31 Jan 2000



Joy

    by Laura JV





It was our galaxy before they knew it.  By the time the Federation

crumbled, we were already strong, rising out of its ashes with all the

strength of our parent races.



We were the voice of Vulcan, its soul given sound and fury; we came out of

Vulcan, out of Terra, out of the Rihannsu underground.  We were fire and

old blood; fire and new blood; the ancient drives of Vulcan given flesh.



We were not conquerors.  Our rise was bloodless, but no less sure for all

of that.  The Federation fell, a political entity grown too large and too

loosely affiliated to hold together--and we were there.  The humans,

passionately attached to the idea of the Federation, clung to it long after

it was viable; the Vulcans accepted what was, and watched us, waiting.



The Vulcans, you see, knew their children, as the humans never could.



We, the half-caste, clung to nothing and accepted nothing.  There is, among

us, a hybridity of philosophy and culture, as well as of genetics; we are

like and nothing like our parent races.



The first of us, Spock cha' Sarek, set a pattern; a pattern we followed not

through blindness or admiration, but by design.  He knew what he was doing

when he set his foot upon it, and he knew what he was doing as he walked it

his entire adult life.  When he was a young man, he said to Vulcan: "I am

not what you say I must be; deny me, if you can."



All of Vulcan could not stand against one man.



He went to Starfleet, where he was not found wanting--by the standards of

human warriors, or of Vulcan.  Even there, however, he was hardly ordinary.

They called him the best first officer in the fleet, not knowing that he

commanded a growing army; not knowing where the loyalties of the

little-bonding would take him; not knowing where his heart tended.



And then he left Starfleet, and went to Gol.  Even now, they tell stories

of the son of Sarek at Gol; how he held his hand up and renounced his

Mastery.  That renunciation contains the soul of us all, the half-caste:

this far we will go, and no further; this far we will be Vulcan, this far

we will be human, and no further.



The son of Sarek always had his own agenda, one not related to the

Federation at all.  One neither the Federation nor Vulcan itself suspected,

but we did.  We knew.



It was our agenda as well, for we followed him, as loyal as the men and

women of many races that he had bound to him, though not as silent.



Silence was not in us.  Silence, to us, was death, and we were too stubborn

to die.



And so the Federation fell, and Vulcan waited, and we rose.  We were a

minority race, the half-caste; the first and eldest of us dead scarcely ten

years.  But we had those bound to us, and we had the Rihannsu underground,

and we were strong, and ready, where others were not.



The Andorians made the mistake of attacking us.  Like our Vulcan forebears,

we are fond of peace; like our Vulcan forebears, we are unconquered and

unconquerable.  A scientific and trade mission became a bloodbath, a war as

bloody as the Romulan War, the Cardassian War, the Dominion War.  When it

was over, the Andorians were a nearly vanished race: less than one billion

of them left alive, scattered over three colony worlds.  Their homeworld

would be unliveable for centuries.



No one else made that mistake.



We ruled nothing but ourselves and made our homes where we chose, tied

together by beliefs and bonds and blood: the half-caste and our associates,

six hundred million all told.  Fire and old blood, fire and new blood; and

the voice of ancient Vulcan, raised once more in joy.



---------------



The End



laura jacquez valentine -+- http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~jacquez

Unused Steven Seagal Movie Title: RENT TO OWN

Jesus is a meme. -+- http://www.memepool.com/