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dwell on that exchange. He and Golanth conveyed people and necessities to
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various Benden coastal holdings, reporting on how the flooded areas were
draining, occasionally using dragon strength to shift wave-driven debris, and
everywhere he had to explain that the dragons could not have stopped the
Fireball from hitting nor held back the tsunami. He was repeatedly asked why
Thread was still falling now that the Red Star was supposed to be gone. Few
understood that the Red Star had only shepherded Thread close to Pern and what
was falling now was what the Red Star had dragged in behind it.
At first he'd used diagrams on the sand, in the dirt, or on a piece of paper:
a big circle for the Sun, a much smaller one for Pern, tiny ones for the two
moons. He'd draw the orbit of the Red Star, and show how it swooped down and
around Pern, then out, carrying with it the cloud of Thread.
"Why does it take so long?" he was asked.
"Thread's been on its way and it takes between forty-five and fifty of our
Turns to get past it again."
Then he'd be asked why the Fireball had dropped. He answered that by saying it
had been a leftover fragment from the Turnover
Ghosts, lost trying to follow the others. (That might not be exactly the
truth; Masters Wansor, Idarolan, and the newly promoted
Master Erragon still had to deliver an official verdict, but at least most
people had seen Ghosts and could accept the little fiction.) He'd drop another
stone-the Fireball-into the water and show them how the tsunami was like the
ripples. It was, he knew, an explanation, not an answer. He didn't know what
the answer was, especially for those who'd lost a lot to "ripples."
Back at Benden Weyr, no one had the energy or the wish to settle on a better
explanation. Or an answer. The next day Benden was flying Thread so, after
eating quickly and checking on S'lan to be sure the lad was holding up well,
he retired to his weyr, checking his safety harness and wondering if he could
afford new leather pants to replace the ones the last few days had split,
torn, and scraped.
F'lessan remembered Tai's fine pelts. Well, there were plenty of felines to be
hunted near Honshu. He could probably trade such pelts for wherhide pants from
the Weyr's tanner. It'd be fun to hunt with Tai and Zaranth. Golanth agreed.
So F'lessan gave the drowsing
bronze an affectionate rub and went out to the ledge of his weyr. He clasped
his arms with his hands against the chill. During those earlier lessons with
Aivas, he had made himself familiar with the names of the brightest stars to
be seen in Benden's wintry skies.
Canopus was low on the horizon, Girtab outshining her.
He really ought to get to work now; to make Honshu a viable part of what
dragonriders could "do" to protect the planet. That was at least obvious to
him. He had no idea how a dragon, or all the dragons of Pern, could stop
another fireball-they didn't have any more antimatter engines to drop on them,
he thought wryly-but it made a lot of good sense to find out if anything else
was likely to impact any time soon. From some scrap of those nearly
disregarded astronomy lessons, he remembered that hazardous impacts were
infrequent. There were a few documented, like the Circle Runner Station and
the most recent meteorite that had rammed into the prison yard at Crom
Minehold.
Wansor, old Lytol, and D'ram were certainly working all out on updating orbits
with Erragon down at Cove Hold. The skies currently above Pern had altered
within Rukbat's system since the colonists had first surveyed it twenty-five
hundred and fifty-three
Turns ago. Asteroids had collided, broken up into different pieces, spinning
into new orbits. Perhaps one of them had been the
Fireball. Others, like the erratic wanderer inaccurately called the Red Star
had entered the system as comets or fragments. In the spare moments F'lessan
had had, he'd reviewed his old astronomy notes from his classes with Aivas. A
long-forgotten lesson reminded him that the
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Yoko got its information from what the Ancients had called "a southern array
of satellites." Aivas had once mentioned the absence of a northern array,
which would have given a much clearer picture of minor planets, comets, and
other orbiting bodies. He remembered that there were more telescopes stored in
the Catherine Caves, which probably would have been set up in observatories to
keep track of such objects. Old Earth certainly had known exactly what was in
its solar system. But no one had anticipated the Red
Star and Thread falling on Pern.
Thread must have sharded a lot of the colonists' plans, F'lessan thought to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]