Dragons Dawn

by Anne McCaffrey

  As he watched the grace of Carenath, swooping to snatch a fat wether from the stampeding flock, his faith in these amazing creatures was reinforced.

  “He really got some altitude there,” David said with ungrudging praise. “Look, Polenth’s dropped his wings now. He’s going for that one!”

  “Got it, too,” Sean replied in a return of compliment.

  Maybe they were all being too cautious, afraid of pushing down the throttle and seeing the result. Carenath flew strongly and well. The bronze was nearly the same height in the shoulder as Cricket, though the conformation was entirely different, Carenath being much longer in the body, deeper in the barrel, and stronger in the hindquarters. In fact, the dragons already were much stronger than similar equines, their basic structure much more durable, utilizing carborundums for strength and resilience. Pol and Bay had gone on about the design features of dragons as if they had been new sleds, which indeed, Sean thought wryly, was what they were intended to replace. According to the program, dragons would gradually increase in size over many generations until they reached the optimum. But in Sean’s eyes, Carenath was just right.

  “At least they eat neatly,” Dave said, averting his eyes from the two dragons who were rending flesh from the carcasses of their kills. “Though I wish they didn’t look like they enjoyed it so much.”

  Sean laughed. “City-bred, were you?”

  Dave nodded and smiled weakly. “Not that I wouldn’t do anything for Polenth. It’s just that it’s one thing on three-D, another to watch it live and know that your best friend prefers to hunt living animals. What did you say, Polenth?” Dave’s eyes took on that curious unfocused look that people had when being addressed by their dragons. Then he gave a rueful laugh.

  “Well?” Sean prompted him.

  “He says anything’s better than fish. He’s meant to fly, not swim.”

  “Good thing he has two bellies,” Sean remarked, seeing Polenth devouring the sheep, horns, hooves, fleece, and all. “The way he’s squaffing down the wool, he could start a premature blaze when he starts chewing firestone.”

  “He will, won’t he, Sean?” Dave’s earnest plea for reassurance worried Sean. The dragonmates could not doubt their beasts for a moment, not on any score.

  “Of course he will,” Sean said, standing up. “That’s enough, Carenath. Two fills your belly. Don’t get greedy. There are more to be fed here today.”

  The bronze had been about to launch himself into the air again, aiming toward the rise into the next valley where the terrified flock had stampeded.

  I would really like another one. So tasty. So much better than fish. I like to hunt. Carenath sounded a trifle petulant.

  “The queens hunt next, Carenath.”

  With a peevish swing of his head, Carenath began to amble back down to Sean, spreading his wings to balance himself. Dragons looked odd when they walked, since they had to crouch to their shorter forelegs; some of them fell more easily into a hop-skip gait, dropping to the forequarters every few steps or using their wings to provide frontal lift. Sean disliked seeing the dragons appear so ungainly and unbalanced.

  “See you later,” he said to David as he and Carenath turned to walk back to the cave they inhabited.

  The dragons had quickly outgrown the backyard shelters and in many cases, the patience of neighbors, some of whom worked night shifts and slept during daylight hours. Dragons were a vocal lot for a species that could not speak aloud. So dragons and partners had explored the Catherine Caves for less public accommodations. Sorka had at first worried about living underground with their baby son, Michael, but the cave site Sean had chosen was spacious, with several large chambers – their new home actually had far more space than did the house in Irish Square. Faranth and Carenath were delighted. There was even a shelf of bare earth above the cave entrance where dragons could sunbathe, the leisure activity they enjoyed even above swimming. We are all much better suited here,” Sorka had exclaimed in capitulation, and had set about making their living quarters bright with lamps, her hand-woven rugs, fabrics, and pictures that she had cadged from Joel.

  But the new quarters had proved to be more than just a physical separation, Sean realized as he and Carenath trudged along. Dave Catarel had put his finger on it in his wistful comment about being forgotten.

  This walk is long. I would rather fly on ahead, Carenath said, doing his little hop-skip beside Sean. Once again Sean thought that his brave and lovely Carenath looked like a bad cross between a rabbit and kangaroo.

  “You were designed to fly. I’ll be happy when we both fly “

  Why do you not fly on me, then? I would be easier to ride than that scared creature. Carenath did not think much of Cricket as a mount for his partner.

  Scared creature, Sean thought with a chuckle. Poor Cricket. How easy it would be to swing up to Carenath’s back and just take off! The notion made the breath catch in his throat. To fly on Carenath, instead of shuffling along on the dusty track. The adolescent year for the dragons was nearly over. Sean looked about in deep speculation. Let Carenath drop off the highest point, and he would have enough space to make that first, all-important downsweep of his wings . . .

  Sean had spent as much time watching how fire-lizards and dragons handled themselves in the air as he once had patiently observed horses. Yes, a drop off a height would be the trick.

  “C’mon, Carenath. I’m glad I didn’t let you fill your belly. C’mon, right up to the top.”

  The top? The ridge? Sean heard comprehension color the dragon’s mind, and Carenath scrambled to the height in a burst of speed that left Sean coughing in the dust. Quickly! The wind is right.

  Rubbing dust particles out of his eyes, Sean laughed aloud, feeling elation and the racing pulse of apprehension. This is the sort of thing you do now, at the right time, in the right place, he thought. And the moment was right for him to ride Carenath!

  There was no saddle to vault to, no stirrup to assist Sean to the high shoulder. Carenath dipped politely, and Sean, lightly stepping on the proffered forearm, caught the two neck ridges firmly and swung over, fitting his body between them.

  “Jays, you were designed for me,” he said with a triumphant laugh, and slapped Carenath’s neck in affection. Then he grabbed at the ridge in front of him.

  Carenath was perched on the very edge of the ridge, and Sean had an awesome view of the bottom of the rock-strewn gorge. He swallowed hastily. Flying Carenath was not at all the same thing as riding Cricket. He took a deep breath. It was also not the time for second thoughts. He took a compulsive hold with legs made strong from years of riding and shoved his buttocks as deeply into the natural saddle as he could.

  “Let’s fly, Carenath. Let’s do it now!”

  We will fly, Carenath said with ineffable calm. He tilted forward off the ridge.

  Despite years of staying astride bucking horses, sliding horses, and jumping horses, the sensation that Sean Connell experienced in that seemingly endless moment was totally different and completely new. A brief memory of a girl’s voice urging him to think of Spacer Yves flitted through his mind. He was falling through space again. A very short space. What sort of a nerd-brain was he to have attempted this?

  Faranth wants to know what we are doing, Carenath said calmly.

  Before Sean’s staggered mind registered the query, Carenath’s wings had finished their downstroke and they were rising. Sean felt the sudden return of gravity, felt Carenath’s neck under him, felt the weight and a return of the confidence that had been totally in abeyance during that endless-seeming initial drop. The power in those wing sweeps drove his seat deeper between the neck ridges as Carenath continued to beat upward. They were level with the next ridge, the floor of the gorge no longer an imminent crash site.

  “Tell Faranth that we’re flying, of course,” Sean replied. He would never admit it to Sorka -he could barely admit it to himself– but for one moment he had been totally and utterly terrified.

  I will not
let you fall, Carenath’s tone chided him.

  “I never thought you would.” Sean forced his body to relax, forced his long legs down and around Carenath’s smooth neck, but he took a firmer grip on the neck ridge. “I just didn’t think I’d stay aboard you for a minute there.”

  Carenath’s wings swept up and down, just behind Sean’s peripheral vision. He felt their strong and steady beat even if he did not see them. He could feel the air pressure against his face and his chest. There was nothing around him but air, open, empty, and absolutely marvelous.

  Yes, once he got the hang of it, flying his dragon was the most marvelous sensation he had ever had.

  I like it, too. I like flying you. You fit on me. This goes well. Where shall we go? The sky is ours.

  “Look, we better not do much of this right now, Carenath. You just ate, and we’re going to have to think this thing through. It’s not enough to fall of a ridge. Oooooooh – ” he cried inadvertently as Carenath banked and he saw the wide-open, dusty, Thread-bare ground far, far beneath him. “Straighten up!”

  I wouldn’t let you fall! Carenath sounded nearly indignant, and Sean freed one hand to give him a reassuring slap. But he quickly replaced his hand on the ridge. Jays, a rider can’t fly Thread hanging on for dear life!

  “You wouldn’t let me fall, my friend, but I might let me!”

  Trying to quell his rising sense of panic, Sean hazarded a glance at the ground. They were nearly to the rank of caves that had become their home. Sean could see Faranth on the height where she must have been sunning herself. She was sitting on her haunches, her wings half-spread. In a few sweeps of Carenath’s powerful wings they had covered a distance that ordinarily took a half hour of up-hill-down-dale slogging.

  Faranth says that Sorka says that we had better come down right away. Right away. Carenath’s tone was defiant, begging Sean to contradict the golden dragon and anything that shortened their new experience. We are flying together. It is the right thing to do for dragons and riders.

  It’s a fantastic thing to do, Carenath, but as we are now home, can you land us, say, by Faranth? Then you can tell her just how we did it!”

  Sean did not care if Sorka had hysterics over his spontaneous and totally unplanned flight. He had done it, they had succeeded, all was well that ended well. The dragons of Pern finally had riders! That would change the odds in Joel’s book!

  The other seventeen riders, including Sorka, once Faranth had reassured her about Carenath’s prowess, were delighted at their tremendous advance. Dave wanted to know why Sean had been so precipitous.

  “Couldn’t you have waited for me? Polenth and I were just behind you. You scared the living wits out of me for a moment, you know.”

  Sean clasped Dave’s arm in tacit apology. “It was what you’d said about being forgotten, Dave. I just had to try, but I didn’t want to endanger anyone else in case I was wrong.” Sean caught Sorka frowning at him and pretended to flinch. “I was all right, love. You know that! But – ” He glared warningly at the others seated on the rugs around him. “We’ve got to go about this in a logical and sensible way, folks. Flying a dragon’s not like riding a horse.”

  His glance held Nora Sejby’s. She certainly was not the sort of person he would have said would Impress a dragon, but Tenneth had chosen her, and they would have to make the best of it. Nora was accident-prone, and Tenneth had already hauled her partner out of the lake and prevented her from falling into the crevices and holes that pitted the hills around the Catherine Caves. On the other hand Nora had been sailing across Monaco Bay since she was strong enough to manage a tiller and she had checked out on both sleds and skimmers.

  “For one thing, there’s all this open air around you. Falling is down onto a hard and injurious surface,” Sean made appropriate gesture smacking one hand into the palm of the other and startling Nora with the noise.

  “So?” Peter Semling said. “We use a saddle.”

  “A dragon’s back is full of wing,” Sorka replied dryly.

  “You ride forward, sitting your butt in the hollow between the last two ridges,” Sean went on, grabbing for a sheet of opaque film and a marker. He made a quick sketch of a dragon’s neck and shoulders and the disposition of two straps. “The rider wears a stout belt, wide like a tool belt. You strap yourself in on either side, and the safety harness goes over your thigh for added security. And we’re going to need special flying gear and protective glasses – the wind made my eyes water, and I wasn’t even aloft all that long.”

  “What did it really feel like, Sean?” Catherine Radelin asked, her eyes shining in anticipation.

  Sean smiled. “The most incredible sensation I’ve ever had. Beats flying a mechanical all hollow. I mean . . .” He raised his fists, tensing his arms into his chest and giving his hands an upward thrusting turn of indescribable experience. “It’s . . . it’s between you and your dragon and . . .” He swung his arms out. “And the whole damned wide world.”

  He made a less dramatic presentation at the impromptu meeting where he was asked to account for such risk-taking. He would rather have reported privately, to maybe Admiral Benden or Pol or Red, but he found himself facing the entire council.

  “Look, sir, the risk was justified,” he said, looking quickly from the admiral to Red Hanrahan. His father-in-law had been both furious and hurt by what he considered a betrayal. Sean had not anticipated that. “We were almost to the ridge when I suddenly knew I had to prove that dragons could fly us. Sir, all the planning in the world sometimes doesn’t get you to the right point at the right time.’

  Admiral Benden nodded wisely, but the startled expression on Jim Tillek’s blunt face and Ongola’s sudden attention told Sean that he had said something wrong.

  “I could risk my own neck, sir, but no one else’s,” he went on, “so we’ve got to take our time getting some of the other riders ready to fly. I’ve done a lot of riding and sled-driving, but flying a dragon’s not the same thing, and I’m not about to go out again until Carenath’s got some safety harness on him. And me.”

  Joel Lilienkamp leaned forward across the table. “And what will that require, Connell?”

  Sean grinned, more out of relief than amusement. “Don’t worry Lili, what I need is what Pern’s got plenty of – hide. I found a use for all that tanned wher skin you’ve got in Stores. It’s plenty tough enough and it’ll be easier on dragons’ necks than that synthetic webbing used in sled harnesses. I’ve made some sketches.” He unfolded the diagrams, much improved on by his discussions with the other dragonmates. “These show the arrangement of straps and the belts we’ll need, the flying suits, and we can use some of those work goggles plastics turns out.”

  “Flying suits and plastic goggles,” Joel repeated, reaching for the drawings. He examined them with a gradually less jaundiced attitude.

  “As soon as I can rig the flying harness for Carenath, Admiral, Governor, sirs,” Sean said politely including all assembled and adding a tentative grin at Cherry Duff’s deep scowl, “you can see just how well my dragon flies me.”

  “You were informed, weren’t you,” Paul Benden said and Sean saw him rubbing the knuckles of his left hand, “that there’re new eggs on the Hatching Sands?”

  Sean nodded. “Like I told you, Admiral, eighteen are not enough to take up much slack. And it’ll be generations before there are enough.”

  “Generations?” Cherry Duff exclaimed in her raspy voice, swinging in accusation on the veterinary team. “Why weren’t we told it’d take generations?”

  “Dragon generations,” Pol answered, smiling slightly at her misinterpretation. “Not human.”

  “Well, how long’s a dragon generation?” she demanded, still affronted. She shot a disgusted scowl at Sean.

  “The females should produce their first independent clutches at three. Sean has proved that a male dragon can fly at just under a year – .”

  Cherry brought both hands down on the table, making a sharp, loud noise. “Giv
e me facts, damn it, Pol.”

  “Then, four to five years?”

  Cherry pursed her lips in annoyance, a habit that made her look even more like a dried prune, Sean thought idly.

  “Humph, then I’m not likely to see squadrons of dragons in the sky, am I? Four to five years. And when will they start flaming Thread” That was their design function, wasn’t it? When will they start being useful?”

  Sean was fed up. “Sooner than you think, Cherry Duff. Open a book on it, Joel.” With that he strode from the office. It galled him to the bone to have to take a skimmer back to Sorka and the others who waited to hear what had happened.

  Ten days later, when Joel Lilienkamp himself brought them the requisitioned belts, straps, flying kit, and goggles, flight training on the Dragons of Pern began in earnest.

  Landing had grown accustomed over the past year and a half to the grumblings and rumblings underfoot. On the morning of the second day of the fourth month of their ninth spring on Pern, early risers sleepily noted the curl of smoke, and the significance did not register.

  Sean and Sorka, emerging from their cave with Carenath and Faranth, also noticed it.

  Why does the mountain smoke? Faranth wanted to know.

  “The mountain what?” Sorka demanded, waking up enough to absorb her dragon’s words. “Jays, Sean, look!”

  Sean gave a long hard look. “It’s not Garben. It’s Picchu Peak. Patrice de Broglie was wrong! Or was he?”

  “What on earth do you mean, Sean?” Sorka stared at him in amazement.

  “I mean, there’s been all this talk of basement rock, and shifting Landing to a more practical base, with a special accommodation for dragons and us . . .” Sean kept his eyes on the plume curling languidly up from the peak, dwarfed beside the mightier Garben but certainly as ominous. He shrugged. “Not even Paul Benden can make a volcano erupt on cue. Come, we can get breakfast at your mothers. Let’s stuff Mick in his flying suit and go. Maybe your dad will have received some official word.” He scowled. “We’re always the last ones to get news. I’ve got to convince Joel to release at least one comm unit for the caves.”