Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (45 page)

She merely smiled and reminded them of her friendship with the Ship-Clans. Many hearts went cold in their owners’ sides as they remembered the mass transports lying in hangar-bays in the four ships, each transport capable of handling five hundred people at a time. There were more than enough transports to manage a smallish army…or a largish one.

They did the only thing they could think of, they offered her the Master Councillory, the lordship of the Grand Council, if she would hold her hand. S’task stood up at that and walked out of council, which he had been attending by courtesy (High Councillors might, though they had to ask permission of the Grandees). “I did not give you leave to go,” the imperious voice rang out behind him.

“I have no need to ask it, of you especially,” said S’task. His voice was not so firm as it had been once: he was very old, even by Vulcan standards, and troubled with circulatory and bone-marrow problems that may have been caused by cumulative radiation exposure on the journey. But he was as fierce as he had ever been, and few dared to cross his mild voice when it was raised in either Council.

“I shall kill you if you do not ask leave,” said T’Rehu, standing up with the S’harien in her hand.

He turned to her, and the carefully preserved council tape records, for all that they have been copied hundreds of times, still clearly show the cool scorn in his eyes. It might have been Surak dealing with some childish flaw in logic. “You may do so,” he said. “That is the prerogative of force. But I give no honor to force. Power, yes. But you have no power, none that I recognize. I ask no leave of you.” And he walked out of chambers, while T’Rehu stood behind him with the sword shaking in her hand.

“You will not do that twice!” she cried, and then found her composure again, and was seated, while the chamber stirred and murmured in fear at the terrible audacity of the woman who would challenge the authority of the father of the Two Worlds, the leader of the journey. Their fear became too much for them. Possibly had they united against her then, they might have stopped her. There might have been a war, but it would have been a small one.

They did not unite against her. They gave T’Rehu the Grand Councillorship, and for a while it held her quiet as she played with the politics of the “lower house” and amused herself. But it did not hold her long, and the thought of her rebuff in front of the Grandees still rankled. She waited for an excuse, and one presented itself.

There are several theories for the cause of the famine in the south continent in 78
A
.
S
. The accusation that T’Rehu started it herself is probably baseless: Rihannsu biotechnology was not far enough along to make germ warfare at all likely. As far as anyone can tell from the records remaining, the weather was quite enough to do it—one of those paradoxical years that happens in many a temperate climate, when winter simply refuses to let go, and temperatures remain subnormal all year long. Freak weather killed most of the imported cultivated graminiformes, and the south continent people were short of other staples. They would not plant “the wretched root,” and so had none when it might have saved their lives. Help was marshaled and sent from other continents and nations, but not quickly enough to save a thousand lives. Part of this (though T’Rehu did all she could to conceal the fact) was the sheer stubbornness of the southerners: they had a tradition of bearing suffering without complaint as they had in
Gorget
and
Vengeance.
And without complaint they died, by hundreds. The help arrived too late.

To T’Rehu, it was a gift from the Elements. She swept into the Grand Council and delivered them a long diatribe, berating them for not doing better for the people in their care. (Carefully she avoided any line of reasoning that might have indicated she, as Master Councillor, was at all responsible for “her” governing body’s failures.) “It will not be allowed to happen again,” she said, and the next day she informed the High Council that the Master Councillor required them to meet.

They sent back to say that the “request” was incorrectly made, but nonetheless they would accommodate her. What the forty had not been expecting was to find her waiting in chambers for them the next morning, with five cohorts of a hundred warriors each standing outside (and many of them inside that crowded little room as well). T’Rehu told them that their rule was ineffective. Others better suited to handling the affairs of two great worlds would now assume it.

The forty, to their credit, did not freeze as completely as the Grand Council had. They had suspected something of T’Rehu’s intent, and had come armed; they defied her. But her eye was not on them. She was watching S’task. He rose up, and slowly and carefully turned his back on her, and headed toward the chamber doors.

“I have not given you leave,” she said, and this time her voice was heard to be shaking in the hush that had fallen on the room.

S’task said never a word.

She signed to her guard, and one of them threw a dart-spear at S’task, and it pierced his side and his heart, and that was the end of him. Only he lifted up his head as he lay there bleeding out his life in the uproar and the massacre that followed, and he said to T’Rehu, “The beginning is contaminated, and force will not avail you, or it.”

So he died there, two hundred forty-eight years old, in the building whose cornerstone he had laid, as he had laid the cornerstone of the journey itself. Not many missed the irony that it was the old “Vulcan,” the way of kings and queens and unbridled passions and wars, for which he had fought, that had killed S’task at last.

It killed the High Council, too, and some members of the Grand Council as well fell victim to T’Rehu as she purged the “corrupt” government of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran and set herself as Ruling Queen in its place, taking as her model the Ruling Queens of Kh’reitekh in northern Vulcan in the ancient days. Her accession was a gaudy affair, and well attended, though it might seem strange from our end of time that people would turn out peaceably to see the murderess of S’task take up the spear of royalty. The truth was that most of the attendees were local people, some of whom had been ordered to attend or their families would suffer, and S’task’s popularity had been quietly waning for some years, as if now that the journey was done, most people had no more need for him. Perhaps the citizenry had been looking, as the governed sometimes will, for something, anything, to replace a government that bores them. For eighteen years the Rihannsu got one that was not at all boring…and that was about all that could be said for it.

Eighteen years is a short term in any office by Vulcan or Rihannsu reckoning. T’Rehu took the title-name
Vriha,
“highest,” and conducted her court in the old high-handed fashion, handing out life and death as it pleased her. She did not have time to do much harm to the Two Worlds, she was by and large too busy gratifying her own desires, mostly for bigger palaces, more luxuries for her favorites, and more money to pay her soldiers. She had the vigorous love of pleasure of a Terran Elizabeth I, without either the sense of responsibility or the high intelligence that drove that monarch. At first she made a great show of being a “just ruler,” sending help to the famine-struck south continent (and the help did no more good than that previously sent by the councils—most of the people were already dead). But eventually “her people” came to concern her only insofar as they gave her money or bowed before her.

T’Rehu had the old council chambers razed and built new ones, bigger and grander, with a throne for her, one ostentatiously blocking the Empty Chair from view…though she did not quite dare to get rid of it or the sword. She chose new councillors, one of them from each continent, totaling twelve in all, mostly women. She made each of them responsible for their whole landmass, and if things went ill there, there was no use pleading for mercy. The floors were marble, and easily washed clean. She went through a fair number of councillors this way, and no one dared chide her for it. They might be next.

She was not mad enough to let all her political connections lapse when she came into power. She enriched the Ship-Clans considerably, delaying for a little the beginning of their decline. In return she demanded a great deal of application of shipside technology to the problems of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, particularly the transportation and communication problems. Naturally these were for the benefit of her throne—it being difficult to control two worlds properly without quick communication and widespread swift transportation—but accidentally these measures did the Rihannsu people some good as well. The first factories for communications hardware and small transport were set up under her aegis, and by 96
A
.
S
. a tolerable videotelephone system was in operation, and at least one House in every five had its own flitter, or could afford one.

But her rule could not last long, simply because it would occur to other people to do what she had done as well. The east-continent factions on ch’Havran smarted under her rule—since their continent was poor, she paid little notice to them—and they decided to do something about it. By themselves, without assistance from the fertility experts, without cloning, they doubled their continental population during T’Rehu’s reign and they quietly raised and trained their own young army in philosophies that the Spartans would have recognized instantly. Ruthless hatred of the enemy, self-sacrifice, instant obedience, and the nation above all—not the state. In this case, that was T’Rehu. They made their own arrangements with the Ship-Clans as well, for one thing their rugged hills had that T’Rehu did not know about—mines with some of the largest optical-grade rubies ever seen on any world, perfect for generating large-scale laser light.

The easterners descended on T’Rehu in the eighteenth year of her reign, brought her (unwillingly) to battle with twice her forces’ numbers, and killed her on the plains of Aihai outside the capital city of Ra’tleihfi, which she was still completing. There was not so much rejoicing at this in the Two Worlds as confusion. The easterners might have moved into the power vacuum and set themselves up as kings, but to their credit, they did not. They wanted a return to a quieter sort of government, one in which tyranny would have difficulty going for such a long time uncorrected.

From this victory in ch’Rihan’s first war, after some squabbling among various continents for supremacy, came the Praetorial and Senatorial structure that we know today, a resurrection of the councillories crossed with the Queen’s Twelve. Our Federation Standard terms are, of course, worn-down Latin cognates: “Praetor” for the Rihannsu
Fvillha,
“landmaster,” and “Senator” for
deihu,
“elder.” The Rihannsu functions are fairly close in some ways to the Roman ones: the Senate passing and vetoing legislation (in the Rihannsu version, one half of the Senate being assigned the business of doing nothing but veto, probably as a reaction to T’Rehu’s tyranny), the Praetorate wielding judicial and executive power for whole continents, implementing the laws passed…and sometimes getting laws passed for which they feel the need. The Senate is counted as two houses, so that all the governing bodies taken together are
seiHehllirh,
the “Tricameron.” Together the Three (or Two) Houses have weathered many troubles, and even the occasional Emperor or Empress…very occasional. History has shown the Rihannsu to have little trust in “single rulers.” They have long seemed to prefer them in groups, feeling perhaps that there is safety in numbers. If one gets out of hand, the others will pull him or her down. And indeed the doings of the Praetorate sometimes look, to an outsider, like nothing so much as the minute-to-minute business of a bucket of crabs—each trying to climb out on the others’ backs, the ones underneath unfailingly pulling off balance the ones climbing on them.

It proved to be a form of government not very stable in the short term: a never-ending swirl of alliances, betrayals, whisperings, veiled allusions, matters of honor shadowy and open, machinations, string-pulling, and arguments forever. Yet despite this, the Rihannsu governmental system proved perfect for the people they were in the process of becoming, and stable in the long run, for people wanted no more T’Rehus. The Tricameron survived through the loss of the ships and the loss of spaceflight technology, through the rediscovery of the sciences and the flowering of the Rihannsu arts, through several more wars and several surprisingly long periods of peace, through the first Rihannsu contact with an alien species and the intertwining of the Two Worlds’ affairs, willy-nilly, with those of the Klingons and the Federation. It survives yet, the crabs climbing up and pulling down as of old. And if the Rihannsu have their way, it will go on for as long as their worlds have people on them. “Certain it is and sure,” says the song, “love burns, ale burns, fire burns, politics burns. But cold were life without them.”