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Beware of those who think and speak in absolutes. “Never” is a very long time, and at what cost? The ahn-woon and the lirpa remain. Vulcans may murmur of ritual and custom, but small wonder so few outworlders are invited to the wedding. The scowling, bare-chested guards with their faces obscured by beaklike masks are impossible to ignore, difficult to explain.

Were they present at the departure as well, these guards, ranks of armed and uncompromising sentries, making certain everyone who was meant to get onboard the ships of the Sundering did so, with no opportunity to turn back? It is a thing no outworlder may know.

Because the question remains: If the Sundering was amicable, by mutual agreement, why was all communication severed once the ships were gone? Why were the distant siblings sent off into the void and never heard from again? Was it their choice to turn their faces from the mother world and never look back? Or were they so instructed?

There is an obscure novel of the last century, written by a non-Vulcan, which purports that the ships of the Sundering were fitted with no means of communication beyond simple short-range radio for ship-to-ship communication. Some sources say they lacked even that. Yet given the resourcefulness of the Vulcan mind, could they not have jury-rigged something with which to communicate long-range, back to the world they had departed?

Unless they had been forbidden to do so. Or any attempt to communicate with anyone back on Vulcan was jammed at the source.

In any event, the silence was absolute, and the Sundered, whether over the course of months or generations, whether free and clear to navigate or beset by ion storms, food shortages, hostility from those whose space they blundered into, internecine squabbles, ended their journey on Romulus.

Did all of the Sundered get that far? Did some perish along the way? Did some venture off in other directions, find other worlds, or disappear without a trace? This can only be conjectured. What is known for certain is that those who remained on Vulcan saw the ships off into the sky, returned to their houses, and went about their lives under the aegis of logic, a logic that did not dwell overmuch on what might have been.

Perhaps they spoke of those who had departed, perhaps not. But it is interesting that such a characteristically curious people were so remarkably incurious about what might have happened to their distant brothers in the centuries between. Was the silence, indeed, absolute, or did their ships sometimes pass in the night? Or if, when Romulus and Earth were at war, the Vulcans looked down their noses when asked and replied, “We don’t know who these people are,” was it at least partly true?

What drove the distant siblings away? Perhaps nothing more than fear of the monolithic society Surak’s teachings would inspire. They knew the Vulcan mind. Did they fear that, having decided to embrace logic, Vulcan would become some great monochrome sand-colored boredom, which they could not abide?

For how was one to define emotion against logic? Were only the “negative” emotions like anger and sorrow included in the roster of what it was now necessary to suppress, or were all emotions suspect, dangerous, in need of suppression? And was the individual to be trusted to take charge of her own emotions, or would there be outside enforcement, thought police patrolling the streets searching for violations, coworkers spying on their colleagues, children on their parents?

What about literature, art, music? Who was to decide whether a piece of music was “logical,” a painting “emotional”? Or were those forms to fall under blanket interdict as well? As it turned out, they did not, but how were the early dissidents to know? The definition of what was deemed “illogical” was too broad, and thereby too narrow, for some to bear.

Humans who suppress all emotion become either mystical or mad. Had the Sundered tried the way of logic at first but, seeing