The Dragonriders of Pern

by Anne McCaffrey

  “All right, what happened?” he demanded.

  She didn’t look at him, but he got a glimpse of her haunted eyes. She blinked constantly as if she longed to erase what she had just seen.

  Finally she got herself somewhat under control and said in a low, tired voice, “I did go to Ruatha. Only . . . I went back to Ruatha.”

  “Back to Ruatha?” F’lar repeated the words stupidly; the significance momentarily eluded him.

  It certainly does, Mnementh agreed and flashed to F’lar’s mind the two scenes he had picked out of Ramoth’s memory.

  Staggered by the import of the visualization, F’lar found himself slowly sinking to the edge of the bed.

  “You went between times?”

  She nodded slowly. The terror was beginning to leave her eyes.

  “Between times,” F’lar murmured. “I wonder . . .”

  His mind raced through the possibilities. It might well tip the scales of survival in the Weyr’s favor. He couldn’t think exactly how to use this extraordinary ability, but there must be an advantage in it for dragonfolk.

  The service shaft rumbled. He took the pitcher from the platform and poured two mugs.

  Lessa’s hands were shaking so much that she couldn’t get hers to her lips. He steadied it for her, wondering if going between times would regularly cause this kind of shock. If so, it wouldn’t be any advantage at all. If she’d had enough of a scare this day, she might not be so contemptuous of his orders the next time; which would be to his benefit.

  Outside in the weyr, Mnementh snorted his opinion on that. F’lar ignored him.

  Lessa was trembling violently now. He put an arm around her, pressing the fur against her slender body. He held the mug to her lips, forcing her to drink. He could feel the tremors ease off. She took long, slow, deep breaths between swallows, equally determined to get herself under control. The moment he felt her stiffen under his arm, he released her. He wondered if Lessa had ever had someone to turn to. Certainly not after Fax invaded her family Hold. She had been only eleven, a child. Had hate and revenge been the only emotions the growing girl had practiced?

  She lowered the mug, cradling it in her hands carefully as if it had assumed some undefinable importance to her.

  “Now. Tell me,” he ordered evenly.

  She took a long deep breath and began to speak, her hands tightening around the mug. Her inner turmoil had not lessened; it was merely under control now.

  “Ramoth and I were bored with the weyrling exercises,” she admitted candidly.

  Grimly F’lar recognized that, while the adventure might have taught her to be more circumspect, it had not scared her into obedience. He doubted that anything would.

  “I gave her the picture of Ruatha so we could go between there.” She did not look at him, but her profile was outlined against the dark fur of the rug. “The Ruatha I knew so well—I accidentally sent myself backward in time to the day Fax invaded.”

  Her shock was now comprehensible to him.

  “And . . .” he prompted her, his voice carefully neutral.

  “And I saw myself—” Her voice broke off. With an effort she continued. “I had visualized for Ramoth the designs of the firepits and the angle of the Hold if one looked down from the pits into the Inner Court. That was where we emerged. It was just dawn”—she lifted her chin with a nervous jerk—“and there was no Red Star in the sky.” She gave him a quick, defensive look as if she expected him to contest this detail. “And I saw men creeping over the firepits, lowering rope ladders to the top windows of the Hold. I saw the Tower guard watching. Just watching.” She clenched her teeth at such treachery, and her eyes gleamed malevolently. “And I saw myself run from the Hall into the watch-wher’s lair. And do you know why”—her voice lowered to a bitter whisper—“the watch-wher did not alarm the Hold?”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was a dragon in the sky, and I, Lessa of Ruatha, was on her.” She flung the mug from her as if she wished she could reject the knowledge, too. “Because I was there, the watch-wher did not alarm the Hold, thinking the intrusion legitimate, with one of the Blood on a dragon in the sky. So I”—her body grew rigid, her hands clasped so tightly that the knuckles were white—“I was the cause of my family’s massacre. Not Fax! If I had not acted the captious fool today, I would not have been there with Ramoth and the watch-wher would—”

  Her voice had risen to an hysterical pitch of recrimination. He slapped her sharply across the cheeks, grabbing her, robe and all, to shake her.

  The stunned look in her eyes and the tragedy in her face alarmed him. His indignation over her willfulness disappeared. Her unruly independence of mind and spirit attracted him as much as her curious dark beauty. Infuriating as her fractious ways might be, they were too vital a part of her integrity to be exorcised. Her indomitable will had taken a grievous shock today, and her self-confidence had better be restored quickly.

  “On the contrary, Lessa,” he said sternly, “Fax would still have murdered your family. He had planned it very carefully, even to scheduling his attack on the morning when the Tower guard was one who could be bribed. Remember, too, it was dawn and the watch-wher, being a nocturnal beast, blind by daylight, is relieved of responsibility at dawn and knows it. Your presence, damnable as it may appear to you, was not the deciding factor by any means. It did, and I draw your attention to this very important fact, cause you to save yourself, by warning Lessa-the-child. Don’t you see that?”

  “I could have called out,” she murmured, but the frantic look had left her eyes and there was a faint hint of normal color in her lips.

  “If you wish to flail around in guilt, go right ahead,” he said with deliberate callousness.

  Ramoth interjected a thought that, since the two of them had been there that previous time as Fax’s men had prepared to invade, it had already happened, so how could it be changed? The act was inevitable both that day and today. For how else could Lessa have lived to come to the Weyr and impress Ramoth at the hatching?

  Mnementh relayed Ramoth’s message scrupulously, even to imitating Ramoth’s egocentric nuances. F’lar looked sharply at Lessa to see the effect of Ramoth’s astringent observation.

  “Just like Ramoth to have the final word,” she said with a hint of her former droll humor.

  F’lar felt the muscles along his neck and shoulders begin to relax. She’d be all right, he decided, but it might be wiser to make her talk it all out now, to put the whole experience into proper perspective.

  “You said you were there twice?” He leaned back on the couch, watching her closely. “When was the second time?”

  “Can’t you guess?” she asked sarcastically.

  “No,” he lied.

  “When else but the dawn I was awakened, feeling the Red Star was a menace to me? . . . Three days before you and Fax came out of the northeast.”

  “It would seem,” he remarked dryly, “that you were your own premonition both times.”

  She nodded.

  “Have you had any more of these presentiments . . . or should I say reinforced warnings?”

  She shuddered but answered him with more of her old spirit.

  “No, but if I should, you go. I don’t want to.”

  F’lar grinned maliciously.

  “I would, however,” she added, “like to know why and how it could happen.”

  “I’ve never run across a mention of it anywhere,” he told her candidly. “Of course, if you have done it—and you undeniably have,” he assured her hastily at her indignant protest, “it obviously can be done. You say you thought of Ruatha, but you thought of it as it was on that particular day. Certainly a day to be remembered. You thought of spring, before dawn, no Red Star—yes, I remember your mentioning that—so one would have to remember references peculiar to a significant day to return between times to the past.”

  She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

  “You used the same method the second time, to get to the
Ruatha of three Turns ago. Again, of course, it was spring.”

  He rubbed his palms together, then brought his hands down on his knees with an emphatic slap and rose to his feet.

  “I’ll be back,” he said and strode from the room, ignoring her half-articulated cry of warning.

  Ramoth was curling up in the Weyr as he passed her. He noticed that her color remained good in spite of the drain on her energies by the morning’s exercises. She glanced at him, her many-faceted eye already covered by the inner, protective lid.

  Mnementh awaited his rider on the ledge, and the moment F’lar leaped to his neck, took off. He circled upward, hovering above the Star Stone.

  You wish to try Lessa’s trick, Mnementh said, unperturbed by the prospective experiment.

  F’lar stroked the great curved neck affectionately. You understand how it worked for Ramoth and Lessa?

  As well as anyone can, Mnementh replied with the approximation of a shrug. When did you have in mind?

  Before that moment F’lar had had no idea. Now, unerringly, his thoughts drew him backward to the summer day R’gul’s bronze Hath had flown to mate the grotesque Nemorth, and R’gul had become Weyrleader in place of his dead father, F’lon.

  Only the cold of between gave them any indication that they had transferred; they were still hovering above the Star Stone. F’lar wondered if they had missed some essential part of the transfer. Then he realized that the sun was in another quarter of the sky and the air was warm and sweet with summer. The Weyr below was empty; there were no dragons sunning themselves on the ledges, no women busy at tasks in the Bowl. Noises impinged on his senses: raucous laughter, yells, shrieks, and a soft crooning noise that dominated the bedlam.

  Then, from the direction of the weyrling barracks in the Lower Caverns, two figures emerged—a stripling and a young bronze dragon. The boy’s arm lay limply along the beast’s neck. The impression that reached the hovering observers was one of utter dejection. The two halted by the lake, the boy peering into the unruffled blue waters, then glancing upward toward the queen’s weyr.

  F’lar knew the boy for himself and compassion for that younger self filled him. If only he could reassure that boy, so torn by grief, so filled with resentment, that he would one day become Weyrleader. . . .

  Abruptly, startled by his own thoughts, he ordered Mnementh to transfer back. The utter cold of between was like a slap in his face, replaced almost instantly as they broke out of between into the cold of normal winter.

  Slowly, Mnementh flew back down to the queen’s weyr, as sobered as F’lar by what they had seen.

  Rise high in glory,

  Bronze and gold,

  Dive entwined,

  Enhance the Hold.

  Count three months and more,

  And five heated weeks,

  A day of glory and

  In a month, who seeks?

  A strand of silver

  In the sky . . .

  With heat, all quickens

  And all times fly.

  “I don’t know why you insisted that F’nor unearth these ridiculous things from Ista Weyr,” Lessa exclaimed in a tone of exasperation. “They consist of nothing but trivial notes on how many measures of grain were used to bake daily bread.”

  F’lar glanced up at her from the Records he was studying. He sighed, leaned back in his chair in a bone-popping stretch.

  “And I used to think,” Lessa said with a rueful expression on her vivid, narrow face, “that those venerable Records would hold the total sum of all dragonlore and human wisdom. Or so I was led to believe,” she added pointedly.

  F’lar chuckled. “They do, but you have to disinter it.”

  Lessa wrinkled her nose. “Phew. They smell as if we had . . . and the only decent thing to do would be to rebury them.”

  “Which is another item I’m hoping to find . . . the old preservative technique that kept the skins from hardening and smelling.”

  “It’s stupid, anyhow, to use skins for recording. There ought to be something better. We have become, dear Weyrleader, entirely too hidebound.”

  While F’lar roared with appreciation of her pun, she regarded him impatiently. Suddenly she jumped up, fired by another of her mercurial moods.

  “Well, you won’t find it. You won’t find the facts you’re looking for. Because I know what you’re really after, and it isn’t recorded!”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “It’s time we stopped hiding a rather brutal truth from ourselves.”

  “Which is?”

  “Our mutual feeling that the Red Star is a menace and that the Threads will come! We decided that out of pure conceit and then went back between times to particularly crucial points in our lives and strengthened that notion, in our earlier selves. And for you, it was when you decided you were destined”—her voice made the word mocking—“to become Weyrleader one day.”

  “Could it be,” she went on scornfully, “that our ultraconservative R’gul has the right of it? That there have been no Threads for four hundred Turns because there are no more? And that the reason we have so few dragons is because the dragons sense they are no longer essential to Pern? That we are anachronisms as well as parasites?”

  F’lar did not know how long he sat looking up at her bitter face or how long it took him to find answers to her probing questions.

  “Anything is possible, Weyrwoman,” he heard his voice replying calmly. “Including the unlikely fact that an eleven-year-old child, scared stiff, could plot revenge on her family’s murderer and—against all odds—succeed.”

  She took an involuntary step forward, struck by his unexpected rebuttal. She listened intently.

  “I prefer to believe,” he went on inexorably, “that there is more to life than raising dragons and playing spring games. That is not enough for me. And I have made others look further, beyond self-interest and comfort. I have given them a purpose, a discipline. Everyone, dragonfolk and Holder alike, profits.

  “I am not looking in these Records for reassurance. I’m looking for solid facts.

  “I can prove, Weyrwoman, that there have been Threads. I can prove that there have been Intervals during which the Weyrs have declined. I can prove that if you sight the Red Star directly bracketed by the Eye Rock at the moment of winter solstice, the Red Star will pass close enough to Pern to throw off Threads. Since I can prove those facts, I believe Pern is in danger. I believe . . . not the youngster of fifteen Turns ago. F’lar, the bronze rider, the Weyrleader, believes it!”

  He saw her eyes reflecting shadowy doubts, but he sensed his arguments were beginning to reassure her.

  “You felt constrained to believe in me once before,” he went on in a milder voice, “when I suggested that you could be Weyrwoman. You believed me and . . .” He made a gesture around the weyr as substantiation.

  She gave him a weak, humorless smile.

  “That was because I had never planned what to do with my life once I did have Fax lying dead at my feet. Of course, being Ramoth’s Weyrmate is wonderful, but”—she frowned slightly—“it isn’t enough anymore, either. That’s why I wanted so to learn to fly and . . .”

  “. . . that’s how this argument started in the first place,” F’lar finished for her with a sardonic smile.

  He leaned across the table urgently.

  “Believe with me, Lessa, until you have cause not to. I respect your doubts. There’s nothing wrong in doubting. It sometimes leads to greater faith. But believe with me until spring. If the Threads have not fallen by then . . .” He shrugged fatalistically.

  She looked at him for a long moment and then inclined her head slowly in agreement.

  He tried to suppress the relief he felt at her decision. Lessa, as Fax had discovered, was a ruthless adversary and a canny advocate. Besides these, she was Weyrwoman: essential to his plans.

  “Now, let’s get back to the contemplation of trivia. They do tell me, you know, time, place, and duration of Thread incursions,”
he grinned up at her reassuringly. “And those facts I must have to make up my timetable.”

  “Timetable? But you said you didn’t know the time.”

  “Now the day to the second when the Threads may spin down. For one thing, while the weather holds so unusually cold for this time of year, the Threads simply turn brittle and blow away like dust. They’re harmless. However, when the air is warm, they are viable and . . . deadly.” He made fists of both hands, placing one above and to one side of the other. “The Red Star is my right hand, my left is Pern. The Red Star turns very fast and in the opposite direction from us. It also wobbles erratically.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Diagram on the walls of the Fort Weyr Hatching Ground. That was the very first Weyr, you know.”

  Lessa smiled sourly. “I know.”

  “So, when the Star makes a pass, the Threads spin off, down toward us, in attacks that last six hours and occur approximately fourteen hours apart.”

  “Attacks last six hours?”

  He nodded gravely.

  “When the Red Star is closest to us. Right now it is just beginning its Pass.”

  She frowned.

  He rummaged among the skin sheets on the table, and an object dropped to the stone floor with a metallic clatter.

  Curious, Lessa bent to pick it up, turning the thin sheet over in her hands.

  “What’s this?” She ran an exploratory finger lightly across the irregular design on one side.

  “I don’t know. F’nor brought it back from Fort Weyr. It was nailed to one of the chests in which the Records had been stored. He brought it along, thinking it might be important. Said there was a plate like it just under the Red Star diagram on the wall of the Hatching Ground.”

  “This first part is plain enough: ‘Mother’s father’s father, who departed for all time between, said this was the key to the mystery, and it came to him while doodling: he said that he said: ARRHENIUS? EUREKA! MYCORRHIZA. . . .’ Of course, that part doesn’t make any sense at all,” Lessa snorted. “It isn’t even Pernese—just babbling, those last three words.”