Dragonsblood

by Todd McCaffrey

  “The song was right,” Kindan whispered, entering the room and peering cautiously around, as though afraid that his gaze might damage some unknown treasure.

  “Indeed it was,” Ketan agreed, pointing to the far wall. There was a door outlined, but no sign of a square plate with which to open it. Instead, written on the door in strange paint was:

  “That word is what you now must say

  To open up the door

  In Benden Weyr, to find the way

  To all my healing lore.”

  The voice changed to another’s. “I am Emorra, Wind Blossom’s daughter. Please, if you have come here to learn how to conquer the dragons’ illness, go to the first cabinet labeled ‘A’ and take the booklets there—one copy for each of you.” The voice paused. “When you have done that, please take one of the chairs and we will continue.”

  Lorana gave Kindan a nervous look, but he nodded firmly to her and the cabinet.

  “Apparently we are to be schooled,” Ketan surmised as Lorana passed a booklet to him. He glanced at it. “This may take a while.”

  “Then the sooner we start, the better,” Lorana declared, seating herself.

  Before she could open the booklet, footsteps on the stairs outside caught her attention.

  “May we join you?” M’tal asked, as he and Salina appeared in the doorway.

  Lorana, Kindan, and Ketan exchanged looks. “I don’t see why not,” Lorana replied.

  “The more help, the better,” Ketan agreed.

  “Excellent,” M’tal replied, nodding his head in thanks. “And Kiyary has promised to bring down refreshments in two hours.”

  Ketan smiled. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. Neither, from their sheepish looks, had Kindan or Lorana.

  “There are booklets in that cabinet behind us,” Lorana said, gesturing. “We were just getting started.”

  “It was the most amazing thing,” Ketan added. “When we first entered, the voice of Wind Blossom herself greeted us.”

  M’tal and Salina looked both surprised—and somewhat disappointed at having missed it.

  “When everyone is ready,” the voice of Emorra spoke from the ceiling above them, “please have someone close the door. Instructions will be played while the door is closed and everyone is seated. If you wish to take a break, simply either all stand, or have someone open the door. The instructions will resume from where they left off when the door is again closed and people are seated.

  “Please note that there is no way to know how many of you are present, so if one of you must leave, be sure to leave the door open until that person returns, or she will miss parts of the instruction.” There was a pause. “Now, the first thing to do is to read the first chapter of the booklet. If you have problems reading the text, you will have to see if you can locate someone who can read it for you. If you do have such problems, please leave the room immediately. The power required to light this room and provide my voice is limited and will eventually fail.

  “At the end of the first chapter you will find instructions on how to indicate that you have finished the first chapter and understand it.”

  Kindan’s furrowed his brows in puzzlement. “That will be some trick,” he said.

  “You may start reading whenever you are ready,” Emorra’s voice said. “Please do not stand on courtesy, as I am not present—this is merely a recording of my voice.”

  All five of them exchanged astonished looks, and Ketan mouthed the word “recording” to himself, trying to grasp the full flavor of its meaning. But Lorana was less interested in the Oldtimer skills than she was in finding a cure for the dragons. Avidly, she opened the booklet and began to read.

  “The dragons and watch-whers of Pern are modifications of the indigenous fire-lizards,” the booklet began. “It was possible to make the much larger dragons and watch-whers from the fire-lizards because all living things contain a set of instructions telling the creature how and what to grow to make a complete living being.

  “These instructions are embodied in a genetic code,” the booklet continued. Lorana leaned forward and immersed herself in the wonders of genetic codes.

  An hour later, she got up from her seat, stretched, and walked to the cabinets. She opened the one marked B, pulled out a tray of equipment, and returned to her seat.

  “What are you doing?” Kindan asked, looking up from his book.

  “Well, I’m ready to start the first experiment,” she explained. “You know, the one at the end of chapter two.”

  “Chapter two?” Kindan said in astonishment. “You’re already done with chapter two? I’m still trying to finish chapter one.”

  Before Lorana could reply, Ketan piped up, “No, don’t wait up for us, Lorana. If we don’t catch up soon, maybe you’ll explain it to us.”

  Lorana nodded and resumed her seat. Immediately she turned to the beginning of chapter three and started working with the equipment.

  The bulk of the equipment consisted of small colored objects, about the size of the tip of her thumb. They weren’t quite balls, being planed off and grooved on four sides—top, bottom, and two sides that met in a corner—the booklet said that they represented the fundamental genetic material. The blue object was for the A molecule, the red object represented a B molecule, the green a C molecule; the purple object represented a C-prime object, the magenta object was for B-prime, and the yellow object was for A-prime. There was a seventh object—a beige one—that represented the N or Null molecule. There was also a pencil and a tablet of paper, which she was to use to record her answers.

  Lorana quickly assembled three of the objects—blue, yellow, and beige—into a triangle. In short order she had built another triangle—red, beige, and blue—and carefully slid the two triangles one on top of the other. With a gentle movement, she twisted the top triangle slightly and felt it lock into place.

  Delighted, she gave a cry of joy, which startled the others. They looked up at her and then gathered around in wonder.

  “What is it?” M’tal asked, eyeing the object eagerly.

  “Are you building a sequence?” Ketan asked.

  Salina craned her neck to get a better view. “Is it a START sequence or a STOP sequence?”

  “Ahem.” Kindan cleared his throat loudly. “Some of us are still reading.”

  “Some of us are slow,” someone—it sounded like Ketan—murmured in response. Kindan reddened and bent his head back over his booklet, pointedly ignoring them all.

  The sound of footsteps outside heralded the arrival of Kiyary and several others from the Kitchens with refreshments.

  “Is it lunchtime already?” Kindan asked in surprise.

  “We can eat while we work,” Lorana said, helping Kiyary place a tray on the workbench in the rear of the room. Kiyary muttered a quick thanks, her eyes wide as she peered around the room in awe.

  “So the Oldtimers made these rooms for us?” Kiyary asked.

  “We heard the voice of Wind Blossom,” Ketan told her. “Her mother created the dragons.”

  “And they can help us now?” Kiyary asked.

  “That’s the hope,” M’tal said, helping himself to a mug of klah and some sweetrolls.

  “And if they can’t?” Tilara asked, crossing the room with another platter. She set it down beside the one Kiyary had brought. “What then?”

  Ketan and Lorana exchanged looks. “We will find a cure,” Lorana told the older woman firmly. “By ourselves, if necessary.”

  Tilara gave Lorana a probing look and, satisfied, nodded. “I’d heard that you felt the death of every dragon,” she commented.

  Lorana nodded, her eyes dark with sorrow.

  “Then no one has a better reason to find a cure than you.”

  She turned away from Lorana and started bustling around the platters and chivying Kiyary to get everything just so. When she turned back again, her eyes were bright with tears and she had a plate with several sweetrolls on it.

  “You haven’t eaten
yet,” Tilara said, thrusting the plate at Lorana. She gestured to one of the chairs. “Sit, and eat.”

  “But—”

  “You’ll learn nothing with a growling stomach,” Tilara insisted.

  “She’s right, you know,” M’tal agreed, stuffing another sweetroll into his mouth.

  “And if you choke to death, you’ll do us no good, either,” Tilara scolded the ex-Weyrleader. Salina added a quick murmur of agreement, giving her weyrmate a dark look.

  Lorana’s attempts to bolt her food were also thwarted.

  “I spent more time making them than you are eating them,” Tilara told her reprovingly. “Stop to taste them, at least, girl!”

  Lorana reddened, but she did slow down, and as she did so, she realized that Tilara and Kiyary had outdone themselves in making the sweetrolls. They were pungent, sometimes spicy, with thin slices of wherry meat, some sauce that Lorana didn’t recognize, and thin-sliced vegetables artfully mixed in. Some were cold and others were hot, and all together they were more of a meal than a snack.

  When they were all full and the sweetrolls gone, Tilara bustled Kiyary into collecting the used plates back onto the trays.

  “We’ll leave the klah here for you,” Tilara said. “It won’t get cold for a while—I’ve put a warmer over it.” And with that she headed back to the kitchens, Kiyary in tow.

  By evening they had made far more progress, but it was not enough for Lorana.

  “We’re still no nearer to figuring out how to open that door,” she said, jabbing her finger toward the poem-decorated door on the far wall of the classroom. “And we’ve no better idea how to save the dragons.”

  “Mmm, I’m not so sure about that,” Ketan disagreed. “We know that dragons, like fire-lizards, have natural defenses against disease.”

  “So?” Lorana demanded.

  “And we know that this disease overwhelms those natural defenses,” Ketan added.

  “That’s all we do know,” Kindan snapped, sharing Lorana’s disappointment and anger.

  “And we know about PNA and how it contains the codes for all the vital operations of the dragons, and all Pernese life-forms,” Ketan continued. “I think that’s more than enough to learn in one day.”

  “I agree,” M’tal announced. “My brain is feeling quite ruffled with all this. I’ll be glad to have a night’s sleep in which to settle and soothe myself.”

  Despite herself, Lorana chuckled in appreciation.

  “Very well,” Kindan conceded, “I suppose we could do with a rest.”

  “We’ll be back before dawn,” Lorana added firmly.

  “At dawn,” M’tal corrected, “and after breakfast.”

  The next morning, they met in the Kitchen Cavern for breakfast. M’tal noticed how the dragonriders politely avoided them and how the cooks—Kiyary in particular—went out of their way to be sure that they ate a good meal.

  “Kindan, what are you doing?” Ketan asked as he downed his second mug of klah.

  M’tal and Salina smiled at each other. They, too, had noticed the harper’s tapping on the table, but it was a well-known fact that the Weyr’s healer always required two mugs of klah to wake up in the morning.

  “Oh, sorry,” Kindan said absently, dropping his hands to his lap. A moment later, one was up again as he took another mouthful of oatmeal. Shortly after that, both of Kindan’s hands were on the tabletop again, tapping softly.

  Lorana gave him a look but shook her head.

  “Kin—” Ketan began again, but Salina’s look cut him short. The ex-Weyrwoman was looking intently at Kindan’s fingers.

  Lorana noticed her look and frowned, closing her eyes in concentration. A moment later, she opened them again and exclaimed delightedly to Kindan, “You did it! You learned the sequence!”

  Kindan, startled out of his reverie, gave her a surprised look. “I did?” he asked. As her words registered, he shook his head. “No, I was just practicing some drum codes . . .” His voice trailed off thoughtfully. “The drum codes are sounds.”

  “But they’re grouped the same way as the PNA sequences,” Lorana insisted. Tentatively, she tapped out a sequence and then looked challengingly at Kindan.

  “That was the START sequence,” Lorana said.

  “No, it was the ATTENTION sequence,” Kindan corrected her. He frowned in thought and quickly tapped a different sequence. “What’s this?”

  “That’s the STOP sequence,” Lorana answered promptly.

  “It’s the END sequence for the drum codes,” Kindan told her. “What’s this?” He tapped a set of sequences.

  “ABC, CBA, BCA,” Lorana translated.

  “You’re right! PNA is based on drum codes!” Kindan declared.

  “I’d say it’s the other way around,” Ketan remarked after a moment.

  Kindan frowned. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “But it makes sense,” M’tal said. “The genetic code is designed to store the most information possible in a group of three, so for simple drum codes it would be just as efficient.”

  As they returned to the Learning Room, Kindan explained, “I had this strange dream that someone was trying to tell me something, some message.”

  “Now you know what it was,” Ketan said.

  Kindan, inspired by his new understanding, soon caught up with the others. Several times, in fact, they turned to him for guidance in difficult sections. He would close his eyes in thought and tentatively tap out a sequence, and correct it.

  “How do you know whether it’s right?” Lorana asked when they’d solved one particularly difficult problem.

  “I’ve been drumming for Turns,” Kindan told her. “It wouldn’t sound right unless it was.”

  By evening the next day, they had all graduated from constructing simple codons to working through replication and the creation of proteins.

  “So the PNA controls how all of the cells in the dragons are created, grow, interact, and die,” M’tal found himself explaining to a bemused B’nik at dinner that night. “And PNA contains the fundamental instructions for building defenses against disease and infections.”

  B’nik, whose duties kept him from what everyone had started to call the Learning Rooms, struggled to keep up with the old Weyrleader. “So, if we can figure out which infection is affecting the dragons, we can build a defense against it?”

  “That’s the hope,” M’tal replied, surprised at B’nik’s quick grasp. “But we haven’t finished the study books, and we know that there’s another room between this one and the first one we discovered.”

  “What’s in it?”

  M’tal shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suspect, given all that we’ve learned, it is probably a room where we can experiment and observe. Perhaps it has instruments to allow us to actually see the infection.”

  “But I thought you said the infection—that ‘bacteria’ or ‘virus’ you were talking about—is too small to see,” B’nik protested.

  “It is,” M’tal agreed, “with the eye alone. But there are hints in the books that there are tools that make such small things big enough to see.”

  “Hmm.” B’nik leaned back in his seat, mulling over this revelation. Then he leaned forward again and beckoned M’tal to come close to him. “Caranth is getting worse,” he confessed. “How long do you think—”

  “Are you asking if we can find a cure in time for Caranth?” M’tal asked gently.

  “And the others,” B’nik added quickly.

  “We’ll do our best,” M’tal replied. “I know what you’re facing.”

  B’nik gave him a bleak look. “Do you think—” He found that he couldn’t go on and swallowed. He took a deep breath and began again. “I’d like you to take over the Weyr if anything happens to Caranth.”

  M’tal gave B’nik an encouraging smile and slapped the younger man on the shoulder reassuringly. “It won’t come to that, B’nik,” he told the young Weyrleader fiercely. “Not if I can help it.”

&n
bsp; B’nik looked long into M’tal’s eyes and then nodded slowly. With a husky voice he said, “Thank you.”

  Loudly, Kindan closed his book and looked up at the others.

  “Done!” he crowed. His grin faded when he saw that M’tal, Salina, and Ketan had already closed their books. He was surprised to see that Lorana was still reading. Indeed, she looked like she was just at the beginning of the book. Kindan gave Ketan a questioning look.

  “She’s rereading it,” Ketan explained. “Again.”

  With a frown, Lorana slammed her book shut and looked up angrily at the others.

  “So what do we know?” M’tal asked. “We know how the immune system works both against specific and nonspecific assaults.”

  “We know that sometimes the immune system can attack symbionts,” Salina added, still surprised that there were tiny creatures that lived in harmony with the dragons.

  “And even the body itself,” Ketan added.

  “And we have a vague idea of how to build new responses to attacks,” Kindan said.

  “But only by changing PNA,” Lorana added glumly. “We can’t make one of these ‘antibiotics’ or ‘antivirals’ to directly assault the disease.”

  “But once we can engineer a change,” M’tal corrected, “we can build a ‘retrovirus’ to correct all the genes of all the cells in the dragons, so that they can correctly fight the infection.”

  “And once we get it right with one dragon,” Salina added, “we can take ichor—the dragon’s blood—from it and inject it into other dragons, and the cure will spread through the circulatory system.”

  “And,” Ketan added ominously, “it’d be best to use the cure on a queen who’s close to clutching—the cure would be carried to the hatchlings.”

  M’tal and Salina exchanged disturbed looks. There was only one queen near to clutching and that was Minith.

  “But we still are no closer to identifying the infection,” Lorana protested. She turned toward the still-closed door. “And we have no idea how to open that door.”

  “Except what’s written on it,” Kindan said.

  “Does anyone know how to talk with people who have been dead for over four hundred Turns?” Lorana asked acerbically.