Dragonsblood (26 page)

rider.”

“You can feel them?” K’tan asked.

Lorana nodded. “They’re
very
distressed.”

Outside came the sound of a dragon popping out of
between.
The watch

dragon bugled a challenge.

Nidanth and C’rion from Ista,
was the response Lorana heard from the

arriving dragon.

“Come on,” K’tan called as he started out toward the Bowl.

A wave of emotion swept Lorana off her feet. Kindan grabbed her before

she could fall.

Dragons keened mournfully.
Kamenth of Ista is no more,
Gaminth

reported. Then the noise redoubled.
Jalith of Telgar has gone
between,

Salina’s queen, Breth, added.

“Here, lean on me,” Kindan told Lorana. She pushed away from him. The

pain of the dragons’ loss tore her heart.

“No! I must get up—Arith will be worried.”

“Then let me help you,” Kindan repeated firmly.

Lorana forced herself to recognize his logic and, with an angry sigh,

wrapped her arms around him. “Be quick,” she told him.

In the Bowl, a bronze dragon was just landing. The rider looked shaken.

Other riders, no less shaken than he, were gathering about him. Lorana

recognized M’tal and Salina. Tullea was clinging unnaturally to B’nik.

K’tan was beside the bronze rider, supporting him while the bronze dragon

curved its head down close beside, eyes whirling in distress.

“I’d heard you had some cure,” C’rion, Weyrleader of Ista Weyr, said

hoarsely to K’tan.

A loud, gurgling cough from high above startled them all.

“Breth, no!” Salina shouted as her queen leaped off her ledge and into the

air. “No! Stop!”

Lorana took a hasty breath, looked up just as the queen went
between,
and

closed her eyes. In her mind she leapt after the queen, calling,
Breth, come

back! Come back!

She bent her will to holding onto the queen, but Breth was stronger. Slowly,

Lorana felt the queen draw away from her, farther
between
than Lorana had

ever been before. In a frightened instant, she lost the queen, and then felt

herself become lost.

Arith!
She called out desperately in her mind, groping to find her way back.

She heard no answer. Frantically, she thrashed, lost in an aloneness more

vast than
between.
Then, at the edge of her being, she felt some “other.”

She grabbed at it, was rebuffed by it, and felt no more.

TEN

All life functions are the product of the interaction between

thermodynamics and chemistry.

—Introduction,
Elementary Biological Systems, 18th Edition

Fort Hold, First Pass, Year 50, AL 58

Wind Blossom woke with a start. There was danger. Danger to dragons.

No,
she told herself, pushing herself upright on her cot with one arm,
I was

dreaming.
She dropped her feet off the bed and sat up, her bare feet

resting on the cold wooden slats that lined the tent floor. Her body

complained more fiercely than usual; she was still aching from the cold and

the rain.

I’m just extrapolating from the fire-lizard to the dragons, she told herself.

Which is logical.

She thought back over the past several weeks.

The fight to save Tieran’s precious fire-lizard had taken over seventeen

days, even with the last of the antibiotics.

The infection was so severe that Wind Blossom was tempted to destroy

the specimen of green ooze she’d collected for fear of infecting others with

it. As it was, she ordered the dead fire-lizard’s carcass dissolved in boiling

nitric acid—and she seriously considered ordering the same for the living

fire-lizard.

In the end she’d destroyed neither the surviving fire-lizard nor the

specimen. Under the microscope, she’d managed to identify a vast array of

antibodies in the green sputum. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to go

much further than that. If the technicians had still been alive to operate the

equipment, she could have dried samples sufficiently to put them under an

electron microscope, if there’d been one still working.

Better yet, if even more advanced technology were still available, and

they’d managed to complete their microbial survey, Wind Blossom could

have employed computerized micro-arrays to assay the genetic material of

the microbes found in the sputum and search for one matching previously

known infectious bacteria with similar characteristics. But the sad truth was

that the first Threadfall had occurred at Landing long before they had

acquired an understanding of Pernese ecosystems.

As it was, Wind Blossom got more useful information by observing the

living fire-lizard’s response to the general-purpose antibiotic.

It took more than four days, using a maximum body-weight dose, for the

fire-lizard’s lungs to stop showing signs of distress. She continued the

antibiotic until it ran out—still not certain that she’d managed to knock out all

of the infection.

She had only a vague idea of what had caused the fire-lizard’s infection.

Repeated but guarded requests for any signs of unusual behaviors in

fire-lizards had turned up nothing. Unbelievably, it seemed that only these

two fire-lizards had acquired the new illness.

While she was busy coordinating the establishment of their

quarantine—including the acquisition of this tent from Lord Mendin, who

was much put out when later informed that the tent and everything in it

would have to be burned once the quarantine was lifted—Janir and Emorra

had been busy answering questions from the four corners of Pern. A prime

concern was controlling the curiosity of uninfected fire-lizards. They had to

be directed to come to either the College or Fort Hold—not the Drum

Tower.

The Drum Tower’s watch—after the tower itself had been disinfected

thoroughly with hot ammonia—had been strengthened to provide

continuous coverage of the place set aside for the tent, which housed Wind

Blossom, Emorra, Tieran, Kassa, and their fire-lizard patient.

Rain beat down upon the tent. The interior was dimly lit by glows. Through

the flap at the front of the tent, Wind Blossom could see that it was getting

lighter outside, and she guessed dawn would come in a few more hours.

Tieran was sleeping oddly, one arm gently draped over a bulge in his

blanket—the fire-lizard.

Kassa, who had the current watch, gave Wind Blossom a nod, then

returned to her brooding by the stove. In their time together, Wind Blossom

had come to respect the young woman and to understand that Kassa had

been willing to look beyond Tieran’s disfigurement to the young man

beneath the surface.

Emorra started in her sleep, and her eyes opened. Catching sight of her

upright mother, she wearily sat up in her own cot.

“Are you all right, Mother?”

Wind Blossom waved a hand dismissively. “I’m fine,” she said. “The

fire-lizard is probably also fine.” She gestured toward the lump in Tieran’s

blanket.

“Then why are you up?” Emorra asked, a touch acerbically.

Kassa turned from her place at the fire to follow their conversation

attentively.

“I had a dream,” Wind Blossom confessed. “A nightmare, really.”

Kassa looked up at Wind Blossom expectantly.

“Dragons?” Emorra asked, her body going tense.

“Something wrong with dragons?” Kassa repeated. “I dreamed that, too.”

When the others looked at her, she shrugged. “Daydreamed, really. I was

awake, staring into the fire.”

“It—the dream—felt odd, it startled me awake,” Emorra confessed.

Wind Blossom sighed. “It was nothing,” she decided. “We are all worried,

especially now that the little brown seems to have recovered. It’s natural.”

Emorra gave her a skeptical look.

“I’ve never had a dream like this before,” Kassa said. “My dreams aren’t as

vivid as this.”

“It’s probably just nerves,” Emorra said. “We are not sleeping in our usual

quarters.”

“Maybe,” Kassa allowed.

“I, for one, will rest easier when we discover the owner of the fire-lizards,”

Emorra said.

Early on, Wind Blossom, Emorra, and Tieran had examined the brown

fire-lizard and noted with admiration the carefully reset break in its wing. It

was obvious from that alone that these two fire-lizards belonged to

someone. Tieran insisted on keeping the brightly decorated bead harness

that the fire-lizard had worn, convinced that it was vital to identifying the

owner.

The harness had been sterilized in boiling water for over thirty minutes and

would be sterilized once more before Wind Blossom ended the

quarantine.

“Go back to sleep, Mother,” Emorra said, lying back down on her bed. “It’s

not yet dawn and the weather looks no better than yesterday.”

In consultation with Janir, Emorra, and Mendin, Wind Blossom had decided

that the quarantine could end when the fire-lizard showed no signs of illness

for more than a week, and when the weather was good enough to burn their

encampment. She hoped it would be a warm day, because the final

decontamination treatment promised to be a chilly affair.

Wind Blossom had informed the others in quarantine of it the week before,

so they had had plenty of time to get over their shock. She had arranged

with Janir to get them a mild acid solution. When they were ready for the

final decontamination, they would strip, remove all body hair, leave the tent,

and scrub each other with the acid solution.

The acid would instantly turn the oils of their skin into soap and kill any

germs on their bodies. It would be a very chilling process, and Emorra had

argued against that treatment for her mother, but Wind Blossom had been

adamant.

“So we’re all going to be standing around out there naked as the day we

were born?” Kassa had squawked.

“What about the fire-lizard?” Tieran asked.

“You’ll have to explain to him that we’ll need to do the same thing to him,

too,” Wind Blossom said.

“If you tell him that he’ll get an extra treat after we’re done, and especially

oiled as well, maybe he’ll stand for it,” Emorra suggested.

Tieran looked dubious. There had been too many times when he’d been

afraid that the fire-lizard would take off
between
never to be seen again. He

had spent many sleepless nights worrying about that until the fire-lizard’s

fever had broken.

Tieran had woken that morning to a head softly rubbing against his cheek

and a plaintive
cheep.
Small green eyes whirled. As Tieran stared in

amazement, his heart beat faster and faster with the hope that this fire-lizard

would stay with
him.
And so the little brown had.

Now Wind Blossom regarded her daughter thoughtfully, considering

whether she would take her advice and go back to sleep. Just as she had

made up her mind and was ready to lie back down, Emorra’s eyes opened

again and she said, “What would happen if the dragons
did
get infected?”

Wind Blossom gestured for her to continue, noticing that Tieran had

awakened and, like Kassa, was listening intently.

“Threadfall’s over; the dragons don’t have to fight,” Emorra said. “If the

infection is just in the lungs . . .”

“Are you suggesting that the shock of
between
killed the queen fire-lizard?”

Wind Blossom asked.

Emorra frowned. “If so, would going
between
kill infected dragons?”

“So the dragons would be unharmed as long as they could be prevented

from going
between
?”

“If the infection itself isn’t deadly,” Emorra agreed. “And hopefully the

dragons would build up an immunity.”

“True, but the immunity would not be expressed in the germ plasm,” Wind

Blossom countered.

“Meaning what?” Kassa asked, her brow creased in irritation. She had done

her best to try to follow their various discussions for the past sevenday, but

it was difficult for someone not trained in medicine.

“She means the next generation of dragons would be just as likely to catch

this infection,” Emorra explained. “Assuming, of course, that it ever mutates

sufficiently to infect dragons instead of fire-lizards.”

“No,” Wind Blossom said, shaking her head. “There is little doubt that an

organism that attacks fire-lizards will also attack dragons and watch-whers.”

“But the dragons are so much bigger!” Kassa objected.

“There is something to that,” Wind Blossom conceded with a nod of her

head.

“Do you mean that there would have to be many more of the organisms—”

“Bacteria,” Wind Blossom corrected.

“Why bacteria?” Emorra wondered.

“Because the infection in the fire-lizard was suppressed with an antibiotic,”

Wind Blossom replied with a look of exasperation. “If it were viral, the

antibiotic would not have worked.”

“Of course,” Emorra said, and grimaced, feeling like an especially dim pupil

in front of an acerbic teacher. “I’m tired, Mother. My mind’s not working at its

best.”

“Obviously,” Wind Blossom agreed tartly. She looked at Kassa. “Your point

about size was a good one. It is quite likely that there would have to be