The Dragonriders of Pern

by Anne McCaffrey

  The messenger also confided to F’lar that the Mastersmith was having difficulties with his distance-writer. All wire must be covered with a protective tubing or Thread cut right through the thinly extruded metal. The Smith had experimented with ceramic and metal casings but he could turn neither out in great or quick enough quantity. With Threadfall coming so frequently now, his halls were besieged with demands to fix flame throwers which clogged or burned out. Ground crews panicked when equipment failed them mid-Fall and it was impossible not to accede to every urgent request for repair. The Lord Holders, promised the distance-writers, as links between help and isolated Holds, began to press for solutions. And for the ultimate—to them—solution: the proposed expedition to the Red Star.

  F’lar had begun to call a council of his intimate advisors and Wing-seconds daily so that no facet of the over-all plan could be lost. They also decided which Lords and Mastercraftsmen could accept the radical knowledge, but had moved cautiously.

  Asgenar told them that Larad of Telgar Hold was far more conservative in his thinking than they’d supposed and that the limited demonstration in the Rooms would not be as powerful a persuader as a protected field under full attack by Thread. Unfortunately, Asgenar’s young bride, Famira, on a visit to her home, inadvertently made a reference to the project. She’d had the good sense to send her lizard for her Lord who had bodily forced his blood relative to Benden Weyr for a full explanation and demonstration. Larad had been unconvinced and furious with what he called “a cruel deception and treacherous breach of faith” by dragonmen. When Asgenar then insisted Larad come to the softwood tract that was being protected and had live Thread poured over a sapling, uprooting the young tree to prove that it had been adequately protected, the Telgar Lord Holder’s rage began to subside.

  Telgar’s broad valleys had been hard hit by the almost constant Threadfalls. Telgar’s ground crews were disheartened by the prospect of ceaseless vigilance.

  “Time is what we haven’t got,” Larad of Telgar had cried when he heard that grub protection would be a long-term project. “We lose fields of grain and root every other day. The men are already weary of fighting Thread interminably, they’ve little energy for anything. At best we’ve only the prospect of a lean winter, and I fear for the worst if these past months are any indication.”

  “Yes, it’s hard to see help so close—and as far away as the life cycle of an insect no larger than the tip of your finger,” said Robinton, an integral part of any such confrontation. He was stroking the little bronze fire lizard which he had Impressed a few days earlier.

  “Or the length of that distance-viewer,” Larad said, his lips tight, his face lined with worry. “Has nothing been done about going to the Red Star?”

  “Yes,” F’lar replied, holding firmly to an attitude of patient reasonableness. “It’s been viewed every clear night Wansor has trained a wing of watchers and borrowed the most accurate draftsmen from Masterweaver Zurg and the Harper. They’ve made endless sketches of the masses on the planet. We know its faces now . . .”

  “And . . .” Larad was adamant

  “We can see no feature distinct enough to guide the dragons.”

  The Lord of Telgar sighed with resignation.

  “We do believe,” and F’lar caught N’ton’s eyes since the young bronze rider did as much of the investigating as Wansor, “that these frequent Falls will taper off in a few more months.”

  “Taper off? How can you tell that?” Hope conflicted with suspicion in the Telgar Lord’s face.

  “Wansor is of the opinion that the other planets in our sky have been affecting the Red Star’s motion; slowing it, pulling it from several directions. We have near neighbors, you see; one is now slightly below the middle of our planet, two above and beyond the Red Star, a rare conjunction. Once the planets move away, Wansor believes the old routine of Threadfall will be established.”

  “In a few months? But that won’t do us any good. And can you be sure?”

  “No, we can’t be sure—which is why we have not announced Wansor’s theory. But we’ll be certain in a few more weeks.” F’lar held up his hand to interrupt Larad’s protests. “You’ve surely noticed the brightest stars, which are our sister planets, move from west to east during the year. Look tonight, you’ll see the blue one slightly above the green one, and very brilliant. And the Red Star below them. Now, remember the diagram in the Fort Weyr Council Room? We’re positive that that is the diagram of skies around our sun. And you’ve watched your fosterlings play stringball. You’ve played it yourself. Substitute the planets for the balls, the sun for the swinger, and you get the general idea. Some balls swing more rapidly than others, depending on the speed of the swing, the length and tension of the cord. Basically, the principle of the stars around the sun is the same.”

  Robinton had been sketching on a leaf and passed the diagram over to Larad.

  “I must see this in the skies for myself,” the Telgar Lord replied, not giving an inch.

  “It’s a sight, I assure you,” Asgenar said. “I’ve become fascinated with the study and if,” he grinned, his thin face suddenly all creases and teeth, “Wansor ever has time to duplicate that distance-viewer, I want one on Lemos’ fire height We’re at a good altitude to see the northern heavens. I’d like to see those showering stars we get every summer through a distance-viewer!”

  Larad snorted at the notion.

  “No, it’s fascinating,” Asgenar protested, his eyes dancing with enthusiasm. Then he added in a different tone, “Nor am I the only one beguiled by such studies. Every time I go to Fort I’m contending with Meron of Nabol for a chance to use the viewer.”

  “Nabol?”

  Asgenar was a little surprised at the impact of his casual remark.

  “Yes, Nabol’s forever at the viewer. Apparently he’s more determined than any dragonrider to find coordinates.” No one else shared his amusement.

  F’lar looked inquiringly at N’ton.

  “Yes, he’s there all right if he weren’t a Lord Holder—” and N’ton shrugged.

  “Why? Does he say why?”

  N’ton shrugged again. “He says he’s looking for coordinates. But so are we. There aren’t any features distinct enough. Just shapeless masses of gray and dark gray-greens. They don’t change and while it’s obvious they’re stable, are they land? Or sea?” N’ton began to feel the accusatory tension in the room and shifted his feet. “So often the face is obscured by those heavy clouds. Discouraging.”

  “Is Meron discouraged?” asked F’lar pointedly.

  “I’m not sure I like your attitude, Benden,” Larad said, his expression hard. “You don’t appear eager to discover any coordinates.”

  F’lar looked Larad full in the eyes. “I thought we’d explained the problem involved. We have to know where we’re going before we can send the dragons.” He pointed to the green lizard perched on Larad’s shoulder. “You’ve been trying to train your fire lizard. You can appreciate the difficulty.” Larad stiffened defensively and his lizard hissed, its eyes rolling. F’lar was not put off. “The fact that no Records exist of any previous attempt to go there strongly indicates that the ancients—who built the distance-viewer, who knew enough to plot the neighbors in our sky—did not go. They must have had a reason, a valid reason. What would you have me do, Larad?” F’lar demanded, pacing in his agitation. “Ask for volunteers? You, you and you,” F’lar whirled, jabbing a finger at an imaginary line of riders, “you go, jump between to the Red Star. Coordinates? Sorry, men, I have none. Tell your dragons to take a long look halfway there. If you don’t come back, we’ll keen to the Red Star for your deaths. But men, you’ll die knowing you’ve solved our problem. Men can’t go to the Red Star.”

  Larad flushed under F’lar’s sarcasm.

  “If the ancients didn’t record any intimate knowledge of the Red Star,” said Robinton quietly into the charged silence, “they did provide domestic solutions. The dragons, and the grubs.”

&
nbsp; “Neither proves to be effective protection right now, when we need it,” Larad replied in a bitter, discouraged voice. “Pern needs something more conclusive than promises—and insects!” He abruptly left the Rooms.

  Asgenar, a protest on his lips, started to follow but F’lar stopped him.

  “He’s in no mood to be reasonable, Asgenar,” F’lar said, his face strained with anxiety. “If he won’t be reassured by today’s demonstrations, I don’t know what more we can do or say.”

  “It’s the loss of the summer crops which bothers him,” Asgenar said. “Telgar Hold has been spreading out, you know. Larad’s attracted many of the small Holders who’ve been dissatisfied in Nerat, Crom and Nabol and switched their allegiances. If the crops fail, he’s going to have more hungry people—and more trouble—than he can handle in the winter.”

  “But what more can we do?” demanded F’lar, a desperate note in his voice. He tired so easily. The fever had left him little reserve strength, a state he found more frustrating than any other problem. Larad’s obduracy had been an unexpected disappointment. They’d been so lucky with every other man approached.

  “I know you can’t send men on a blind jump to the Red Star,” Asgenar said, distressed by F’lar’s anxiety. “I’ve tried to tell my Rial where I want him to go. He gets frantic at times because he can’t see it clearly enough. Just wait until Larad starts sending his lizard about. He’ll understand. You see, what bothers him most is the realization that you can’t plan an attack on the Red Star.”

  “Your initial mistake, my dear F’lar,” and the Harper’s voice was at its drollest, “was in providing salvation from the last imminent disaster in a scant three days by bringing up the Five Lost Weyrs. The Lord Holders really expect you to provide a second miracle in similar short order.”

  The remark was so preposterous that F’nor laughed out loud before he could stop himself. But the tension and anxiety dissolved and the worried men regained some needed perspective.

  “Time is all we need,” F’lar insisted.

  “Time is what we don’t have,” Asgenar said wearily.

  “Then let’s use what time we have to the best possible advantage,” F’lar said decisively, his moment of doubt and disillusion behind him. “Let’s work on Telgar. F’nor, how many riders can T’bor spare us to hunt larval sacks between time at Southern? You and N’ton can work out coordinates with them.”

  “Won’t that weaken Southern’s protection?” asked Robinton.

  “No, because N’ton keeps his eyes open. He noticed that a lot of sacks started in the fall get blown down or devoured during the winter months. So we’ve altered our methods. We check an area in spring to place the sacks that survive, go back to the fall and take some of those which didn’t last. There were a few wherries who missed a meal but I don’t think we disturbed the balance much.”

  F’lar began to pace, one hand absently scratching his ribs where the scar tissues itched.

  “I need someone to keep an eye on Nabol, too.”

  Robinton let out a snort of amusement. “We do seem beholden to the oddest agencies. Grub life. Meron. Oh yes,” and he chuckled at their irritation. “He may yet prove to be an asset. Let him strain his eyes and crick his neck nightly watching the Red Star. As long as he is occupied that way, we’ll know we have time. The eyes of a vengeful man miss few details he can turn to advantage.”

  “Good point, Robinton. N’ton,” and F’lar turned to the young bronze rider. “I want to know every remark that man makes, which aspects of the Red Star he views, what he could possibly see, what his reactions are. We’ve ignored that man too often to our regret. We might even be grateful to him.”

  “I’d rather be grateful to grubs,” N’ton replied with some fervor. “Frankly, sir,” he added, hesitant for the first time about any assignment since he’d been included in the council, “I’d rather hunt grubs or catch Thread.”

  F’lar eyed the young rider thoughtfully for a moment “Think of this assignment then, N’ton, as the ultimate Thread catch.”

  Brekke had insisted on taking over the care of the plants in the Rooms once she was stronger. She argued that she was farmcraftbred and capable of such duties. She preferred not to be present during the demonstrations. In fact she went out of her way to avoid seeing anyone but weyrfolk. She could abide their sympathy but the pity of outsiders was repugnant to her.

  This did not affect her curiosity and she would get F’nor to tell her every detail of what she termed the best-known Craft secret on Pern. What F’nor narrated the Telgar Lord’s bitter repudiation of what the Weyrs were trying to accomplish, she was visibly disturbed.

  “Larad’s wrong,” she said in the slow deliberate way she’d adopted lately. “The grubs are the solution, the right one. But it’s true that the best solution is not always easy to accept. And an expedition to the Red Star is not a solution, even if it’s the one Pernese instinctively crave. It’s obvious. Just as two thousand dragons over Telgar Hold was rather obvious seven Turns ago.” She surprised F’nor with a little smile, the first since Wirenth’s death. “I myself, like Robinton, would prefer to rely on grubs. They present fewer problems. But then I’m craftbred.”

  “You use that phrase a lot lately,” F’nor remarked, turning her face toward him, searching her green eyes. They were serious, as always, and clear in the candid gaze was the shadow of a sorrow that would never lift.

  She locked her fingers in his and smiled gently, a smile which did not disperse the sorrow. “I was craftbred,” she corrected herself. “I’m weyrfolk now.” Berd crooned approvingly and Grall added a trill of her own.

  “We could lose a few Holds this Turn around,” F’nor said bitterly.

  “That would solve nothing,” she said. “I’m relieved that F’lar is going to watch that Nabolese. He has a warped mind.”

  Suddenly she gasped, gripping F’nor’s fingers so tight that her fingernails broke the skin.

  “What’s the matter?” He put both arms around her protectively.

  “He has a warped mind,” Brekke said, staring at him with frightened eyes. “And he also has a fire lizard, a bronze, as old as Grall and Berd. Does anyone know if he’s been training it? Training it to go between?”

  “All the Lords have been shown how—” F’nor broke off as he realized the trend of her thought. Berd and Grall reacted to Brekke’s fright with nervous squeals and fanning wings. “No, no, Brekke. He can’t,” F’nor reassured her. “Asgenar has one a week or so younger and he was saying how difficult he found it to send his Rial about in his own Hold.”

  “But Meron’s had his longer. It could be further along . . .”

  “Nabol?” F’nor was skeptical. “That man has no conception of how to handle a fire lizard.”

  “Then why is he so fascinated with the Red Star? What else could he have in mind but to send his bronze lizard there?”

  “But he knows that dragonmen won’t attempt to send dragons. How can he imagine that a fire lizard could go?”

  “He doesn’t trust dragonmen,” Brekke pointed out, obviously obsessed with the idea. “Why should he trust that statement? You’ve got to tell F’lar!”

  He agreed to because it was the only way to reassure her. She was still so pathetically thin. Her eyelids looked transparent though there was soft flush of color in her lips and cheeks.

  “Promise you’ll tell F’lar.”

  “I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him, but not in the middle of the night.”

  With a wing of riders to direct between time for larval sacks the next day, his promise slipped F’nor’s mind until late that evening. Rather than distress her with his forgetfulness, he asked Canth to bespeak N’ton’s Lioth to pass the theory on to N’ton. If the Fort Weyr bronze rider saw anything that gave Brekke’s premise substance, then they’d tell F’lar.

  He had a chance to speak to N’ton the following day as they met in the isolated valley field which Larad of Telgar Hold had picked to be seeded by gru
bs. The field, F’nor noticed with some jaundice, was planted with a new hybrid vegetable, much in demand as a table luxury and grown successfully only in some upland areas of Telgar and the High Reaches Hold.

  “Brekke may have something, F’nor,” N’ton admitted. “The watchriders have mentioned that Nabol will stare for a long time into the distance-viewer and then suddenly stare into his fire lizard’s eyes until the creature becomes frantic and tries to rise. In fact, last night the poor thing went between screaming. Nabol stalked off in a bad mood, cursing all dragonkind.”

  “Did you check what he’d been looking at?”

  N’ton shrugged. “Wasn’t too clear last night. Lots of clouds. Only thing visible was that one gray tail—the place that resembles Nerat but points east instead of west. It was visible only briefly.”

  F’nor remembered that feature well. A mass of grayness formed like a thick dragon tail, pointing in the opposite direction from the planet’s rotation.

  “Sometimes,” N’ton chuckled, “the clouds above the star are clearer than anything we can see below. The other night, for instance, there was a cloud drift that looked like a girl,” N’ton made passes with his hands to describe a head, and a few to one side of the air-drawn circle, “braiding her hair. I could see her head, tilted to the left, the half-finished braid and then the stream of free hair. Fascinating.”

  F’nor did not dismiss that conversation entirely for he’d noticed the variety of recognizable patterns in the clouds around the Red Star and often had been more absorbed in that show than in what he was supposed to be watching for.

  N’ton’s report of the fire lizard’s behavior was very interesting. The little creatures were not as dependent on their handlers as dragons. They were quite apt to disappear between when bored or asked to do something they didn’t feel like doing. They reappeared after an interlude, usually near dinnertime, evidently assuming people forgot quickly. Grall and Berd had apparently matured beyond such behavior. Certainly they had a nice sense of responsibility toward Brekke. One was always near her. F’nor was willing to wager that Grall and Berd were the most reliable pair of fire lizards on Pern.