he and his philosophy were less than perfect. And it is a lesson of more than one planet’s history that even the most inspired of reformers cannot foresee all possible long-term outcomes of their reforms.
Outworlders know of Vulcan only what Vulcans wish them to know. Vulcans speak in lofty phrases of a history “shrouded in antiquity… savage, even by Earth standards,” and few who are not Vulcan presume to question them further, grateful perhaps that beings of such intellect and physical strength-and telepaths at that-have chosen to suppress all that potential for violence beneath a veneer of logic and civilization. Easier to assume that those who could not tolerate Surak’s reforms simply boarded their ships without a glance back and quietly, if bitterly, left the planet.
But did they go all at once or over decades, years, generations? Was there only a handful of ships, or did vast armadas fill the skies above the arid and unforgiving mother world? Did all who went go willingly, or were some forced into exile, and by what means? Were families, friends, lovers torn apart?
And what of those who stayed behind? Did they buy the official story, that both sides would be the better for it, that it was not an end but a beginning? Or did some, even as the ships departed, too late, have second thoughts?
Postulate a civilization that had spaceflight technology millennia before humans did, but almost lost it all to the terrible violence that led to the rise of Surak. Rebuilding from a fragmented culture-the shattered statues at Gol speak eloquently in their silence, their offspring extant in the masked and ax-wielding entourage that accompanies every traditional Vulcan marriage ceremony-surely