Dragonsblood (15 page)

bit of work to haul wood up every evening.”

“Lazy!” Emorra teased. “Well, it’s your bones that’ll freeze.”

The tower grew in Emorra’s eyes as they approached it; she was always

used to seeing it from the distance of the College. They walked and

climbed in companionable silence until they were halfway up the steps

wrapped around the outside of the tower and Emorra paused, gasping for

breath.

“And
this
is why I’ll keep my bones cold, thank you,” Tieran said, pointing at

the stairway and grinning as he waited for her to recover her breath.

“Yes, I can see that it would be a chore,” Emorra agreed at last. Much more

slowly they completed their ascent.

“Rodar, Jendel, we’re here!” Tieran called as he crested the stairs.

“You’re late!” Jendel retorted. “I just hope the food’s good.”

“It’s cold,” Emorra said as she set the tray down on the only table available.

“That’s nothing new,” Rodar said, jumping up to help her.

“Where’s Kassa?” Jendel asked.

Tieran groaned and slapped his forehead. “I
knew
I was forgetting

something!”

“It’s my fault, I distracted him,” Emorra said.

“Never mind—at least you brought food!” Rodar exclaimed.

“Poor Rodar’s been up here since first watch,” Tieran told Emorra.

“What’s the soup?” Rodar asked, lifting a bowl and sniffing it.

“The last of the hot boxes failed, so it’s all cold,” Tieran warned.

Rodar had already dipped a finger into his bowl of the whitish soup and

licked it. “Potato leek! Excellent.”

Further investigation revealed a number of cold cuts, plenty of fresh-sliced

bread, honey, mustard, and Alandro’s own special invention, a sage

vinaigrette that doubled as a dressing for the greens and as a condiment

for the sandwiches.

There were no chairs at the top of the Drum Tower, but the lower parts of

the crenellations were wide enough to offer comfortable, if sometimes

windy, seating.

“Alandro’s dressing is superb, as always,” Rodar said to no one in

particular.

“We’re lucky to have it,” Emorra agreed. Jendel raised an eyebrow at her,

so she expanded her comment. “The botanists had a very hard time getting

the sage to take.”

“Why was that?” Rodar asked.

Emorra shrugged. “Mother said something about the boron uptake rates. In

the end they finally got it to go by grafting it onto a native plant. Mother says

it doesn’t taste quite the same as the original.”

“She’s one of the few left who’d know,” Jendel said.

“I like the flavor,” Tieran declared.

“What’s the difference?” Rodar asked Emorra.

Emorra shrugged. “I never asked her.”

“The dean of the College not asking?” Rodar was amazed.

Emorra shook her head. “I was a student of my mother’s at the time.”

“Oh,” Tieran said. He and Emorra exchanged looks of understanding.

“Did they adapt all the Earth fauna, or what?” Rodar wondered. He looked

at Emorra. “Would you know?”

“Most of the adaptations were done before Crossing,” Emorra answered.

“But I believe that the botanists and Kitti Ping had to drop a few

adaptations. Some of it was a question of resources.”

“And some of it?” Rodar prompted.

Emorra grinned. “Some of it was by choice. Apparently there was

something called okra that was dropped by mutual consent.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t drop spinach, then,” Jendel noted sourly, pushing

a few spinach leaves about his otherwise empty salad bowl.

“Ah, but that’s good for you!” Tieran said.

“They were pretty selective about their animals, too,” Rodar noted sourly.

“They had complete gene banks at Landing,” Emorra said, adding dryly, “I

think the original growth plans were interrupted.”

“Did they have elephants in the gene banks?” Rodar persisted.

“Not that again,” Jendel groaned. Tieran shook his head and smiled.

“Yes, they had elephants,” Emorra said.

“We sure could use them,” Rodar complained.

“As beasts of burden they are not as good as horses,” Emorra said,

ignoring Tieran’s alarmed look and Jendel’s agitated shushing gestures.

“Who wants beasts of burden?” Rodar replied. “Their feet were very

sensitive to subsurface vibrations—”

“They could hear noise over thirty kilometers,” Jendel and Tieran joined in

chorus with Rodar.

“Oh,” Emorra said, suddenly enlightened. “That would make them good for

picking up your drum sounds, wouldn’t it?”

“
If
you could train them!” Jendel said.

“They were very smart!” Rodar said.

“But how would they have got them from Landing to here?” Emorra

wondered.

“On a ship,” Rodar answered.

“How could you get an elephant on a ship?” Jendel asked.

“Once you got it on, how could you get it off?” Tieran added.

“And what would you do if it actually
liked
ships?” Jendel continued.

“I suppose you’d have to take it on a cruise around the world,” Tieran

finished with a laugh, which Jendel joined in, much to Rodar’s disgust.

Tieran leaned to Emorra and confided, “We tried to warn you. Rodar’s

always going on about elephants.”

“Anyway,” Emorra continued, back on the original topic, “they couldn’t take

over the Pernese ecosystem completely—”

“Did they ever completely categorize the Pernese ecosystem?” Rodar

asked.

Emorra shook her head. “Hardly. On Earth they had never completely

categorized the ecosystem, and they had millennia.”

Jendel rose from his seat with a shudder. “Oh, this is too much for a simple

percussionist!” he said, waving the conversation away. “Tieran, seeing as

you forgot to bring along your partner, how do you plan to run your watch?”

“I’ll stay,” Emorra offered. “You two can bring the trays back and send the

other replacement over.”

Jendel pursed his lips consideringly.

“She knows the sequences, Jendel,” Tieran said.

“She does?” Rodar was surprised.

“Sure,” Tieran said. “They’re a fairly basic set of sequences, many of them

modeled on genetic sequences.”

“Genetic sequences?” Jendel repeated. “You never told me that.”

He grabbed a tray, passed it to Rodar, and grabbed the other for himself,

gesturing for Rodar to precede him down the tower stairs.

“All right,” he said from the top step. “Tieran, you can use the small drum to

drill her on some of the basic sequences just to be sure. You know,

attention, emergency, stuff like that.”

“Will do,” Tieran said, throwing the chief drummer a mock salute. Jendel

returned it with a nod of his head and began his descent.

Tieran dutifully drilled Emorra on the drum sequences, gave her a quick

test, and pronounced her fit to take watch with him. The whole procedure

took less than a quarter of an hour.

“That’s twice in one day you’ve taught a class,” Emorra remarked dryly.

“Keep it up and we’ll have to put you on the faculty.”

Tieran didn’t respond to her comment. Instead, he carefully hung the small

drum by its harness on one of the small hooks pounded into the wall

nearest the stairs. Then he peered out into Fort’s lush main valley, watching

people tending the fields.

Finally, he turned back to Emorra. “What did they have, the settlers, before

the first Thread fell? Eight years, less than that, and then they had to

abandon everything and come here to the North.”

Emorra nodded. With a sigh, she rose and walked over to him.

“They didn’t have any time to do a proper survey, did they?” Tieran asked.

“Especially when you add the need they had to engineer the dragons,”

Emorra agreed. “Mother would never tell me, and the reports are very

vague.”

She frowned as she said that, wondering why her mother hadn’t insisted on

making her read every report of the original landing survey.

“So what did they get? Five percent, ten percent?” Tieran wondered.

Emorra shook her head. “The best I could ever discover was about three

percent.”

Suddenly she realized why Wind Blossom hadn’t told her about the survey:

Her omission had encouraged Emorra to look up the information herself.

Mother, you manipulated me—again! Emorra thought angrily.

Tieran snorted, unaware of Emorra’s feelings. “Three percent of the entire

ecosystem, that’s all?”

“They got a very good description of the fire-lizard genome,” she

answered. “That’s almost complete, say ninety-seven percent or more.

They mapped two or three other genomes, including one of the more basic

bacteria.”

“What about Thread?”

“You know,” Emorra responded. “Mother says that they got a complete

decode on the Thread genome—”

“—but it was lost in the Crossing,” Tieran concluded. He glanced guiltily at

Emorra.

Everyone knew that Wind Blossom had been responsible for a large part of

the equipment and records that were lost overboard on the storm-tossed

ships bringing the survivors north from the Southern Continent. He

continued hastily, “And the Fever Year was caused by a mutation of one of

the viral strains from Earth.”

“Yes, as far as we know,” Emorra said. “It was far too early for any

crossover infection.”

“And when that comes?”

Emorra shrugged. “I can only hope that people on Pern will survive. For all

that they had so little time, my mother and grandmother, and all the other

medical people, did everything they could to adapt us to life on Pern—even

before they arrived.”

“Is that why you quit?” Tieran asked. “Is that why you left your mother? Was

it the thought of just having to wait, having to hope that if any epidemic

broke out it would come at a time when we could still identify it, still fight it,

and come up with a cure before everyone on Pern was too ill to survive?”

“Is that why
you
quit, Tieran?” Emorra asked, deflecting his question.

Tieran nodded slowly.

“You lasted longer than I did, you know,” Emorra admitted. “I could only

handle four years before I fled. You stayed a whole six. After my mother,

you are the best-qualified geneticist on Pern.”

Tieran snorted. “That’s not saying much!”

Emorra shook her head emphatically, flinging her braided hair in the breeze.

“It’s saying a lot, Tieran. You must know that.”

Tieran brushed her comment off. “Why did you give up?”

Emorra pursed her lips for a long moment of silence, wondering whether

she would answer him. At last she said slowly, “I quit because I wasn’t

good enough, Tieran. I knew that I couldn’t be the sort of person my mother

expected me to be, the sort of person my family traditions demanded that I

be.”

She swallowed hard. “I couldn’t wait for the next plague, the next mutation,

the next biological disaster, knowing that the tools we needed had either

failed already or were going to fail any day—maybe the day before we

needed them the most.” She shook her head emphatically, looking

miserable. “I just
couldn’t.
”

Tieran reflected that while Emorra might have fled her responsibilities, she

had only gone so far as to become the College’s dean. It seemed to him

that she would clearly be dealing with the impact of “the next biological

disaster” in that lofty position.

“So how will we survive on Pern?”

“The best we can,” Emorra answered. “When this Pass ends—and that’ll

be very soon—people will spread to every liveable corner on the continent.

And they’ll have children, lots of children, and those children will eat things

they’re told not to.”

Tieran snorted in agreement.

“And some of those children will get sick,” Emorra went on. “Some will die,

and others will get better. Over time, people will learn what Pernese plants

and animals they can eat, and what they have to avoid. With enough time

they’ll be able to develop a whole new list of ills and a pharmacopoeia of

the herbals to cure them.

“And if worse comes to worst, then perhaps some isolated group of people

will not get infected and the disease will run its course, and the isolated

ones will survive and repopulate the planet.

“And that’s what we hope for,” she concluded.

Tieran looked doubtful. Emorra looked away, out toward the College.

“Is that person my replacement?” she asked, pointing to a woman walking

briskly in their direction from the entrance of the College.

Tieran peered out, following her finger. “Yes, that’s Kassa.”

“She’s pretty,” Emorra said suggestively.

“She’s seeing someone,” Tieran agreed sadly.

Emorra reached up and ruffled his hair affectionately. “You’ll find

someone,” she told him.

Tieran sneered, running a finger over the scar from the top of his right

forehead to his left cheek. “Not with this.”

Emorra held back a quick retort with a shake of her head.

The sound of someone climbing the stairs alerted them to Kassa’s

approach. Then Kassa arrived, breathless. “Sorry, Dean! I put my head

down for a nap and completely lost track of time.”

“No problem,” Emorra said, taking her place on the steps. “I had a lot of

fun.”

She gave Tieran a cheerful wave as she left.

“The trouble with this job is that it’s either very boring or very exciting,”

Kassa grumbled hours later as she and Tieran lounged under the waning