Postulate a civilization that had spaceflight technology millennia before humans did, but almost lost it all to the terrible violence that led to the rise of Surak. Rebuilding from a fragmented culture—the shattered statues at Gol speak eloquently in their silence, their offspring extant in the masked and ax-wielding entourage that accompanies every traditional Vulcan marriage ceremony—surely they vowed to employ whatever means necessary to guarantee that such destruction would never occur again.

Beware of those who think and speak in absolutes. “Never” is a very long time, and at what cost? The ahn-woonand the lirparemain. 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 too many of their fellows fall to madness, decided it was better to leave? Was there nowhere on the world that they could live in peace? Whose idea was it to pack themselves off on a trajectory to nowhere, and forever?

Doubtless there are histories on Romulus, at least, which record that part, but they are not accessible to the average citizen. And if the Vulcans knew, they were not sharing. “Lost when the ships were lost,” is the official story even today.

Whereas the history of life on Romulus seems to have begun, and almost ended, with the Gnawing.

There are plenty of brave little children’s stories about the early settlers in their hand-me-down clothing who stood on a rise overlooking a valley burgeoning with green and growing things beneath the light of a gentler sun, the stars of a different sky. The artwork accompanying these stories is often quite evocative.

The stories tell of the brave pioneers using the hulls of their ships as shelters from the too-frequent rains on their strange new world as they learned to forage the native materials to build rudimentary housing and supplement their dwindling food supply. Some of the teaching materials deemed acceptable for adolescent readers are a little darker, featuring epic struggles with native predators, unforeseeably indigestible plants, lightning and floods and deadly windstorms, through all of which, of course, the Indomitable Spirit of the Romulan People inevitably triumphed, leading naturally to the Dawn of the People’s Empire. But if one reads carefully, one notices a considerable gap of years between those early days and the ascendancy of that almighty Empire.

That gap is not spoken of. It holds too many horrors. Too many things went wrong.

There was the climate, for starters. Why did they choose to settle here, when it was so different from the world they’d known? Did they choose, or was it chosen for them? Had they run out of fuel or gone off course, had their instruments told them this was the only habitable world in their path and they had best make do? Was there damage from the Jeltorai asteroid belt that meant they had to make landfall, and soon?

There is some suggestion that they didn’t even know at first that there were twin worlds. Perhaps they landed here and thought it was all there was. Was there debate or even revolt, one group who said “We will land here,” who simply shouted louder than the ones who said “But what about the weather”? If it was recorded anywhere, no one knew where to find it.

Where Vulcan was hot and dry and rain was such a rarity that, even in their logic, Vulcans would stop what they were doing whenever it fell to go outdoors and marvel at it (apparently, as more than one human wag had put it, not having sense enough to come in out of the rain), it rained overmuch on most of this new world for the well-being of those whose origins were desert.

There were doubtless some among the early settlers who rejoiced in pointing out the benefits—a longer growing season, no need for irrigation, no food shortages regardless of how their population increased. It had not occurred to them that lungs evolved over millions of years for the desert might find breathing difficult in a place where the weather alternated between hot and humid and cold and damp. It was difficult to grow food and build cities or even walk about when you were battling fungal infections, skin rashes, and airborne allergens, and felt most of the time as if you were drowning. Trudging about under an alien sun or, more often, finding it obscured by ominous cloud cover, wiping runny noses and scratching dermatoses, few noticed the symptoms of the Gnawing, until it was too late.