THE GIRL WHO HEARD DRAGONS

 

 

Copyright (c) 1994 by Anne McCaffrey

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

Introduction: So, You're Anne McCaffrey

 

 

1 The Girl Who Heard Dragons

 

 

2 Velvet Fields

 

 

3 Euterpe on a Fling

 

 

4 Duty Calls

 

 

5 A Sleeping Humpty Dumpty Beauty

 

 

6 The Mandalay Cure

 

 

7 A Flock of Geese

 

 

8 The Greatest Love

 

 

9 A Quiet One

 

 

10 If Madam Likes You..

 

 

11 Zulei, Grace, Nimshi, and the Damnyankees

 

 

12 Cinderella Switch

 

 

13 Habit Is an Old Horse

 

 

14 Lady-in-Waiting

 

 

15 The Bones Do Lie

 

 

So, You're Anne McCaffrey

 

 

I'm never sure what image readers construct of me from reading my books. But, generally, when I get a response of "You're Anne McCaffrey?" I haven't had the nerve to ask what they were expecting. Tones range from skepticism to deep disappointment and incredulity. Yet I do describe myself.. "My hair is silver, my eyes are green, and I freckle. The rest is subject to change without notice" -- the "rest" being the unrepentant bulk of me.

 

 

Fortunately, the faces of authors are not as widely displayed as those of more public celebrities. Often the jacket flap or the back copy includes a photo, formal or informal, of the author, which very few people ever connect to the person sitting next to them on an airplane or walking in a mall.

 

 

Once, on the shuttle from New York to Boston, I was recognized: I'd been on a Boston TV talk show that noon. I remember the show vividly, because during a commercial break I was sitting in the audience, waiting my turn, when Ethel Merman suddenly swept in. She was there to promote her autobiography. She did, then swept out again. To my horror, I was beckoned to come on the set then.

 

 

I was still sort of in a trance (as I used to sing many of the songs that Ethel Merman had made popular) when the presenter asked me how I get such fantastic ideas.

 

 

"That's nowhere near as fantastic as following Ethel Merman's act on this show," I replied, and got a laugh and applause.

 

 

About two hours later, as I was filing down the aisle of the shuttle, a girl tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was Anne McCaffrey.

 

 

"Oh, are you a fan?" I asked, pleased.

 

 

"No, I just thought I recognized you from the show with Ethel Merman."

 

 

Very early on in my career, I learned never to admit to seatmates on airplanes (particularly long-distance flights) that I write for a living.

 

 

That was a surefire way to be told in exhaustive detail their idea for a best-selling novel, invariably based on an autobiographical event. When asked directly what I do, I tend to vary between saying I'm 1) a potato farmer, 2) a horse breeder, and 3) going to visit my grandchildren. The latter generally silences all but the most garrulous. Who wants to be shown pictures or bored with tales of precocious off-spring?

 

 

Twice, though, seatmates provided considerable gratification for me. In I980, I was suffering from a heavy cold on a short hop from Melbourne to Sydney, Australia, and I had buried my head in the mammoth crossword puzzle I was doing. Having the window seat, I didn't pay much attention as the other passengers filed into our row.

 

 

When I did come up for a look, I was amazed to see the man next to me - mid-thirties, attractive, very elegantly dressed in fine gray flannel with a silk shirt and Countess Mara tie - engrossed in a book with an extremely familiar cover: To Ride Pegasus. I waited until he was turning a page and then asked him in a sort of skeptical tone if the book was any good.

 

 

He looked up and replied that yes, it was good but then he enjoyed all this author's books.

 

 

"That's good;' said I, "because you're sitting next to her!"

 

 

He introduced himself as David Ogilvy, the director of the Sydney Opera Company, on his way to direct Joan Sutherland in a concert version of Lucia di Lammermoor. We chatted quite amiably until the plane landed, but I count him as one of my more prestigious readers.

 

 

Every time I'm at Andromeda Book Shop in Birmingham, I'm asked to sign a book for Bob Monkhouse. "We must stop meeting like this!"

 

 

In April I984, on one of those remarkable zigzag air routes from New York to Alaska, I acquired two new seat-mates in Dallas: a very pretty girl in the middle seat, and on the aisle a gangly guy, who immediately chatted her up. She was a beauty counselor on her way to Seattle, and he announced that he had just finished a first-aid course for helicopter pilots and was on his way back to Fairbanks, Alaska - my ultimate destination. I listened to their banter but didn't add anything.

 

 

When she left the plane at Seattle, I asked him about the weather in Fairbanks. He was quite civil, but he obviously wanted to get back to the book he was reading - which was an SF title. I asked him if he liked reading the genre, and he replied that he liked the hard science but fantasy bored him. Out of courtesy, he asked why I was on my way to Alaska, so I told him I was a potato farmer.

 

 

I spent a marvelous time as author in residence in Fairbanks, going dogsledding, eating moose-meat spaghetti, watching the aurora borealis, corrupting junior and senior high-school students and undergraduates at the University of Alaska - anyone I could get my hands on. I was there on my birthday, and the local bakery students whornped up an irnmense White Dragon cake ---- enough for everyone in the Fairbanks Arts buffet. On the final Saturday, I was doing an autograph session in one of the malls, when in comes my airplane friend, arms loaded down with books, wife and daughters trailing after him. He stopped in front of my table and plopped down every book I had written, including the three Dell romances.

 

 

"You didn't tell me you were famous," he accused me.

 

 

"You didn't ask!"

 

 

Then there are those times at conventions when people don't yet realize that you're the Guest of Honor. I enjoy sitting at the registration table when my con schedule permits - and getting a charge out of reactions.

 

 

In Baltimore in I977 (the year I discovered I had become a cult figure), I was sitting in the registration area when a woman, neatly dressed in a Villager shirtwaist dress, carrying two heavy Lord & Taylor shopping bags, advanced on the desk. She was not at all the type that you would expect would read SF I thought she might have got into the wrong hotel. She wanted to know if Anne McCaffrey was really speaking that day. I replied that she was. The woman asked at what time, so I told her (all this with two of the registration staff trying to keep their faces straight).

 

 

"Are you sure she's going to speak?"

 

 

"Oh, yes, I can vouch for it. She's here and she'll be speaking at two o'clock."

 

 

Only then would she pay for her day badge. After my speech, the lady approached me again, still lugging her shopping bags.

 

 

She gave me a sideways glance and then smiled. "You fooled me." She upended the shopping bags to display all my novels, including the romances, and the magazines that had published my short stories.

 

 

"And you fooled me" I replied, pointing at the bags. We both had a chuckle.

 

 

I remember being asked if I knew Doris Pitkin Buck, who was in her seventies when I first met her at Milford, Pennsylvania, but who could write tales with intense and horrific insights into human nature or gentle and restorative tales. When I admitted to knowing her, the boy asked me how old she was.

 

 

"How old do you think she is?" I asked.

 

 

"Oh, early twenties." Obviously that was a considerable age to him. "How ever did you guess?" Well, why not? Doris wrote with a very young, romantic voice at times, and for the duration of those stories she was in her early twenties. The identity dichotomy (the real versus the imaginary) started for me in the late I960s, by the time of the Kent student massacre. My son Alec, who started his career as a protestor at this point, asked permission to use the SFWA mimeograph machine to run off some flyers for a march to be held in Sea Cliff, Long Island, where we were living. Alec was bustling about my office, introducing his mother to the Columbia students who were joining in the march. One of them noticed the titles on the bookshelves.

 

 

"Hey, who reads science fiction?" one young man asked.

 

 

"My mother," Alec replied, because he was not totally convinced that he wanted a science-fiction author as his mother.

 

 

"Hey, why does your mother have four and five copies of Anne McCaffrey's books?" the boy wanted to know. "Because she is Anne McCaffrey," Alee replied, exasperated.

 

 

"No shit!" was the admiring response.

 

 

I think that's when Alec realized that having an SF author as a mother was not altogether a bad hit.

 

 

Alec never has been much of a fiction reader anyhow, and certainly not as dedicated to science fiction as his brother, Todd. In fact, it wasn't until Alec was shamed by clients at the I00 Flowers Book Shop he managed in Cambridge that he finally read Dragonflight.

 

 

Now he takes great pride in my success and is diligent about reporting how my books are displayed at the local malls, and will always turn my titles out whenever he can.

 

 

A variant of that occurred the day I was looking for a copy of Todd's first published novel: Slammers Down, a Pathway adventure based on David Drake's military novels.

 

 

The B. Dalton store manager recognized me and came up proudly to point out their display of my titles.

 

 

"I'm looking for Todd Johnson's novel" I told him, and saw his bafflement. "He's my son, and it's his first!" I added, beaming like any fatuously proud mother. And I was.

 

 

"But you're Anne McCaffrey" was the manager's startled reply.

 

 

"That doesn't keep me from being Todd Johnson's mother!"

 

 

Todd also had encounters with the doubting: well, it's understandable, since I reverted to my maiden name after my divorce. When Todd was doorman one evening in Lehigh's gymnasium, reading The White Dragon, which had just been published, one of the students noticed the title.

 

 

"Hey, is it any good?" he asked Todd.

 

 

"It's not bad;' and Todd has always been scrupulously honest, "but there're a lot of typos."

 

 

"There are? Going to tell the publisher?"

 

 

"No, I'll tell Anne McCaffrey."

 

 

"How do you dare do that?"

 

 

"She's my mother."

 

 

"I find that hard to believe," the student replied, and stalked off.

 

 

As it happened, Decision at Doona, based on Todd's remarkable personality, was dedicated "to Todd Johnson, of course."

 

 

When I arrived at Lehigh in between conventions later that year, I signed all the copies of Decision in Lehigh's bookshop, adding "Yes, I AM his mother!"

 

 

When Todd joined the U.S. Army to serve at Boblingen, West Germany, he would haunt the post bookshop for new titles. He was somewhat surprised to find his captain searching for new SF releases. So they fell to talking about authors and new titles, and the captain picked up a copy of Moreta, recommending it to Todd, who demurred.

 

 

"Thanks, sir, but I've read it."

 

 

"It just came in"

 

 

"I read it in manuscript."

 

 

"How'd you do that, Johnson?"

 

 

"She's my mother!"

 

 

(Again) "No shit!"

 

 

Having fans in useful places is a phenomenon that occurs when you least expect it, and most need it.

 

 

The best "for instance" was during my arduous I979 White Dragon promotional tour - twenty-two cities in thirty-two days. By Toledo, Kansas, I had been on such an adrenaline high that I hadn't slept in five nights. My escort managed to get a doctor to sit next to me at a press luncheon - he was also a reader - and he prescribed a tranquilizer, which, indeed, reduced my stress. But, sadly, it did not help me get to sleep. By evening I had to travel on to Minneapolis and at 3:30 had still not managed to get any rest. I called the desk clerk to ask what to do in a medical emergency. He recommended a cab to the nearest hospital.

 

 

I was the only patient entering the emergency facility, so I was seen immediately and explained to the nurse who took the usual pulse, temperature, and blood-pressure readings, what my problem was, showing her my daunting schedule. She left me in the cubicle to speak to the duty doctor. I could just hear her whisper, "Don't you know who she is?"

 

 

He may not have, but she did, and I got some sleeping pills - only, I suspect, because she knew I was "who I was," not just some middle-aged lady with travel fatigue. I went back to the hotel and had four hours of blessed unconsciousness.

 

 

Living in Ireland as I do has insulated me from having too many unexpected visitors, although it's amazing how many people will go to the trouble to "find" Dragonhold while touring Ireland. I prefer it when people phone me in advance - so at least I can pick up the comfortable clutter in the living room and be sure there are enough cookies to serve with coffee or tea. I remember one young man who arrived just as a fractious mare had jumped out of the exercise paddock and was racing down to the road. He had the good sense to hold up both arms and scare her into turning. He'd arrived on a very "Dragonhold" day - the sort when everything goes obliquely wrong!

 

 

It is a given that the visitors you'd like to have stay on and join you in a meal insist on leaving after an hour. The ones who bore you stupid are those who hang on and on and on. Fortunately my sister-in-law, Sara Brooks, who now lives with me, recognizes the symptoms and is always jane on the spot with an excuse for me.

 

 

I did have a very intense interview with a girl who insisted that there had to be religion on Pern. There was no way, in her lexicon, that the colony could have been established without religion. I told her in very certain tones and terms that Pern was my world and I could do with it what I wanted. I wanted it not to have religion, considering the crimes committed in the name of one deity or another. There are some people you just don't argue with. On cue, Sis "reminded" me that my accountant was arriving soon and I'd better assemble my files for him.

 

 

Then there are the earnest interviewers, some of them very young. Because there had recently been some bloopers in articles about me - the kind of mistakes and misrepresentations that are such a nuisance to correct when someone challenges them - I asked one nice, young interviewer to let me see her article before it was published. She agreed with effusions of goodwill.

 

 

Now, she brought with her the two books that had prompted the interview, she had a tape recorder going, and she took notes. When she phoned me the next day to say that the issue was going to press immediately, so I wouldn't be able to see her interview but she just knew there would be no errors, I could only sigh in hopes.

 

 

They were daunted. She didn't spell my name correctly throughout; she mixed up the two titles; she described my sister-in-law as "pottering" about in the kitchen - well, Sis has been a potter, but the correct term is "putter." To crown the confusion, she had my father dying in the Crimean War. When I phoned to ask for corrections, she didn't even realize the time scale between the two wars. They both started with a "k" sound: Korea or Crimea, did it make that much difference? They were both wars, weren't they? As someone who tries to be positive about such blunders, I told everyone that I was really I34 years old and my mother had given birth to my younger brother posthumously. When I told Kevin about the mistake, he allowed as how that must explain why he'd had so much trouble all his life!

 

 

In Christmas '9I, I visited the far-flung members of my family and agreed to do autograph sessions in Dayton, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Los Angeles, returning favors done relatives.

 

 

I discovered that there are two new parameters in the readership: I) that the kids who read the Harper Hall series are now grown-up enough to introduce the next crop to the books, and 2) that there are kids who've had to read either "The Smallest Dragonboy" or one of the Harper Hall novels in class.

 

 

I've had very mixed feelings about having stories included in school textbooks or on required-reading lists. I generally loathed the books I had to read. So, in St. Louis, when a trio of boys told me they'd read "The Smallest Dragonboy" even as they asked me to personalize copies of Dragondrums for them, I got the nerve to ask if they liked it.

 

 

"Well, it wasn't that bad;' I was told by a Tom Sawyerish type. "Not bad at all."

 

 

"I liked it," said another one of the group.

 

 

"D'you see that gentleman over there on the bench?" I said, pointing to my brother, Kevin, silver-haired like me and virtually unflappable. "That's my brother and the model for Keevan" - the hero of "The Smallest Dragonboy." "You should get his autograph, too' "

 

 

"Him?" asked the third boy, incredulous.

 

 

"He was young once, too, and very brave, just like Keevan."

 

 

They did get Keve's autograph. Why should I do all the work?

 

 

I don't say that I adore autograph sessions: the last promotion trip has left me with tennis elbow. But they do provide me with the feedback that is invaluable to an author who spends a lot of solitary hours in front of a keyboard. It also answers some part of the question "So, you're Anne McCaffrey?"

 

 

The Girl Who Heard Dragons

 

 

Aramina was aroused by the urgency of her parents' voices: Dowell's a fierce whisper of persuasion and her mother's a fearful rejoinder. She lay still, at first thinking that her mother had had another of her "seeings," but on such occasions Barla's voice was totally devoid of emotion. Straining her ears to pick up only her parents' words, Aramina ignored the myriad nocturnal noises of the enormous Igen cavern that sheltered some of the hundreds of holdless folk on Pern.

 

 

"It is pointless to assign blame at this juncture, Barla," her father was whispering, "or to moan about our pride in Aramina's ability. We must leave. Now. Tonight."

 

 

"But winter comes," Barla wailed. "How will we survive?"

 

 

"I can't say that we survived all that well here last winter, with so many to share out what game was caught," Dowell said as he rapidly stuffed oddments into the capacious pack. "I've heard tell of caves in Lemos. And Lemos..."

 

 

"Has wood!" There was bitterness in Barla's voice. "And none in Igen to suit you."

 

 

"We may be holdless, woman, but we have not lost honor and dignity. I will not be party to Lady Holdless Thella's designs. I will not permit our daughter to be exploited in such a way. Gather your things. Now. I'll wake the children."

 

 

When Dowell touched Aramina's shoulder, she swallowed against her fear. She hadn't liked the self-styled Lady Holdless Thella when Thella had sought her out on the last few visits to the Igen caverns to recruit people to her roving bands. Aramina had been fascinated, and obliquely repelled by Giron, Thella's second-in-command, the dragonless man who had scrutinized her so intently that Aramina had been hard put not to squirm under his cold and empty eyes. A man who had been a dragonrider and lost his dragon was only half a man, or so everyone said. Thella had hinted at concessions for Aramina's family, perhaps even a hold, though Aramina was not so stupid as to contest that possibility, even as Thella offered the bait. Nor did Thella's argument that the holdless had to band together, sharing whatever possessions they had, hold any weight with a child who had early learned that no gift was free.

 

 

"I'm sorry, Father," she murmured in fearful contrition.

 

 

"Sorry? For what, child? Oh, you heard? You are not at fault, 'Mina. Can you manage your sister? We must leave now."

 

 

Aramina nodded. She rose and deftly twisted her blanket about her shoulders to make a sling for Nexa. She had carried her thus often as the small family had wandered east-ward. Indeed, Nexa merely draped herself sleepily across Aramina's bony young shoulder and snuggled into the supporting blanket without rousing from her deep slumber. Aramina glanced about, unconsciously checking to see that every one of their few belongings had been reclaimed.

 

 

"I've already packed the wagon with what we could take." Dowell said.

 

 

"And mother thought that this thieving Nerat family was stealing things again." Aramina was somewhat exasperated because she had been obliged to spend the entire day surreptitiously near that noisome camp, trying to spot any of their belongings.

 

 

Barla had already gathered up her precious cooking pots, wrapping them in old clothes to prevent their banging. Another shawl held the rest of the family's portables, zealously guarded against the pilfering habits of the cavern's population.

 

 

"Hush now! Come. We must make the most of the full moons."

 

 

For the first time Aramina regretted that her father's skill with woods had purchased for his family a partially secluded alcove toward the rear of the great Igen cavern. It had been much cooler during the blazing Igen summer, warmer and sheltered from the bitter winds, but now it seemed an interminable distance as they wended a cautious path among sleeping bodies to reach the entrance of the wind-sculpted sandstone cave.

 

 

Frequently Aramina had to shift Nexa in the journey down the sands to the river, sinking occasionally into old refuse holes and trying not to trip over debris. Having no hold to be proud of, the holdless residing in Igen cavern had no pride of place either, and any accommodation, transient or semipermanent, was marked by mute evidence of their occupancy.

 

 

The moons came out, bright Belior high and the smaller, dimmer Timor halfway down her arc, highlighting Igen River. Aramina wondered how long her father had planned this exodus, for not only did they have illumination but the river, dried by the summer's sun, was low enough to make crossing to the Lemos side relatively easy and safe. Very soon, when the fall rains began in the high mountains, no one would be able to cross the torrent that rampaged around the bend, flooding the now shallow ford. Aramina also remembered that Thella and Giron had been in the cavern that very afternoon, unlikely to return for several days, thus giving the fleeing family some margin of escape. Neither had approached Aramina, for which she had been grateful, but perhaps Thella had alarmed Dowell. Whatever the reason, Aramina was grateful on many counts to be away from the brawling, odorous, overcrowded cavern. And she knew that Barla would be, too. Her brother Pell's tendency to brag about his family would now be limited to hill and forest, wherry and tunnel snake.

 

 

The dray beasts were already hitched to the family's wagon, a smallish one but adequate for four people. Since Aramina heard dragons and could give warning of the imminence of Threadfall, the family could travel with some impunity. It was this talent, until just recently considered the family's most valuable asset, that the Lady Holdless Thella wished to pervert to her unlawful ends.

 

 

Aramina shifted her sleeping sister once more, for both shoulders ached, and Nexa, like other inanimate objects, appeared to grow heavier. Pell had awakened; his initial outburst muffled by Dowell's large hand, he now trotted beside his father, burdened by the shawl bundle, and complained in a low undertone. Aramina came abreast of him.

 

 

"If you hadn't blabbed to show off, we wouldn't be running away," she said to him in a tone for his ears only.

 

 

"We aren't running," Pell snapped back, grunting as the shawl bundle cracked him on the right shin. "We don't run away. We change camps!" He was taunting her now with her own words, used on previous occasions to ease the stigma of their holdlessness. "But where can we go," and his voice became a frightened wail, "that Thella can't find us?"

 

 

"It's me she wants, and she won't find me. You'll be safe."

 

 

"I don't want to be safe," Pell replied stoutly, "if you have to run because of me and my big mouth."

 

 

"Hush!" said Dowell in a sharp voice. The children trudged the rest of the way in silence.

 

 

Their dray beasts. Nudge and Shove, turned their heads, lowing softly at the approach of familiar people; Dowell had left them with sufficient grain in their feed bags to content them. Barla climbed into the rear of the hide-covered wagon, took the sleeping Nexa from Aramina, the bundle from Pell, and gestured the children to the fore where Dowell was untying ring reins from the tether stone. Aramina and Pell reclaimed their goods for the wagon and took their positions, one on either side of the team, ready to encourage them into the river and up the bank on the far side. Dowell and Barla would walk behind to push should the wagon founder.

 

 

Despite the hour and the circumstances of their departure, Aramina felt a tremendous relief as they moved off. Two Turns ago she had been inexpressibly relieved not to have to plod at the pace of Nudge and Shove day after weary day. But now traveling was a far more palatable alternative to being part of Thella's vindictive schemes.

 

 

"We are not holdless by choice, Aramina," Barla had often abjured her daughter, "for your father held well under Lord Kale of Ruatha Hold. Oh," and Barla would bow her head and press her hands to her mouth in anguish over terrible memories, "the perfidy, the treachery of that terrible, ruthless man! To murder all Ruatha blood in one pitiless hour!" Barla would gather herself then, lifting her head proudly. "Nor would your father serve Lord Fax of the High Reaches." Barla was not an extravagant person in word or deed, retaining a quiet and unobtrusive dignity despite all the slights and pettiness that came the way of the holdless. Her acrimony was therefore the more memorable, and Aramina, as well as her surviving brother and sister, knew Fax as the villain, despoiler, and tyrant, possessed of no single redeeming virtue. "We had pride enough to leave when he made his unspeakable order...." Barla would often color and then pale when reciting this part of their exodus. "Your father had made this very wagon for us to attend gathers." Barla would sigh. "Attend gathers as respected holders, not as wanderers, holdless and friendless. For other Lord Holders did not wish to antagonize Fax just then, and though your father had been so certain of a welcome elsewhere, there was none. But we are not like the others, children. We chose to retain our honor and would not submit to the incarnate evil of Fax."

 

 

Although Barla would never be specific about that, of late Aramina was beginning to get glimmerings, now that she had become a woman. For Barla, despite the depredations of fourteen Turns of nomadic life and endless pregnancies as tokens of Dowell's esteem, still retained a beautiful face and a slender figure. Aramina was old enough to realize that Barla was far more handsome than most holdless women and that, when they entered a new hold, Barla kept her lustrous hair hidden under a tattered head scarf and wore the many-layered garments of cold poverty.

 

 

Dowell had been a skilled wood joiner, holding a modest but profitable hold for Lord Kale in the forests of Ruatha. News of the treacherous massacre of the entire bloodline had reached the mountain fastness long after the event, when a contingent of Fax's rough troops had thundered into the hold's yard and informed the astounded Dowell of the change in Lord Holder. He had bowed his head - reluctantly but wisely - to that announcement and kept his resentment and horror masked, hoping that none of the troop realized that his wife, Barla, expecting her first child, also bore Ruathan blood in her veins.

 

 

If Dowell hoped that a meek acceptance and an isolated location would keep him from Fax's notice, he erred. The leader of the troop had eyes in his head; if he couldn't detect Barla's bloodline at a glance, one look was enough to tell him that here was a woman of interest to Lord Fax.. Nor had the man's shrewd gleam escaped Dowell, and the wood-crafter had made contingency plans, which began with leaving the hold's gather wagon and two sturdy dray beasts in a blind valley on the Tillek side of the mountain. When half a Turn had passed with no further visitation, Dowell had begun to think his precautions foolish: that he had mistaken the man's reaction to Barla's beauty.

 

 

Then Lord Fax, followed by a score of his men, came galloping up the narrow trace to the woodland hold. His scowl had been frightening when he had seen Barla's gravid state.

 

 

"Well, the pump will be primed and ready. She'll whelp soon. Collect her in two months. See that she is waiting for her Lord Holder's summons!"

 

 

Without a backward look, Fax had cruelly spun his runner about and, clouting the lathered creature with his rawhide whip, clattered back the way he had come.

 

 

Dowell and Barla had left their hold within the hour. Seven days later, a boy had been prematurely born, and died. Nor did Dowell and Barla find a ready sanctuary in Tillek's hold.

 

 

"Not this close to Fax, man. Perhaps farther west," their first host has suggested. "I don't want him knocking on my hold door. Not that one!"

 

 

Dowell and Barla had traveled ever since, to the western reach of Tillek, where they had found brief respites in their joumeyings while Dowell carved bowls and cups or joined cabinets, or crafted gather wagons. A few weeks here, a half Turn there; and Aramina was born on their way through the mountains of Fort, the first of Barla's children to survive birth. The news of Fax's death caught up with them in the vast plains of Keroon, just after Nexa's birth.

 

 

"Ruatha Hold brought Fax nothing but disease and trouble," the harper told Dowell and Barla in Keroon beasthold, where Dowell was building stables.

 

 

"Then we could return and claim our hold again."

 

 

"If there's anything to claim, but I'm told that Lytol is a fair man and he'll need good workers," the harper had said, eyeing the notched timbers that Dowell had fitted.

 

 

"We'll return then," Dowell had told Barla, "when I've finished my bond with the mastercraftsman."

 

 

More than a full Turn later, they did begin the long journey up the Keroon peninsula, with a sturdy daughter, a small son, and a tiny baby.

 

 

Then Thread began to fall on the innocent green land, raining destruction on a population that had denied the existence of their ancient enemy. Once again dragons filled the skies with their fiery breath, charring the dread menace in midair, saving the rich land from the devouring Thread.

 

 

Travel became more hazardous than ever for the holdless; people clung to the safety of stone walls and stout doors, and to the traditional leadership of their Lord Holders. Within those sanctuaries there was little room for those without legitimate claim on leadership, supplies, and refuge. A new terror was visited on the unfortunate, deprived for any number of reasons of their right to hold or craft affiliation.

 

 

For Dowell and Barla, the terror was slightly abated by Aramina's unexpected ability to hear dragons. When she first naively reported such conversations, she had been soundly spanked for telling lies. Then came the day when she persisted in warning them that her dragons said Threadfall was imminent. Threatened with a second thrashing and a supperless night, she had tearfully refused to retract her report. It was only when Dowell saw the leading edge of Thread, a silver smudging in the sky, dotted with the fiery blossoms of dragon breath, that he had apologized. As the family lay crouched under a rocky ledge just large enough to shelter them, they were grateful to her.

 

 

"The lords of Ruatha have always given dragonriders complete hospitality," Barla had said, shielding the squalling Nexa against her shoulder. She had to stop to wipe grit from her lips. "No one in my immediate family was ever taken on Search, but then, there haven't been that many Searches in my lifetime. Aramina comes by her talent as a right of blood."

 

 

"And to think I ever complained that our firstborn was female," Dowell had murmured, smiling at Aramina, tucked in the safest angle of the rock ledge. "I wonder if Nexa will be able to hear dragons."

 

 

"I'll bet I will when I'm older," Pell had ventured, not wishing to let his sister take all the honors.

 

 

"It means we'll be safe traveling across Telgar Plains to Ruatha, for Aramina can always warn us about Threadfall. We won't need to be beholden to any lord for shelter!"

 

 

To be without restraint or obligation meant a great deal to Dowell's pride. Since the advent of Threadfall, the holdless had suffered more than the usual indignities at the hands of holders, large and small. Having no right of affiliation, they could be cheated of the ordinary rights of hospitality; overcharged for any goods their infrequent marks could purchase; forced to work unnatural hours for the mere privilege of shelter from Thread; deprived of dignity and honor; and, above all else, required to express gratitude for even the least condescension shown by holders and crafters.

 

 

The elation of the small family was short-lived, for their dray beasts had run off in the panic of Threadfall. Dowell was forced to return to Keroon beasthold on foot, hire his skill at a hard-bargained price for the next Turn, then trudge all the way back with the new team to where his family had waited, fearful of marauding holdless men and women and Threadfall.

 

 

The indenture over, Dowell had once again turned team and wagon westward. A miscarriage and fever had forced them to take refuge in the huge Igen cave, and expediency had kept them there when Dowell's resolution had faltered under a series of misfortunes, all apparently designed to thwart his repatriation to Ruatha Hold.

 

 

Now they pushed on through the night, struggling to escape yet another threat to honor and resolve.

 

 

From somewhere Dowell had acquired a map of Lemos Hold, complete with road, track, and trace. Lemos had so many forests and mountains that rivers, Pern's other road-ways, were unusable. Dowell elected to follow the faintest of tracks and was careful to remove any droppings. When he finally gave them to rest, it was noontime. During the brief respite he allowed his family and team, Dowell crushed leaves and stained the wagon's leather cover with green to make it less visible to any searching eye.

 

 

"We'll be safe in the forests of Lemos," he said, reassuring himself as well as his family. "There are caves there in the mountains which no one could find...."

 

 

"If no one can find them, how will we?" asked Pell reasonably.

 

 

"Because we'll be looking very hard, of course," Aramina answered before her weary father's short temper flared.

 

 

"Oh!"

 

 

"And we'll live by ourselves and thrive on the provender that woods naturally provide us" Aramina went on, "for we'll have all the wood we need to be warm, and nuts and roots because we know where to look for them, and berries and roast wherry..."

 

 

"Roast wherry?" Pell's eyes widened with delight at such a promise. "Because you fashion such excellent snares..."

 

 

"I always caught more tunnel snakes than any one else at Igen," Pell began. Then, remembering that this helter-skelter trip was due to his boastfulness, he covered his mouth with his hand and huddled into a tight ball of remorse.

 

 

"Any of the forest caves ought to have lots of snakes, shouldn't they, Mother?" Aramina asked, wanting to lighten her mother's sad face as well as her brother's guilt.

 

 

"They should," Barla agreed in the absent way of parents who have not really attended to their children's conversation.

 

 

Dowell called them to order, and they continued on their way until Nudge refused to go farther and, when Dowell took the stick to him, sank resolutely to his knees. Unhitching the recalcitrant brute, they forced Shove to haul the wagon into the brush at the side of the trace.

 

 

"Nudge has got sense," Pell muttered to his sister as the weary children gathered enough branches to screen the wagon.

 

 

"Father has, too. I certainly didn't want to help Thella or," and Aramina shivered with revulsion, "that dragonless man, Giron."

 

 

"They're as bad as Fax."

 

 

"Worse."

 

 

Although Barla roused herself sufficiently to hand out dry rations, she found that Aramina and Pell had fallen asleep.

 

 

Only when they had put four mountains between themselves and Igen River did Dowell let up on the pace he had set. On the narrow traces, more logging tracks than proper trails, there were none to witness their passage as they climbed higher into the vast Lemos range.

 

 

They were not quite alone, for dragons passed overhead on daily sweeps and Aramina reveled in their conversations. She made her reports amusing, to liven evening campfire - for Dowell had conceded that a careful, smokeless fire would not be easily seen in the thick woods.

 

 

"It was green Path again today, with Heth and Monarth," Aramina said on the tenth day after their exodus from Igen Cave. "Lamanth, the queen, has clutched thirty fine eggs, but Monarth says that there are no queen eggs."

 

 

"There aren't always queen eggs," Dowell reminded Aramina, who sounded unhappy.

 

 

"That's what Path said. I don't know why Monarth was upset."

 

 

"I didn't realize that dragons talked to each other," Barla remarked, puzzled. "I thought they only talked to their riders."

 

 

"Oh, they do," Aramina assured her. "Heth talks constantly to K'van when they're doing the sweep alone.

 

 

"Why are there three today then?" Pell asked.

 

 

"Because Threadfall is imminent."

 

 

"Why didn't you say so?" Dowell wanted to know, exasperated with his daughter's diffidence.

 

 

"I was going to. They think Threadfall will come over Lemos tomorrow late afternoon."

 

 

"How can we survive Threadfall out in these woods?" Dowell demanded, angry with apprehension.

 

 

"You said there were lots of caves here in Lemos," Pell said, grimacing his face into a tearful expression.

 

 

"We'll need one!" Dowell said grimly. "We'll start first light tomorrow. Aramina, you and Pell will search ahead. On the upper slope. For there is bare cliff above us and somewhere there must be a cave for shelter."

 

 

"And we'll need more roots and anything else you can find to eat," Barla added, showing the empty stewpot as proof of the need. "There's naught left of the dried meat and vegetables."

 

 

"Why is it Thread always comes at times like these?" Pell asked, but expected no answer to his plaint. He had occasion to repeat much the same expression the next morning when the off-rear wheel, sinking in a leaf-covered hole, cracked the cotter pin and lazily spun off. The team dragged the wagon on for several lengths, grinding the hub into the dirt before Dowell was able to halt them. Grimly he surveyed the damage. Then, with the sigh of long-suffering patience, he set to the job of repairing the wheel.

 

 

It was by no means the first time that wheels had come off, and Aramina and Pell needed no instructions to search out stout limbs, and to help roll a boulder into place for the lever. Indeed it was a well-drilled operation, and Aramina and Pell had wedged two blocks under the wagon bed as soon as Dowell and Barla had levered it up. They had the wheel back on the axle when Dowell discovered that there were no more cotter pins or kingpins in the wagon. He'd used the last on the journey to Igen Cave and had no reason to replace them in the long Turn.

 

 

"With the world and all of wood about us, Dowell?" Barla had remonstrated to cut short his flow of self-recriminations. "There's a hardwood over there. It can't take much time to whittle new pegs. The children can forage ahead for food and a cave. Come." She handed him the hatchet. "I'll help. Aramina, take a sack and one of the hide buckets. Pell, make one of your snares and set it if you cross snake spoor. Nexa, you may carry the small shovel, but don't lose it in the woods."

 

 

"If you hear more about Threadfall from the dragons, Aramina, you come back to me straightaway," Dowell added as he made for the hardwood visible from the track. "Don't dally."

 

 

With a spirit of urgent adventure the three children ran up the track. For the first four switchbacks, there was nothing but forest on either side, though Pell insisted on inspecting several outcroppings of the gray rock that he felt looked promising.

 

 

Then the logging trace started a long, straight run, which finally disappeared around a rocky outthrust. To their right, up a steep bank, the trees were sparser as the native rock intruded.

 

 

"I'll go look up there, 'Mina!" Pell cried, and took off just as Nexa called Aramina's attention to the unmistakable if withered tops of redroots growing on the downside.

 

 

Aramina saw Pell scrambling for footing on the steep and slippery bank, and elected to forage with Nexa. They had been digging for only a short while when Aramina heard Pell's warbling, the family signal for an emergency. Fearful that he had injured himself climbing, Aramina raced back to the track.

 

 

"I found a cave, 'Mina! I found a cave." Pell slithered back down the bank. "A good deep one. Room for Nudge and Shove, too." His voice reflected the jouncing his body took as he half walked, half slid the remaining distance to his sister.

 

 

"And lost your gathering," she said sternly, pointing to the cluster of broken bulge-nut twigs he still clutched in his left hand.

 

 

"Oh, them." Pell tossed the useless bits aside, stood up, and brushed the wet leaves from his leathern pants. "There're plenty more where they..." He broke off, an uncertain look on his face as his hand hesitated.

 

 

"Hmm, sprung the seams again, too," Aramina said impatiently and, grabbing him, swung him about to see the damage the slide had done his trousers. She sighed, controlling her temper. Pell never considered risk and consequence.

 

 

"Only the seam. Not the leather. Mother can mend it! In the cave I just found. Plenty of space." Grinning broadly to soothe the frown from his sister's face, he made exaggerated gestures with his arms, outlining the splendor of his discovery.

 

 

"How far up the slope?" Aramina regarded the steep incline with a thoughtful eye. "I'm not sure Nudge and Shove could make it."

 

 

"They'll make it 'cause there's grass and water.. "

 

 

"The cave is damp?"

 

 

"Nah! Dry as far in as I went." Pell cocked his head sideways. "And I didn't go all the way in, just like you always warn me. Only far enough to see it was big and dry. And the tunnel-snake signs. Good eating." He rolled his eyes and smacked his lips at the prospect. "There's even a stream and a cascade, too."

 

 

Aramina hesitated, eyeing the steep bank and wondering if Pell's enthusiasm hadn't clouded his judgment. Pell would go through life seeing only what he hoped he was seeing, not what really was. But the need to get under shelter was critical. No matter if Pell had exaggerated: he had found a cave. Her father could decide on its suitability.

 

 

"How far up the slope is it?"

 

 

"Straight to the top of the ridge" -Pell pointed- "down into the dip past the nut plantation. Turn to your right at the forked birch and you'll stare right at the entrance. Only it's to the left. A good overhang. C'mon, I'll show you."

 

 

"No, you wait here. Nexa's down there digging roots" - Aramina pulled a face at her brother's sour expression - "which we need nearly as much as the cave." She hesitated once more. Maybe she ought to check the cave first, rather than raise false hopes.

 

 

"Ah, 'Mina, I wouldn't lie about shelter."

 

 

Aramina scrutinized her brother's face, his features contorted into an expression of utter trustworthiness. No, Pell wouldn't lie about something that important. A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds, lancing past the soughing tree branches, reminding her that there was little time left if they were to be under cover when Thread fell.

 

 

"Don't wander off! You know how scared Nexa gets." Aramina threw a deft twist of cord about the neck of her root sack and tossed it to the side of the logging track.

 

 

"I won't stir from her side. But I expect I'd do better gathering kindling." Thus avoiding his most hated chore of rooting, Pell diligently collected branches.

 

 

Aramina started off down the track in a lope, her long plaits bouncing off her shoulders and buttocks. She was light on her feet, moving with an economy of movement that would have been envied by a hold runner.

 

 

The sunlight seemed to follow her, illuminating her way on the overgrown trace, the springiness underfoot making the going a pleasure. She shortened her stride as the track switched back on itself, and listened intently, over the thud of her footfalls, for the sound of the wagon. Surely it hadn't taken her father too long to whittle the necessary pins. Dowell and Barla should have made some distance up the logging road. Surely she ought to have heard the lumbering wagon, her father's voice urging Nudge and Shove to their task.

 

 

Peering through the thickly planted trees, Aramina looked for some glimpse of the covered wagon. Apprehension lent her impetus and down the trace she sped, every nerve anxiously alert for any reassuring sight or sound. Faster she ran, positive now in her mind that something had happened. Could Lady Holdless Thella have possibly caught up with them?

 

 

Taking a more direct line, she bypassed the next turn and pushed through the underbrush, wiggling past trees. Then, as she discerned the bulk of the green-smeared wagon cover through the trees, she moved more circumspectly. The wagon had not shifted from the spot in which they had left it two hours past. Trembling with fear, Aramina paused, listening now for the sound of voices, for the bass rumble of Giron or the crisp acid alto of Thella. Hearing nothing but the wind soughing through the leafless trees, she moved cautiously down until she was poised on the bank above where the wagon was still canted. Muffling a cry of fear, Aramina slid down the bank, recoiling in horror as she saw her father's head and shoulders protruding from under the wagon. Somehow the blocks had slipped and the wheel lay once again on its side. Horrified, Aramina was certain that her father had been crushed to death until she saw that one block had fallen directly under the wagon bed, preventing the complete collapse of the heavy load onto her father's chest.

 

 

Only then did Aramina hear the hoarse grunt and half sob, as she realized that her mother was attempting to lever the wagon bed off her stricken husband.

 

 

"Mother!"

 

 

"I cannot lift it, 'Mina!" Barla sobbed, leaning exhaustedly against the pole. "I've been trying and trying."

 

 

Wasting no words, Aramina threw her weight onto the lever, and though Barla gave every remaining ounce of her strength, the two women could not summon enough mass between them to shift the wagon more than a finger's breadth.

 

 

"Oh, 'Mina, what can we do? Even if we had Pell and Nexa, they couldn't help enough...." Defeated, Barla slumped onto the ground, weeping.

 

 

"We lifted it enough. If Pell and Nexa were here, they could pull him free...." Aramina swung 'round to her father, his tanned face pale with shock, the pulse in his neck beating slowly but reassuringly. "Pell's found a cave. It's not too far up the track. I'll be right back."

 

 

Giving Barla no chance to protest, Aramina started up the track again as fast as she could run. Pell and Nexa just had to be strong enough. She didn't dare believe anything else. And they must hurry. The sun glancing into her eyes warned her that time was very short if they were to rescue Dowell and get the wagon up the trail to the cave. She couldn't consider any other problems then, only the most immediate ones, and she almost ignored the sight of the dragon gliding overhead. She stopped so fast that she almost fell.

 

 

Dragon, dragon, hear me! Help me! HELP ME! Aramina had never attempted to communicate with the dragons, but a dragonrider would be strong enough to help her. Surely a dragonrider would not ignore her need.

 

 

Who calls a dragon?

 

 

She recognized the voice of Heth.

 

 

It is Aramina. Down on the logging trace, above the river in the forest. Please help me. My father is trapped beneath our wagon. And Thread will fall soon! She jumped up and down in the middle of the trace, waving frantically. Oh, please help me!

 

 

No need to shout. I heard you the first time. My rider wants to know who you are.

 

 

To her relief, Aramina saw the dragon change directions, circling down toward the track.

 

 

I told you, I'm Aramina.

 

 

May I tell him?

 

 

Such consideration rarely came Aramina's way.

 

 

Yes, yes, of course. Are you Heth?

 

 

I am Heth. My rider is K'van.

 

 

How do you do?

 

 

I'd do better if we could see you.

 

 

But I'm right here. In the middle of the trace. And the wagon is large.... Oh, my father painted it green. If you 'II just fly lower...

 

 

I'm a dragon, not a wherry.... K'van sees the wagon.

 

 

Aramina crashed through the underbrush to reach the wagon at the same time as dragon and rider. Barla looked about to faint with shock at their sudden appearance.

 

 

"It's all right, Mother. They'll help us. They're much stronger than Pell and Nexa would be." Then Aramina realized that Shove and Nudge were taking great exception to the proximity of a dragon. She tied them tightly down by their nose rings to the tether stone, giving them more immediate pain to occupy their stupid brains.

 

 

Fortunately, the dragonrider directed Heth to land behind the wagon, out of the dray beasts' immediate sight.

 

 

To her dismay, Aramina realized that both dragon and rider were young. She'd always thought that bronze dragons must be big, and, indeed, Heth had seemed enormous, out- lined in the sky. But now she could see that he wasn't fully grown and that his rider, K'van, was both undersized and younger than herself.

 

 

As if K'van sensed her disappointed appraisal, he straightened his shoulders and jerked his chin up. He walked forward, taking in the lever propped against the boulder and looking down at the prostrate Dowell.

 

 

"We may be weyrlings, but we can help you," K'van said without ostentation. He turned to Heth. "What I want you to do is to heave on this, Heth, with your forearms. C'mon, Aramina."

 

 

Aramina stopped staring at the bronze dragon, who waddled forward to place his five-clawed paws about the lever.

 

 

"Not until I say go, Heth," K'van cautioned, grinning a bit at Aramina as they knelt in the dust beside the unconscious Dowell, fastening their hands under the man's armpits. "Heave, Heth! Heave!"

 

 

As quickly as they could, Aramina and K'van hauled Dowell's body from under the wagon. With a cry of incredulous relief, Barla rushed to her husband's side, opening his shirt to judge the extent of his injury. K'van had the presence of mind to replace the fallen block and prop the wagon up.

 

 

"You'll need the wheel back on," he said to Aramina. "That was fine, Heth."

 

 

I am very strong, said the dragon with a trace of smugness, his great faceted eyes whirling bluey green as he maintained pressure on the lever.

 

 

"Oh, you are indeed, you beautiful beautiful creature," cried Aramina.

 

 

"All right, Heth, ease it down," said K'van, holding the block in place. "Slowly now."

 

 

The wagon settled, creaking as the block took its weight. K'van fumbled about in the grass and dust and triumphantly held up the pegs.

 

 

"Mother?" Aramina's trembling voice held a questions as she turned to look at her father.

 

 

"I can't find anything broken," Barla said in a low unsteady voice, "but look..." Her hand indicated the terrible line of bruising already discoloring the skin. Carefully she smoothed the hair back from Dowell's brow, her expression of concerned tenderness causing the two young people to exchange embarrassed glances.

 

 

K'van touched Aramina's arm. "Do you know how to set the wheel back on the axle?" He gave her a rueful glance as he proffered the pegs. "I don't."

 

 

"Whyever should you?" Aramina wanted to know as she took the pegs and noticed, with a pang, how carefully Dowell had made a cotter hole in the kingpin. "You're a dragonrider."

 

 

"Not all that long," he said with a grin as he helped her lift the wheel and roll it into position. "And weyrlings are taught a little bit of craft needed by the Weyr. You never know when something will come in handy. Like now!" He said this on the end of a grunt as the two young people tried to force the wheel onto the axle.

 

 

"It's the dirt encrusted on the hub," Aramina said as K'van paused uncertainly. With her belt knife, she scraped off the caked dirt, found a large rock, and, with a healthy knock, set the wheel firmly on. With another few taps of her rock, she rammed the kingpin through and then the cotter pin into its place.

 

 

"You're deft at that," K'van said admiringly.

 

 

"Practice."

 

 

With Heth's assistance, they removed the block from under the wagon.

 

 

"Have you far to go?" K'van asked then. "Thread falls soon and, as I recall, the foresters' hold is a long ways up the track"

 

 

Barla stifled a sound in her throat, but Aramina had an answer ready.

 

 

"I know," Aramina lied calmly, "but this accident delayed us. However, there's a cave not far up the track where we can wait out Threadfall."

 

 

"Is it large?" asked K'van.

 

 

"Large enough. Why?" Aramina asked, suddenly wary.

 

 

"Well, just before you called us," and K'van grinned ingenuously for her temerity, "Heth spotted a band of runners beyond the river. Are they part of your group?"

 

 

"No," Barla groaned aloud, looking wildly up at Aramina.

 

 

"There shouldn't be anyone else in this part of Lord Asgenar's forests," Aramina said with all the indignation she could muster. "We were warned that holdless raiders have been seen."

 

 

"Holdless men?" K'van was instantly alert. "If they are, they'll disperse once they've seen me. Look, let me help you get your father into the wagon and see you safely on your way to the cave. I'll take care of the raiders. And warn Lord Asgenar, too."

 

 

Aramina hadn't expected that, but she said what was appropriate, determined to play out her part in this charade. She unfastened the tailgate so that they could slide Dowell in. Then, while K'van watched beside Heth, she and Barla took up their positions and prodded Nudge and Shove into a walk, and then into a shambling trot up the trace.

 

 

Barla and Aramina had to keep hard at the dray beasts to maintain their trot. Nudge resented the pace, twisting his horned head and lowing piteously, but Aramina had no mercy on him. Women and beasts were sweating when they finally reached the bank. Pell cheering lustily until Aramina shouted at him to stop being so foolish and come help.

 

 

In a few tense words, Aramina explained what had happened, and Pell began shaking his head slowly from side to side.

 

 

"I don't know how we'll get Father up that bank," he said, appraising the difficulty. "You shouldn't've sent the dragonrider away."

 

 

"It's not just Father being hurt. Pell. K'van saw a troop of riders on the other side of the river...."

 

 

Pell quailed, and his distress communicated itself to Nexa, who had been standing there, wide-eyed and perplexed. Now she burst into tears.

 

 

"So we must also get the wagon out of sight. And hide Nudge and Shove."

 

 

"But Thread's coming. And we have to get Father up to the cave and..." Pell's words tripped over themselves in his anxiety.

 

 

"Somehow we'll do it," Aramina said, peering up and down the trace to find a possible screen for the mass of the wagon. "Maybe, if K'van has frightened them with Threadfall, they'll have to go back the way they came.... Maybe if we rig a stretcher, we can haul Father up the bank...."

 

 

"Maybe, maybe, maybe!" Pell almost danced with frustration.

 

 

"I won't have you children fighting at a time like this," Barla said tartly, appearing in the back of the wagon. "We've got to rouse your father.... How long before Thread falls, Aramina? Or didn't you ask the dragonrider?"

 

 

Aramina bowed her head at her mother's rebuke. As she did so, her glance fell on a group of evergreens on the left-hand side of the roadway a few lengths farther up the track.

 

 

"There!" she cried dramatically, gesturing wildly. "There! We can drive the wagon in there, behind the evergreens. They're just tall enough!"

 

 

With something constructive to do, even Nexa stopped her whingeing. Dowell was carefully lifted out of the wagon and covered by a sleeping fur. Then everyone concentrated on getting the wagon out of sight. Nexa was directed to brush away the tracks of the wagon as Aramina and Pell forced the dray beasts through the opening Barla parted into the copse. The artistic addition of extra branches completed the camouflage.

 

 

Then Barla sent Pell and Nexa on ahead to the cave with sleeping furs and Barla's precious stewpot, while Aramina and her mother tried to rouse Dowell. The usual aromatic had no effect, and the two women exchanged anxious glances, when suddenly Nudge and Shove, tethered by the trace, began to moan fearfully and pull at their ring ropes.

 

 

"Thread?" gasped Barla, bending protectively over her husband.

 

 

"No," cried Aramina, "Dragons! Big dragons!" Indeed it seemed to her as if the sky was filled with them, their great wings causing the saplings to bend to their backwind.

 

 

"Aramina, how did that dragonrider come to help us in the first place? You didn't call him, did you?" When Aramina mutely nodded, Barla gave a despairing cry. "But the Weyrs will take you from us if they know you can hear and speak to dragons! And then what shall we do?"

 

 

"How else were we to save Father?" asked Aramina even as she, too, regretted her action.

 

 

I hear Aramina, said Heth's unmistakable voice.

 

 

Oh, please go away, Heth. Say you can't find me.

 

 

But I have! You must not fear. We won't harm you. Before Aramina could speak again, three dragons skimmed neatly down onto the track, making Nudge and Shove buck and strain to be free of their tether. As one, Barla and Aramina dashed forward to prevent the escape of the dray beasts, twisting the nose rings until pain paralyzed the stupid animals.

 

 

We will move down the track, Aramina heard Heth say as she coped with the frantic Nudge. When the dragons were far enough away not to be an immediate threat, Aramina and Barla relaxed their hold.

 

 

"I am T'gellan, bronze rider of Monarth, and this is Mirrim, who rides green Path," said the oldest of the three riders who approached them. "K'van wisely called for help to persuade those holdless raiders to absent themselves from this vicinity. So I thought we'd better make sure you had safely reached shelter before Threadfall."

 

 

Barla hovered between her critical need for assistance and anxiety at the presence of dragonriders who might very easily depart with her daughter who could hear dragons.

 

 

Mirrim knelt beside Dowell and opened his shirt, then exhaled her breath on a long whistle.

 

 

"I can feel no broken bones, but he's not regained consciousness," Barla told Mirrim, sensibly making her husband's needs her first priority.

 

 

"If he was under a wagon as K'van says, that doesn't surprise me," Mirrim remarked. "I've done considerable nursing at the Weyr. First let's get him to this cave."

 

 

"We don't have much time to spare," T'gellan added, squinting at the steep bank. "And I don't fancy trying to haul an unconscious man up that!"

 

 

"Is there any sort of a clearing by your cave?" Mirrim asked Aramina. "A small one," she said, devoutly hoping that Pell's description bore some resemblance to fact.

 

 

"Path? Would you oblige us?" Mirrim asked the green dragon.

 

 

I see no reason why not. In a maneuver that Aramina couldn't believe she was seeing, the green dragon glided to the group without moving her wings or appearing to walk. Silly beasts, aren't they? Path added as Nudge and Shove began their terrified lowing again.

 

 

Aramina was obliged to go calm them; their perturbation abruptly ceased as Mirrim, Path, her father, and her mother disappeared.

 

 

"Well, it seemed easier to send your mother along, too, Aramina," T'gellan said with a laugh for her astonishment. "You'd best go the hard way. Thread will fall very shortly."

 

 

"But I can't... Nudge and Shove..."

 

 

K'van grinned. "Just get on one, get a good hold on the nose rein of the other. We'll supply the impulsion." And he jerked his thumb at the two dragons watching with their jewel eyes whirling mildly.

 

 

It was perhaps the wildest ride Aramina had ever had. In the first place, dray beasts were not designed for comfortable riding, having straight backs, wide withers, short necks and low-held heads. However, the flapping of dragon wings behind Nudge and Shove was more than enough to have sent them plunging through fire. They took the bank, cloven hooves slipping on the wet footing in no more than four bucking jumps. Momentum carried them over the top and down the dip, almost right into the cliff wall, where they fetched up to a dead stop that sent Aramina onto Nudge's horns, and then to the ground with a force that jarred her from heel to headbones.

 

 

Pell appeared, eyes wide at her impetuous arrival.

 

 

"A girl on a green dragon brought Father and Mother. I didn't think girls were allowed to ride fighting dragons."

 

 

"Help me get these inside the cave before they stampede again," Aramina said, though she had been equally surprised by Mirrim and Path.

 

 

"Oh, look, they're going!" Pell's disappointment was patent, as he saw the dragons hover briefly in the sky. "I'm forever missing the good parts," he complained.

 

 

"Get Shove inside!" Aramina had no time to humor her brother, and she gave him such a hard prod that he sharply reminded her that he wasn't any old dray beast.

 

 

He hauled on the nose rein and, lowing, Shove followed his painful muzzle - then bellowed as his hindquarters scraped along the right wall of the narrow entry. Aramina pushed at his dappled flanks and set him right. She was careful to line Nudge squarely in the opening, and to prevent any further recalcitrance she twisted his nose ring. With an injured bellow, he, too, made the passage into the cave, running into Aramina, who stopped, amazed at what lay before her.

 

 

"Isn't this cave marvelous, 'Mina? Didn't I find a good one? Couldn't we get everything in here? Maybe we could even live here." Pell dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper on the last sentence. "For it's as big as a hold, isn't it, 'Mina?" The boy was all but dancing at the end of Shove's ring rein, momentarily oblivious of everything but his need for her approval.

 

 

In a sweeping glance, Aramina saw a solemn-faced Nexa cradling her father's head where he lay on the pile of sleeping furs, and her mother busy lighting a small fire within a ring of stones before she allowed herself to examine the cave in more detail.

 

 

"Why, it is truly big enough to be a hold," she said in a voice awed enough to delight her brother.

 

 

"It's bigger than many holds we've been in, 'Mina," Pell said with great satisfaction. "Much bigger. It's nearly as big as any of the Igen caverns I ever was in." Aramina appraised the high ceiling, dry as far as she could see in the dim light filtering in from the entrance. She could sense rather than see clearly that the cave extended far beyond the immediate chamber in which they stood.

 

 

"There's even a sort of stall place where we can tether Nudge and Shove," he went on, babbling happily, and pulled on Shove to lead the way.

 

 

The beasts settled, Aramina and Pell came back to the front of the cavern, where Barla was coaxing the flames on the small hearth. Then a soft moan broke the silence as Dowell rolled his head from side to side in Nexa's lap. She snatched her hands away from him, as if contact might somehow impede his recovery. With startled eyes, she looked about for reassurance.

 

 

"There now, Nexa, I told you he'd come around," said Barla, rising from the now healthy fire. "Aramina, we'll need fresh water. As cold as you can draw it. We've nothing but cold compresses to ease the bruising. And hurry. Those dragonriders said that Threadfall was a matter of minutes away."

 

 

" 'Mina," and Pell caught the other side of the bucket, accompanying his sister out of the cavern, "can you hear 'em yet?"

 

 

Aramina halted at the entrance, listening with every fiber in her ears, smiled at Pell, and walked quickly out.

 

 

"Show me where the water is," she said, and Pell danced around in front of her and to their left.

 

 

"Right here! Right here!" he caroled, pointing and dancing about. "Just like I said. You won't ever doubt me again, will you, 'Mina?"

 

 

"No, I won't," she said, smiling as she extended her hand into the little cascade that leaped and fell down the side of the mountain. The water was ice cold, numbing her fingers in seconds. She filled the bucket. She was just at the entrance to the cave when Pell let out an excited whoop. At the same time she heard a multitude of voices, excited and anticipatory.

 

 

"They're here! I can see them! I saw them first!" His triumph found a lack in her talent.

 

 

"Well, I can hear them talking!"

 

 

"Can I watch the dragons fight Thread this time, 'Mina? This time can I watch?"

 

 

Aramina shushed him, examining the overhang of the cavern. Unless Thread should happen to fall at a tremendous velocity and at a slant, she couldn't see how any of the dreaded menace could score them. Turns of familiarity with Thread had dampened her fear of it.

 

 

"Yes, I think it's safe here for us to watch." She placed a warning finger on her lips, and, slipping quickly inside to bring her mother the bucket of cold water, she rejoined him in the entrance.

 

 

To Pell's keen disappointment, there wasn't as much to watch as he'd anticipated. They could see the dragons in their ranks, suspended motionless in the clear mountain air, gleaming where wing and body reflected the sun briefly. Then the two watching children saw the sudden blurring of the sky, the silvery mist that was the leading edge of Thread.

 

 

Only then did the dragons break the temporary suspension, swooping up to meet the deadly rain, sending blossoms of fiery breath to char the parasitic Thread. Pell didn't breathe with the wonder of the darting forays of the smaller dragons, exclaiming as he saw a long tongue of flame reach out to char a mass of Thread. Silver mist turned to black smoke and then dissipated lazily. Fire blooms traced the dragons' progress after their ancient enemy until the hills and trees covered the distant sight from the watchers' searching eyes.

 

 

"It didn't last long enough," Pell said dejectedly. "It'll last long enough for the dragonriders, I'm sure," Aramina said with mild rebuke for his callousness. "Did you remember to bring the roots with you?"

 

 

"Ah, who wants to eat roots. There are acres of nuts out there."

 

 

"Then you'll have no trouble filling a sack, will you?" As Aramina turned back to the fire, she heard her father's querulous voice.

 

 

"I don't understand how you managed, with just Aramina."

 

 

"Pell was a great help, too," Barla said soothingly, wringing out another cold compress. She gave Aramina a quick stem glance.

 

 

"It was really very simple, Father. You keep telling us that if there was a lever long enough, we could even move Pern away from the Red Star," Aramina said with a smile.

 

 

"This is not time for levity," Barla said severely.

 

 

"Whyever not? Father's conscious, we've got this huge big cave all to ourselves, and Pell's gone out for more of these delicious nuts." Expertly Aramina positioned two in her palm and cracked them. "See?" She held out the meats to Barla.

 

 

After a supper of boiled roots and crisp nutmeats, Aramina and Pell used the last of the daylight to gather fodder for Nudge and Shove, and sufficient boughs and fragrant bracken for bedding.

 

 

Tired as she was, Aramina found that sleep eluded her. She had been brought up to honor truth, and today that teaching had been disregarded for expediency. She had permitted K'van to think that they were proper holders, on their lord's business. She had avoided truth with her father, although at Barla's behest, so as not to worry him.

 

 

In each case the truth would confound her lies in very short order. But... K'van had chased off the Lady Holdless Thella and the band that had nearly caught up with her and her family. And... they had contrived to get Dowell safely into this cave refuge, hopefully without leaving an easy trail that Thella could follow. But... to achieve that end, she had revealed her ability to hear dragons to Benden Weyr riders. And... the dragonriders now knew exactly where she was even if Lady Holdless Thella did not. She could not imagine what punishment would be meted out to her for that day-long imprudence.

 

 

Nexa, curled close against her sister's body, whimpered in a restless sleep. Aramina pulled the sleeping rug closely about her, stroking her arm, and Nexa subsided into sleep. For a while, she was distracted by Dowell's breathing, a light snore because he had to sleep on his back, but its soft rhythm finally lulled Aramina to sleep.

 

 

It seemed all too short a time before Pell was urgently tugging at her shoulders and whispering excitedly in her ear.

 

 

" 'Mina! 'Mina! K'van is here! And so is the Weyrleader! He wants to speak to you! And there are lots of strange men out there, too."

 

 

"Here?" Frantically brushing sleep from her eyes, Aramina sat up, all too aware of yesterday's bruises and scrapes and the dull ache across her shoulders from abused muscles.

 

 

"No, on the track. The men are armed with bows and arrows and spears and I think the dragons brought them." Pell's eyes were wide with excitement. K'van was just beyond him.

 

 

"It's all right, Aramina, really it is," said K'van, softly so as not to disturb the other sleepers. "It's the raiders, you see."

 

 

Careful not to rouse Nexa, Aramina slipped out from under the fur and pressed it gently down about her sister.

 

 

"The raiders are coming?" Pell's voice slipped from whisper to harsh alarm, but Aramina quickly covered his mouth. Fear darkened his eyes as he stared at his sister.

 

 

The little one is suddenly afraid, said a surprised, richly mellow voice.

 

 

She has more to fear from the holdless. The second dragon voice was deep and dark, like a pool of the blackwater that Aramina had seen in Igen.

 

 

"I am not afraid of you." Aramina spoke stoutly.

 

 

"Of me?" K'van asked in astonishment, his hand on his chest.

 

 

"Not you. Those dragons." No, Aramina told herself, she was not afraid of the dragons, but of their riders and the impending justice that would be meted out for all the lies of yesterday. She hoped that K'van would not think too badly of her.

 

 

"I don't think badly of you," K'van protested as they stepped out into the sunlight. "Why should I? I think you were an absolute marvel yesterday, fixing that wheel and getting everyone safe inside the cave...."

 

 

"Oh, you don't understand," said Aramina, trying to keep her voice from breaking.

 

 

"And neither does Heth but..."

 

 

It will come right, said Heth as if he meant it.

 

 

Then they were at the top of the bank and Aramina held on to a sapling to steady herself at the sight of masses of armed men, just as Pell had reported, and an incredible stream of dragons, taking off and landing in the track. Standing slightly apart with the enormous bronze dragon and a brown almost as big was the Weyrleader, F'lar, and his wingleader, F'nor, talking earnestly with two men dressed in gleaming mail. A fur-trimmed cape was slung negligently over the shoulders of the younger man.

 

 

"Are those who I think they are?" asked Pell in an awed whisper. His hands clasped his sister's arm for reassurance. Then he stiffened, for F'nor had seen the three standing on the bank. He smiled and beckoned them down.

 

 

Aramina prayed earnestly that she wouldn't lose her footing and arrive in an ignominious heap at the bottom of the slope. Then she felt K'van's steadying hand. It was Pell who slipped, tumbling almost to the feet of the Weyrleader, who, with an easy laugh, gave him a hand to his feet. Then Aramina and K'van reached the group.

 

 

"How is your father today?" F'lar asked with a sympathetic smile.

 

 

"Badly bruised but sleeping. Lord F'lar," Aramina managed to stammer. That was the correct form of address for the Weyrleader of Pern, wasn't it? Aramina braced herself for the worst.

 

 

"We'll hope not to disturb him, but those holdless marauders did not disperse after Threadfall." F'lar's slight frown indicated his annoyance with that intransigence.

 

 

"So," F'nor took up the explanation, "Lord Asgenar plans to disperse them." He grinned as he gestured to the tall man.

 

 

It was all Aramina could do to stand straight as she stared, appalled to be in the company of the Lord Holder whose land had been invaded by impudent holdless raiders in pursuit of a trespassing holdless family. In a daze she heard Lord Asgenar wondering why the raiders were pressing so far into his forestry. She saw that men were marching down the track, quietly but in good array.

 

 

"I've foresters in the top camp, although I cannot see what profit raiders could make of sawn logs," Lord Asgenar was saying.

 

 

Now the truth must out, to save good men from Lady Holdless Thella's brutal riders.

 

 

"It's me."

 

 

Aramina's voice cracked so that her tentative admission was almost unheard. But the bronze dragon rumbled, and suddenly F'lar was regarding her with a sharp and penetrating gaze.

 

 

"You said that it was you, Aramina?"

 

 

The two men turned to gaze down at her. Pell's fingers tightened about her arm.

 

 

You do not need to fear, child.

 

 

"Mnementh's quite right, Aramina. Would you explain?"

 

 

"It's me. Because I can hear dragons. And the Lady Holdless Thella..."

 

 

"Thella, is it?" exclaimed Lord Asgenar, slapping his hand onto his sword hilt. "By the first egg, I've been longing to meet that one."

 

 

"Thella has been chasing you, child?"

 

 

It was such a relief to admit to the first truth that her confession was almost incoherent, except that between her words Aramina kept hearing the reassurances of three dragon voices in her head, calming her, bidding her speak more slowly and above all not to be worried about a thing.

 

 

"So, Thella thinks to Search for what is the Weyr's by right?" F'lar's amber eyes flashed with a fire no less frightening than dragon breath. "And you and your family left Igen Cave only ten days ago? You have traveled hard to escape that woman. Where did you come from?"

 

 

"Last Turn my father bonded himself to Keroon beastmaster...."

 

 

"Then you are Keronese?"

 

 

"No, Lord F'lar. My father and mother had a small forest hold in Ruatha..."

 

 

Aramina stopped in midsentence, startled by the play of surprise and comprehension that flashed across the faces of the dragonriders.

 

 

"Lessa should have come, after all, F'lar," F'nor said, grinning with some private amusement at the Weyrleader.

 

 

"So Fax made your family holdless, Aramina." F'lar's voice was kind, though his eyes still sparkled.

 

 

Unable to speak, Aramina nodded.

 

 

"And your father was a forester?" Lord Asgenar's question was eager. Again Aramina could only nod.

 

 

"He's the best wood joiner and carver in all Pern." Pell spoke up, sensing a sympathy in their audience that Aramina, immersed in guilt, could not appreciate.

 

 

"Is he now? I thought as much." F'lar took up the conversation, giving Aramina a chance to regain her poise. "That's a very well made gather wagon you hid so neatly. We almost didn't spot it, did we, Asgenar?"

 

 

"Well hidden indeed. But I must go on, F'lar, F'nor. My men are assembled. I'm leaving men to guard your cave, Aramina, so you will have absolutely nothing to fear from our Lady Holdless Thella. Not now or again. We'll see to that."

 

 

And, at his signal, two men ranged behind Aramina, K'van, and Pell. As Aramina watched the tall young Lord Holder stride down the track to join his men, she began to feel secure for the first time since her first encounter with Thella and Giron.

 

 

"We must leave, too," F'lar said to F'nor. "Can't let them sight dragons in the sky near this mountain. Aramina, K'van brings some medicines for your father from our healer."

 

 

"We do not like to be beholden to anyone," Aramina replied, as her parents had drilled her to say to any such well meant offers. "We have all we need with us." She caught her lip to be telling yet another untruth.

 

 

"But we," - and F'lar bowed slightly toward her - "are beholden to you for luring that hellion Thella near enough to grab her."

 

 

"Oh!"

 

 

"Take the medicines, child. Ease your father's injuries," said F'nor, clasping Aramina's shoulders in his warm, gentle hands. He gave her a kindly little squeeze. "And don't be afraid."

 

 

"I'm not afraid," Aramina replied, for she wasn't. Not of the weyrmen. But what would her proud father say of her actions over the past two days?

 

 

Then both dragonriders quickly vaulted to their waiting dragons, swinging nimbly up onto the neck ridges. With mighty leaps that sent dust, pebbles, and bruised leaves flying, the two beasts launched themselves upward. Suddenly the trace was empty of dragons and men, and only the two soldiers and the youngsters remained to hear the morning breeze sighing through the forest.

 

 

"I wonder if they'd have taken me along to see Thella get trounced," Pell said, cocking his head around and beaming at the soldiers.

 

 

"Well now, lad, you should have asked, shouldn't you?" said the older guard. "Now, young lady, if you'll just lead the way to this cave of yours..."

 

 

"K'van, where's Heth got to? You're here. Where's he?" Pell wanted to know, looking all about him as if the bronze dragon might be roosting in a nearby tree.

 

 

"He's up at the cave, Pell. Probably asleep in that small clearing... if it's big enough. Dragons like the sun and we had a very busy day yesterday."

 

 

"And a busy one so far today, too," Pell said amiably, digging his toes into the damp mulch of the bank.

 

 

"You could to with some steps cut in this bank," said the younger soldier, who had just slipped as far as he had come.

 

 

"Oh, we couldn't do that," Pell replied, horrified. "We don't really live in that cave. Though I'd sure like to," he added with such ingenuousness that the older guard chuckled.

 

 

"Can you make a good snare?" he asked him. " 'Cause that cave is just crawling with tunnel snakes. They'd make mighty good eating after months and months of nothing but roots and fish."

 

 

"I tie a pretty good snare," K'van said, grabbing a sapling to pull himself onto the top of the ridge.

 

 

"You? But you're a dragonrider." "I wasn't always," K'van admitted, grinning over Pell's head at Aramina. "Before I was a dragonrider I was a very lowly weyrboy, and small. Just the right size to set snares for tunnel snakes. My foster mother used to give an eighth of a mark for every fifty snakes we caught."

 

 

"Really?" Pell was awed by the thought of riches beyond the eating. "Well," and Pell recovered from his awe, "I'm bloody good at snake-snaring, too, aren't I, Aramina?"

 

 

"Not if you use the word 'bloody' you aren't," she said in reproof, not wishing the soldiers to think that the holdless were also mannerless.

 

 

They had reached the clearing-and there was Heth, curled in a tight ball that just fit in the available space. The soldiers grinned as Pell, eyes wide, carefully circled the sleeping bronze dragon.

 

 

"The cave is where, young lady?" asked the guard leader.

 

 

Aramina pointed. "There!"

 

 

"There's water just to the right," Pell said hospitably, "and there's a whole grove of nuts just beyond the copse if you're hungry."

 

 

"Thank'ee, lad, we've rations with us." The guard patted a bulging pouch. "Though a drink of cold water would be welcome. Traveling between sort of dries a man's mouth of spit. You go on in, tell your folks not to worry. We'll be out here on guard."

 

 

"I'd rather stay with you," Pell said confidentially.

 

 

Aramina caught the guard's expression and hastily vetoed that option.

 

 

"Aw, Aramina, you had all the fun yesterday."

 

 

"Fun?" Aramina got a firm grip on his arm and pulled him ruthlessly toward the cave entrance.

 

 

"Later, perhaps. Pell," K'van said in the role of conciliator, "after you've eaten your breakfast, for I know I woke you out of a sound sleep. I've got enough klah here to serve everyone, and some bread, because Mende knew you wouldn't have had a chance to bake yesterday." K'van's engaging grin dared Aramina to reject the treats.

 

 

"Bread? Klah? What else do you have in that sack, K'van?" Pell, displaying the manners of the worst Igen holdless riffraff, tried to pull open the neck of the sack for a glimpse of its contents.

 

 

"Pell!" Aramina's shocked whisper reminded her brother of their sleeping parents as well as his manners.

 

 

"But, 'Mina, do you know how long it is since we had klah!"

 

 

"I've promised to make it for the guards, 'Mina," K'van said in a voice that had brought many around to indulge his whimsies. "Surely a cup between friends..."

 

 

She relented, though she was sure to receive a scolding on that account as well as for her other errors. But a cup of klah would do much to ease the trembling in her stomach and knees, and give her the energy to bear whatever other shocks this day might hold for her.

 

 

The aroma, as it steeped, roused the sleepers, though Barla's first conscious act was to peer in her husband's face, reassured by the soft snores that emanated from his slightly open mouth. Only then did Barla react to the fragrance of the brewing klah.

 

 

"We had no klah" she said, frowning at Aramina before she recognized K'van beside the little hearth.

 

 

"My foster mother, Mende, sent it along with fellis and numbweed salve to ease your husband's injury," said K'van, rising to bring her a cup of the fresh brew. He smiled with a shy charm to which Barla was scarcely impervious.

 

 

Aramina regarded the young bronze rider with astonishment.

 

 

"My Weyrleaders insisted that I return to see if he is recovering from the accident."

 

 

"That is kind of you, young K'van, but unnecessary. We do not care to be beholden to anyone." Barla pretended not to see the cup he offered, but Aramina saw her mother's nostrils twitch in appreciation of the aromatic steam.

 

 

K'van gave her another of his charming smiles. "I'm weyrbred, you know," he said, undaunted, "so I know how you feel about being under obligation." When he saw Barla's incredulous expression, he went on. "Before the Pass began, Benden Weyr was begrudged every jot and tittle... because" - and now his voice became querulous and his eyes took on a merry twinkle for this impersonation - "everyone knows that Thread won't fall on Pern again!" He grinned impishly at Barla's astonishment and her sudden realization that Benden had indeed once been relegated to a state not much different from that of the holdless: tolerated when unavoidable, ignored when possible, and condemned on every occasion for uselessness. "Drink, good lady, and enjoy it. Mende also sent along bread, knowing you'd've had no chance to bake yesterday."

 

 

"Mother, could we not send Mende one of the wooden spoons Father carved at Igen?" Aramina ventured to suggest to salve her mother's sensibility.

 

 

"Yes, an exchange is always permissible," Barla replied and, inclining her head graciously, finally accepted the cup of klah.

 

 

Relieved by her mother's capitulation, Aramina carefully cut a thick slice of the round loaf, spreading it generously with the jam that K'van had also extracted from his sack of surprises. She bent a stem glance on Pell when he started to devour the treat ravenously.

 

 

Only when she had served the others did Aramina eat, savoring the klah and the thick, crunchy bread spread with the berry jam. Daintily she even rescued the crumbs from her lap with a moistened fingertip. When K'van and Pell went outside to serve the guards, Barla summoned Aramina to the sleeping furs, where she was delicately smearing numbweed salve on the livid bruises on Dowell's chest. "Why is that rider still here?"

 

 

"He came back this morning. Mother." Then Aramina took a deep breath, realizing that only the truth would serve. Evasion was as dishonest as lying, whatever her motive. The presence of the dragonriders and Lord Asgenar would insure the safety of everyone. With complete candor she accounted for her part in the events of the past day and this morning. "And the Benden Weyrleader was just here with Lord Asgenar and his men because Lady Holdless Thella has followed us. Lord Asgenar is using this opportunity to ambush her and that horrid band of hers. So we'll be safe now because Lord Asgenar and Lord F'lar think father built a fine gather wagon. And truly, they did call it a gather wagon just as if that's all it ever has been."

 

 

"That's what it was made for," said Dowell in a sad voice, slightly shaken by the pain of the shallow breaths he took to speak.

 

 

"Here, Dowell. Drink this fellis," Barla said, raising the carved wooden cup to his lips.

 

 

"Fellis? We had no fellis!"

 

 

"We have it now, Dowell. Don't be so proud it hurts!" Barla said, suspending pride in the interests of healing her husband.

 

 

Thus abjured, Dowell swallowed the dose, closing his eyes at the pain that minor movement caused his swollen flesh.

 

 

Barla saw Aramina's tender concern. "The numbweed will be taking effect soon. I am truly grateful to this Mende. I think a spoon and one of the sandstone bowls. A woman can never have too many of them." She sighed. "I am truly grateful to her. And..." She turned to Dowell, who had closed his eyes in tacit accord. "I think that we must be grateful to you, daughter... in spite of the fact that you seem to have forgotten all we have tried to instil in you of manners and conduct." Aramina bowed her head, assuming a contrite pose. Then she realized that although her mother's voice was sharp, there was no bite to her words. Discipline required a scolding, but this time it was only the form that was obeyed, not the spirit. Aramina looked up and tried not to smile at this unexpected absolution.

 

 

" 'Mina, if Lord Asgenar..." Dowell began in a voice no stronger than a whisper, speaking in short phrases between the shallow breaths he took, "... favors us... with his presence again... we must request... formal permission to stay... in this cave... until I am able... to continue our journey."

 

 

"I'll tell him. And I'll mention it to the guard as well."

 

 

Dowell nodded again, closing his eyes, his mouth beginning to relax a little as fellis and numbweed gave him surcease. Barla rose and, motioning Aramina to follow her, left his side.

 

 

"It is a good dry cave, 'Mina," she said, as if this were the first chance she had had to inspect it. "There are guards? We must not fail in hospitality."

 

 

"Pell remembered to offer. Mother, and they say they have their own rations."

 

 

"That is not to the point, 'Mina, and you know it. Would there be more roots in the patch Nexa found yesterday? And nuts, too? For they make a tasty flat bread."

 

 

Aramina schooled her features not to betray her dismay, for it took a great many nuts to make a decent quantity of nut flour, and the grinding took hours.

 

 

"I'll get nuts, and there may be some wild onions, too," she said, aware of her narrow escape from punishment and determined to be dutiful today.

 

 

"Where's Pell? He ought to accompany you."

 

 

"He's with K'van, Mother." Aramina picked up her sack, cleaned her belt knife, and sheathed it. She glanced about in the habit of someone used to thinking ahead on chores before she left.

 

 

Pell was not with the guards, nor was K'van, although Heth's bronze hide was visible through the trees.

 

 

"The boys have gone off to set a wherry snare," the older guard told Aramina with a grin for such youthful pastimes. "There's roosts there." He pointed over the rocky saddle leading to a farther dell.

 

 

"A roast wherry would be a real treat for all of us," Aramina said, smiling to include both guards.

 

 

"Oh, aye, that it would, young lady." When Aramina started toward the nut plantation, he caught her by the arm. "It's you we're guarding. Where are you going?"

 

 

"Only over the ridge" - Aramina pointed to the south - "for nuts."

 

 

"I'll just have a look-see." The guard strode along with her, past the sleeping Heth, and up the long slope.

 

 

He halted, catching her arm again, as he looked down into the peaceful grove. The nut trees, well grown, were so thick-branched that they had inhibited any undergrowth that the acid of the nut mast had not killed. The approach of humans had sent the wood snakes scurrying, and only the last vestiges of the summer's insects flitted about. Nuts were visible in plenty.

 

 

"I'll give you a hand," the guard said, seeing that it was a matter of scooping up the fallen tree fruits.

 

 

With two willing pairs of hands, Aramina's sack was filled in short order.

 

 

"How much do you need?" the man asked when Aramina began to make a carryall of her jerkin.

 

 

"Mother has a mind for nut bread."

 

 

The man raised his eyes skyward. "It do be tasty, and you might just need enough" - he winked broadly at her - "to stuff that wherry your brother plans to snare. I'll just fetch these to your mother. Don't stray now." Aramina didn't stray, but in gathering she headed toward the far edge of the grove, wondering what other edibles might be found. She filled her jerkin as she moved, and had it stuffed to overflowing when she reached the boundary. There the land fell away into broken boulders. She looked up to the top of the mountain on whose flank she stood. She could see down to a twist of the river rushing through a gorge, just visible through the wintry forest. To be alone, after so many Turns of overcrowding, was a rare treat for Aramina. Maybe Lord Asgenar's gratitude would indeed extend to a longer stay for her family in the cave. It could be made quite tenable, she was sure, even in the coldest weather. Why, they could make stalls for Nudge and Shove, and if Lord Asgenar didn't object, maybe cut steps up the bank. From the fallen trees, they could fashion furniture. Her father could even season wood in the dry rear of the cave and have his own workshop. Her imagination embellished the dazzling possibilities. And then, being a practical girl, she sighed at her folly. She would be content enough to have a secure and private dwelling for as long as it took her father's chest to heal. She mustn't be greedy.

 

 

She listened then, as the breeze caressed her face, to what other sounds might be carried up from the river. She wondered if the ambush had been sprung and if she'd hear the sounds of battle. She shivered. Much as she feared Lady Holdless Thella and Giron, she wished only an end to their threat, not their lives.

 

 

She heard the faint sound of someone treading close and, thinking it was the guard returning, was taken completely by surprise as a rough hand covered her mouth and strong ones pinned her arms to her sides.

 

 

"It falls out well, after all, Giron," said a harsh voice, and Aramina's head was pulled cruelly back by her hair so that she looked up into the stained, sweaty face of Lady Holdless Thella. "We have snared the wild wherry after all, and the trap she laid is bare for Asgenar."

 

 

Heth! Heth! Help me! Thella! Even if Giron's heavy hand had not covered her mouth, Aramina was completely paralyzed by fear. Her mind idiotically repeated the one syllable that meant rescue. Heth! Heth! Heth!

 

 

Giron growled at Aramina as he began to manhandle her across the grove. "Don't struggle, girl, or I'll knock you senseless. Maybe I ought to, Thella," he added, cocking his big fist in preparation. "If she can hear dragons, they can hear her."

 

 

"She's never been near a Weyr!" Thella's reply was contemptuous, but the notion, now Giron had planted it, gave her a moment's pause. Her face contorted with anger, she gave Aramina's hair another savage jerk. "Don't even think of calling for a dragon."

 

 

Aramina couldn't have stopped her mind's chant, but she frantically rolled her eyes as if complying with Thella's order. Anything to relieve the pain of her scalp.

 

 

"Too late!" Giron threw Aramina from him, a heave that left a hunk of her hair and scalp in Thella's hand and Aramina teetering on the brink of a drop. A drop that was blocked by Heth, his eyes whirling red and orange in anger. He bellowed, sinuously weaving in among the trees, chasing Thella and Giron. From the other side of the grove came the two guards. Pell, and K'van, shouting imprecations. Aramina saw Giron and Thella disappear into the woods. The guards ran past in full pelt, but Heth had to stop at the edge of the grove, the forest being too dense for him to penetrate. He continued to bellow in fury, even after K'van reached him.

 

 

Shaking with reaction to her frightening experience, Aramina slumped against the nearest bulge-nut tree, clasping it for support and trying not to weep so childishly.

 

 

" 'Mina! What happened to you?" Pell knelt beside her, his hand hovering over the bleeding scalp wound. "It was really Thella? Who else was with her?"

 

 

K'van was beside her, patting her shoulders.

 

 

"You did the right thing, 'Mina. Heth heard you and told me. We were setting snares. Heth's called for reinforcements. They won't get away. If there hadn't been so many trees, Heth would've caught 'em already!"

 

 

"Dragons," she said in gasps, "aren't built... to run in forests." Sniffing, she pointed to Heth, who was retracing his way, weaving in and out of the trees, snarling as one wing caught on a protruding branch. He looked so funny; she oughtn't to laugh at the dear dragon who had saved her from Thella and Giron, but it was funny, and she began to giggle and then couldn't stop her laughing.

 

 

"What's so funny!" demanded Pell, outraged by his sister's laughter.

 

 

"I expect she's a bit hysterical. Not that I blame her. You take her other arm. Pell. We've got to get her back to the cave."

 

 

"What about Heth?"

 

 

Heth rejoined them, his roars now reduced to belly rumbles.

 

 

I told her I was coming! I told her I heard her! Didn't you hear me, 'Mina? Heth curled his neck around K'van to peer anxiously up at Aramina.

 

 

Hiccupping somewhere between laughter and tears, Aramina speechlessly patted Heth's muzzle.

 

 

I was so scared... even her thought hiccupped... I couldn't even hear myself.

 

 

"Shards!" said K'van as a whoosh of wind signaled the arrival of a wing of dragons. Heth swiveled his head toward the display.

 

 

The guards chase them through the woods!

 

 

As the three youngsters watched, Aramina marveling at the snippets of conversations she caught in the confusion of orders given and received, the dragons began to peel off from the wing formation, going in all directions in a search for the renegades.

 

 

"T'gellan's leading the wing," K'van informed them, deftly picking out of the stream the information that escaped Aramina. "They'll search. We're to get back to the cave."

 

 

"Oh, my sackful of nuts!" cried Aramina.

 

 

"Nuts, she worries about! At a time like this!" Pell was disgusted.

 

 

Aramina started to cry again, unable to stop the tears. "Mother needs them for bread flour...."

 

 

"I'll come back for 'em," exclaimed Pell at the top of his voice in frustration. "I'll come back!"

 

 

Not completely reassured, since she knew her brother so well, Aramina was nonetheless willing to be helped back to the cave. Her mother, after her first startlement, bathed and salved Aramina's scalp and the other scratches she had received from the rough handling. If Barla did so with compressed lips and a decidedly pale face, she did not scold Aramina. Pell, under K'van's stern eye, had gone back for the nuts and Aramina's jerkin. K'van brewed more klah, a very welcome cup that infused Aramina's cold stomach with welcome heat.

 

 

Aramina, Lessa waits without, said Heth. For your mother, too.

 

 

"Mother, we're wanted outside," Aramina said.

 

 

"By whom?"

 

 

"By Lessa, the Weyrwoman of Pern," said K'van. "Heth just relayed the message."

 

 

Barla looked at her daughter as if she had never really seen her clearly before.

 

 

"You don't just hear dragons," she said in a puzzled voice, "they hear you, and they talk to you, and you can answer them?"

 

 

"A very useful knack," K'van said with a grin; then he added, "Lessa's waiting."

 

 

"Is she angry with me?" Aramina asked timorously.

 

 

"Why would she be angry with you?" K'van asked, puzzled.

 

 

We could not be angry with you, Aramina, said the most beautiful dragon voice that Aramina had yet heard.

 

 

"C'mon," K'van took Aramina firmly by the arm to haul her out of the cave. "You don't keep Lessa waiting."

 

 

Aramina's first impression of the slender figure standing in the clearing was surprise. The Weyrwoman of Benden was so small in stature: a full head shorter than Aramina. But, once Aramina confronted Lessa, the vivid eyes and the forceful personality made her forget about such a trivial detail as height. Nor had Heth mentioned that F'lar and Lord Asgenar also waited.

 

 

"My dear child, are you quite all right?" Lessa's expression turned anxious as her hand hovered over the ugly bare patch on Aramina's head.

 

 

"I don't know how that villain Thella eluded us," said Asgenar, his teeth clenched with frustration. "We have captured the rest of her band. Fewer to trouble you, and us. I am most chagrined, Aramina, that despite our precautions you were put at risk."

 

 

"I'm fine, really. Lord Asgenar. Heth saved me. And Mother had the fellis and numbweed."

 

 

"We are extremely grateful to you," Barla put in, "for those generous gifts."

 

 

"Generous!" Lessa made a scathing remark. "I would be a lot more generous, Lady Barla, if your stiff Ruathan pride would permit."

 

 

Nothing could have startled Barla more, but, though she permitted a slight smile to curve her lips, to Aramina she seemed to be more prideful than ever.

 

 

"We Ruathans have reason to be proud, Lady Lessa."

 

 

"But not stupid in that pride, Lady Barla. Lytol tells me that Dowell's hold is still vacant. Deserted, needing repairs, for no one under Fax's holding prospered. Would you prefer to return there? Lord Asgenar" - Asgenar bowed at his name - "is also interested in anyone with wood mastery."

 

 

Barla looked from one to the other. "Ruatha is ours by right."

 

 

"So be it, Lady Barla," Lessa said, and, from the way her mouth twitched, Aramina was certain that she applauded the answer.

 

 

"However, Lord Asgenar, I am certain that my husband would be glad to build you a gather wagon... to acquit our lodging here."

 

 

"Only if he also accepts the marks his Craft allots for the labor," said Asgenar with a wide grin.

 

 

"Of course, Aramina is for Benden Weyr," Lessa went on, her eyes now fixed on Barla's face.-

 

 

"But I want to go home, to Ruatha!" cried Aramina, clinging to her mother now; clinging, too, to the dream on which she had been nourished from childhood, the return to the place of her birth, where her family belonged.

 

 

"A girl who hears dragons belongs to the Weyr," said Barla, firmly taking Aramina's hands and pressing them hard.

 

 

"It's not as if you can't visit any time you want to," Lessa said lightly. "I do. Though we of Ruatha serve our Weyrs whenever we are called to."

 

 

Please, 'Mina. Heth's tremulous whisper invaded her conflicting thoughts. Please come to Benden with me and K'van. We'd love to have you.

 

 

You will be most welcome in Benden Weyr, said the dark black rich voice of Mnementh.

 

 

"There are eggs hardening on Benden Hatching Ground right now," Lessa went on, her voice persuasive. "Benden needs a girl who can hear dragons."

 

 

"More than my family needs me?" asked Aramina perversely.

 

 

"Far more, as you'll discover," said Lessa, holding her hand out to Aramina. "Coming?"

 

 

"I don't have a choice, do I?" But Aramina smiled.

 

 

"Not when Lessa, and Benden's dragons, have made up your mind for you," said F'lar with a laugh.

 

 

From the track, dragons bellowed an emphatic agreement.

 

 

Velvet Fields

 

 

Of course we moved into the cities of the planet we now know we must call Zobranoirundisi when Worlds Federated finally permitted a colony there. Although Survey had kept a watch on the planet for more than thirty years standard and the cities were obviously on a standby directive, the owners remained conspicuous by their absence. Since Resources and Supplies had agitated in council for another breadbasket planet in that sector of the galaxy and Zobranoirundisi was unoccupied, we were sent in, chartered to be self-sufficient in one sidereal year and to produce a surplus in two.

 

 

It would, therefore, have been a great misdirection of effort not to have inhabited the cities - we only moved into four - so patently suitable for humanoid life-forms. The murals that decorated a conspicuous wall in every dwelling unit gave only a vague idea of the physiology of our landlords, always depicted in an attitude of reverent obeisance toward a dominating Tree symbol so that only the backs, the rounded fuzz-covered craniums, and the suggestions of arms extended in front of the bodies were visible.

 

 

I suppose if we had not been so concerned with establishing the herds, generally breaking our necks to meet the colony charter requirements, we might have discovered sooner that there had been a gross error. The clues were there. For example, although we inhabited the cities, they could not be made fully "operational" despite all the efforts of Dunlapil, the metropolitan engineer. Then, too, we could find no single example of the Tree anywhere on the lush planet. But, with R&S on our backs to produce, produce, produce, we didn't take time to delve into the perplexing anomalies. Dunlapil, with his usual urbane contempt for the botanical, quipped to Martin Chavez, our ecologist, that the Tree was the Tree of Life and therefore mythical.

 

 

"Carry the analogy further," he would tease Martin, "and it explains why the Tree worshipers" - that's what we called them before we knew - "aren't around anymore. Some dissident plucked the Apple and got 'em all kicked out of the Garden of Eden."

 

 

Eden might well have been modeled on this planet, with its velvet fields, parklike forests, and rolling plains. Amid these sat lovely little cities constructed of pressed fibrous blocks tinted in pleasant colors during a manufacturing process whose nature frustrated Dunlapil as much as the absence of Trees perplexed Chavez.

 

 

So, suppressing our pervasive sense of trespassing, we moved into the abandoned dwellings, careful not to make any irreparable changes to accommodate our equipment. In fact, the only sophisticated nonindigenous equipment that I, as colony commissioner, permitted within any city was the plastisteel Comtower. I ordered the spaceport constructed beyond a low range of foothills on the rather scrubby plain at some distance from my headquarters city. An old riverbed proved an acceptable road for moving cargo to and from the port, and no one really objected to the distance. It would be far better not to offend our landlords with the dirt and chaos of outer-space commerce close to their pretty city.

 

 

We pastured the cattle in neatly separated velvet fields. Martin Chavez worried when close inspection disclosed that each velvet field was underpinned by its own ten-meter- thick foundation of ancient, rock-hard clay. Those same foundations housed what seemed to be a deep irrigation system.

 

 

I did ask Martin Chavez to investigate the curious absence of herbivores from a planet so perfectly suited to them. He had catalogued several types of omnivores, a wide variety of fowl, and a plethora of fishes. He did discover some fossil remains of herbivores, but nothing more recent than traces comparable to those of our Pleistocene epoch.

 

 

He therefore was forced to conclude - and submitted in a voluminous report with numerous comparisons to nearby galactic examples - that some catastrophes, perhaps the same that had wiped out the humanoids, had eliminated herbivores at an earlier stage.

 

 

Whatever the disaster had been - bacterial, viral, or something more esoteric - it did not recur to plague us. We thrived on the planet. The first children, conceived under the bluish alien sun, were born just after we had shipped our first year's surplus offworld. Life settled into a pleasant seasonal routine: the beef, sheep, horses, kine, even the windoers of Grace's World imported on an experimental basis, multiplied on the velvet fields. The centenarian crops from half a dozen worlds gave us abundant yields. We had some failures, of course, with inedible or grotesque ergotic mutations, but not enough to be worth more than a minor Chavezian thesis in the record and the shrug of the pioneering farmer. If a colonist is eating well, living comfortably, with leisure time for his kids and time off with his wife on the languid southern seas, he puts up with minor failures and irritations. Even with the omnipresent guilt of trespassing.

 

 

I was not the only one who never felt entirely at ease in the pretty cities. But, as I rationalized the intermittent twinges of conscience, it would have been ridiculous to build facilities when empty accommodations were already available, despite their obstinate refusal to work no matter how Dunlapil tried to energize them. Still, we managed fine and gradually came to ignore the anomalies we had never fully explored, settling down to make our gardens and our families grow.

 

 

The tenth year was just beginning, with surprising warmth, when Martin Chavez called a meeting with me and Dunlapil. Chavez had even convened it on a Restday, which was annoying as well as unusual.

 

 

"Just in case we have to call a meeting of the colony," he told me when I protested. That statement, on top of his insistence on a meeting, was enough to make me feel apprehensive. Although Martin was a worrier he was no fool; he did not force his problems on anyone unnecessarily, nor was he one for calling useless meetings.

 

 

"I've an unusual report to make on a new plant growth discernible on the velvet fields, commissioner Sarubbi," he announced, addressing me formally. "Such a manifestation is not generally associated with simple monocotyledonous plants. I've cross-checked both used and unused pastures, and the distortions of the growth in the used fields are distressing."

 

 

"You mean, we've imported a virus that's mutating the indigenous grasses?" I asked. "Or has the old virus that killed off the herbivorous life revived?"

 

 

"Nothing like this mutation has ever been classified and no, I don't think it's a return of a previous calamity." Chavez frowned with worry.

 

 

"Ah, champion, Martin," Dunlapil said with some disgust. "Don't go calling for a planetary quarantine just when we're showing a nice credit balance."

 

 

Chavez drew himself up indignantly.

 

 

"He hasn't suggested anything of the sort, Dun," I said, wondering if the urban engineer was annoyed because Chavez might be closer to solving the enigma of the Tree than Dunlapil was the mechanics of the cities. "Please explain, Specialist Chavez."

 

 

"I've just recently become aware of a weird evolution from the family Graminaceae, which these plants have resembled until now." He snapped on the handviewer and projected a slide onto the only wall in my office bare of the ubiquitous murals. "The nodular extrusions now developing in the velvet fields show none of the characteristics of herbaceous plants. No joined stems or slender sheathing leaves." He looked around to see if we had seen enough before he flashed on a slide of magnified cellular material. "This cross section suggests genus Helianthus, an improbable mutation." Chavez shrugged his helplessness in presenting such contradictory material. "However, something new is under every sun and we have not yet determined how the usual blue light of this primary will affect growth after prolonged exposure. We might get a Bragae Two effect."

 

 

"The next thing you'll be telling us, Martin," Dunlapil said as if to forestall a discourse on galactic comparisons, "is that these plants are the aliens who built these cities." He shot me a grin.

 

 

"That ought to be obvious," Chavez said with such a lack of rancor that the disbelief I had been entertaining disappeared. "Commissioner" - Chavez's grave eyes met mine - "can you give me another reason why every city has similarly fenced lots, all placed to catch full daily sun? Why the velvet fields with that central dominant Tree symbol appear to be the reverent focus of the aliens - excuse me - the indigenous species?"

 

 

"But they're humanoid," Dunlapil said in protest.

 

 

"Their culture is agrarian. And there are no grazers. Not a single example of that blasted Tree anywhere on the planet - yet!"

 

 

That was when I truly began to be afraid.

 

 

"There are no grazing beasts," Chavez went on inexorably, "because they have been eliminated to protect the velvet fields and whatever is growing in them now."

 

 

"You mean, when those fields bloom with whatever it is they bloom with, the aliens will return?" Dunlapil asked.

 

 

Chavez nodded. "If we haven't irreparably altered the growth cycle."

 

 

"But that's fantastic! An entire civilization can't be dependent on a crazy who-knows-how-long cycle of plant life!" Dunlapil was sputtering with indignation.

 

 

"Nothing is impossible," replied Chavez at his most didactic.

 

 

"Your research has been sufficiently comprehensive?" I asked him, although I was sick with the sense of impending disaster.

 

 

"As comprehensive as my limited equipment and xenobotanical experience allow. I would welcome a chance to submit my findings to a board of specialists with greater experience in esoteric plant-life forms. And I respectfully request that you have Colonial Central send us a team at once. I'm afraid that we've already done incalculable damage to the - " He paused and, with a grim smile, corrected himself. " - indigenous organism seeded in those fields."

 

 

The semantic nicety jarred me. If Chavez was even remotely correct, we would require not only xenobotanists and xenobiologists but an entire investigation team from Worlds Federated to examine our intrusion into a domain that had not, after all, been abandoned by its occupants like a Marie Celeste but had simply been lying fallow - with the indigenous natives quiescently in residence.

 

 

As Chavez, Dunlapil, and I walked from my office toward the Comtower, I remember now that I felt a little foolish and very scared, like a child reluctant to report an accident to his parents but dutifully conscientious about admitting his misdemeanor. The plastisteel tower had never looked so out of place, so alien, so sacrilegious as it did now.

 

 

"Hey, wait a minute, you two," Dunlapil protested. "You know what an investigation team means...."

 

 

"Anything and everything must be done to mitigate our offense as soon as possible," Chavez said, interrupting nervously.

 

 

"Dammit!" Dunlapil stopped in his tracks. "We've done nothing wrong."

 

 

"Indeed we have! We may have crippled an entire generation." Chavez spoke with an expression of ineffable sorrow.

 

 

"There are plenty of fields we never touched. The aliens - natives - can use them for food...."

 

 

Chavez's sad smile deepened and he gently removed Dunlapil's hand from his arm. " 'From dust ye came, to dust ye shall return, and from dust shall ye spring again.'"

 

 

It was then that Dunlapil understood the enormity of our crime.

 

 

"You mean, the plants are the peopled"

 

 

"What else have I been saying? They are born from the Trees."

 

 

We did what we could even as we waited for the specialists and investigation team to arrive.

 

 

First we cleared the animals and crops from every one of the velvet fields. We removed every sign of our colonial occupation from the cities. The team, composed of five non-human and three humanoid species, arrived with menacing expedition well before the initial flood of xenospecialists. The team members did not comment on our preliminary efforts to repair our error, nor did they protest their quarters in the hastily erected dwellings on the bare, dusty plain and the subsequent roaring activity of the spaceport close by. All they did was observe with portentous intensity.

 

 

Of course, except for vacating the cities - and occupying them was apparently the least of our cumulative crimes - everything we did to remedy our trespass proved horribly inept in the final analysis. We would have been less destructive had we kept the cattle on the velvet fields and not slaughtered them for food. We ought to have let the crops ripen, die, and return to the special soils that had nourished them. For the fields we stripped produced the worst horrors. But how were we to know?

 

 

Now, of course, we know all too fully. We are burdened to this very day with guilt and remorse for the wholesale dismemberment and dispersal of those irretrievable beings;

 

 

eaten, digested, defecated upon by grazers. And again, eaten, digested, and eliminated by those who partook of the grazers' flesh. Of the countless disintegrated natives removed from their home soil by unwitting carriers, none can bear fruit on foreign soil. And on their own soil, to repeat, the fields we had stripped produced the worst horrors....

 

 

I remember when the last report had been turned in to the eight judges composing the investigation team. Its members wasted no further time in formulating their decree. I was called to their conference room to hear the verdict. As I entered, I saw the judges seated on a raised platform, several feet above my head. That in itself was warning that we had lost all status in Worlds Federated.

 

 

A flick of the wrist attracted my attention to one of three humans on the team. Humbly I craned my head back, but he refused to glance down at me.

 

 

"The investigation is complete," he said in an emotionless tone. "You have committed the worst act of genocide yet to be recorded in all galactic history."

 

 

"Sir..." My protest was cut off by a second, peremptory gesture.

 

 

"Xenobiologists report that the growths in the velvet fields have reached the third stage in their evolution. The parallel between this life-form in its second stage and that of the cellulose fauna of Brandon Two is inescapable." Chavez had already told me of that parallel. "Now the plants resemble the exorhizomorphs of Planariae Five and it is inevitable that this third stage will give way to the sentient life pictured in the murals of their cities.

 

 

"You came here as agrarians and agrarians you shall be, in the fields of those you have mutilated. What final reparations will be levied against you, one and all, cannot be known until the victims of your crimes pronounce the penance whereby you may redeem your species in the eyes of the Worlds Federated." He stopped speaking and waved me away. I withdrew to announce the verdict to my dazed fellow colonists. I would far rather that we had been summarily executed then and there, instead of being worn and torn apart by bits and pieces. But that was not the way of judgment for those who trespass in modem enlightened times.

 

 

We could not even make an appeal on the grounds that the planet had been released to us, for the colony in its charter took on all responsibility for its subsequent actions, having reaped benefits now so dearly to be paid for.

 

 

So we worked from that day until Budding Time late that heinous fall. We watched anxiously as the seedling exorhizomorphs grew at a phenomenal rate until they were ten, then twenty, finally twenty-five feet high, thick-trunked, branching out, lush with green triangular foliage. By mid-summer we knew why it was that during our time on the planet we had never been able to find any examples of the Tree: such Trees grew once every hundred years. For they were the Trees of Life and bore the Fruit of Zobranoirundisi in the cellular wombs, two to a branch, three to eleven branches per Tree. In the good fields - that is, the unviolated fields. In the others...

 

 

The galaxy knows we tried to atone for our crime. Every man, woman, and child was devoted to tending the twisted, stunted, deformed, half-branched Trees that grew so piteously in those desecrated fields. Every one of us watched with growing apprehension and horror as each new day showed further evidence of the extent of our sacrilege. Oh, the hideous difference between those straight, tall, fine Zobranoirundisi and - the Others. We were ready for any sacrifice as penance.

 

 

Then, the morning after the first good frost, when the cold had shriveled the stems, the first Zobranoirundisi tore through his vegetable placenta. He shook his tall willowy body, turned and made obeisance to his natal Tree of Life, ate of the soil at its roots, of its triangular foliage... and knew!

 

 

I can never retell the agony of that day, when all those Zobranoirundisi faced us, their maimers, and announced the form our expiation would take. We bowed our heads to the inevitable, for we knew the sentence to be just and of Hammurabian simplicity.

 

 

We had to give back to the soil what we had taken from it. The handless Zobranoirundisi, recognizing his missing member from the cells now incorporated into the fingers of a young colony child nurtured on milk from cattle fed in the velvet fields, had every right to reclaim what was undeniably his own flesh. The legless Zobranoirundisi could not be condemned to a crippled existence when the Terran child had used the same cells to run freely for seven years on land where previously only Zobranoirundisi had trod.

 

 

We rendered, all of us, unto the Zobranoirundisi that which was truly theirs - seed and soil of the velvet fields, part and particle of the originally fertilizing dust that would have been reconstituted during the cycle we had so impiously interrupted.

 

 

Nor were we permitted to evade the least segment of required reparation, for the galaxy watched. I will say this of us proudly, though I no longer have a tongue: Mankind will be able to live with its conscience. Not one of us, when required, failed to give his flesh to the Zobranoirundisi in atonement!

 

 

Euterpe on a Fling

 

 

Looking through old files for something else entirely, I chanced upon the notes I'd made during an interview with Madame Florence Foster Jenkins. Considering that the musical world had been far more concerned with the curious and brief career of one Peter Pelty, substitute tenor at the Metropolitan Opera House, I'd never transcribed the notes into an article. But reviewing them now - after nearly fifty years - I was amazed at how vividly I recalled the incident. Of course, Madame Florence Foster Jenkins had had her own niche in the recital world of New York. Having met and then heard her, I knew that she was eminently memorable.

 

 

I carefully unfolded the two yellowed and now fragile clippings attached to my scrawled sheets, and suddenly it was as if I were back in that dark comer of the gloomy old Seymour Lounge, where Madame Jenkins had agreed to meet me.

 

 

The first article, lamentably in only the last paragraph, described her Carnegie Hall debut, at age seventy-six. I'd been there: I didn't need further joggling. I grinned as I read,

 

 

Her style, her artistry, her joy of singing, her technique remain one of the most refreshingly different pages in the annals of musical history. She was known as the mistress of the sliding scale, a skilled proponent of altered tempi. Her ability to remain a quarter tone above or below the written note was truly inspired.

 

 

Her rendition of the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute had, to my astonished ears, been certainly all that and more.

 

 

The second clipping mentioned the curious and unscheduled debut of the American tenor Peter Pelty, who remains far more of a controversial musical mystery than Madame Florence Foster Jenkins.

 

 

Or, -I thought with sudden surprise, does he?

 

 

Pelty had substituted in the role of Radamès in a Saturday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera, the advertised tenor having been injured in a taxi accident on his way to the opera house. Those in the audience vowed they had never heard such a magnificent voice - an opinion substantiated by not only Milton Cross but also Mr. Aaronsky, the director of the Met; Madame Neroni, who sang Aida; and Maestro Di Saltsa, the conductor. The radio audience, however, held a diametrically opposite opinion of Pelty's vocal accomplishments. The entire musical world was talking about the affair, so I had thought to set Madame Jenkins at ease by asking her opinion of the dichotomy, for she had been at the performance.

 

 

"Tenors are never so happy but when they are stage center," Madame Jenkins told me, inclining her torso toward me, a habit she used to emphasize a point. Her voice, which, up to that point, had been genteel and refined, suddenly oozed with disdain. "He had only himself to blame for overextending himself. Eighteen curtain calls is impolite: especially when he took most of them himself."

 

 

"He won't do it again," I said, remembering that he had expired before the curtain could be raised on the nineteenth demand of his audience to express their appreciation of that incredible performance.

 

 

"It shall remain as a lesson to others not to exceed operatic decorum." Again that slight forward motion, but her lips were primly thin in disapproval.

 

 

She was, in herself, an astonishing figure: small, and so well corseted I thought I heard subtle creakings - but then many singers are tightly corseted during performances to assist breath support. Her rounded face displayed the jowls that often plague singers and mar an otherwise pretty face, but Madame Jenkins looked more Victorian, e.g., like the Queen. Her mousy hair was neatly marcelled in waves reminiscent of a prewar style, and her clothing, while well cut and an attractive cherry red that lent color to a rather pale complexion, also harked back to the pre-flapper era. But it suited her.

 

 

"Didn't you think it odd, Madame Jenkins, that a total unknown would be called upon to substitute at the Met?"

 

 

"Not at all," she surprised me by saying. "He was not only a dedicated subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera Society but he knew every libretto by heart." An expression of mixed exasperation and then immediate remorse crossed her expressive little face. "He sat near me, you see."

 

 

"Sat near you, Madame Jenkins? I don't understand."

 

 

She waved a graceful hand, preparatory to enlightening me. "Ever since I have subscribed to my seat for the Saturday opera matinees, I have had his voice in my ear."

 

 

"His voice in your ear?"

 

 

"It's quite simple, young man. His seat was diagonally behind mine in row H. I was in row G. I'm just a teensy bit nearsighted," she added in a confidential tone. Then she drew herself up, reclasping her hands in her lap with Victorian precision. "For twenty-four years, through every opera, he hummed every single tenor aria and chanted, mind you, chanted the recitatives. No one ever sat beside him, on either side, more than once but.. " She shuddered delicately, eyes closed, her pale rounded face eloquently expressing her patient forbearance. "... he ought not to have done so."

 

 

"That must have been frightfully irritating," I said solicitously.

 

 

"Irritating?" One graceful hand rose in a gesture of dismay. "It was ill-mannered in the extreme. My papa and my mama would have had words with the manager at the very first occurrence. Of course. Papa was not fond of opera although he attended when the troupe came to Philadelphia, where we lived. But a lone woman, with no escort, speaking to a man to whom she hasn't been introduced... No, simply not done."

 

 

"But if he was interfering with your pleasure..."

 

 

Her eyes widened in surprise. "The irritating thing, young man, was that he was often so much better a singer than the one on stage."

 

 

I remember gawking in surprise.

 

 

"And when he took the stage as Radamès, I have never heard a more brilliant performance. He lived the role. He suffered it. He sang it." Her voice wavered touchingly on the verb. "We were totally under the spell of his magic voice."

 

 

"Really?" It was hard to keep from laughing, either at her unexpected endorsement or my recollection of the cacophony I had heard issue from my radio - fortunately, for just the first act of Aida,

 

 

"Young man," she said, waggling an admonishing beringed finger at me, "I know whereof I speak. I was in that audience. You were not. I have seen Aida some..." She gazed heavenward, counting. "... some twenty times and I have never heard the role sung better. Furthermore, Mr. Pelty did not, as some tenors would, depart from the tempi of Maestro Verdi's score, or put in those little embellishments that tenors seem so fond of. Mr. Pelty was in flawless voice throughout the entire performance. Now, the Amneris..."

 

 

"Oh, come now, Madame Jenkins," I began, "I heard the first scene. Madame Schezani's Amneris was on pitch whereas Pelty..."

 

 

"Radio is in its infancy, young man," she said with a patronizing smile. "We, in the audience, to the last one of us, heard exactly what we were supposed to hear-a superb, never-to-be-forgotten Radamès in full and glorious voice."

 

 

"Madame, my cat with its tail caught in the icebox door was Nellie Melba in comparison."

 

 

"Madame Melba, young man, was a soprano," she said in a prim reprimand. "Even Mr. Cross," and she smiled graciously at mentioning him, "could not understand why the NBC was in such a tizzy over what appeared to all of us to be a unique experience. He said so to me several times - that is, before he refused to discuss the matter at all. He told me that his ears could not have so deceived him. After all, Mr. Cross is Mr. Opera. My poor opinion is as nothing next to his but, on this, we are in agreement!"

 

 

"Hmm, yes, but he won't, as you say, discuss the incident. I believe Mr. Aaronsky has been on the carpet, too...."

 

 

"And so he should," she confused me by saying, "for not having assured himself of the availability of an understudy for the matinees as they invariably do for the evening performance."

 

 

"You surely can't blame Mr. Aaronsky for Mr. Sostenuto's taxi accident?" She gave me a stern look, her ample chin tucked down to her high bosom.

 

 

"Of course not. But, in my youth, every contingency was provided for. Consequently our society was very well ordered."

 

 

"To be sure, to be sure."

 

 

"At first," she continued, nodding at my meek apology, "when Mr. Aaronsky stepped in front of the curtain to explain a delay of the performance, I presumed that he had sent for the first cover of the tenor role. Albeit, Mr. Sostenuto had never missed a performance in his life - he resides on East Sixty-second Street during the season - still it was gross negligence of the director."

 

 

I remember that I couldn't resist teasing her then.

 

 

"Even when you were treated to such a musical debut?"

 

 

"Sagacious provision against unexpected emergencies is another matter entirely. I fault him on that score, not on permitting Mr. Pelty to sing Radamès." A glow suffused her round face. "That was serendipitous."

 

 

"What I don't understand, Madame, is how he got on the Met stage at all!" A question that had been asked over and over. If Madame Jenkins had the answer, I might have a scoop on my hands, not a fill-in article.

 

 

"Of course, when Mr. Pelty rose from his seat behind me, I thought he was leaving, not going to offer to play the role." She paused, drawing herself to an even more rigid position on the edge of the chair she occupied. "You can imagine my surprise when, shortly thereafter, Mr. Aaronsky reappeared to announce that Mr. Pelty would sing the role."

 

 

"But Mr. Pelty was totally unknown...."

 

 

"He was known to me, though we had never been on more than nodding terms."

 

 

"And the Met has an enviable reputation. Very few get past the initial auditions. I mean, someone out of the audience, saying that he knows an operatic role... I mean, anyone can say he knows an operatic role but..."

 

 

"Young man," she said, interrupting me with an imperious gesture, "I have already mentioned that he had been humming and chanting the tenor roles in my left ear for years...."

 

 

"I remember that, but his... voice?" I grimaced in recollection of the tones that had assailed my ears from a usually trustworthy radio.

 

 

"Ah, but, as Mr. Aaronsky said several times, quite forcefully at one point, I believe, Mr. Pelty did have an audition. That is why Mr. Aaronsky permitted him to go on."

 

 

I must have looked my disbelief.

 

 

"Madame Neroni, who was singing Aida, as well as Maestro Di Saltsa," she continued, compounding the evidence in Pelty's favor, "were present. Madame Neroni declared herself delighted to sing Aida to his Radamès and the conductor was certainly willing. Then, too, singers go from opera house to opera house with rarely more than a walk-through of stage movements. Mr. Cross said that Mr. Pelty assured them he had seen the Met production of Aida often enough to need only occasional prompting. Which, under the circumstances, with the network demanding to proceed, was the most minor of the considerations.

 

 

"So, no matter what you may think, no matter what you think you heard on that radio-really, it is an abominable invention. I certainly shall never sing through its medium if that is how it distorts the human voice. What we in the audience were privileged to hear that day was a transcendent performance of Grand Opera! Her eyes shone at the memory, her face lit with an inner warmth and dedication.

 

 

"Oh, no," I said under my breath.

 

 

"Oh, yes," she contradicted politely, not catching my facetious tone. "As I'm sure you're aware," she went on in a gently instructive manner, "Radamès sings his big aria, the glorious 'Celeste Aida,' almost as soon as the curtain is raised." She interrupted herself to tsck-tsck softly, sighing before she picked up her story. "So often tenors will stint on the preperformance vocalizing. They appear on stage unprepared to do justice to the splendor of that magnificent Verdi aria. It has, you know, three B-flats and many a time I am forced to confess that I have heard the Radamès distinctly under pitch on the second B-flat. And twice, no, three times, the tenor has not held that final note its full count."

 

 

"Inexcusable!"

 

 

"Of course, there are many tenors who, as the expression goes, 'milk' that final B-flat beyond what Maestro Verdi wished. But Mr. Pelty was in glorious voice." Her eyes turned heavenward again, her hands lifted eloquently in the same direction. "Each note, pure, spinning, magnificently supported."

 

 

She and the bemused audience had been unanimous on that point despite the fact that everyone in radio range heard a cross between a gargling scream and a wailing animal in acute distress. Before Mr. Pelty had finished the opening aria, there had been such a shocked wave of protest to NBC from radio listeners that the network - after tuning into the opera - had peremptorily cut Mr. Cross's microphones from the air and substituted a recorded but infinitely more acceptable performance of the opera. Mr. Cross, when called to the phone by the frantic studio director, had insisted with vehemence that the performance was truly a memorable one, the tenor inspired, and that it must be the fault of the electronic equipment. In the early thirties the radio facilities at the Met were still makeshift. Mr. Cross, however, would not credit the fact that only the tenor's voice seemed affected by the malfunction.

 

 

"His style," Madame continued, "his presence, his authority were... divinely inspired!" Her eyes returned to earthly horizons, still shining with remembered ecstasy. "And it was, of course, a distinct relief to have him onstage, singing the role instead of humming in my left ear."

 

 

An air bubble or something caught in my windpipe and I began to choke helplessly.

 

 

"Waiter, a glass of water, please," Madame directed thoughtfully.

 

 

"Oh, thank you, very good of you, Madame. My apologies," I managed to gasp between sips. "Would you join me? I mean, Madame, do you drink? Liquor, that is?"

 

 

She drew herself up with great dignity and said in measured syllables, "Does a fish swim?"

 

 

The waiter resorted to pounding me vigorously on the back before the second paroxysm passed.

 

 

When he returned with the drinks, I was limp but functioning. I tried to get back to the subject of Peter Pelty's performance.

 

 

"We have wasted entirely enough time on tenors, young man," she informed me. "I believe you asked to interview me?" Her emphasis on the pronoun was genteelly delicate.

 

 

"Yes, do forgive me, Madame Jenkins." I flipped to a fresh page. "Yes, Carnegie Hall next week."

 

 

She gave me a penetrating look before she retrieved her handbag from the floor beside her.

 

 

"You are, of course, attending?"

 

 

I hadn't planned to, but circumstances forced me to concur with a show of enthusiasm.

 

 

"Ticket agencies never make an exact accounting of their sales," she said. Then, with a minimum of fumbling, she brought out of the copious black purse a package of tickets, secured with a heavy rubber band. She riffled through them expertly, extracting one, which she checked before handing it to me with a dainty flourish of her wrist.

 

 

"I am my own manager," she said with a gracious smile. "That will be two dollars, please. I've given you row H."

 

 

I had no other option but to pull two dollars out of my wallet and complete the exchange with as good a grace as I could muster. Briefly I wondered if she would have the consummate gall to charge the music critics, too.

 

 

"The demand for tickets to my concerts has been so great that I have been forced to move from the Sherry-Netherland to the Hall," she said as she added my two crumpled bills to a huge roll, also confined by a rubber band. She returned money and tickets to the ancient black purse and it to its previous position.

 

 

"I've never trusted tenors, agents, or managers, and I find I do very well indeed without them," she said without a trace of rancor. "Now!" She folded her hands primly in her lap and cocked her head expectantly at me for my questions.

 

 

"Don't artistes usually start their careers somewhat earlier than you have, Madame?" I put it as diplomatically as possible. Not every seventy-year-old makes a debut in Carnegie Hall. I'd heard that her parents had kept her from singing while they were alive, and her husband during his life span. Unfortunately he had had a heart attack and died intestate, so she had inherited a considerable estate with no restrictions and immediately founded the Verdi Society, Giuseppe being her favorite opera composer.

 

 

"I have been a concert artiste, in my modest way, since 1924," she told me demurely. "I was taught, as all young girls" - which, in her enunciation, sounded more like "gels" - "in my day, to play the piano and accompany my vocal renditions evenings after dinner. I have always maintained that if you desire something badly enough, and work assiduously toward that goal, you will one day succeed. Papa and Mama were very strict, as indeed parents should be, and they felt that a stage career was not suitable for a young woman of my social standing. I approve of a certain amount of relaxation in such strictures these days. After all, these are modem times."

 

 

"Indeed. Very true. Very liberal of you."

 

 

"Of course, I would never dream of presenting myself in anything so lacking in taste as that dreadfully fast Oklahoma, which the public raves about."

 

 

"The public" was patently not in the same social sphere as those who attended operatic performances. I nodded encouragingly. She didn't need much, for she was well launched now.

 

 

"But the concert stage has always been eminently respectable."

 

 

"Indeed."

 

 

"And when dear Mr. Jenkins left me financially independent, I vowed to support my real love -- Operah! -- and to follow the career my parents felt constrained by the dictates of society to deny me."

 

 

She consulted the watch pinned to her pleated lacy shirt-waist and rose to her feet. I found myself drawn up, as by strings, to my feet.

 

 

"Mr. McMoon, my accompanist, is awaiting me. He is a jewel of patience and perseverance. So few pianists are gifted enough to follow me when I am inspired by the music I am performing. I have a mattinata tomorrow. The life of an artiste is rigorous and there are many demands on my time."

 

 

"Yes, yes, you've been most gracious, Madame, but one last question?"

 

 

She smiled, the epitome of the gentle lost grace of another era.

 

 

"Mr. Pelty," I began, seizing my last opportunity awkwardly, unable to phrase my notion.

 

 

A look of penitent remorse crossed her face.

 

 

"I fear I might have sounded, not entirely charitable," she said. "Tenors are, you know, the cross we sopranos suffer for our art. I'm sure, however, I could have put any personal feelings aside to have sung Leonora to Pelty's Manrico." She sighed expressively for the might-have-been. "And he did deserve many curtain calls. Perhaps not eighteen but what a glorious way for an artiste to pass to his reward!"

 

 

"Yes, glorious!" Fortunately she didn't catch the irony. "But, Madame, do you think it possible... It would explain why the radio listeners heard one thing and you in the audience another... Could he have been doing a reverse Trilby?"

 

 

She stiffened, her whole body rigid; her eyes lost their mildness and took on a piercing quality.

 

 

"What on earth do you mean to suggest?" she asked in the iciest of tones.

 

 

"That... he had the audience hypnotized into hearing... what they heard...." I stammered it out, slowing down with each word because of the awing, unnerving change in Madame Jenkins's face.

 

 

"The entire Metropolitan audience and Mr. Cross? Hypnotized?" she demanded with regal and searing scorn.

 

 

"Well, it's a possibility, isn't it? After all, fifty thousand radios can't be wrong, can they?"

 

 

She drew in a deep breath, obviously controlling herself. "And why not?" she intoned. "Radio being a mechanical contrivance, crackling at best, with wavering transmissions of dubious quality. You would do well to forget such a preposterous theory, young man. There is a mystic bond between artiste and audience which some minds can never understand!"

 

 

"Yes, of course, Madame. Silly of me to suggest such a thing. Impertinent."

 

 

"Indeed!"

 

 

After one more penetrating stare, she relaxed suddenly, smiling with more characteristic gentleness.

 

 

"Do not be late for my concert, now," she said as she turned away. "I can promise you an extraordinary musical experience. I know exactly where you'll be sitting and I shall throw blossoms at you during the lieder selections."

 

 

Stunned at the prospect, I could only bob deferentially as she swept out of the lounge. But I am positive I heard her saying:

 

 

"Pelty? A Svengali? Impossible! He was only a tenor!"

 

 

Nothing could have kept me from that concert. Carnegie Hall was packed out. The rose blossoms she lavishly threw from the basket that completed her Dresden shepherdess's costume missed me entirely in row H. The concert was... unforgettable. But then, so was Madame Florence Foster Jenkins.

 

 

Over the years, there have been others who have tried to emulate her highly personal form of singing. Though there are recordings of her recitals, she never did perform on the radio and I wonder if it had something to do with Peter Pelty and his doubly ill-fated debut. Or perhaps it was the "mystical bond between artiste and audience" that she felt she could count on. She could certainly hold an audience and, in her own way, she has remained unique: Euterpe on a fling!

 

 

Duty Calls

 

 

With the sort of bad luck that had dogged the Alliance lately, escort and convoy came back into normal space in the midst of space debris.

 

 

We came from the queer blankness of FTL drive into the incredible starscape of that sector, so tightly packed with sun systems that we had had to reenter far sooner than the admiral liked, considering nearby Khalian positions. But we had no choice. We had to leave the obscurity of FTL in relatively "open" space. It would take nearly six months to reduce our reentry velocity of 93 percent C to one slow enough for us to make an orbit over the beleaguered world of Persuasion, our eventual destination. We also were con- strained to reduce that tremendous velocity before nearing the gravity wells of such a profusion of stars; otherwise the fleet could be disrupted or, worse, scattered to be easily picked off by any roving Khalians. The admiral had plotted a brilliant two-step braking progress through the gravity wells of nearer star systems to "lose" speed. So we emerged from FTL, nearly blinded by the blaze of brilliantly glowing stars which was, as suddenly, obscured. Then wow! Every alert on the dreadnought Gormenghast went spare.

 

 

Considering my position, attached to a landing pod, slightly forward of the main bridge section, I immediately went into action. Under the circumstances, the faster we could clear the junk the better, because 1) many of the supply pods towed by the freighters could be holed by some of the bigger tidbits flying around at the speeds they were moving, and 2) we were awfuldam close to a colony the Khalians had overrun three galactic years ago. If they had set up any peripheral scanners, they'd catch the Cerenkov radiations from our plasma weapons. So everything that could blast a target throughout the length of the convoy did!

 

 

Me, I always enjoy target practice, if I'm not it (which in my line of work as pilot of the admiral's gig is more frequently the case than the sane would wish). Against space debris I have no peer, and I was happily potting the stuff with for'ard and portside cannon when I received an urgent signal from the bridge.

 

 

"Hansing? Prepare to receive relevant charts and data for area ASD 800/900. Are you flight-ready?"

 

 

"Aye, aye, sir," I said, for an admiral's gig is always ready or you're dropped onto garbage runs right smart. I recognized the voice as that of the admiral's aide, Commander Het Lee Wing, a frequent passenger of mine and a canny battle strategist who enjoys the full confidence of Admiral Ban Corrie Eberhard. Commander Het has planned, and frequently participated in, some of the more successful forays against Khalian forces that have overrun Alliance planets. Het doesn't have much sense of humor; I don't think I would if only half of me was human and the more useful parts no longer in working order. I think all his spare parts affected his brain. That's all that's left of me, but I got to keep an offbeat but workable humor. "Data received."

 

 

"Stand by, Bil," he said. I stifled a groan. When Het gets friendly, I get worried. "The admiral!"

 

 

"Mr. Hansing" - the admiral's baritone voice was loud and clear, just a shade too jovial for my peace of mind - "I have a mission for you. Need a recon on the third planet of ASD 836/929; its settlers call it Bethesda. It's coming up below us in half a light-year. The one the pirates got a couple of years back. Need to be sure the Khalians don't know we've passed by. Don't want them charging up our ass end. We've got to get the convoy, intact, to the colony. They're counting on us."

 

 

"Yes, sir!" I made me sound approving and willing.

 

 

"You'll have a brawn to make contact with our local agent, who is, fortunately, still alive. The colony surrendered to the Khalians, you know. Hadn't equipped themselves with anything larger than handguns." The admiral's voice registered impatient disapproval of people unable to protect themselves from invasion. But then, a lot of the earliest colonists had been sponsored by nonaggressives long before the Alliance encountered the Khalians. Or had they encountered us? I can never remember now, for the initial contact had been several lifetimes ago, or so it seemed to me, who had fought Khalians all my adult life. However, it had been SOP to recruit a few "observers" in every colonial contingent, equipped with implanted receivers for just such an emergency as had overtaken Bethesda. "Het'll give you the agent's coordinates," the admiral went on. "Had to patch this trip up, Bil, but you're the best one to handle it. Space dust! Hah!" I could appreciate his disgust at our bad luck. "You've got a special brawn partner for this, Bil. She'll brief you on the way."

 

 

I didn't like the sound of that. But time was of the essence if the admiral had to prepare contingency plans to scramble this immense convoy to avoid a Khalian space attack. Somehow or other, despite modem technology, a fleet never managed to reassemble all the original convoy vessels and get them safely to their destination: some mothers got so lost or confused in the scramble, they never did find themselves again. Much less their original destination. Merchantmen could be worse than sheep to round up, and often about as smart. Yeah, I remember what sheep are.

 

 

"Aye, aye, sir," I said crisply and with, I hoped, convincing enthusiasm for the job. I hate dealing with on-the-spots (OTS's): they're such a paranoid lot, terrified of exposure either to Khalian overlords or to their planetary colleagues who could be jeopardized by the agent's very existence. Khalian reprisals are exceptionally vicious. I was glad that a brawn had to contact the OTS.

 

 

Even as I accepted the assignment, I was also accessing the data received from the Gormenghast's banks. The computers of an Ocelot Scout, even the Mark 18 that I drove, are programmed mainly for evasive tactics, maintenance, emergency repairs and stuff like that, with any memory limited to the immediate assignment. We don't know that the Khalians can break into our programs, but there's no sense in handing them, free, gratis, green, the whole nine meters, is there? Even in the very unlikely chance that they get their greasy paws on one of us.

 

 

The mortality and capture statistics for scouts like mine don't bear thinking about, so I don't think about them. Leaves most of my brain cells able to cope with immediate problems. Brawns have an even lower survival rate: being personalities that thrive on danger, risk, and uncertainty, and get large doses of all. I wondered what "she" was. What ancient poet said, "The female of the species is more deadly than the male"? Well, he had it right by all I've seen, in space or on the surface.

 

 

"Good luck, Bil!"

 

 

"Thank you, sir."

 

 

Admiral Eberhard doesn't have to brief scout pilots like me, but I appreciate his courtesy. Like I said, the mortality for small ships is high, and that little extra personal touch makes a spaceman try that much harder to complete his mission successfully.

 

 

"Permission to come aboard." The voice, rather deeper than I'd expected, issued from the air-lock corn unit.

 

 

I took a look and damned near blew a mess of circuits. "She" was a feline, an ironically suitable brawn for an Ocelot Scout like me, but she was the most amazing... colors, for her short thick fawn fur was splashed, dashed, and dotted by a crazy random pattern of different shades of brown, fawn, black, and a reddish tan. She was battle-lean, too, with a few thin patches of fur on forearm and the deep rib cage, which might or might not be scars. At her feet was a rolled-up mass of fabric, tightly tied with quick-release straps. I'd seen Hrrubans before, of course: they're one of the few species in the Alliance who, like humans, are natural predators, and consequently make very good combat fighters. I'm not poor-mouthing our Allies, but, without naming types, some definitely have no fighting potential, though as battle support personnel they have no peer and, in their own specialties, are equally valuable in the Alliance war with the Khalians. "A shacking goo," as the man said.

 

 

This representative of the Hrruban species was not very large: some of their troops are big mothers. I'd say that this Hrruban was young - they're allowed to fight at a much earlier age than humans - for even the adult females are of a size with the best of us. This one had the usual oddly scrunched shoulder conformation. As she stood upright, her arms dangled at what looked like an awkward angle. It would be for the human body. She held herself in that curious, straight-backed, half-forward crouch from her pelvis that Hrrubans affected: the way she stood, the weight on the balls of her furred feet, thighs forward, calves on the slant, the knee ahead of the toe, indicated that she stood erect right now, by choice, but was still effective on all fours. Khalians had once been quadrupeds, too, but you rarely saw one drop to all fours, unless it was dying. And that was the only way I wanted to see Khalians.

 

 

"Permission..." she began again patiently, one foot nudging the folded bundle of fabric beside her. I opened the air lock and let her in.

 

 

"Sorry, but I've never seen an Hrruban quite like you before...."

 

 

I ended on an upward inflection, waiting for her to identify herself.

 

 

"B'ghra Hrrunalkharr," she said, "senior lieutenant, Combat Supply."

 

 

And if survival is low for brawns, it's even lower for Combat Supply personnel. If she had made a senior lieutenancy, she was good.

 

 

"Hi, I'm Bil Hansing," I replied cheerily. Ours might be a brief association but I preferred to make it as pleasant as possible.

 

 

She flung a quick salute with her "hand" turned inward, for her wrist did not swivel for a proper Navy gesture. Then the comers of her very feline mouth lifted slightly, the lower jaw dropped in what I could readily identify as a smile.

 

 

"You can call me Ghra, easier than sputtering over the rest of it. You lot can never get your tongues around r's."

 

 

"Wanna bet?" And I rolled off her name as easily as she had.

 

 

"Well, I am impressed," she said, giving the double s a sibilant emphasis. She had lugged her bundle aboard and looked around the tiny cabin of the Ocelot. "Where can I stow this, Bil?"

 

 

"Under the for'ard couch. We are short on space, we Ocelots!"

 

 

I could see her fangs now as she really smiled, and the tip of a delicate pink tongue. She quickly stowed the bundle and turned around to survey me.

 

 

"Yeah, and the fastest ships in the galaxy," she said with such a warm approval that my liking for her increased. "Mr. Hansing, please inform the bridge of my arrival. I take it you've got the data. I'm to share the rest of my briefing when we're under way."

 

 

She was polite but firm about her eagerness to get on with what could only be a difficult assignment. And I liked that attitude in her. With an exceedingly graceful movement, she eased into the left-hand seat, and latched the safety harness, her amazing "hands" (they weren't really paws - Khalians have paws - for the "fingers" on her hands had evolved to digit status, with less webbing between them for better gripping) curving over the armrests. The end of her thickly furred tail twitched idly as the appendage jutted out beyond the back of the cushioned seat. I watched it in fascination. I'd never appreciated how eloquent such a tenable extremity could be.

 

 

Nevertheless, duty called and I alerted the bridge to our readiness. We received an instant departure okay, and I released the pressure grapples of the air lock, gave the starboard repellers a little jolt, and swung carefully away from the Gormenghast.

 

 

I enjoy piloting the Ocelot. She's a sweet ship, handles like a dream, can turn her thirty meters on her tail if she has to, and have, though not many believe me. I remind them that she's a Mark 18, the very latest off the fleet's research-and-development mother ship. Well, five years galactic standard ago. But I oversee all maintenance myself and she's in prime condition, save for the normal space wear and tear and the tip of one fin caught by a Khalian bolt the second year I commanded her, when Het and I ran a pirate blockade in FCD 122/785.

 

 

Of course, she's light on armament, can't waste maneuverability and speed on shielding, and I've only the four plasma cannons, bow and stem, and swivelers port and starboard. I'd rather rely on speed and zip: the ship's a fast minx and I'm a bloody good driver. I can say that because I've proved it. Five GS years in commission and still going.

 

 

I pumped us up to speed and the fleet was fast disappearing into the blackness of space, visible only as the slight halo of light where they were still firing to clear lanes through the damned dust, and that quickly dispersed - those telltale emissions, which could prove very dangerous. That is, if Khalians were looking our way. Space is big and the convoy was two light-years from its destination at Persuasion, slowing to move cautiously through the congested globular ASD cluster to make our ultimate orbit about ASD 836/934. Everywhere in this young cluster there was dust, which was a navigational hazard despite its small to minuscule size.

 

 

The reason the fleet was convoying such an unwieldy number of ships through this sector of space, adjacent to that known to be controlled by Khalians, was to reinforce the sizable and valuable mining colony on Persuasion 836/934-and strengthen the defenses of two nearby Alliance planets: the water world of the Persepolis, whose oceans teemed with edible marine forms chockful of valuable protein for both humanoid and the weasel-like Khalians, and the fabulous woods of Poinsettia, which were more splendid and versatile in their uses than teak, mahogany, or redwood. In the ASD sector the Khalians had only three planets, none valuable except as stepping-stones, so that a takeover of the richer Alliance-held worlds had a high probability factor, which the Alliance was determined to reduce by the reinforcement of troops and material in this convoy. Or once again the great offensive strike planned for Target, the main Khalian base in Alliance space, would have to be set back.

 

 

As the tremendous entry speed was reduced, the convoy was, of course, vulnerable to any Khalian marauders during the six months that maneuver took. FTL is the fastest way to travel: it's the slowing down that takes so much time. (You got one, you got the other. You live with it.) So Alliance High Command had created a few diversions in sectors BRE, BSF - attacks on two rather important Khalian-held planets - and had thrown great fleet strength into the repulsing maneuver at KSD: a strategy that was evidently working, to judge by the lack of visible traces of Khalian force hereabouts. In FTL, you have obscurity, Alliance or Khalian; but in normal space, the emissions of your normal drive make ever-expanding "cones," which are detectable in normal space. The large number of ships included in our convoy increased the detection factor to any spaceship crossing the cone trail. Cones were, fortunately, not detectable from a planetary source, but the plasma bursts would be - that is, if Bethesda had the right equipment.

 

 

If we could be spared any further unforeseen incidents, the convoy had a good chance of relieving Persuasion and the other worlds before the piratic weasels could summon strike elements to the ASD area.

 

 

I had never actually been near a Khalian. Maybe my decorative brawn had. I intended to ask her as soon as I had locked us on course. Ghra's tail tip continued to twitch, just slightly, as we reached the Ocelot's cruising speed. I had now programmed in the data to reach Bethesda, and to reenter normal space at three planetary orbits away from it, on the dark side. I checked my calculations and then, warning Ghra, activated the FTL drive and we were off!

 

 

Ghra released the safety belt and stretched, her tail sticking straight out behind her. Good thing she couldn't see me gawping at it. Scout ships with a good pilot like me, and I'm not immodest to say so, could utilize the FTL drive between systems, where the fleet, if it wanted to keep its many vessels together in some form of order, could not.

 

 

"If you'll put what is now the spaceport area of Bethesda on the screen, Bil, I'll brief you," she said, leaning forward to the terminal. I screened the relevant map. She extended one claw, using it to show me the landing site. "We're to go in north of the spaceport, low, where they won't be looking for anything. Just here, there're a lot of canyons and ravines. And a lot of volcanic debris, some of it bigger than your Ocelot. So you can pretend you're an old mountain fragment while I mosey into the settlement to see the OTS."

 

 

"And when the sun comes up and shines off my hull, it'll be bloody plain I'm no rock."

 

 

She gave a rippling chuckle, more like a happy growl. "Ah, but you'll be camouflaged by the time the sun rises," she said, pointing her left hand toward the couch under which her bundle was stored.

 

 

"Camouflaged?"