The Skies of Pern

by Anne McCaffrey

  “I’ll match those with Shaula and Antares,” and he lightly touched her shoulder to turn her toward Adhara.

  “I am glad that you retained Honshu’s old name,” she said softly, her voice rough with fatigue. “I think it is honorable that we use the names the Ancients had for their places, and their stars.”

  “Why not? They brought the names with them. The stars haven’t moved that much and there are bright ones in our skies that the Ancients saw from old Earth only as dim ones.”

  “It isn’t the stars we have to worry about,” Tai said, her voice as weary as the sudden slump in her shoulders.

  “No, it isn’t,” he agreed tiredly, “but it’s good to see they don’t change. I’ve a pair of binoculars, you know, if you’d like to use them tomorrow night.”

  “You do?” Excitement briefly sparkled in tired eyes and then she sighed. “Tomorrow, if you’d trust me with them. They’re … hard to come by.”

  F’lessan managed a wry grin. “I’ve known Piemur and Jancis a long time, you see, so I snuck to the top of the list. Besides, they’re very keen to get the Honshu instrument working. A bit of extortion!”

  “Extortion?” That startled her.

  “It’s all friendly. A dare and challenge situation,” he assured her. “Tomorrow night then. We both need the sleep tonight.” He put his hand lightly on the small of her back and gave a push.

  Quietly they left the upper terrace and separated in the hall inside. For this one night, fire-lizards would stand watch. F’lessan shared his room with the last to arrive: T’lion, bronze Gadareth’s rider, and his brother, K’drin, brown Buleth’s rider. Fortunately, neither snored.

  Part 3

  AFTERMATH

  Honshu—1.10.31

  F’lessan found himself awake at Benden’s usual dawn hour though night lingered at Honshu.

  Ramoth says we must come back to Benden, Golanth told him. The brown riders will visit your seaholders. They are Monaco’s people, not Benden’s.

  F’lessan quietly gathered his clothing, hoping to have a chance to bathe and change, and left his room without waking the others. He took a quick shower; there’d be many people wanting one. He was glad he’d fixed the cisterns. As he padded down the stairs, past many sleepers, the pungent and irresistible odor of fresh klah told him someone else was awake. He heard voices, arguing quietly but intensely. Well, that was their problem, whoever it was. He needed klah.

  He slid open the panel into the kitchen and nearly ducked out again when he saw that it was Mirrim and Tai who were bickering. Or rather, Mirrim was ranting at Tai, who kept saying “No, I didn’t,” “No, the children came first,” and “I don’t know how.”

  Zaranth says, Golanth told him, that Mirrim thinks Tai deserted the Weyr’s children to save her skins.

  Skins?

  Her pelts from the Cardiff felines.

  She saved the children. I sent you with her.

  Zaranth says she got the skins.

  How could she? F’lessan looked from Mirrim’s angry face to Tai’s pale one. You were with her. She came and went with you.

  “Golanth says Zaranth was with him all the time, transporting children,” F’lessan said and strode across the counter to the huge urn of klah. He’d have a cup no matter what the argument was.

  Mirrim whirled toward him. “She didn’t have the skins when she got to the Weyr. She did have them when she left.”

  “I didn’t get them.”

  She’s telling the truth, Golanth said.

  “Golanth says Tai’s telling the truth, Mirrim, so leave her alone.”

  “Then how did she get them?” Mirrim demanded.

  “I didn’t!” Tai was taut with anger and frustration. “If I’d had time to get to my place, I’d’ve saved my books and notes. Not sharding pelts.”

  “Pelts like that would have given you enough credit to buy new books,” Mirrim countered.

  “Ahha, but not her notes, Mirrim. Golanth says she’s telling the truth. Now leave it!” F’lessan rarely spoke in such a tone. Mirrim gulped, and swallowed whatever she had been about to say. F’lessan used her silence to drink as much hot klah as he could. “Thanks, whoever brewed the klah.” He looked toward the pale, tense Tai and smiled, indicating he was certain she’d made the klah.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she murmured.

  “And, if that doesn’t—” Mirrim began.

  “I told you to leave it, Mirrim!” F’lessan took a menacing step toward Mirrim who unexpectedly gave ground. He saw the meatrolls on the counter behind Tai and, stepping around her, grabbed a handful. “Thanks, Tai. Besides which, Mirrim, I didn’t see the pelts on Zaranth’s saddle until Landing.”

  As he hurriedly slid the door open to leave, he heard Mirrim sputtering behind him. He bumped into T’gellan who looked thin and haggard despite a night’s sleep.

  “No matter what Mirrim says, ‘Gell, Golanth says Tai’s not lying. Good flying today.”

  He raced down the stairs and out the wide door to the main terrace before he sat down to put on boots and jacket, allowing Golanth time to arrive from wherever he had weyred that night. Slits of blue and green dragon eyes on the terraces above watched him mount but closed again before Golanth tilted off the ledge and made his first wingstroke. Far to the east was the brightening of the sky on a new day.

  And what does it have in store for us? F’lessan wondered.

  Tai was telling the truth.

  I know.

  Zaranth saved the pelts.

  I suppose, F’lessan said facetiously, because she didn’t know which books and notes to save.

  Quite likely. Ramoth calls me.

  With that, the bronze went between.

  Considering what filled the day, it was not at all surprising F’lessan did not dwell on that exchange. He and Golanth conveyed people and necessities to various Benden coastal holdings, reporting on how the flooded areas were draining, occasionally using dragon strength to shift wave-driven debris, and everywhere he had to explain that the dragons could not have stopped the Fireball from hitting nor held back the tsunami. He was repeatedly asked why Thread was still falling now that the Red Star was supposed to be gone. Few understood that the Red Star had only shepherded Thread close to Pern and what was falling now was what the Red Star had dragged in behind it.

  At first he’d used diagrams on the sand, in the dirt, or on a piece of paper: a big circle for the Sun, a much smaller one for Pern, tiny ones for the two moons. He’d draw the orbit of the Red Star, and show how it swooped down and around Pern, then out, carrying with it the cloud of Thread.

  “Why does it take so long?” he was asked.

  “Thread’s been on its way and it takes between forty-five and fifty of our Turns to get past it again.”

  Then he’d be asked why the Fireball had dropped. He answered that by saying it had been a leftover fragment from the Turnover Ghosts, lost trying to follow the others. (That might not be exactly the truth; Masters Wansor, Idarolan, and the newly promoted Master Erragon still had to deliver an official verdict, but at least most people had seen Ghosts and could accept the little fiction.) He’d drop another stone—the Fireball—into the water and show them how the tsunami was like the ripples. It was, he knew, an explanation, not an answer. He didn’t know what the answer was, especially for those who’d lost a lot to “ripples.”

  Back at Benden Weyr, no one had the energy or the wish to settle on a better explanation. Or an answer. The next day Benden was flying Thread so, after eating quickly and checking on S’lan to be sure the lad was holding up well, he retired to his weyr, checking his safety harness and wondering if he could afford new leather pants to replace the ones the last few days had split, torn, and scraped. F’lessan remembered Tai’s fine pelts. Well, there were plenty of felines to be hunted near Honshu. He could probably trade such pelts for wher-hide pants from the Weyr’s tanner. It’d be fun to hunt with Tai and Zaranth. Golanth agreed. So F’lessan gave the drowsing bronze an
affectionate rub and went out to the ledge of his weyr. He clasped his arms with his hands against the chill. During those earlier lessons with Aivas, he had made himself familiar with the names of the brightest stars to be seen in Benden’s wintry skies. Canopus was low on the horizon, Girtab outshining her.

  He really ought to get to work now; to make Honshu a viable part of what dragonriders could “do” to protect the planet. That was at least obvious to him. He had no idea how a dragon, or all the dragons of Pern, could stop another fireball—they didn’t have any more antimatter engines to drop on them, he thought wryly—but it made a lot of good sense to find out if anything else was likely to impact any time soon. From some scrap of those nearly disregarded astronomy lessons, he remembered that hazardous impacts were infrequent. There were a few documented, like the Circle Runner Station and the most recent meteorite that had rammed into the prison yard at Crom Minehold.

  Wansor, old Lytol, and D’ram were certainly working all out on updating orbits with Erragon down at Cove Hold. The skies currently above Pern had altered within Rukbat’s system since the colonists had first surveyed it twenty-five hundred and fifty-three Turns ago. Asteroids had collided, broken up into different pieces, spinning into new orbits. Perhaps one of them had been the Fireball. Others, like the erratic wanderer inaccurately called the Red Star had entered the system as comets or fragments. In the spare moments F’lessan had had, he’d reviewed his old astronomy notes from his classes with Aivas. A long-forgotten lesson reminded him that the Yoko got its information from what the Ancients had called “a southern array of satellites.” Aivas had once mentioned the absence of a northern array, which would have given a much clearer picture of minor planets, comets, and other orbiting bodies. He remembered that there were more telescopes stored in the Catherine Caves, which probably would have been set up in observatories to keep track of such objects. Old Earth certainly had known exactly what was in its solar system. But no one had anticipated the Red Star and Thread falling on Pern.

  Thread must have sharded a lot of the colonists’ plans, F’lessan thought to himself.

  To identify what now circled in Pern’s spatially near vicinity would need more than however many apprentices and journeymen currently worked at Cove Hold. The telescope in the ingenious observatory that old Kenjo had contrived was the type that required a computer and a screen to display what it saw. The 10×50mm binoculars he had wheedled out of Jancis worked well enough. With these he had been able to spot what were marked in the Aivas charts as minor planets and the larger objects in the asteroid belt. But to have an instrument that would produce images that one could study in detail! That would help enormously in charting the skies. He grinned, rubbing his cold arms. And maybe he’d get Tai to help him. Ah!

  When the entire furor over the Flood had eased down, he was sure he could now get authorization from Master Wansor to withdraw the appropriate boards and crystals out of storage at Admin to be able to focus the primary mirror. Aivas had taught him how to assemble a computer. Benelek, another of his old friends and now Master of the Computer Hall, could probably be talked into helping him. Screens were harder to come by, but he might just cajole Stinar into giving him a spare one, if he promised regular reports of what the ancient Schmidt-type telescope detected.

  Enough stargazing. He had a tiring day ahead of him. He hadn’t had a chance to show Tai where he kept the binoculars or the stand. Much less the glory of the Honshu observatory. As he turned on his heels and walked quickly back into his weyr, out of the cold, he smiled to himself: she’d like that!

  Circle Runner Station—1.18.31

  “Not the first time things have fallen on Pern that weren’t Thread!” Chesmic, Circle’s garrulous Stationmaster said to the two men who had asked for a night’s shelter. Since it was extremely cold and there was enough in the stew pot for two more, Chesmic allowed them in. Besides, he could use a new audience. Every other Runner gathered for a warm meal before continuing their runs had already heard his usual tale.

  “Why d’you think we call this place Circle?” he went on, glancing first at one and then the other.

  “Do tell us,” the younger man said, his tone so close to downright rudeness that Chesmic almost didn’t continue.

  “Do tell us.” The older man with the scarred face spoke more courteously, in a deep, oddly muffled voice. When he broke off a piece of bread from the big loaf in the center of the table, Chesmic noticed that he was minus the top joint of the first finger on his left hand.

  “Not because it’s built round.” As he took up his tale again, Chesmic’s penetrating glare included everyone at his table and their quiet conversations stopped. “Which it ain’t. But, ’cos o’ that great hole out there!” He pointed in the appropriate direction. “Twenty good paces from the front door and twice as deep as the tallest man ever growed. ’Cos that’s where that—” and now he pointed to the twisted black fragment displayed in a niche in the stone wall, “—landed!”

  Of the two guests, only the older man looked at it. His companion assumed a supercilious smile as he continued to spoon stew into his face. At least, Chesmic thought, they won’t complain they hadn’t been well fed at Circle.

  “Nothing compared to what the Fireball did,” the younger man said, openly contemptuous. “Never should have messed with the Red Star.”

  “That—” Chesmic waggled his hand toward the crater, “fell over a thousand Turns ago before Aivas had the dragonriders push the Red Star out of harm’s way.” He rushed on before the arrogant young man could do more than open his mouth. “So it stands to reason there ain’t no connection twixt it and the thing what plowed through Crom Minehold. Both of them are meteorites.” He pronounced each syllable. “Ain’t the first that have fallen. Fireball was a different thing altogether. Right?” he asked the Runners.

  They murmured agreement with him.

  “Does Crom Minehold display its meteorite as you do?” asked the older man in his odd speech.

  Chesmic couldn’t quite place the man’s accent. He was certainly not from Keroon; Keroonians drawled—that is, when they spoke at all. Nor was he from the eastern coast. Runners bred there spoke in crisp tones. West coasters did, too, though they accented some words differently. That was it. The man had no accent, no tone to his words: he just spoke them and sometimes blurred the t’s and d’s and n’s.

  “Naw, sold it to the Smithcrafthall for more marks than the mines’ve earned in Turns.” Chesmic did not wholly approve of that sale but it had been their meteorite. Not that he couldn’t have sold his to the Smithcrafthall, if he felt like it, but you couldn’t sell something that had been in his family so long. Wouldn’t be right!

  “I heard that they think it’s part of the Red Star,” the young man said, a sly gleam in his eyes.

  “That’s a bundle of snake wallop,” Chesmic replied contemptuously. He pointed skyward. “Iffen the Red Star had broke up—which Masters Erragon and Stinar and Wansor has seen through Cove Hold that it hasn’t—we’d have rocks falling down all over the planet. And we don’t.”

  “That Fireball made enough trouble for us,” one of the Runners said.

  “It was wrong to move the Red Star,” the older man said, his face somber and his voice forbidding. “It has circled Pern for centuries and to alter its course is a bad deed.”

  “Oh, it’s still to circle Pern,” Chesmic agreed. “Just not close enough to drop Thread on us again.”

  “Thread, and the dragonriders flaming it out of our skies, is tradition. So many have been broken. So much has Aivas corrupted our way of life, our traditions.”

  There was something about the man’s toneless voice that caught you up in his words but Chesmic knew about traditions. Runners followed ones that belonged to the first Crafthall to be formed at Fort Hold.

  “There isn’t a Runner on any trace on Pern, north or south, that does not follow tradition. And since you’ve both finished eating, you’d best make use of the beds that tradition—” Che
smic paused to be sure these strangers understood what he meant. “—requires us to offer travelers during winter.” He rose and gestured toward the loft steps.

  The older one rose and bowed. So did the younger man, but his expression was sullen as they both made their way to the sleeping loft.

  Mulling over the unease he had felt about that pair, Chesmic recalled the description that Prilla had given of the man who’d stopped her on the trace to carry a message onward. Definitely it had been the older fellow, for Prilla had mentioned his odd deep voice. He’d’ve been wearing a hat, possibly, so the scar wouldn’t’ve been so noticeable. Of course he’d paid his mark piece for the service or Prilla wouldn’t have carried it a stride farther. But why’d a fellow waylay a Runner when he could have easily brought it to the Station and had it logged on and all in the proper manner?

  Harper Hall

  Well into the next month, as the flooded coasts drained and, in most cases, resumed their previous contours, food and materials were sent by almost every inland hold, minor or major on both continents, to sustain and rebuild drowned holds. Messages bulged Runner pouches and fire-lizards carried more, finding out who needed what and where. Shipmasters volunteered free cargo space and, on the days between Threadfalls, riders offered the services of their dragons and themselves. In the atmosphere of renewed friendships and mutual assistance, the unfortunate occurrences at Turn’s End faded in the press of other priorities. The general movement of matériel and people included some of those in whom Pinch had an interest. He did know that messages were sent, but not to whom or their content. None of the people he watched so assiduously had fire-lizards, which proved that fire-lizards wouldn’t come to just anyone who fed them. He could never quite get close enough to hear their discreet conferences. He’d come back to Harper Hall to report, get some new clothes and marks.