The Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey [78]
F’lar knew the boy for himself and compassion for that younger self filled him. If only he could reassure that boy, so torn by grief, so filled with resentment, that he would one day become Weyrleader. . . .
Abruptly, startled by his own thoughts, he ordered Mnementh to transfer back. The utter cold of between was like a slap in his face, replaced almost instantly as they broke out of between into the cold of normal winter.
Slowly, Mnementh flew back down to the queen’s weyr, as sobered as F’lar by what they had seen.
Rise high in glory,
Bronze and gold,
Dive entwined,
Enhance the Hold.
Count three months and more,
And five heated weeks,
A day of glory and
In a month, who seeks?
A strand of silver
In the sky . . .
With heat, all quickens
And all times fly.
“I don’t know why you insisted that F’nor unearth these ridiculous things from Ista Weyr,” Lessa exclaimed in a tone of exasperation. “They consist of nothing but trivial notes on how many measures of grain were used to bake daily bread.”
F’lar glanced up at her from the Records he was studying. He sighed, leaned back in his chair in a bone-popping stretch.
“And I used to think,” Lessa said with a rueful expression on her vivid, narrow face, “that those venerable Records would hold the total sum of all dragonlore and human wisdom. Or so I was led to believe,” she added pointedly.
F’lar chuckled. “They do, but you have to disinter it.”
Lessa wrinkled her nose. “Phew. They smell as if we had . . . and the only decent thing to do would be to rebury them.”
“Which is another item I’m hoping to find . . . the old preservative technique that kept the skins from hardening and smelling.”
“It’s stupid, anyhow, to use skins for recording. There ought to be something better. We have become, dear Weyrleader, entirely too hidebound.”
While F’lar roared with appreciation of her pun, she regarded him impatiently. Suddenly she jumped up, fired by another of her mercurial moods.
“Well, you won’t find it. You won’t find the facts you’re looking for. Because I know what you’re really after, and it isn’t recorded!”
“Explain yourself.”
“It’s time we stopped hiding a rather brutal truth from ourselves.”
“Which is?”
“Our mutual feeling that the Red Star is a menace and that the Threads will come! We decided that out of pure conceit and then went back between times to particularly crucial points in our lives and strengthened that notion, in our earlier selves. And for you, it was when you decided you were destined”—her voice made the word mocking—“to become Weyrleader one day.”
“Could it be,” she went on scornfully, “that our ultraconservative R’gul has the right of it? That there have been no Threads for four hundred Turns because there are no more? And that the reason we have so few dragons is because the dragons sense they are no longer essential to Pern? That we are anachronisms as well as parasites?”
F’lar did not know how long he sat looking up at her bitter face or how long it took him to find answers to her probing questions.
“Anything is possible, Weyrwoman,” he heard his voice replying calmly. “Including the unlikely fact that an eleven-year-old child, scared stiff, could plot revenge on her family’s murderer and—against all odds—succeed.”
She took an involuntary step forward, struck by his unexpected rebuttal. She listened intently.
“I prefer to believe,” he went on inexorably, “that there is more to life than raising dragons and playing spring games. That is not enough for me. And I have made others look further, beyond self-interest and comfort. I have given them a purpose, a discipline. Everyone, dragonfolk and Holder alike, profits.
“I am not looking in these Records for reassurance. I’m looking for solid facts.
“I can prove, Weyrwoman, that there have been Threads. I can prove that there have been Intervals during which the Weyrs have declined. I can prove that if you sight the Red Star directly bracketed by the Eye