"She has been an excellent pupil, Piemur. There should be no problem, as she is well accustomed to obeying you."
Piemur took a deep breath. "All right, Farli," he said. He unwrapped her tail from his neck and held up his arm in the position that indicated she was to take a message.
Carefully walking along his bare arm with her talons sheathed, Farli reached his forearm and turned about to face him, her eyes whirling alertly.
"Now-" Piemur held up his right hand. "This is going to be slightly different, Farli. I want you to go up in the sky, to the place you see in my mind." He closed his eyes and focused his thoughts tightly on the scene of the bridge and the particular console she was to activate.
Farli chirruped queryingly, looked over her shoulder at the picture on the screen, and burbled once, reclosing her wings on her back.
"No, Farli, not into the screen. Get the 'where' from my mind." Piemur closed his eyes again, concentrating on the exact place he wanted her to go, emphasizing the life-support console next to the slumped corpse. When she chirruped again, this time almost impatiently, he sighed and turned to the others in defeat.
"She just doesn't understand," he said, trying not to let his disappointment color his voice. Not that he blamed her. She had been to most of the places he sent her. How could he get across the difference between traveling around the planet and going into space above it? Especially as he could not quite grasp the concept himself.
Farli emphasized this by flitting from his arm to the room in which she had been trained, moments later coming back and trying to fly into the picture on the screen.
Piemur's grin was weak. "What do you bet she's gone and done her exercises again? That much she understands!"
Disappointment was palpable in the room. Piemur kept his eyes straight ahead, on the tantalizingly unreachable view on the screen.
"So?" F'lar asked. "What do we do now, Aivas?"
There was a long pause before Aivas spoke. "The mind of the fire-lizard does not function in recorded animal behavioral patterns."
"That's not surprising. Your records only cover Terran types," Piemur remarked, trying not to feel so depressed about his little queen's failure. She was the best of the whole fair, better even than Menolly's Beauty, who was certainly very well trained. But he had hoped that she would be able to make this strange variation of flight. "It's also a long way to ask her to go when no one's been there before."
Another silence hung on the room.
"There's only one dragon in fact," F'lar said slowly and thoughtfully, breaking the pause, "who's ever been off the planet."
"Canth!" Lessa exclaimed.
"F'nor's brown Canth is too large," Aivas said.
"It wasn't his size I was thinking of," Lessa replied. "It's his experience in going above this planet. He's done it, so perhaps he can explain to Farli so that she'll understand what's wanted of her." Her eyes lost their focus as she sought for Canth.
Yes, we can come immediately, Canth replied to Lessa's request.
There was a stir of anticipation among those waiting in Aivas's room. Piemur kept stroking Farli, who had returned to her position on his arm. He murmured softly that she was a marvelous fire-lizard, the best in the world, but that the toggles she was to pull and the buttons she was to press were really not the ones in the next room but, rather, identical ones up on the Yokohama, far above their heads in the dark sky. She kept cocking her head this way and that, her throat pulsing as she tried her very best to understand what was wanted of her.
"Ah, they're here," Lessa said. "F'nor's on his way in."
Looking as if he had dressed in a hurry, F'nor came running into the room. "Canth said it was important," he said. After a puzzled glance around the room, he regarded Lessa expectantly.
"Aivas needs Farli to get to the bridge on the Yokohama," she explained. "Farli doesn't understand her directions. You and Canth are the only two on Pern who have left the planet. We thought Canth might be able to clarify the instructions so Farli will know what she is expected to do."
As she spoke, F'nor pulled off his flight cap and shucked off his heavy riding gear. When she had finished, his expression turned humorously quizzical.
"Well, now, Lessa, that's a problem. I've never been exactly sure how Canth and I managed that abortive flight in the first place-"
"Do you remember what you were thinking?" F'lar asked.
F'nor chuckled. "I was thinking I had to do something to keep you from trying to get to the Red Star." Then he frowned. "Come to think of it, Meron was there, and he tried to make his fire-lizard go. She disappeared in a flash, and I don't know if she ever returned to him."
"Farli's not afraid," Piemur said staunchly. "She just doesn't understand where she's supposed to perform what she's been trained to do."
F'nor spread his hands in a gesture of appeal. "If Farli can't get the hang of it, I don't think any of them could."
"But could Canth explain to her that he went off the planet? Into space?" Lessa asked.
Could you, Canth? F'nor asked the brown dragon. Canth was in the process of draping himself on the ridge above Landing where the rising sun would warm him.
You showed me where you wanted me to go. I went.
F'nor repeated Canth's answer. "A planet is a bigger target than a spaceship we can't see."
Farli does not understand, Canth added. She has done the things she was asked to do in the place where she has always done them:
Canth, Lessa asked the dragon directly, do you understand what we're asking Farli to do?
Yes, you want her to go up to the ship and do the things she has been trained to do there! She doesn't understand where she is to go. She's never been there.
Jaxom squirmed a little on the chair. Considering how hard Piemur had worked with Farli, it was a crying shame that the little creature couldn't grasp the essential point.
Ruth, do you understand? he asked the white dragon. Sometimes fire-lizards listened to Ruth when they ignored everyone else.
Yes, but it is a cold, long way for a fire-lizard to go if she hasn't been there before. She's trying very hard to understand.
A lot of thoughts crowded Jaxom's mind just then. But the main one was that Ruth was not too big to fit on the bridge-if his wings were folded back and he landed precisely on the floor just in front of the lift door. He would also have to remain very still, for Aivas had said there was no gravity on the bridge. Ruth would be in free-fall. Aivas did not see that as a problem for a dragon or a fire-lizard, accustomed as they were to being airborne. Jaxom had known that that was one reason Aivas had grilled him so long and so hard on the layout of the bridge and lectured him on null-gravity conditions. But until Farli had done her exercise on board the Yokohama, turning on the bridge's life-support system, Ruth and Jaxom could not go.
Aivas had had crews searching the Catherine Caves assiduously for "space suits." They had found two-or, rather, the perished scraps of fabric and the bright plastic shapes that had once serviced it. Oxygen cylinders had been manufactured, being not dissimilar to agenothree tanks. HNO3, Jaxom reminded himself, now that he knew the precise chemical constituents of the flame-producing mixture. But there was no protection for a frail human body in the absolute cold and airless vacuum of the Yokohama's bridge in its present state.
Jaxom thought that manufacturing proper equipment would prove to be Aivas's alternative. He had already had several long discussions with Masterweaver Zurg. But alternatives would take time, not to mention more experimentation on the part of both Zurg and Hamian's innovative crew-more time in which the disenchanted Lord Holders could steadily withdraw their support from Landing.