One of the mistakes people tend to make about their own planets, or others’, is that a world’s location is a fairly permanent thing. It’s true that we speak of planetary coordinates as if you could point at them on a map and find the planet there again in the same spot the next day. (You will, but only because the computer has obligingly updated the starmap to take into account the million and a half miles your planet has moved in its orbit since yesterday and the million miles sideways your star has pulled it in the same time, as the whole starsystem cruises off toward some other star whose company your primary has been covertly seeking for the past eight thousand years…. )

These same people may tell you about the Big Bang a sentence later—making it plain that they’ve never considered the phenomenon past the fact itself; never thought about the kinds of changes that that picture of the Universe implies…the vast silent journeys, the terrible speeds. Star travel gives us back a sense of scale in terms of the Galaxy’s size, but (most especially since the discovery of warpdrive and its sidestepping of relativistic effects) it can do nothing about our perception of its scale of time. This is no surprise, considering. When a single rotation of ten million years will see all but a very few of our civilizations destroyed by the mere attrition of time, the galaxies seem to move with ponderous dignity, with awful grandeur. And this perception, for living creatures, is a true one. But just as true, and harder for us to see, is the way (in its own terms) in which a galaxy roars through the universe, hurling itself along, seething, churning, changing itself with every whirlpool rotation, changing all its stars and all its worlds: star systems caroming in and out of one another’s influence, clusters shifting shape, stars flaring, dying, being reborn from exploded remnants: a cosmic billiards game, run marvelously amok. Our Galaxy has hauled us, all unprotesting, along with all the myriad planets of the billion humanities, across untold and untellable light-years, at speeds that starships easily surpass but could never maintain…not for a trillion years at a time.

With all this in mind, it is pointless to try to locate one bit of space and say, “Vulcan was bornthere .” The birth took three billion years, and was dragged across half that many light-years—a storm track, a cloudy set of possible loci, like an electron’s shell, rather than anything that could be pinpointed. Indeed computers could trace that track, but to what purpose? Many stars have streaked through that area: many more will plunge through it before the Universe goes cold and starts to implode. Right now there is an X-ray star there, used by the Federation as a beacon for navigation purposes. But by tomorrow the beacon will be three million miles somewhere else, and that space will be “empty” again. Everything moves: therein, in paradox, lies our only stability.

We can postulate, though, a moving point of view—one that tracks along with that foggy stripe of probability loci, the long, broad, spiraling shape traced through those parts of space for three billion years. Not that a point of view would have had much to see but what seemed empty space for the first seventy percent of the stripe.

The space was of course not empty at all. Unseen forces and pathways crammed it full—the shallow curvatures of gravity, the occasional immaterial Klein-bottle nozzle of a wormhole, the little-understood “strings” of nonmatter/nonenergy that define the structure of space itself. Matter and energy passing through those pathways responded to them, ran down them, converged in places, like raindrops running down a cobweb. This was indeed how the Galaxy’s first generation of stars had congealed out of the hurtling dark ghost-cloud of dust and gas in its earliest life, as the dust gathered at countless gravitational nexi, compressed itself, kindled slowly or swiftly to starhood.

Few of those most ancient stars had any planets. Free energy in that early, formative galaxy was at a terrible premium, and very few stars “did anything” with what energy was available except kindle themselves. Even fewer of the ones that did have planets, as far as we can tell, ever played host to life. Time and the normal life cycle of the oldest stars have long destroyed almost all traces of the earliest sentience. Many stars vaporized their planets by nova-blast or wiped out all life and artifacts on them by starflare, and their humanities’ histories are silence to us. A handful of other worlds, more fortunate, still have histories nearly as oblique. Among them must be counted the worlds that were first homes to species like the Organians and the Metrons, who eventually became pilgrims among planets, outliving their worlds over millions of years—finally giving up bodies for existence, and becoming for being. How many of these creatures move still about the Galaxy, by our definition immortal, untroubled by space and time and physicality, no one can say they know.

However, our concern lies not with the oldest stars, mostly now dwarfed or yellow-white with age, but with the second generation of stellar formation, what astronomers call Population II. The broad flat starry oval of the young Galaxy, traveling through patches and tangles of “strings,” began to stretch itself (or to be pulled out by the resisting tangles) against the old night. Helped by the oval’s own rotation, arms reached out of it: first as blunt bars from the ends of the oval, then curving back into the familiar long graceful glowing arcs of spiral arms, inexpressible tonnages of interstellar hydrogen and dust, all lit by the first-generation stars that had been swept into the arms by immense gravitational-tidal forces. The arms multiplied; the Galaxy became a pinwheel, a whirlpool of dust and light. The dust once again gathered and compressed itself in a billion nexi of strings and gravitation, a network even more complex this time because of the added tidal forces and gravitation of the spiral structure—gathered, and kindled, and burned with blue fusion-fire. Billions of these second-generation stars were born of the forces intermingling in the arms; and with the new stars, planets, almost everywhere that stellar formation took place. Here again, time-scale confuses us. We can choose which we see: a slow glow into burning, like the coals of a fire burning hotter as they’re blown on—or (from the Galaxy’s own viewpoint) a burst of celestial firecrackers, life leaping into being, light born and blazing in the time it takes to speak a word….

Considered in large, the process was continual: but there were bursts of more rapid stellar creation within the larger steady progression. The same “creation cluster” produced many of the Federation stars, and both Sol and 40 Eridani, about eight billion years ago. Earth came later in the process. 40 Eri, as the astronomers call Vulcan’s starsystem in shorthand, came earlier by sixty million years, a difference barely significant on the planetary scale.

But at the time we are considering, there was no sight of either world yet, much less either world’s star. Interstellar dust is as nearly invisible as anything that exists, especially without a nearby sun to excite it to a glow, or at least to silhouette it from one side, coal-sack style. Nonetheless, there were untold trillions of tons of dust, more than enough to make up five “hard” planets, three gas giants, and a star…and thereby hangs a tale.

In most ways the formation of Vulcan’s solar system was typical, the so-called “planetary formation” that every schoolchild knows. Dust and gas gather together in the dark, swirling about in tiny mimicry of the Galactic spiral structure. In the small mimic spiral arms, matter clots, gathers itself to itself in little hurricane swirls, hardens down to a core, begins to attract more. Slowly gravity becomes a force to be reckoned with, at least on the local scale, rather than (as it more usually is) one of the puniest forces known to science.

You would have to bring your own light to see all this by, of course, for at the time we deal with, there would be nothing to break the old dark but the cool faint glow of the distant, dust-blocked galactic core. The Milky Way Galaxy was at this point just three billion years old. It had barely begun to develop the earliest stages of its present spiral structure, and from a distance (if anyone had been there to look) would have seemed a fairly tightly packed oval, all ablaze with that first crop of stars, the then blue white giants of Population I. But the tight-packed look was an illusion. Emptiness was almost everywhere, except in such vicinities as the one we’re considering—a track along which three stars were being born.

They started out as huge, vague, quietly glowing orbs, warming slowly, shrinking as gravity compressed them through red heat, to yellow and white, and finally past mere moltenness to the point at which gravity overcomes atomic forces, stripping the atoms bare, reducing them to plasma, and atomic fusion starts. One, the biggest, flared white; the other two, much smaller, burned orange yellow and golden, respectively. They were a true triple star, or more exactly, a pair-and-a-half, all formed from distant segments of the same cloud and all influencing one another gravitationally, to differing degrees. The two smaller stars quickly came to orbit one another quite closely. This may have had something to do with their rapid aging, so that both rather prematurely collapsed into dwarf stars, one hyperdense and white, its companion rather light and diffuse, very red, and unusually small.

The dwarf pair and the white giant were distant neighbors at best. They each would be a very bright star or pair of stars in the other’s sky by night, and perhaps occasionally by day, but none would ever be so close as to show a disc to the other’s worlds. They would spend the rest of their lives tumbling about one another, around their major and minor centers of gravity, if nothing catastrophic happened to them. Certainly such things had often happened before, to other multiple stars. One of a close pair might be too big, might burn blue white awhile, then go unstable, explode through its Schwartzchild radius and collapse into a black hole—and afterward spend millennia sucking the plasma out of its neighbor in a long deadly spiral, leaving one primary a lightless gravitational tombstone, the other a husk. Or other stars might break up a happy couple or threesome, pulling one or another off by tidal forces. But in the case we’re considering, this didn’t happen. The tidal effects of the red dwarf and white dwarf on the white giant were minimal, and the member stars of 40 Eridani passed a long and uneventful partnership while their planets condensed.

This process had started while the three stars themselves were barely beginning to collapse. Now it swiftly gained impetus from the solar winds generated by the increased magnetic fields in the stars’ early stages of fusion and from the intensified gravity of the collapsed bodies. The spiral-arm clouds of dust around them had already sorted themselves into wide bands; now they became narrower ones, then clumps. Some of the clumps, those farthest out from 40 Eri A, the white giant, tended toward the lighter elements and became gas giants. Four of the planets—three close to the big star, one farther away—had acquired sufficient heavy and metallic elements to develop the standard iron-nickel core and silicon-dominant crust of a “hard” planet. On none of these did life ever arise. The nearest three were too close and hot, the farthest too cold. But in the fourth orbit out from 40 Eri A, odd things were happening.

Usually when clumps occur, one is sufficiently large to draw other clumps to it by gravity and consolidate all the matter in one spot, eventually sweeping the band of dust clean and incorporating it all in a single planetary mass. There can be variations to this process. Two clumps of a fairly balanced size may start orbiting one another within the band: or a cloud of dust within the band may begin to eddy around itself, developing two foci within an elliptical boundary, and matter will accrete to both foci. The actual mechanics of the formation are still obscure. But the final result of this sort of variation is the same—two bodies orbiting one another, sharing a common center of gravity, both achieving planetary or at least near-planetary mass. This is a double planet system.

Such systems are commoner than one might suspect. The Earth and Moon are one such system, though even in this day and age, few people seem to realize it. The popular assumption is that the Moon is Terra’s satellite. But the Moon fails the most basic test to find out whether a body is a satellite or not: namely, as it orbits, it falls onlytoward the star it and the Earth jointly circle, and never away. A true satellite or “moon,” completely in the gravitational grip of its primary body, would occasionally fall away from the star at the heart of the system. The poor misnamed Moon never does…leaving us with the astronomer’s laconic statement that while a satellite may sometimes be a moon, the Moon is not a satellite.

And the Earth and Moon give a good indication of how delicate the balance can be while such a system is forming. If one partner gets too much of the heavier elements, “cheating” the other, the other body of the pair may never develop an atmosphere—or may lose it, as some astronomers think the Moon did, long long ago. There are pairs in which the balance abruptly changes in mid-formation due to the influences of other passing bodies, causingboth planets to lose their gaseous elements. And without an atmosphere, at least on planets suitable for carbon-based life, there is no chance of that life arising. When a double-planet system is forming, the balance can be turned by a hair.

The pair that formed in the fourth orbit out from 40 Eri A was luckier than some. One planet, the larger one, kept its atmosphere: though what it kept was thin and hot, even then. It also kept almost all of the water…which was as well, since if the division had happened more fairly, life might never have sprung up on the larger planet at all. The larger world kept a significant fraction of the nickel-iron available from the primordial cloud, though almost all of it was buried in the seething heat and pressure of the core: the tiny fraction that remained was erratically scattered as iron oxides in the planet’s crust.

The other planet, shortchanged on the denser elements, was able to settle into an orbit with its partner that would seem, to those unfamiliar with the physics and densities involved, to bring it dangerously close to Vulcan. It rarely fails tolook dangerous, especially when a Terran used to a small, cool, distant, silvery Moon, looks up at dusk to see a ruddy, bloated, burning bulk a third of the Vulcan horizon wide come lounging up over the edge of the world, practically leaning over it, the active volcanoes on its surface clearly visible, especially in dark phase. “Vulcan has no moon,” various Vulcans have been heard to remark: accurate as always, when speaking scientifically. “Damn right it doesn’t,” at least one Terran has responded: “it has a nightmare.” T’Khut is this lesser planet’s name in the Vulcan—the female-name form of the noun “watcher”; the eye that opens and closes, but that (legend later said) always sees, and sees most and best in the dark. “Charis,” the Terran astronomers later called her, after the ruddy, cheerful goddess, one of the three Graces, who married the forge-god Vulcan after Love jilted him for War. No one really knows what the Vulcans think of the name—any more than we know what they think of the name “Vulcan” itself. They were polite enough about accepting it as standard Federation nomenclature. But they have other names for their world, and at least one name that they tell to no one.

But all this is long before names, or those who give them. Both planets swung around one another and around their blazing white primary for many, many centuries, and their star and its tiny companions dragged them away through the new Galactic arm, while orbits settled down, continental plates ground against one another, and quakes and volcanoes tore everything. For this while, the planet looked like the popular images of Vulcan, a red brown desolation, full of lava and scorching stone and fire. But a change was (quite literally) in the air, as Vulcan’s atmosphere slowly filled with smoke and vapor, and eventually with cloud and rain. Standing on Vulcan at present, it is hard to imagine the rain streaming down in its first condensation from water vapor—years-long, cataclysmic falls of water, relentlessly washing away the slow-weathering volcanic stone, mingling unexpected combinations of minerals in the first sea beds. But the fossil record is clear: Vulcan, now ninety-six percent dry land, was once ninety percent water—a few islands, and nothing else anywhere but the new hot sea. T’Khut would rise for thousands of centuries to be paced by the reflection of her sullen, fiery face in the wild waters. It was a period that, on the cosmic scale, would not last long: but it lasted long enough for the miracle to happen.

The exact nature of the miracle, as usual, is as obscure as the manner of the formation of the double-planet system itself. By conjecture, of course, we can seem to see what the laboratory tests have proved possible: the right elements present in the water, the right nucleic acids ready to come together to form one more complex: the long seething incubation, the waters hissing with near-boiling warm rain, shuddering under the thunder—and then the lightning-strikes, one or many. That would have been all that was necessary. Remnants of those earliest sea-bed strata indicate that Vulcan’s was more a primordial stew than a soup: sludgier, but far richer in nucleic acids, than the initial mixture present on most carbon-life-form worlds. Great variety existed there in terms of available molecules, and there are theories that the present Vulcan analogues to DNA and RNA show signs of having been the result of arguments, or agreements, among several rival strains that sorted out among themselves, by attempted and successful recombinations, which one was the most likely to survive in the murky waters. Some have since found it ironic that even here, at the earliest point in life’s history on Vulcan, warfare of sorts seemed to be going on.

But after the initial combination of DNA settled down, and the face of the waters grew still, peace seemed to reign for a long time. It was illusory, of course: the analogues of algae and plants, and many life-forms which have no analogues on other worlds, were jostling one another with innocent and primitive ferocity under the water’s surface. But the illusion held for a long time. Many thousands of centuries went by, and the climate shifted radically, before any creature had need to crawl up out of the shrinking, blood-colored waters to burrow into the red-brown sand, or take its chances under the naked eye of day. Until that happened, the world that would be Vulcan dreamed huge and silent under its seas, with T’Khut gazing down on it. Together the two of them tumbled around their burning white shield of a sun, and the sun around its tiny white red and white jewel-partners, as all danced through the expanding arm of the Galaxy: life going to meet life…with who knew what consequences.