that—”
The sound of a dragon arriving cut her short.
“I would have expected him sooner,” Wind Blossom said, glancing out the
window to confirm the arrival of M’hall from Benden Weyr.
“Maybe he had better things to do,” Emorra said waspishly.
“Maybe he didn’t wish to infect his dragon,” Wind Blossom returned
imperturbably. She started out to greet the bronze rider, then turned back to
ask Emorra, “Did you want to come along?”
Emorra shook her head. “No, I’ve got a class to teach.”
Wind Blossom met M’hall just inside the archway of the College.
“I was hoping to meet you,” M’hall said as he caught sight of her.
“And
I
had been expecting you,” Wind Blossom answered with a courteous
nod. She gestured toward the kitchen. “Shall we see if Moira has anything
for a Weyrleader fresh from
between
?”
M’hall smiled. “Yes, please!”
Moira did, indeed, have a fresh pot of
klah
and some scones still warm
from the oven. “There’s butter, too,” she said. “Alandro’s gone to fetch it.”
“Many thanks!” M’hall replied, taking the tray and finding a quiet alcove.
Once seated, he poured for both of them and waited until Alandro arrived
with the butter. They each had a hot buttered scone. That done, M’hall got
right to it: “Tell me about these fire-lizards and your medical emergency.”
Wind Blossom repeated the events as best she could. When she was
done, M’hall leaned back slowly on his bench and sighed. Then he
straightened again, buttered another scone, and ate in thoughtful silence.
“And the beadwork? No one on Pern now could have made it?” he asked at
last.
“So Emorra informs me,” Wind Blossom said. She waved a hand in a
throwaway gesture. “Of course, beads are such tiny things that they may
have come across from Landing uninventoried.”
M’hall snorted. “Not from what I’ve heard of Joel Lilienkamp! Rumor has it
that he hand-counted each
nail
that he came across. I can’t see how he’d
miss beads.”
“But it
is
possible,” Wind Blossom reiterated without conviction.
M’hall nodded in understanding. “It’s particularly possible for those to whom
the other explanation is too incredible.”
“Or uncomfortable,” Wind Blossom added.
“And not too many people know about all the capabilities of fire-lizards,”
M’hall said. In a lower voice, he added, “Or dragons.”
After a moment of silent reflection, he continued. “So, if they came from the
future, what then?”
Wind Blossom shrugged. “Perhaps it was a minor outbreak, and these two
were the only ones who succumbed to it.”
“That’s the best-case scenario,” M’hall agreed. His voice hardened. “What
about the worst-case?”
Wind Blossom pursed her lips tightly before responding. “In the worst
case, the disease could be transmitted to others.”
“Including the dragons?”
Wind Blossom nodded.
“What about the watch-whers?” M’hall pressed.
“Those, too, in the worst case,” Wind Blossom agreed solemnly. “Although
I would have greater hopes for them.”
“Why?” M’hall asked.
“I made an effort to differentiate them somewhat more from the original
genome than we did with the dragons,” she answered.
“I always knew that dragons were fire-lizards writ large,” M’hall said. “What
were watch-whers, then?”
“Dragons ‘writ’ differently,” Wind Blossom told him.
“Could you differentiate the dragons from the ‘original genome,’ too?”
M’hall asked.
“Perhaps,” Wind Blossom responded. “But whether it would be enough, I
don’t know.”
“Why not work on a cure for all three—fire-lizards, dragons, and
watch-whers?”
“Because if I did that,” Wind Blossom responded, “then, judging by those
two fire-lizards, I failed.”
M’hall stroked his chin thoughtfully. “How long do you think it would be
before someone comes up with those beads and uses them to make
harnesses?”
“Do you mean, how far in the future do I think those fire-lizards came
from?” Wind Blossom asked.
M’hall nodded.
Wind Blossom shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“But sooner in the future rather than later,” M’hall suggested. “I can’t see
fire-lizards jumping far
between
times.”
“They were sick, disoriented,” Wind Blossom pointed out. “I know too little
of the breed to say whether they’d jump farther or shorter in such
circumstances.”
“Well, they must have been here before: To return here they must have had
a good visual image of the place.”
“Perhaps,” Wind Blossom said. At M’hall’s probing look, she expounded, “I
recall that fire-lizards can sometimes locate a person they know in an
unfamiliar setting.”
M’hall nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard that, too. But usually they go where they’ve
been before, looking for someone they already know. Given that they were
sick—”
Wind Blossom raised an eyebrow reproachfully. M’hall caught the look and
laughed.
“Very well,” he said, “I’ll leave the diagnosing to you. Are you saying they
might have gone back in time to a familiar person?”
“I was saying that I don’t know,” Wind Blossom responded.
M’hall nodded and resumed a thoughtful expression. After a moment he
stirred. “Is there anything you can do? Is this talk just conjectural?”
“Perhaps I can do something,” Wind Blossom said. “I would need to know
more about the problem.”
“And there’s no way to do that,” M’hall said. “Not unless another fire-lizard
or”—his voice dropped—“a dragon falls out of the sky.”
“I have considered that, yes,” Wind Blossom replied.
M’hall gave her a startled look. “Is that why you ordered all that
agenothree?”
“Do you mean nitric acid, HNO ?” Wind Blossom asked primly.
3
The redheaded dragonrider blushed. “Yes, I do,” he said, looking
chagrinned. “When you’re flying Threadfall, you tend to slur words, so it
becomes agenothree.”
“Mmm,” Wind Blossom murmured noncommittally.
“You’re teasing me!” M’hall exclaimed suddenly with a startled laugh. “I
don’t believe it! You’re actually teasing me.”
Wind Blossom lowered her eyes shamefully for a moment and then raised
them again to meet his. “It is very rude of me, I know,” she said sheepishly.
“I never even
knew
you had a sense of humor.”
“My mother would berate me for it,” Wind Blossom agreed. “However, it
has kept me company in trying times. I had hoped to keep it under control
but apparently it got away from me again.”
“Oh, you enjoyed that all right,” M’hall said, wagging a finger at her. “Don’t
deny it, you enjoyed it.”
Wind Blossom nodded. “I do not deny it.”
M’hall sobered suddenly. “You say that your humor surfaces in trying times?
Are these trying times?”
“Every day is a trying time,” Wind Blossom answered evasively. M’hall
pinned her with his gaze and the old lady accepted his chiding with a nod of
her head.
“We have embarked on a great experiment in ecological engineering,” she
explained. “Every ecosystem is resilient and conservative in nature. It will
always try to maintain the status quo. Adding dragons, watch-whers,
Tubberman’s grubs, and, most importantly, all our Terran ecosystem has
altered the status quo. It is inevitable that there will be repercussions.”
“And it’s your job to guard against those repercussions,” M’hall said firmly.
“It’s my job for this generation,” Wind Blossom corrected. “I am eighty-one
years old, M’hall. I might possibly live to see ninety, but certainly not one
hundred.”
“Did you ever determine the cause of the early dementia?” M’hall asked
choosing his words carefully.
“No,” Wind Blossom replied softly. “The emergency with the fire-lizard
came before I could complete my analysis.”
M’hall shifted uncomfortably.
Wind Blossom noted his unease. “Janir and I have talked about this,” she
told him. “We agree that my short-term memory is fading, but my long-term
memory, particularly of events in my youth, remains strong.”
“Is there anything we can do?” M’hall asked softly, relieved that Wind
Blossom had answered the question he could not bring himself to ask.
“Janir knows to keep an eye on me,” Wind Blossom said. “And now, so do
you.”
“And Emorra?”
“I have not told her myself, but I believe she has made her own diagnosis,”
Wind Blossom said after a moment. She looked the dragonrider squarely in
the eyes. “You know how difficult it is to lose a parent.”
M’hall nodded swiftly in agreement.
“Janir and I have agreed that whatever is reducing mental capacity in the
elderly will probably not be a factor in the future,” Wind Blossom continued.
M’hall thought that over for a moment. He could think of no one still alive
near Wind Blossom’s age. His own mother had been only seventy when
she died, and his father, Sean, had been sixty-two. He did not need Wind
Blossom to tell him that the harder life on Pern would mean reduced life
expectancies.
He sought a new subject. “What happens after you, Wind Blossom?”
“In the Eridani Way there should be others for the succeeding
generations.”
“Do you mean Emorra and Tieran?” M’hall asked. “That smacks of slavery,
to expect them to continue blindly in the tradition.”
“It is more of a genetic destiny,” Wind Blossom said. The look in her eyes
made M’hall realize that she herself was an example of that “genetic
destiny.” “The Eridani Way involves a discipline transcending generations
and millennia, a dedication to the good of the ecosystem.”
“I can appreciate their goals, but I don’t like their methods,” M’hall replied.
Wind Blossom nodded. “Neither do I,” she agreed. “And I have better
reason than most to appreciate their goals and question their methods. In
fact, if we were in contact with the EEC, I’d have some comments to make
to the Eridani Council itself.”
M’hall’s eyebrows rose as he considered the image of this tiny old lady
berating the prestigious Eridani Council. He imagined the Eridani Council
would soon see the error of its ways.
“What would your comments be?” he asked, his eyes dancing humorously.
“I would say that I consider it a mistake to engage an aristocracy in
maintaining ecologies—that it should be something that is the inheritance of
every sentient being living in the ecosystem,” Wind Blossom told him.
“I see,” M’hall said. “And how would you implement that here, on Pern?”
Wind Blossom shook her head. “I don’t know,” she replied. “With an
adequate technology base and a larger population, there would be time to
teach everyone. But this is a world built on agriculture—we don’t have the
tools required to do delicate genetic testing. There are not enough people
and not enough food for our expanding population.”
“It would seem that here,” M’hall said, waving his hand around to indicate
the College, “would be the place to retain that knowledge.”
“We’re already losing that knowledge,” Wind Blossom said. “Shortly we’ll
be unable to perform any invasive surgery. We haven’t got the equipment
to monitor the effect of an anesthetic on a person, let alone the people
trained to administer it.”
“What about genetics?”
“Genetics is even worse,” Wind Blossom said. “Fortunately the base
population is pretty healthy, but there will be mutations—there are about six
to seven hundred mutations in every newborn—and some of those will be
malevolent.
“We could teach something about basic genetics, plant breeding and so
on, but nothing about genome manipulation—how to detect and repair
defective genes.”
M’hall grimaced. “So do you see no hope?”
“I didn’t say that. There’s a chance that at some future date—perhaps a
thousand years or more—our society will advance to the point where it will
be possible to recover what was lost at Landing and re-establish contact
with the
Yokohama
or the other ships in orbit. When that happens, all the
knowledge we had will be made available to our descendants,” she said.
“What they do with it will be up to them, of course.”
“So you’re worried about the short-term only?”
Wind Blossom shook her head. “My
training
leaves me worried about our
world.”
M’hall nodded sympathetically. “I share your worries, you know,” he told her.
He rose and stretched. “I must get back to my Weyr.”
Wind Blossom nodded understandingly.
“There is less to do now, but more than I’d realized,” he added with a rueful
grin. “Still, if anything else happens to fall out of the sky—let me know. And
if you come up with any ideas on how to solve these problems you worry
about, let me know and I’ll do all I can to help.”
“Thank you, M’hall, that’s all I could hope for,” Wind Blossom answered.
As they walked back out through the courtyard to where Brianth was waiting,
M’hall looked down at the dimunitive old-timer and said conversationally,
“You know, Wind Blossom, you need a break from all this.”
He wagged a finger in response to her shocked expression. “Some time
off will do you a world of good. If you want to go someplace, like a warm