The Sundering

Sadahshaya (The Sundering) refers to the exodus of S'task and his followers from Vulcan.

Sadahshsu'la - (The Sundered) refers to The Eighty Thousand leaving the planet.

Seheikk'he - (The Declared) name S'task and his followers chose for themselves, eventually becoming Rihannsu

Surak and S'task

S'task records something of their first meeting in the memoirs he left before he went off-planet.

Surak looked up from his writing as the young man came in and put down the fruit he was eating. "Who are you?" he said.

"S'task," he said.

"What can I do for you?"

"Teach me what you know."

S'task says that Surak put the fruit down and said to him most sincerely, "I thank you very much indeed. Please leave." "But why? Have I done something wrong?"

"Of course you have," Surak said, "but that is not the point I am making. You are about to get into a great deal of trouble, and I would save you that if I could. Entropy will increase."

"It will increase anyway, whether I get in trouble or not," S'task said.

Apparently it was the right thing to say. "You are quite right," Surak said, nodding. "That is why you should leave."

"You are not making a lot of sense," S'task said, somewhat nettled.

"I know," Surak said. "Logic is a delight to me, but there are things it is no good for." And he shook his head regretfully. "But I must cast out sorrow," he said. "And you, too. Please leave."

S'task thought he would stand his ground, but a few seconds later, he says "I found myself sitting on the pavement outside the front door, and he would not answer the signal. I never met anyone that strong, from that day to this. But I was determined to work with him, so I sat there. For four days I sat there - there wasn't a back door to his apartment - and I was determined to catch him as he went in or out. But he did not go in or out, and I became very angry and decided to leave. Then I thought 'What am I doing sitting here, being angry at him, when I cam all this way to learn how not to be?" So I sat there longer. I don't know how long it was: it might have been another seven or ten days. And finally someone came in from the street and stood over me, and said, 'What about windows?'It was he. He opened the door, and we went in, and I stayed and I studied with him for the next three years."

The Duthulhiv Pirates

By the time of Surak, the first landing on Vulcan's sister planet T'Khut was already centuries in the past and mining expeditions to the inner worlds of 40 Eridani were becoming, if not commonplace, at least not unusual.

By and large the Vulcans regarded the rest of the universe with interest and expected to find - or be found by - other intelligent life at some point. As a result of Vulcan culture in which the threat is usually your neighbor, but the stranger is offered hospitality, they expected to treat fairly and courteously with any outworlders, though always from a position of strength.

First Contact

After having surveyed the system for months, the Orion pirates employed their usual method of subterfuge: stumbling transmission of codes by conventional radio (which according to their own records "no one ever cracked as swiftly as the Vulcans did. It was almost as if they had been expecting it.").

When communication was established, the pirates offered peaceful trade and cultural opportunities; the first messages were debated for months around the planet. Several wars or declarations of war were in fact put on hold or postponed in order to present a united front.

At the agreed anding place near Shi'Kahr five hundred twenty three of Vulcan greats gathered to greet the strangers - but what met them were phasers who stunned those to be held for ransom or sold as slaves, and blew to bloddy rags those who fought or tried ro escape.

Ahkh

What is still called "The War" by the Vulcans, thus demoting all others before to the rank of mere tribal feuds, swiftly took battle to the Duthulhiv Pirates. Although Vulcan never had thought to arm their starships, their chief psi-talents and technicians quickly taught the pirates that weapons aren't everything. Metal came unraveled in ship's hulls,; pilots calmly locked their ships into suicidal courses, unheeding of the screams of the crews.

By a twist of fate Surak had been delayed at the port facility of ta'Valsh, but S'task was at the meeting; and one of those taken hostage. After uttering the famous "I am Vulcan, bred to peace" it was S'task who proceeded to break his torturer's back, organize the in-ship rebellion that cost many slavers' lives, broke into the database and - after safely releasing the other hostages - crashed the luckless vessel into the pirate mothership.

He was picked up weeks later, after much anguished searching, in a lifepod in an L5 orbit; half dead of dehydration but clinging to life through sheer rage. They brought him home, and Surak hurried to his couch-side - to rebuke him. The words "I have lost my best student to madness" are the beginning of the Sundering of the Vulcan species.

Pre-Flight

No writer has recorded the anguished conversations between Surak and S'task, but it became clear that S'task was convinced peace was not the way to deal with a hostile universe. The only way to meet other species, obviously barbaric, was in power to match their own. Over the next few months the schism led to riots and the potential for civil war, prompting S'task to seek seclusion, hunting solutions. Though he had come to hate his reasoning, S'Task loved his teacher and was also quite aware that their disagreement would destroy any chance Vulcan would ever have of facing as a unified entity the powers watching from outside.

"Beginnings must be clean", Surak had said to S'task at their first meeting, and S'task had taken this to heart. So he proposed that if the world was not working, those Vulcans who were dissatisfied with it should make another. Take the technology the pirates had inadvertently brought, add their own, and go hunting for a world where what they loved would be preserved as they thought it should be.

The Statement of Intention of Flight

Naturally one does not simply say good-bye to one's planet, build a fleet of spaceships and take off. Knowing well what kind of massive undertaking he proposed, S'task began by planting the idea of a mass exodus to be beneficial to not only Vulcan's spiritual well-being but its economy and eventual peace, into the mind-trees of the time. To that end, he published "A Study of Socioeconomic Influences on Vulcan Space Exploration", later known as the "Statement of Intention of Flight".

In this study S'task reasoned that if thousands of people could leave Vulcan, the endless cycle of wars brought about by scarce resources might be slowed; and the spin-off from such wars which improved living conditions until the next cycle might for once be enjoyed without further bloodshed, perhaps even breaking the cycle.

As a result, the travelers eventually found pressure on them to go; and unfortunately some factions which were not at all in agreement with S'task were pressured into leaving against their will.Those factions of course 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 different versions of the "Romulan Empire", all espousing different aims and behaving in different ways.

The Seheikk'he

During the fifteen years the argument officially lasted, a group began to emerge who named themselves "The Declared". At the point where their numbers were approaching twelve thousand, S'task - well aware that finding venture capital to build fifteen ships of a kind never seen before was next to impossible - suggested that perhaps only those wholly invested in the venture should make the journey. To that end, those unwilling to give nearly all they possessed in support of the undertaking were 'shaken out', but subscriptions began to pile up nonetheless, to the point where Vulcan's financial community began to feel the effects.

With the rapid growth of the traveler movement, and construction on Rea's Helm and Farseeker under way, more and more capital was removed from the banking system and it might have well caused a depression too deep for the planet to recover from. So the major banking cartels took the only action possible to them, one that cost them the equivalent of billions of credits but saved Vulcan from a depression and made them a fortune later: they financed the building of the starships themselves, as well as research and development.

The problem of transport thus solved, some of the attractiveness of the journey as a 'deperate cause' was lost, but S'task considered it a small price to pay. And even though the banks were now financing the ships, many 'nest eggs' and hoards of family money yet flowed into the building fund. Many a family was bitterly divided over the issue, and much Vulcan fiction of the time revolves around The Sundering.

A peculiar side effect noted by sociologists is the emergence of a "foundation context", a mindest rooted in the scarcity the Declared were enduring while waiting for the completion of the ships. The idea that possessing more than what one needed for one's daily life was an evil, and that one should share with others making the journey, created the effect that privation and scarcity were seen as good and noble things. Had the journey begun differently, perhaps the Rihannsu might not have faced as many troubles with poverty and scarcity as they had later. But neither would they have become the Rihannsu we know.

The Ships

With construction well under way, the debate over a destination became paramount. Vulcans had been surveying their galactic neighborhood with interest for centuries, and several star systems seemed promising and within reach. Of course the data gathered from the Etoshan pirates was also available, but eyed with mistrust; and besides, one wanted to stay well away from them in any case. With a twelve-year timeframe for the closest most likely star systems to have Vulcan-type planets, and an additional fifty years to reach the less well-scanned outer ones should the former prove unsuitable, the ships were designed as fairly short-term interstellar vessels with the option for use as generation ships.

Each ship was meant to carry about five thousand people and the crops to feed them, grown in specially constructed bays. There was also much controversy about what - and how much - of the culture the Travelers were leaving should be taken on the journey.

Vulcan foods, clothing styles, literature, weapons, poetry, religions, social customs, furniture designs, fairy tales art, science, and philosphy all were endlessly examined and debated in a fifteen-year game of "lifeboat" while the ships were built. Only the best, or that which was threatened to be extinguished on the new, peaceful Vulcan and should be preserved, was to be chosen. No one arbiter or committee was ever chosen, the Declared would argue themselves into consensus or silence and it is surprising (to other species at least) how often there was agreement.

In the end, while many good things were added to what was to become Rihannsu culture, much was also lost. While for example the matrilineal cast (and matriarchal tendencies) remained, much literature was condemned as 'liberal' or 'decadent' and left behind.

Of course there were cultural and artistic "smugglings". No one can police the thoughts of eighty thousand fiercely committed revolutionaries (or counter-revolutionaries), and bits and pieces of of non-approved culture and art sneaked in. Some should later become the source of endless anguish. Others were afterward cherished as treasures.

The Swords

While small things in the greater scheme, the Swords of S'harien have had a profound influence on Rihannsu culture, and are thought by many to have become a symbol of The Sundering itself.

As poets often are, S'task himself was a swordsman as well, and besides his wife and daughter and the clothes on his back, the only things he brought with him on the journey were three swords by the smith S'harien.

Contemporary sources tell of a last meeting between Surak and his once-pupil S'task, when late one night before the ships were set to leave, a flitter docked outside S'task's quarters and a short, dark, fierce figure emerged with a long bundle in his arms. The security people stared in astonishment, but they took Surak to S'task and made to leave, though very much desiring to stay as master and pupil had at this point not seen each other for six standard years.

Surak bade them stay, and handed the bundle to S'task. "Keep these safe, I pray you," he said in the Old High Vulcan of ceremony. And S'task, stricken by the formality of the language - or perhaps by the worn look of his old master - took the bundle, bowed deeply, and made no other answer. When he straightened, Surak was already on his way out.

The bundle contained three of the most priceless S'hariens on the planet, two of which had been thought to belong to kings, and one to the High Councillor, himself a bitter enemy of Surak's.

How Surak had come by the swords no one ever found out, though various Vulcan families have (conflicting) tales of a shadowy shape who came to them around that time and begged them for "their sword's life". There was argument about keeping the swords at first - they had after all come from Surak, and there were sore hearts who wanted no gifts from him. Gifts, they said, bind. But S'task said a few quiet words on the swords' behalf in meeting, some nights before the ships left, and put the issue to rest. In time the travelers came to treasure the S'hariens greatly, as a gift from their most worthy adversary; and as beautiful things in their own right and symbols of the ancient glory they were leaving behind.

The S'hariens were, after all, "Swords of the Twilight", made in the ancient style by methods none save S'harien had been able to reconstruct, symbols of a long gone time of ferocity and splendor. So the travelers decided they would take the swords with them to remember the old Vulcan by - the energetic, angry, beautiful, whole Vulcan - all blood-green passion that dared death, laughing. They took the swords though it was their enemy who gave them, and though the man who made them would have sooner have seen them destroyed than in Rihannsu hands, or indeed any other.

The sword became both the cause and the symbol of the Sundering. It was the sword that parted Vulcan. It was the sword that would eventually draw the two sundered parts together over the years, though neither side was to know that as Rea's Helm glided away into the long night.

"Perhaps those angry hearts in meeting were right. Perhaps gifts do bind. Or perhaps, despite millennia, blood is enough"

(-Terise Haleakala LoBrutto)

The Last Song

Rea's Helm was the first to leave Vulcan, some fifty years after the Statement of Intention of Flight. Behind her, in twos and threes, came the names still preserved in the Rihannsu fleets, both merchant and military, and never allowed to lay idle:

Warbird, Starcatcher, T'Hie, Pennon, Bloodwing and Corona, Lance and Gorget, Sunheart, Forge and Lost Road and Blacklight, Firestorm and Vengeance and Memory and Shield.

The last message from Helm, sent as it cut in its subdrivers, provoked much confusion. It was a single stave in the steheht mode. Like all other Vulcan poetry, its translation is never certain, but more translations of it have been attempted than of any verse except T'sahen's Stricture, and so the sense is fairly certain:

Entrhone your pasts: this done, fire and old blood will find you again: better hearts' breaking than worlds'.

It was the Last Song, S'task's farewell to Vulcan, and the last poem he ever made: after it he cut the strings of his ryill and spoke no other song till he died. Some on Vulcan consider that a greater loss than the departure of the Eighty Thousand, or all the death that befell as they returned to the counsels of the Worlds two thousand years later.

In their absence, under Surak's tutelage, Vulcan became one. The irony has been much commented on, that the aliens who presented the threat that almost destroyed Vulcan were eventually the instrument of its unification, and the world which has never been not at war became the exemplar of peace.

Surak spent his life, and eventually gave his life, for an idea whose time had come - and idea the accomplishment of which would fill other planets, in future times, with envy or longing. But the other side of the idea, the lost side, the incomplete, the failed side, was never out of his mind, or Vulcan's.

Among his writings after he died was found this stave:

Dethrone the past: this done, day comes up new though empty-hearted: O the long silence, my son