Dragonflight

  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.”

  “I’ve studied it, Lessa,” F’lar replied, glancing at it again and tipping it toward him to reaffirm his conclusions. “The only way to depart for all time between is to die, right? People just don’t fly away on their own, obviously. So it is a death vision, dutifully recorded by a grandchild, who couldn’t spell very well either. ‘Doodling’ as the present tense of dying!” He smiled indulgently. “And as for the rest of it, after the nonsense—like most death visions, it ‘explains’ what everyone has always known. Read on.”

  “ ‘Flamethrowing fire lizards to wipe out the spores. Q.E.D.’?”

  “No help there, either. Obviously just a primitive rejoicing that he is a dragonman, who didn’t even know the right word for Threads.” F’lar’s shrug was expressive.

  Lessa wet one fingertip to see if the patterns were inked on. The metal was shiny enough for a good mirror if she could get rid of the designs. However, the patterns remained smooth and precise.

  “Primitive or no, they had a more permanent way of recording their visions that is superior to even the well-preserved skins,” she murmured.

  “Well-preserved babblings,” F’lar said, turning back to the skins he was checking for understandable data.

  “A badly scored ballad?” Lessa wondered and then dismissed the whole thing. “The design isn’t even pretty.”

  F’lar pulled forward a chart that showed overlapping horizontal bands imposed on the projection of Pern’s continental mass.

  “Here,” he said, “this represents waves of attack, and this one”—he pulled forward the second map with vertical bandings—“shows time zones. So you can see that with a fourteen-hour break only certain parts of Pern are affected in each attack. One reason for spacing of the Weyrs.”

  “Six full Weyrs,” she murmured, “close to three thousand dragons.”

  “I’m aware of the statistics,” he replied in a voice devoid of expression. “It meant no one Weyr was overburdened during the height of the attacks, not that three thousand beasts must be available. However, with these timetables, we can manage until Ramoth’s first clutches have matured.”

  She turned a cynical look on him. “You’ve a lot of faith in one queen’s capacity.”

  He waved that remark aside impatiently. “I’ve more faith, no matter what your opinion is, in the startling repetitions of events in these Records.”

  “Ha!”

  “I don’t mean how many measures for daily bread, Lessa,” he retorted, his voice rising. “I mean such things as the time such and such a wing was sent out on patrol, how long the patrol lasted, how many riders were hurt. The brooding capacities of queens, during the fifty years a Pass lasts and the Intervals between such Passes. Yes, it tells that. By all I’ve studied here,” and he pounded emphatically on the nearest stack of dusty, smelly skins, “Nemorth should have been mating twice a Turn for the last ten. Had she even kept to her paltry twelve a clutch, we’d have two hundred and forty more beasts. . . . Don’t interrupt. But we had Jora as Weyrwoman and R’gul as Weyrleader, and we had fallen into planet-wide disfavor during a four hundred Turn Interval. Well, Ramoth will brood over no measly dozen, and she’ll lay a queen egg, mark my words. She will rise often to mate and lay generously. By the time the Red Star is passing closest to us and the attacks become frequent, we’ll be ready.”

  She stared at him, her eyes wide with incredulity. “Out of Ramoth?”

  “Out of Ramoth and out of the queens she’ll lay. Remember, there are Records of Faranth laying sixty eggs at a time, including several queen eggs.”

  Lessa could only shake her head slowly in wonder.

  “ ‘A strand of silver/In the sky. . . . With heat, all quickens/And all times fly,’ ” F’lar quoted to her.

  “She’s got weeks more to go before laying, and then the eggs must hatch . . .”

  “Been on the Hatching Ground recently? Wear your boots. You’ll be burned through sandals.”

  She dismissed that with a guttural noise. He sat back, outwardly amused by her disbelief.

  “And then you have to make Impression and wait till the riders—” she went on.

  “Why do you think I’ve insisted on older boys? The dragons are mature long before their riders.”

  “Then the system is faulty.”

  He narrowed his eyes slightly, shaking the stylus at her.

  “Dragon tradition started out as a guide . . . but there comes a time when man becomes too traditional, too—what was it you said?—too hidebound? Yes, it’s traditional to use the weyrbred, because it’s been convenient. And because this sensitivity to dragons strengthens where both sire and dam are weyrbred. That doesn’t mean weyrbred is best. You, for example . . .”

  “There’s Weyrblood in the Ruathan line,” she said proudly.

  “Granted. Take young Naton; he’s craftbred from Nabol, yet F’nor tells me he can make Canth understand him.”

  “Oh, that’s not hard to do,” she interjected.

  “What do you mean?” F’lar jumped on her statement.

  They were both interrupted by a high-pitched, penetrating whine. F’lar listened intently for a moment and then shrugged, grinning.

  “Some green’s getting herself chased again.”

  “And that’s another item these so-called all-knowing Records of yours never mention. Why is it that only the gold dragon can reproduce?”

  F’lar did not suppress a lascivious chuckle.

  “Well, for one thing, firestone inhibits reproduction. If they never chewed stone, a green could lay, but at best they produce small beasts, and we need big ones. And, for another thing”—his chuckle rolled out as he went on deliberately, grinning mischievously—“if the greens could reproduce, considering their amorousness and the numbers we have of them, we’d be up to our ears in dragons in next to no time.”

  The first whine was joined by another, and then a low hum throbbed as if carried by the stones of the Weyr itself.

  F’lar, his face changing rapidly from surprise to triumphant astonishment, dashed up the passage.

  “What’s the matter?” Lessa demanded, picking up her skirts to run after him. “What does that mean?”

  The hum, resonating everywhere, was deafening in the echo-chamber of the queen’s weyr. Lessa registered the fact that Ramoth was gone. She heard F’lar’s boots pounding down the passage to the ledge, a sharp ta-ta-tat over the kettledrum booming hum. The whine was so high-pitched now that it was inaudible, but still nerve-racking. Disturbed, frightened, Lessa followed F’lar out.

  By the t
ime she reached the ledge, the Bowl was a-whir with dragons on the wing, making for the high entrance to the Hatching Ground. Weyrfolk, riders, women, children, all screaming with excitement, were pouring across the Bowl to the lower entrance to the Ground.

  She caught sight of F’lar, charging across to the entrance, and she shrieked at him to wait. He couldn’t have heard her across the bedlam.

  Fuming because she had the long stairs to descend, then must double back as the stairs faced the feeding grounds at the opposite end of the Bowl from the Hatching Ground, Lessa realized that she, the Weyrwoman, would be the last one there.

  Why had Ramoth decided to be secretive about laying? Wasn’t she close enough to her own weyrmate to want her with her?

  A dragon knows what to do, Ramoth calmly informed Lessa.

  You could have told me, Lessa wailed, feeling much abused.

  Why, at the time F’lar had been going on largely about huge clutches and three thousand beasts, that infuriating dragon-child had been doing it!

  It didn’t improve Lessa’s temper to have to recall another remark of F’lar’s—on the state of the Hatching Grounds. The moment she stepped into the mountain-high cavern, she felt the heat through the soles of her sandals. Everyone was crowded in a loose circle around the far end of the cavern. And everyone was swaying from foot to foot. As Lessa was short to begin with, this only decreased the likelihood of her ever seeing what Ramoth had done.

  “Let me through!” she demanded imperiously, pounding on the wide backs of two tall riders.

  An aisle was reluctantly opened for her, and she went through, looking neither to her right or left at the excited weyrfolk. She was furious, confused, hurt, and knew she looked ridiculous because the hot sand made her walk with a curious mincing quickstep.

  She halted, stunned and wide-eyed at the mass of eggs, and forgot such trivial things as hot feet.

  Ramoth was curled around the clutch, looking enormously pleased with herself. She, too, kept shifting, closing and opening a protective wing over her eggs, so that it was difficult to count them.