Dragonsdawn (8 page)

“Don’t be so stupid, girl. I wouldn’t harm her. I’ve been watching her for two days. An’ I haven’t told a soul about her.”

Finally understanding what he was saying, Sorka lay quiescent, eyeing him suspiciously. “You mean that?”

“Yup.”

“It’d still be wrong.” Sorka heaved against him experimentally, but he pressed her harder into the sand. Stones were bruising her back. “Taking her from her eggs.”

“I was gonna keep watch on ’em.”

“But you don’t know if her hatchlings need her or not. You can’t take her.”

Sean regarded Sorka with equally angry suspicion. “An’ what were
you
going to do? There’s a reward for such as her. An’ we need the money a lot more than you do.”

“There isn’t any money on Pern! Who needs it?” Sorka regarded him with surprise and then sympathy for the dismay in his face. “You can get anything you need at Stores. Didn’t they explain that to you when you went to school?” Sean regarded her warily. “Oh, you didn’t even stay in school long enough to learn that, did you?” She gave a disgusted snort. “Let me up. I’ve got stones digging holes in my back. You really are the absolute end.” She got to her feet and swatted at the worst of the sand on her clothes. She faced Sean again. “Did you at least wait to find out what was poisonous?” When he gave her a slow nod, she exhaled in relief. “School isn’t all bad. At least, not here.”

“No money?” Sean seemed unable to grasp that astonishing idea.

“Not unless someone brought some old coins for keepsake. I doubt it: coins’d be heavy. Look,” she said quickly, catching his arm when he started to twist away. “You go to the Stores building at Landing. It’s the biggest one. Tell them what you want, sign your name on a chit, and if they have it, they give it to you. That’s called requisitioning, and every one of us, kids included, are entitled to requisition things from Stores. Well, reasonable things.” She grinned, hoping to lighten his scowl. “What are you doing way out here?” She felt a twinge of annoyance as she realized that if he and his family were in that area, then she had not been the first person to see the headland, and she could not ask to have it named after her.

“Like you told me on the spaceship—” He grinned suddenly, a smile full of charm and mischief. “Once we got here, we could go where we please. Only we can’t go really far yet until we get some horses.”

“Don’t tell me you brought your wagons with you?” Sorka was appalled at the weight those would take up in a cargo hold.

“Wagons were brought for us,” he told her. “Only we’ve nothing to pull ’em with.” He waved toward the thick underbrush. “But we are free again, and camping where we want until we get our animals.”

“That’s going to take a couple of years, you know,” she said earnestly. Once again he nodded solemnly. “But we’ve started. My dad’s a vet and he said they’d woken up some horse and donkey mares, cows, goats, and sheep and made ’em pregnant with our kinds of animals.”

“Woken up?” Sean’s eyes protruded.

“Sure, who could muck livestock out for fifteen years? But it’ll still take eleven months for the horses to be born, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”

“Horses, always. We were promised horses.” Sean sounded wistful as well as emphatic, and she experienced a moment of kindliness toward him.

“You’ll get them, too. My father said so,” she added mendaciously. “He said that the ti—the traveling folk were first on the list.”

“We’d better be.” Sean glowered darkly. “Or there’ll be trouble.”

“You see me before you make any trouble here. My da always got on well with your people in Clonmel. Believe me, you’ll get your horses.” She could see that he was skeptical. “Now, mind, I hear that you’ve harmed our creature and I’ll see you don’t, Sean Connell!” She held up a warning hand, the flat edge in an offensive position. “Not that you could catch her. She’s smart, that one. She understands what you’re thinking.”

Sean eyed her, more scornful than skeptical. “You know so much about her?”

“I’m good with animals.” She paused, then grinned. “Just like you are. See you ’round. And remember about requisitioning!”

She turned and started back down the beach to catch up with Jacob and Chung—just in time to help carry the samples back to the hatchery.

When Sallah Telgar heard the call for volunteers to make up a skeleton crew so that those who had not yet been down to the surface would have a weekend break on Pern, she hesitated until she saw the names of the first three volunteers: Avril, Bart, and Nabhi. That trio did nothing that did not further themselves. Why would
they
volunteer? Suspicious, she scrawled her name down immediately. Also, she was still curious about what Kenjo had been up to with his fuel economies. The
Eujisan
had drawn its quota regularly, yet her private calculations indicated a growing balance that had neither been burned up by the
Eujisan
nor was in the
Yoko’s
fuel tanks. Very strange. Soon there would be no place on the old
Yoko
to hide a thimbleful of fuel, much less the volume of the shortfall she had calculated. But Kenjo was not among the volunteers.

All six shuttles went up to relieve the ships’ crews and to bring down more bits and pieces. Sallah flew the
Eujisan
up with the skeleton crew for the
Yoko
. Avril had a smile on her face, smug enough to satisfy Sallah that the woman had personal plans for her weekend. Bart Lemos looked apprehensive and fidgeted while Nabhi continued to look supercilious. They were up to something, Sallah was sure. But what it might be she couldn’t imagine.

When Sallah sprang the hatch on the
Yoko’s
landing deck, she was nearly bowled over by the jubilant men and women waiting to board the
Eujisan
for their first trip to the surface of their new home. Sallah had never seen a faster loading. Shortly all that would remain of the
Yoko
would be bare hull and the corridors leading to the bridge, where the mainframe computer banks would remain intact. Most of the computer’s vast memory had been duplicated for use on the surface, but not all—the bulk of the naval and military programs were protected and, in any case, irrelevant. Once passengers and crew left the three spaceships in their orbit, there would be no need to know how to fight space battles.

The volunteers were given their orders by the crew members they were replacing and then the shore-leave party merrily departed.

“Gawd, this place is eerie,” Boris Pahlevi whispered as he and Sallah made their way to the bridge through the echoing corridors, which had been stripped of siding and were down to the central plank of flooring.

“Will the last man off roll the plank up behind him?” Sallah asked facetiously. She shuddered when she noticed that the safety hatches between sections had been removed. Lighting had been reduced to three units per corridor. She watched where she put her feet.

“It’s rape, though,” Boris remarked in a lugubrious tone, as he gazed around, “gutting the old girl this way.”

“Ivan the Terrible,” Sallah said. That was the pilots’ nickname for the ship’s quartermaster in charge of the removal process. “He’s Alaskan, you know, and a real scrounger scrooge.”

“Tut-tut,” Boris said with a mock stern expression. “We’re all Pernese now, Sal. But what’s Alaskan?”

“Fardles, you is the most iggerant bastard, Boris, even for a second-generation Centauran. Alaska was a territory on Earth, not far from its arctic circle, and cold. Alaskans had a reputation for never throwing anything away. My father never did. Must have been a genetic trait because he was reared on First, although my grandparents were Alaskan.” Sallah sighed with nostalgia. “Dad never threw anything away. I had to chuck the whole nine yards before we shipped out. Eighteen years of accumulated—well, it wasn’t junk, because I got good prices on practically everything in the mountain, but it was some chore. Hercules and the Augean stables were clean in comparison.”

“Hercules?”

“Never mind,” Sallah said, wondering if Boris was teasing her by pretending ignorance of old Earth legends and peoples. Some people had wanted to throw everything out, literature, legend, language, all the things that had made people so interestingly different from each other. But wiser, more tolerant heads had prevailed. General Cherry Duff, the colony’s official historian and librarian, had insisted that records of all ethnic written and visual cultures be taken to Pern. Those who had craved a completely fresh start consoled themselves with the fact that anything not valid in the new context would eventually fall into disuse as new traditions were established.

“You never know,” Cherry Duff frequently admonished, “when old information becomes new, viable, and valuable. We keep the whole schmear!” The valiant lady defender of Cygnus III, a healthy woman in her eleventh decade with great-grandchildren making the trip with her on the
Buenos Aires,
affected idiomatic speech in order to make her points memorable. “Takes up no space at all on the chips we’ve got.”

Sallah and Boris found the bridge territory reassuringly intact. Even the danger doors were still in place. Boris took the command chair and asked Sallah to confirm the stability of their orbit. He was an engineer who dabbled in computer programming, and as weekend duty officer, he would probably spend all his time on the mainframe. He was certainly competent to detect and deal with any untoward deviation from orbit. He had welcomed the respite from outdoor work, as he had forgotten to protect a fair skin against sunburn while he was helping to erect temporary power pylons for the hydroelectric unit. He was annoyed with himself for ignoring a simple precaution just because everyone around him had been shucking shirts to get planet-brown.

“Program’s been left up,” Sallah told him, sliding into the chair at the navigator’s position. “The
Yoko’s
smack dab on orbit.”

“The duty officer really should have remained here until I officially took over,” Boris muttered. Then he exhaled. “But I suppose she was afraid that they’d leave without her. No harm done, at any rate.”

Boris began calling in the other manned stations, confirming the duty personnel from the roster he had been given. Avril Bitra and Bart Lemos were assigned to Life Support, and Nabhi Nabol was in Supply. While Boris was involved in roll call, Sallah began some discreet checking of her own from the big terminal. She initiated a program to discover who else had been accessing the mainframe. That sort of internal check was a function of the bridge terminal and not available on any of the others, except the one that had once been in the admiral’s suite. By the time Sallah left the
Yoko,
she would know who had asked for what, if not why.

“D’you know if they’ve got all the library tapes down below yet?” Boris asked, relaxing in the command chair once the calls had been completed and logged in.

“I think General Duff said they are, but why not get your own copies while there’s tape left?”

“Well, I’ll just do a few for private consumption. After all, my hide has been flayed to produce power to run ’em.”

Sallah laughed, but she could not help but feel compassion. Poor Boris’s face was raw with sunburn, and he wore the loosest possible clothing. She regarded him casually until he became absorbed in a perusal of the library; then she turned back to the computer.

Avril was asking for figures on the remaining fuel in the tanks of all three colony ships. Nabol was inquiring about machine parts and replacement units that had already been landed. He was accessing their exact locations in Stores. So he won’t have to ask to get them, Sallah thought. More worrisome were Avril’s programs, for she was the only fully qualified and experienced astrogator. If anyone could make use of available fuel, it was Avril. And where were the liters and liters that Kenjo had scrounged?

Avril requested the coordinates for the nearest planet capable of sustaining humanoids. Two had EEC reports that indicated developing sentient life. They were distant, but within the range of the admiral’s gig. Just. Sallah could not quite see why Avril would be at all interested in those planets, even if they were within reach of the
Mariposa.
Granted Avril could calculate her way there, but it would be a long, harrowing trip even at the maximum speed the gig could achieve. Then Sallah remembered that the gig had two deep-sleep tanks: a last resort and not one she herself would undertake. If she were in deep sleep, she would prefer to have someone awake and checking the dials. The method was not as foolproof as all that. But there were two tanks. So who was the lucky one to go with Avril? If escape from Pern was what she planned. But why would anyone escape from Pern when she had just got there, Sallah wondered, mystified. A whole new sparkling world, and Avril was not going to wait until she had given it a chance? Or was she?

Sallah continued her surveillance throughout the three-day stint and took hard copy before she erased the file. By the time she boarded the shuttle to return planetside, she understood why the crews had needed shore leave. The poor old nearly gutted
Yoko
was a depressing place. The two smaller ships,
Buenos Aires
and
Bahrain,
would be claustrophobic. But the stripping was nearly complete, and soon the three colony ships would be abandoned to their lonely orbit, visible at dawn and dusk only as three points of light reflecting Rukbat’s rays.

D
ESPITE HER PARENTS’
tacit disapproval of Sean Connell as a friend for their daughter, Sorka found many reasons to continue seeing him, once he had relaxed his natural suspicions of her. Curiously enough, Sorka also noticed that his family was no keener on his friendship with her than her own was. That added a certain fillip.

They were bound together by their fascination with their creature and her clutch of eggs. Sorka was watching the nest with Sean, as much to be sure that he did not succeed in his efforts to snare her as to be present when the eggs hatched.

That morning—a rest day—Sorka had come prepared for a long vigil with sandwiches in her pack. She had brought enough to share with Sean. The two children had hidden; bellies down, in the underbrush that bordered the headland rock, in a spot where they- could keep the nest in sight. The little gold animal sunned herself on the seaside; they could see her eyes glittering as she maintained her watch over her eggs.

“Just like a lizard,” Sean murmured, his breath tickling Sorka’s ear.

“Not at all,” Sorka protested, recalling illustrations in a book of fairy tales. “More like a little dragon. A dragonet,” she said almost aggressively. She did not think that “lizard” was at all appropriate for such a gorgeous being.

She carefully waved away another one of the many-legged bugs that was urgently trundling its three-sectioned body through the underbrush. Felicia Grant, the children’s botany teacher, had called them a form of millipede and was happy to see them. She had explained their reproductive cycle to the class: the adult produced young, which remained attached to the parent until it reached the same size, whereupon it was dropped off. Two maturing offspring were often in tow.

Sean was idly building a dam of leaves to turn the bug away from him. “Snakes eat a lot of these, and wherries eat snakes.”

“Wherries also eat wherries,” Sorka said in a disgusted tone of voice, recalling the scavengers at work.

A subtle crooning alerted them as they sprawled, half-drowsing in the midday heat. The little golden dragonet spread her wings.

“Protecting them,” Sorka said.

“Nope. Welcoming them.”

Sean had a habit of taking exactly the opposite line in any discussions they had. Sorka had grown used to it, even expected it.

“It could be both,” she suggested tolerantly.

Sean only snorted. “I’ll bet that trundle-bug was running from snakes.”

Sorka suppressed a shudder. She would not let Sean see how much she detested the slithery things. “You’re right. She’s welcoming them.” Sorka’s eyes widened. “She’s singing!”

Sean smiled at the sound that was growing more lyrical. The little creature tilted her head so that they could see her throat vibrating.

Suddenly the air about the rock was busy with dragonets. Sean grasped Sorka’s arm, as much in surprise as to command her to silence. Openmouthed in astonishment, Sorka could not have uttered a sound; she was too delighted with the assembly to do more than stare. Blue, brown, and bronze dragonets hovered in the air, blending their voices with that of the little gold.

“There must be hundreds of the dragonets, Sean.” The way they were wheeling and darting about, the air seemed overladen with them.

“Only twelve lizards,” Sean replied, impervious. “No, sixteen.”

“Dragonets,” Sorka said firmly.

Sean ignored her interruption. “I wonder why.”

“Look!” She pointed to a new flight of dragonets that appeared suddenly, trailing large branches of dripping seaweeds. More arrived, each with something wiggling in its mouth, the burden deposited on the seaweeds that made an uneven circle about the nest. “Like a dam,” Sorka murmured wonderingly. More avians, or perhaps the same ones on a return trip, brought trundle-bugs and sandworms, which flopped or burrowed in the weeds.

Then, as they saw the first of the eggs crack and a little wet head poke through, Sorka and Sean clung to each other in order to contain their excitement. Pausing in their harvesting, the airborne creatures warbled an intricate pattern of sound.

“See, it is welcome!” Sean knew that he had been right all along.

“No! Protection!” Sorka pointed to the blunt snouts of two huge mottled snakes at the far side of the underbrush.

The intruders were spotted by the flyers, and half a dozen dove at the protruding heads. Four of the dragonets sustained the attack right into the vegetation, and there was considerable agitation of branches until the attackers emerged, chittering loudly. In that brief interval, four more eggs had cracked open. The adult avians were a living chain of supply as the first arrival shed its shell and staggered about, keening woefully. Its dam herded it, with wing motion and encouraging chirps, toward a nearby dragonet that was holding a flopping fishling for the hatching to devour.

A bolder snake, emerging from the sand where it had hidden itself, attempted a rush up the rock face toward another hatchling. It braced its middle limbs as it raised its head, its turtlelike mouth agape, to grab its prey. Instantly the snake was attacked by the airborne dragonets. With a good sense of preservation, the hatchling lurched over the damlike ramparts of seaweed, toward the bush under which Sorka and Sean hid.

“Go away,” Sean muttered between clenched teeth. He waved his hand at the keening juvenile, shooing it away from them. He had no wish to be attacked by its adult kin.

“It’s starving, Sean,” Sorka said, fumbling for the packet of sandwiches. “Can’t you
feel
the hunger in it?”

“Don’t you dare mother it!” he muttered, though he, too, sensed the little thing’s craving. But he had seen the flyers rend fish with their sharp talons. He would prefer not to be their next victim.

Before he could stop her, Sorka tossed a corner of her sandwich out onto the rock. It landed right in front of the weaving, crying hatchling, who pounced and seemed to inhale the bit. Its cry became urgently demanding, and it hobbled more purposefully toward the source. Two more of the little creatures raised their heads and turned in that direction, despite their dam’s efforts to shoo them to the adults holding out succulent marine life.

Sean groaned. “Now you’ve done it.”

“But it’s hungry.” Sorka broke off more bits and lobbed them at the three hatchlings.

The other two scurried to secure a share of the bounty. To Sean’s dismay, Sorka had crawled out of their hiding place and was offering the foremost hatchling a piece directly from her fingers. Sean made a grab for her but missed, bruising his chin on the rock.

Sorka’s creature took the offered piece and then climbed into her hand, snuffling piteously.

“Oh, Sean, it’s a perfect darling. And it can’t be a lizard. It’s warm and feels soft. Oh, do take a sandwich and feed the others. They’re starving of the hunger.”

Sean spared a glance at the dam and realized with intense relief that she was far more concerned with getting the others fed than with coming after the three renegades. His fascination with the creatures overcame caution. He grabbed a sandwich and, kneeling beside Sorka, coaxed the nearer brown dragonet to him. The second brown, hearing the change in its sibling’s cries, spread its wet wings and, with a screech, joined it in a frantic dive. Sean found that Sorka was right: the critters had pliant skins and were warm to the touch. They did not feel at all lizardlike.

In short order, the sandwiches had been reduced to bulges in lizard bellies, and Sorka and Sean had unwittingly made lifelong friends. They had been so preoccupied with their three that they had failed to note the disappearance of the others. Only the empty shards of discarded eggs in a hollow of the rock bore witness to the recent event.

“We can’t just leave them here. Their mother’s gone,” Sorka said, surprised by the abandonment of dragonet kin.

“I wasn’t going to leave mine any road,” Sean said, slightly derisive of her quandary. “I’m keeping ’em. I’ll keep yours, too, if you don’t want to bring it back to Landing. Your mother won’t let you have a wild thing.”

“This one’s not wild,” Sorka replied, taking offense. With her forefinger, she stroked the back of the tiny bronze lizard curled in the crook of her arm. It stirred and snuggled closer, exhaling on something remarkably like a purr. “My mother’s great with babies. She used to save lambs that even my father thought might die.”

Sean was pacified. He had put the browns in his shirt, one on either side, and tightened the leather belt he had dared requisition. The ease with which he had accomplished that at the Stores building had encouraged him to trust Sorka. It had also proved to his father that the “others” were fairly distributing the wealth of matériel carried to Pern in the spaceships. Two days after getting his belt, Sean began to see proper new pots replacing discarded tins over the campfire, and his mother and three sisters were wearing new shirts and shoes.

The brown dragonets felt warm against his skin and a bit prickly where their tiny spikes pressed, but he was more than pleased with his success. They only had three toes, the front one folded against the back two. Everyone in his father’s camp had been hunting for lizard—well, dragonet—nests and snake holes along the coast. They looked for signs of the legendary lizards for fun, and hunted the snakes for safety. The scavenging reptiles were dangerous to people who camped in rough shelters of woven branches and broad-leaf fronds. Reptiles had eaten their way into the shelters and had bitten sleeping children in their blankets. Nothing was safe from their predatory habits. And they were not good eating.

Sean’s father had caught, skinned, and grilled several snakes. He had sampled a tiny bite of each variety and instantly had to wash his mouth out, as the snake flesh stung and caused his mouth to swell. So the order had gone to everyone in the camp: snare and kill the vermin. Of course, as soon as they had terriers or ferrets to go down the holes, they could make short work of the menace. Porrig Connell had been upset because the other members of the expedition seemed not to understand how urgent it was for his people to have dogs. The animals were not pets—they were necessary adjuncts of his folk’s life-style. It was proving the same on Pern as on Earth: the Connells were the last to get anything useful and the first to be given the back of the hand. But he had had each of his five families put in for a dog.

“Your dad’ll be pleased,” Sorka said, expansive in her own pleasure. “Won’t he, Sean? Bet they’ll be better even than dogs at going after snakes. Look at the way they attacked the mottleds.”

Sean snorted. “Only because the hatchlings were being attacked.”

“I doubt it was just that. I could almost feel the way they hated the snakes.” She wanted to believe that the flying lizards were unusual, just as she had always believed that their marmalade tom, Duke, was the best hunter in the valley, and old Chip the best cattle dog in Tipperary. Doubt suddenly assailed her. “But maybe we should leave them here for their dam.”

Sean frowned. “She was shooing the others off to the sea fast enough.”

Of one mind, they rose and, walking carefully so as not to disturb their sleeping burdens, headed for the summit of the headland.

“Oh, look!” Sorka cried, pointing wildly just as something pulled the tattered body of a hatchling under the water. “Oh, oh, oh.” Sean watched impassively. Sorka turned away, clenching her fists. “She’s not a very good mother after all.”

“Only the best survive,” Sean said. “our three are safe. They were smart enough to come to us!” Then he turned, cocking his head and peering at her through narrowed eyes. “Will yours be
safe
at Landing? They’ve been after us to bring ’em specimens, you know. ’Cause my dad’s special at trapping and snaring.”

Sorka hugged her sleeping charge closer to her body. “My father wouldn’t let anything happen to this lad. I know he wouldn’t.”

Sean was cynical. “Yeah, but he’s not head of his group, is he? He has to obey orders, doesn’t he?”

“They just want to
look
at life-forms. They don’t want to cut ’em up or anything.”

Sean was unconvinced, but he followed Sorka as she moved away from the sea and made her way through the undergrowth to the edge of the plateau.

“See ya tomorra?” Sean asked, suddenly loath to give up their meetings now that their mutual vigil had come to an end.

“Well, tomorrow’s a workday, but I’ll see you in the evening?” Sorka didn’t even pause a moment to think about her reply. She was no longer hampered by the stern tenets of Earth restrictions on her comings and goings. She was beginning to accept her safety on Pern as easily as she accepted her responsibility to work for her future there. Sean was also part of that sense of personal safety, despite his innate distrust of all but his own people. Even if Sean was unaware of it, a special link had been forged between Sean and her after their momentous experience on the rock head.

“Are you sure these creatures will hunt the snake?” Porrig Connell asked as he examined one of Sean’s sleeping acquisitions. It remained motionless when he extended one of the limp wings.

“If they’re hungry,” Sean replied, holding his breath lest his father inadvertently hurt his little lizard.

Porrig snorted. “We’ll see. At least it’s a creature of this place. Anything’s better than being eaten alive. One of the blue mottled ones took a huge chunk out of Sinead’s babee last night.”

“Sorka says the snakes can’t get in
their
house. Plastic keeps ’em out.”

Porrig gave another of his skeptical grunts, then nodded toward the sleeping hatchling. “Watch ’em now. They’re your problem.”

At Residence Fourteen in Asian Square, there was considerably more enthusiasm about Sorka’s creature. Mairi dispatched Brian to bring his father from the veterinary shed. Then she made a little nest in one of the baskets she had been weaving from the tough Pernese reeds, lining it with dried plant fiber. Tenderly she transferred the creature from Sorka’s arm to its new bed, where it immediately curled itself into a ball and, with a tremendous sigh that inflated its torso to the size of its engorged belly, fell deeper into sleep.

“It’s not really a lizard, is it?” she said, softly striking the warm skin. “It feels like good suede. Lizards are dry and hard to the touch. And it’s smiling. See?”