All the Weyrs of Pern (33 page)

He looked around one last time, deciding not to investigate further so that others might have the pleasure of seeing the place as it had been left. Then he carefully closed the windows.

Golanth, crammed into the doorway, had been trying to see what he could. As F’lessan approached him, he carefully backed out onto the broad shelf that jutted out from that level. F’lessan closed the doors behind him, marveling at the workmanship that allowed the heavy metal to pivot so easily after so many centuries of disuse. He gazed up at the sweep of the hold: three more levels of windows were visible.

“Neither weyr nor hold but it would serve,” F’lessan said, remembering the point of his search. “That is, once the artifacters and Craftmasters get their look-in.”

Dragons would find this spot eminently suitable, F’lessan,
Golanth assured him.
There is the river, which is deep, clear, and tasty to drink, and there are many ledges that face the sun all the day long.
The bronze dragon swung his head to left and right to bring those places to F’lessan’s notice.
This would make a very good Weyr indeed.

“And so we shall report.”

12

T
HE DISCOVERY OF
Honshu was partially eclipsed by S’len’s discovery of eighteen usable space suits in the
Yokohama
EVA ready room. In Master Robinton’s opinion, Aivas had received that news with a great deal more excitement than he had displayed when hearing about Honshu’s state of preservation. Aivas said that the suits gave his schedule considerably more flexibility and dispensed with some rather awkward and possibly dangerous alternatives. However, some folk in the Smithcraft, and many in the Harper Hall, considered Honshu the more important, and certainly more immediately useful, discovery.

While Aivas was revising his plan, Jancis and Hamian were appointed by Master Fandarel to inventory the tools at Honshu and, if their use was not immediately apparent, to decide what function they had had. Aivas did take time to print out a manual for the sled, out of respect for the keen interest shown, but added the qualifier that any such investigations were esoteric since he could give no assistance in powering it. That provoked some resentment in those who felt that aerial transportation should not be restricted to dragonriders and “a chosen few.”

Aivas’s rebuttal to that accusation was to enumerate all the skills and technological improvements—which most of those same complainants objected to in theory—that would be necessary to produce powered aerial vehicles, including the development of an alternative and reliable power source.

“The settlers used power packs,” Aivas reminded them. The subject had arisen before. “These units were rechargeable, but no recharging mechanism survived.”

“But can’t you tell us how to make the power packs?”

“There are two kinds of science,” Aivas began in his oblique fashion. “Practical and theoretical. With practical, engineers use only what is known—and proved to work in the everyday world—to achieve certain predicted and predictable results. Theoretical science, on the other hand, pushes at the boundaries and laws that are
known
to work—and sometimes even steps outside of them. For the projects you have been working on, you already had enough background and know-how to learn the necessary science to follow my instructions. But for some things—such as the alien power packs—Pern simply has not the technology or the science to understand the theories well enough to apply them practically.”

“In other words, we’re stuck with this world and what’s in it?” Jaxom asked.

“Precisely. And it is up to you to work this out for yourself, or to gain help from Lytol rather than from this facility.”

And that was as much time as Aivas would spend on Honshu. With additional space suits available, he initiated new projects, which, it was made clear, were much closer to the major task at hand: the destruction of Thread.

Now that the life-support systems on the
Bahrain
and the
Buenos Aires
were fully operational, Mirrim and S’len were sent on their green dragons to make the necessary links between the bridge consoles on the two smaller ships and the
Yokohama
link with Aivas. The
Bahrain
and the
Buenos Aires
had, however, sustained more damage over the centuries than the
Yokohama,
losing antennae, exterior optics, and considerable areas of the outside skin from impacts that the shields had been unable to deflect. But that damage, Aivas was quick to state, would not interfere with the Plan.

Terry, Wansor, three of the Glass-smith’s brightest journeymen, and Perschar, the artist, were ferried up by green dragons for long sessions on the
Yokohama
’s telescope, mapping the Red Star for any distinctive features. The vid-link down to Aivas was still imperfect; Aivas had been unable to discover the problem and so had to rely on human observations. They soon reported to Aivas that only one side of the planet was turned toward them. Perschar was to do large reproductions of whatever geographic features the surface of the eccentric planet presented. Wansor had to be peeled away from the console, so exhausted by his lengthy efforts that he actually fell asleep
between
on the return trip.

Teams made up of green and bronze riders—all transported by the smaller green dragons—explored the deserted levels of the
Yokohama
in case anything else had been left behind. But the ancients had stripped an amazing amount of material from the ship. The space suits—and the banks of coldsleep capsules—were all that had been deemed useless on the surface.

Then a team of Mastersmiths was sent to all three ships, starting with the
Yokohama,
so that all four could familiarize themselves with the cargo bays and engine rooms. The four— Fandarel, Belterac, Evan, and Jancis—were fascinated by the ship’s construction, pausing to examine the way struts had been secured, how walls, ceilings and floors had been fitted into the skeleton of the ship. It was difficult for them to assimilate the fact that the
Yokohama
had been assembled in space at one of the old Earth’s gigantic satellite shipyards, and that the heaviest portions had been pushed into position by single workers with computer-controlled machines.

Master Fandarel made full use of the
Yokohama
as a schoolroom, getting Aivas to explain the designs and the safety aspects of the compartmentalization. He was truly amazed at the rationale behind the odd design of the spacegoing ship and had many questions to put to Aivas about the apparent anomalies.

The main section of the
Yokohama
was a huge sphere of many levels, each of which could be closed off, as could sections of each level—to sustain life, Aivas told them, should the main hull be breached. Thus heat and oxygen could be maintained only where necessary, as was being done now, to conserve supplies. The bridge area, the environmental section and the lift accessing it, a small infirmary, and Airlock A were the most heavily shielded. According to Aivas, escape pods had once been attached to Airlock A, until the
Yokohama
had been recommissioned as a colony ship and those pod positions had been altered to access supply drones.

The huge matter-antimatter engines were housed on a long shaft, attached to the midsection of the main sphere but separated by the heaviest shielding on the
Yokohama.
Two great wheels on either end of the engine shaft had held the fuel and cargo pods that had been wrapped around the engines. Those had, of course, been emptied during the journey and launched to splash down in the seas off Monaco Bay. Retrieved, the basic metal had been smelted down and reworked. The ceramic fuel tanks had been put to different uses. Very little of the superstructure of the
Yokohama
and the other two colony ships remained. The narrower stern wheel on the end of the engine shaft still held its band of maneuvering jets which, powered by the solar panels and in conjunction with those around the main sphere, were what kept the
Yokohama
’s orbit stable. One of the first checks Aivas had commissioned was to ascertain how much fuel remained in the
Yokohama
’s main tank.

Fandarel, thinking about that fuel, wondered why the settlers had dared to leave the colony ships in an orbit that was ultimately destined to decay. Aivas replied curtly that that was not an immediate concern: So far, the orbits had not decayed, and the surface of Pern was not at risk—not, at least, from ship debris.

It was while Jancis was busy patching the main engineering board into Aivas while the others were examining the “readiness” run of the great propulsion units that one of the green riders activated the red alert from the bridge. Jancis’s bronze fire-lizard, Trig, became so agitated that she had a hard time calming him down enough to make sense of his response. She could raise neither S’len nor L’zan on the com. And the red-alert signal continued to blink in the engineering facility.

“Thread attacking the
Yokohama
?” Jancis got that much from Trig’s chaotic thoughts. “It can’t, Trig. It can’t. We’re safe here! No, don’t you dare breathe fire in here!”

Jancis then bellowed directions through the speaker to the bridge until S’len hit the right sequence of buttons to make voice contact.

“It’s Thread, Jancis, I’m sure of it,” S’len replied. “Not space debris. There’s this flood of egglike things of varying sizes streaming toward us. Looks just like the stuff Aivas described to us in his lecture. Space debris wouldn’t come in a steady flow, would it? This stuff goes back as far as we can see from the window. Only none of them ever hits the window, and the pilot’s board is all lit up and the engineer’s station is beeping at us.” His words came tumbling out in his haste to describe the situation. Then his voice became agitated. “Bigath and Beerth are demanding that we go
outside.
They say it’s Thread. I never should have even
thought
what I thought it is!” Then in an explosive aside: “No, Bigath, we
can’t
fly this sort of a Fall. It’s not Thread yet, if that’s what it is! We haven’t any firestone, and there’s no air out there, and you wouldn’t fly outside anyway— you’d float, just like in here. Shards! Jancis, I can’t make her understand!”

S’len didn’t panic easily, and Bigath was not as erratic as some greens. In the background, Jancis could also hear Aivas’s loud reassurances. If Bigath was not obeying her rider, she certainly could not be disciplined by the Aivas. Her bugling challenge at Thread took on a frantic edge.

“Tell them Ruth says they’re not to go! They obey him!” she said, latching on to an authority the greens respected. She didn’t know a green dragon who wasn’t partial to the white dragon.

“When is Ruth coming, Bigath wants to know!” S’len’s tone had altered from dismay to desperation. Aivas’s calm voice continued to exhort the green dragons to listen to reason, but he was using reason that the dragons were not in a state to hear.

Jancis was scribbling a note to Jaxom to come at once when S’len, with a cry of relief, said, “Ruth’s here and everything’s under control!”

Jancis looked at the note and then at her fire-lizard, who cocked his head at her quizzically. She considered the matter for a moment longer and then made a decision. There was absolutely no way in which Jaxom and Ruth would have known to come to the bridge. He was in Ruatha today, and Aivas had no way of communicating with him there. She checked the exact time on her watch and wrote it down on the note. She added a final phrase in big letters: “TIME IT!” Then she sent Trig off to Ruatha and Jaxom.

“But if Ruth and Jaxom are here, why send the note now?” Fandarel asked.

Jancis smiled at her grandfather. “Trig needs the practice, Granddad.”

Trig was back almost immediately, looking inordinately pleased with himself.

“He needs more than practice,” Fandarel said, dismayed at the apparent disobedience.

“I don’t know about you,” Jancis said as a diversion, striding over to the lift, “but I want to see this ‘attack.’ I’ve never been allowed out of Hall or Hold during a Fall, so now may be my only chance. Aren’t any of you interested?”

The reaction to her challenge was immediate, and when Jancis found herself crammed into the lift with three big smiths she was sorry that she had issued it.

Then the lift door opened to a curious bedlam: two green dragons, wings plastered to the window, were so fiercely hissing and spraying saliva that the view was largely obscured, while Ruth, his wing fingers on those of the two greens, putting him at full stretch, overlapped their bodies. He was loudly emitting some sort of croon that was only just audible through their angry sputters.

Jancis managed to grab Trig before he took off to join the dragons in their futile posturing. She pinned him firmly under one arm while she hung on to the railing lest his violent attempts to free himself send her into a spin. Ruth turned his redshot eyes in their direction and barked peremptorily. The bronze fire-lizard immediately subsided.

The view—or the part of it that was not blocked by green and white dragon bodies—was awesome: the objects blanketed the entire panorama. Jancis had to exert a firm control over an urge to recoil as the shapes, zooming straight at
Yokohama
, were deflected at seemingly the last moment before impact by the ship’s shields. But gradually, she and the smiths became accustomed to the spectacle and could appreciate it with detachment. Not that any of them found it as amusing as Jaxom did. He was clutching the pilot’s chair in one hand to prevent himself from floating off, but he was nearly doubled up with laughter. S’len and L’zan, hovering circumspectly out of reach of furiously swishing dragon tails, looked on in chagrin and embarrassment.

Being the tallest man there, Fandarel had a reasonably unobstructed view. “An amazing spectacle. Aivas, is this one of those meteor showers you’ve told us about?”

“What you are seeing is not a meteor shower,” Aivas replied. “Comparing the present onslaught with reports made by Pilot Kenjo Fusaiyuki during his reconnaissance flights and pending examination of a sample, it is reasonable to assume that Thread, in its space-traveling form, is flowing past the
Yokohama
on its way to your planet.”

“But where will it fall?” Jaxom asked, unable to remember which Weyr was scheduled to fly Fall next.

“On Nerat, in precisely forty-six hours,” Aivas replied.

Jaxom let out a long whistle.

“This swarm has a long way to go yet to reach the atmospheric envelope of the planet,” Aivas continued.

“Hmmm,” Fandarel said, moving closer to peer out the window. “Fascinating! To be amid Thread and unharmed by it. Truly astounding. It’s a great pity we can’t do something to stem the tide here, before it reaches the surface.”

S’len groaned. “Please don’t even think that,” he said, flicking his hand at the willing creatures whom Ruth was visibly restraining at the window.

“Thread doesn’t look so dangerous right now,” Jancis said thoughtfully as she watched the ovoids sweep in and abruptly disappear.

“In its frozen state, it is unlikely to be life-threatening,” Aivas said.

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“Attempts were made by Nabhi Nabol and Bart Lemos to secure specimens, but their ship disintegrated before they were able to return with them.”