“Did they ever completely categorize the Pernese ecosystem?” Rodar asked.
Emorra shook her head. “Hardly. On Earth they had never completely categorized the ecosystem, and they had millennia.”
Jendel rose from his seat with a shudder. “Oh, this is too much for a simple percussionist!” he said, waving the conversation away. “Tieran, seeing as you forgot to bring along your partner, how do you plan to run your watch?”
“I’ll stay,” Emorra offered. “You two can bring the trays back and send the other replacement over.”
Jendel pursed his lips consideringly.
“She knows the sequences, Jendel,” Tieran said.
“She does?” Rodar was surprised.
“Sure,” Tieran said. “They’re a fairly basic set of sequences, many of them modeled on genetic sequences.”
“Genetic sequences?” Jendel repeated. “You never told me that.”
He grabbed a tray, passed it to Rodar, and grabbed the other for himself, gesturing for Rodar to precede him down the tower stairs.
“All right,” he said from the top step. “Tieran, you can use the small drum to drill her on some of the basic sequences just to be sure. You know, attention, emergency, stuff like that.”
“Will do,” Tieran said, throwing the chief drummer a mock salute. Jendel returned it with a nod of his head and began his descent.
Tieran dutifully drilled Emorra on the drum sequences, gave her a quick test, and pronounced her fit to take watch with him. The whole procedure took less than a quarter of an hour.
“That’s twice in one day you’ve taught a class,” Emorra remarked dryly. “Keep it up and we’ll have to put you on the faculty.”
Tieran didn’t respond to her comment. Instead, he carefully hung the small drum by its harness on one of the small hooks pounded into the wall nearest the stairs. Then he peered out into Fort’s lush main valley, watching people tending the fields.
Finally, he turned back to Emorra. “What did they have, the settlers, before the first Thread fell? Eight years, less than that, and then they had to abandon everything and come here to the North.”
Emorra nodded. With a sigh, she rose and walked over to him.
“They didn’t have any time to do a proper survey, did they?” Tieran asked.
“Especially when you add the need they had to engineer the dragons,” Emorra agreed. “Mother would never tell me, and the reports are very vague.”
She frowned as she said that, wondering why her mother hadn’t insisted on making her read every report of the original landing survey.
“So what did they get? Five percent, ten percent?” Tieran wondered.
Emorra shook her head. “The best I could ever discover was about three percent.”
Suddenly she realized why Wind Blossom hadn’t told her about the survey: Her omission had encouraged Emorra to look up the information herself.
Mother, you manipulated me—again! Emorra thought angrily.
Tieran snorted, unaware of Emorra’s feelings. “Three percent of the entire ecosystem, that’s all?”
“They got a very good description of the fire-lizard genome,” she answered. “That’s almost complete, say ninety-seven percent or more. They mapped two or three other genomes, including one of the more basic bacteria.”
“What about Thread?”
“You know,” Emorra responded. “Mother says that they got a complete decode on the Thread genome—”
“—but it was lost in the Crossing,” Tieran concluded. He glanced guiltily at Emorra.
Everyone knew that Wind Blossom had been responsible for a large part of the equipment and records that were lost overboard on the storm-tossed ships bringing the survivors north from the Southern Continent. He continued hastily, “And the Fever Year was caused by a mutation of one of the viral strains from Earth.”
“Yes, as far as we know,” Emorra said. “It was far too early for any crossover infection.”
“And when that comes?”
Emorra shrugged. “I can only hope that people on Pern will survive. For all that they had so little time, my mother and grandmother, and all the other medical people, did everything they could to adapt us to life on Pern—even before they arrived.”
“Is that why you quit?” Tieran asked. “Is that why you left your mother? Was it the thought of just having to wait, having to hope that if any epidemic broke out it would come at a time when we could still identify it, still fight it, and come up with a cure before everyone on Pern was too ill to survive?”
“Is that why you quit, Tieran?” Emorra asked, deflecting his question.
Tieran nodded slowly.
“You lasted longer than I did, you know,” Emorra admitted. “I could only handle four years before I fled. You stayed a whole six. After my mother, you are the best-qualified geneticist on Pern.”
Tieran snorted. “That’s not saying much!”
Emorra shook her head emphatically, flinging her braided hair in the breeze. “It’s saying a lot, Tieran. You must know that.”
Tieran brushed her comment off. “Why did you give up?”
Emorra pursed her lips for a long moment of silence, wondering whether she would answer him. At last she said slowly, “I quit because I wasn’t good enough, Tieran. I knew that I couldn’t be the sort of person my mother expected me to be, the sort of person my family traditions demanded that I be.”
She swallowed hard. “I couldn’t wait for the next plague, the next mutation, the next biological disaster, knowing that the tools we needed had either failed already or were going to fail any day—maybe the day before we needed them the most.” She shook her head emphatically, looking miserable. “I just couldn’t.”
Tieran reflected that while Emorra might have fled her responsibilities, she had only gone so far as to become the College’s dean. It seemed to him that she would clearly be dealing with the impact of “the next biological disaster” in that lofty position.
“So how will we survive on Pern?”
“The best we can,” Emorra answered. “When this Pass ends—and that’ll be very soon—people will spread to every liveable corner on the continent. And they’ll have children, lots of children, and those children will eat things they’re told not to.”
Tieran snorted in agreement.
“And some of those children will get sick,” Emorra went on. “Some will die, and others will get better. Over time, people will learn what Pernese plants and animals they can eat, and what they have to avoid. With enough time they’ll be able to develop a whole new list of ills and a pharmacopoeia of the herbals to cure them.
“And if worse comes to worst, then perhaps some isolated group of people will not get infected and the disease will run its course, and the isolated ones will survive and repopulate the planet.
“And that’s what we hope for,” she concluded.
Tieran looked doubtful. Emorra looked away, out toward the College.
“Is that person my replacement?” she asked, pointing to a woman walking briskly in their direction from the entrance of the College.
Tieran peered out, following her finger. “Yes, that’s Kassa.”
“She’s pretty,” Emorra said suggestively.
“She’s seeing someone,” Tieran agreed sadly.
Emorra reached up and ruffled his hair affectionately. “You’ll find someone,” she told him.
Tieran sneered, running a finger over the scar from the top of his right forehead to his left cheek. “Not with this.”
Emorra held back a quick retort with a shake of her head.
The sound of someone climbing the stairs alerted them to Kassa’s approach. Then Kassa arrived, breathless. “Sorry, Dean! I put my head down for a nap and completely lost track of time.”
“No problem,” Emorra said, taking her place on the steps. “I had a lot of fun.”
She gave Tieran a cheerful wave as she left.
“The trouble with this job is that it’s
either very boring or very exciting,” Kassa grumbled hours later as she and Tieran lounged under the waning sun.
“We’ve got only a few more hours to go,” Tieran said. The last message they had handled had come in over an hour earlier, and had only been a simple inquiry from the southern Ruatha valley—just a communications check. Kassa had impishly drummed back, “What? You woke us up for that?”
Tieran had groaned when she sent the message, hoping that Vedric wasn’t on duty at the South Tower or she’d get a scathing. Vedric had no sense of humor and didn’t “appreciate levity when engaged in official duties”—as Tieran could attest with well-remembered chagrin.
She’d been lucky and there’d been no further response. They both agreed that the drummer was likely Fella, who still had problems with some of the more complex rolls, which explained why her message was so simple and also why she had made no reply.
After that they had been reduced to gossiping. Naturally, the first topic of conversation was what would happen with the Drum Towers at the end of the Pass, only a few months away. Kassa hoped that with no Thread falling, it would be possible to link up the various towers established at the Holds into a Pern-wide network. Tieran wasn’t so sure and wondered if the dragonriders wouldn’t fill in the gaps? Kassa thought that the dragonriders would be too busy with their own issues to be bothered. They both agreed that it would be far easier to set up Drum Towers than it would be to lay telegraph lines across the continent. “Besides, there are better uses for the metal,” Kassa pointed out.
The conversation moved on to more intimate topics. Kassa admitted that she wouldn’t mind being placed in one of the newer holds after the Pass. She was hoping to marry soon—she blushed in embarrassment—before she was considered a spinster. Mind you, she had said, she wasn’t sure she could handle six kids as well as her mother had. Maybe four or five, but not six.
Tieran tried to steer the conversation in a different direction before he found himself having to deal with embarrassing issues. He had said that while it was important to increase the number of Pern’s settlers until there were enough people to safely live and protect the Northern Continent, he wasn’t sure that everyone absolutely had to have children.
“Are you nuts?” Kassa replied. “Everyone’s got to have at least four kids or we’ll be wiped out—as we nearly were—by the next plague that hits us.” She narrowed her eyes at him and opened her mouth to continue heatedly, then closed it again with a snap.
Tieran flushed in embarrassment. “That number’s an average. Some people don’t have any, look at the dean . . .”
Kassa snorted derisively at him. “The dean? She just hasn’t found the right person. I’m sure she’ll have six or more when she gets the chance.”
Tieran was shocked.
Kassa shook her head patronizingly, which further infuriated Tieran, as she was a full two years younger than he.
“Really, Tieran, you need to get out of this tower more,” she said. “However are you going to find a mate if you don’t keep up with current affairs?”
His anger inflamed him to respond. “No one,” he said, pointing to his face, “is going to want me with this.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kassa replied soothingly. “I’ll bet there are plenty of girls out there who are willing to lower their sights.”
At that point Tieran had stalked off, getting as far from her as he could.
Kassa didn’t say anything for the next hour. When she finally spoke again it was only to say to herself, “Storm’s coming. I can feel it.”
Tieran heard her, as he knew she had intended. He was still irritated with her but grateful for the warning; early on it had been established that Kassa had excellent weather sense.
He looked around and saw only a few scattered clouds above. To the west he could see some cumulus clouds building up into larger thunder clouds. He sniffed the air; it was preternaturally clean, as though all the ions had been swept out of it—like shortly before a big storm.
“We should get word from the West Tower soon,” Tieran said to himself, but also loud enough that Kassa could hear him.
Kassa disagreed. “It might slip north of them.”
Tieran was about to turn around and engage her directly in conversation when a loud boom and a rush of cold air heralded the arrival of a dragon. A large, bronze dragon. A halo of condensed air swirled around it as it glided in low for a quick landing between the tower and the College.
Tieran had grabbed the small drum and was darting down the stairs, telling Kassa, “I’ll go!” in an instant.
“Go, go!” Kassa had replied, a broad grin on her face. “I’ll relay.”
Tieran returned the grin with a wave as he darted down the tower’s stairs. As soon as he reached the bottom of the stairs he broke into a steady, loping trot, deftly slinging the small drum over his shoulder without breaking stride.
The bronze dragon was Brianth and the rider was M’hall, Weyrleader of Benden Weyr. There were two other passengers—no, Tieran corrected his assessment as he got closer: one other passenger and a wrapped bundle. The bundle was a body. The passenger was Wind Blossom.
M’hall was helping Wind Blossom down as Tieran arrived. He grabbed the small woman from M’hall’s hands and deftly put her on the ground.
“Get help,” Wind Blossom ordered. “The body must go to the cold room.”
“Body?” Tieran repeated even as he was rapping out a quick staccato on his message drum. It was answered by a rush of people from the College, and the shroud-wrapped figure was quickly carried away, Wind Blossom trotting alongside, snapping instructions.
There was another boom and burst of air, and a second dragon arrived. Tieran had pulled the small drum off his back and banged out his quick message to Kassa before he had identified the new arrival, who landed on his right.
It was M’hall on Brianth! Again. While the new arrival looked somber and time-pressed, the first M’hall was desolate and had tears streaming down his face.
“Don’t do it!” the first M’hall shouted to the other.
Somber M’hall startled at the sound of his own voice coming to him. “You’re from the future?”
The first nodded. “Please, don’t do it. You’ll regret it more than you can possibly imagine.”
“We shouldn’t be talking!” the younger M’hall said. He caught sight of Tieran and told him, “Send for Wind Blossom. Urgent.”
“No!” the other yelled. “Don’t do it!”
“You would make a time paradox?” younger M’hall’s eyes were wide with terror and incomprehension that his future self would even consider such a dangerous suggestion.
The older M’hall’s jaw worked but he was voiceless. Finally, he jumped back onto his Brianth, sobbing, “Go then! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” The older Brianth gave a leap, one powerful downbeat of his wings and vanished between.
“Tieran!” the younger M’hall called to him. Tieran looked up. M’hall was clearly overwhelmed by his future self and dizzy with worry. “Don’t say anything about this until I get back.”
Stunned, Tieran could only nod.
Wind Blossom returned, escorted by a medical trainee. Tieran helped lift her up to M’hall. And for the second time in almost as many minutes, Brianth vanished between.
As though the dragon’s disappearance had been a signal, rain started falling. It went from a trickle to a torrent in no time. Lightning flickered across the sky and thunder boomed repeatedly. Tieran was surprised to realize how dark it had gotten. Dimly, he wondered if time-jumping acted like a lightning rod. He was drenched in seconds.
SEVEN
Genomics: The study of genetic material and the functions it encodes. See DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
—Glossary of terms, Elementary Biological Systems, 18th Edition
Fort Weyr, First Pass, Year 50, AL 58
The cold of between was still deep in Wind Blossom’s bones as she and M’hall were escorted to the queen’s qua
rters at Fort Weyr.
“My mother asked for you,” M’hall told her as he helped her into Sorka’s quarters.
“Is it her time?” Wind Blossom’s voice was calm, flat. She had seen all her friends die, save this one.
M’hall’s lips trembled as he nodded, and a deep anguished sigh passed his lips. Wind Blossom reached to take his arm reassuringly, but her grip was so weak that M’hall misinterpreted the gesture as need for support. He grabbed her and helped her to a chair.
“How did you know?” she asked. Then, taking in M’hall’s exhausted pallor, she answered herself, “You timed it.”
M’hall nodded.
“It drained you,” Wind Blossom said.
“More than you can imagine, and please don’t ask,” the Weyrleader said, forestalling further questions. He turned to Sorka, lying half-asleep in her bed.
His mother must have felt his presence, for her eyelids fluttered open. “Did you bring her?”
“I’m here,” Wind Blossom answered, rising from her chair and kneeling beside Sorka’s bed. The old Weyrwoman reached out a hand and clasped Wind Blossom’s as she offered it.
M’hall dragged Wind Blossom’s chair over to her. Thankfully, Wind Blossom sat. “Your son brought me.”
“He’s a good lad,” Sorka agreed with a small smile. “He does as he’s told.”
The two elder women shared a secret pause, then smiled as the expected comment from Benden’s Weyrleader failed to materialize.
“He has learned wisdom,” Wind Blossom said. It was her highest praise, words she had never before uttered to or about anyone. “He is a good man. Like his brothers and sisters. Blood tells. You and Sean have everything to be proud of.”
Behind her, Wind Blossom felt M’hall stiffen at the mention of his late father, who had led the colony’s original dragonriders through their first and so many other Threadfalls with an iron will.
Even at the hale age of sixty-two, Sean O’Connell had retained his position as the first Weyrleader—and Weyrleader of Fort Weyr, despite every argument to the contrary. But he was too old. Badly scored when they failed to dodge an oddly clumped bunch of Thread, Sean and Carenath had gone between—and never returned. That had been over eight years ago.
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