“The paper, Colonel.”
She looked at them, slid the simple piece of paper back across the desk. The board member collected it and put it into the folder. Carefully.
“It’s more than evidence,” she said. “That’s a treaty. The indigenes know it is.”
They left her office, less than comfortable in their official search for blame and where, officially, to put it.
She was already packed. Going back on the same ship with an elvish corpse, all the way to Pell and Downbelow. There would be a grave there onworld.
It had surprised no one when the broadcast tape got an elvish response. Hopes rose when it got the fighting stopped and brought an elvish delegation to the front; but there was a bit of confusion when the elves viewed both bodies and wanted deFranco’s. Only deFranco’s.
And they made him a stone grave there on the shell-pocked plain, a stone monument; and they wrote everything they knew about him. I was John Rand deFranco, a graven plaque said. I was born on a space station twenty light-years away. I left my mother and my brothers. The friends I had were soldiers and many of them died before me. I came to fight and I died for the peace, even when mine was the winning side. I died at the hand of Angan Anassidi, and he died at mine, for the peace; and we were friends at the end of our lives.
Elves—suilti was one name they called themselves—came to this place and laid gifts of silk ribbons and bunches of flowers—flowers, in all that desolation; and in their thousands they mourned and they wept in their own tearless, expressionless way.
For their enemy.
One of their own was on his way to humankind. For humankind to cry for. I was Angan Anassidi, his grave would say; and all the right things. Possibly no human would shed a tear. Except the veterans of Elfland, when they came home, if they got down to the world—they might, like Agnes Finn, in their own way and for their own dead, in front of alien shrine.
C. J. Cherryh
C. J. Cherryh is the creator of the vast Union-Alliance future history series, which chronicles the interplay of intergalactic commerce and politics several millennia hence, and includes, among others, the Hugo Award– winning novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen. Praised for its inventive extrapolations of clinical and social science and deft blends of technology and human interest, the series enfolds a number of celebrated subseries, including her Faded Sun trilogy (Kesrith, Shon’jir, Kutath) and the Chanur series (The Pride of Chanur, Chanur’s Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur’s Homecoming, Chanur’s Legacy). A recent quartet of novels— Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, and Precursor—has been praised for its sensitive documentation of the cultural and racial differences a human colony must overcome in forming a fragile alliance with the planet’s alien inhabitants. Cherryh has also authored the four-volume Morgaine heroic fantasy series and the epic Galisien sword-and-sorcery series, which includes Fortress in the Eye of Time, Fortress of Eagles, and Fortress of Owls. She is the creator of the Merovingen Nights shared-world series and cocreator of the multivolume Heroes in Hell shared-world compilations.
DRAGONRIDER
Anne McCaffrey
The Finger Points
At an Eye blood red.
Alert the Weyrs
To sear the Thread.
“YOU STILL DOUBT, R’gul?” F’lar asked, appearing slightly amused by the older bronze rider’s perversity.
R’gul, his handsome features stubbornly set, made no reply to the Weyrleader’s taunt. He ground his teeth together as if he could grind away F’lar’s authority over him.
“There have been no Threads in Pern’s skies for over four hundred Turns. There are no more!”
“There is always that possibility,” F’lar conceded amiably. There was not, however, the slightest trace of tolerance in his amber eyes. Nor the slightest hint of compromise in his manner.
He was more like F’lon, his sire, R’gul decided, than a son had any right to be. Always so sure of himself, always slightly contemptuous of what others did and thought. Arrogant, that’s what F’lar was. Impertinent, too, and underhanded in the matter of that young Weyrwoman. Why, R’gul had trained her up to be one of the finest Weyrwomen in many Turns. Before he’d finished her instruction, she knew all the teaching ballads and sagas letter perfect. And then the silly child had turned to F’lar. Didn’t have sense enough to appreciate the merits of an older, more experienced man. Undoubtedly she felt a first obligation to F’lar, he having discovered her at Ruath Hold during Search.
“You do, however,” F’lar was saying, “admit that when the sun hits the Finger Rock at the moment of dawn, winter solstice has been reached?”
“Any fool knows that’s what Finger Rock is for,” R’gul grunted.
“Then why don’t you, you old fool, admit that the Eye Rock was placed on Star Stone to bracket the Red Star when it’s about to make a Pass?” burst out K’net, the youngest of the dragonriders.
R’gul flushed, half-starting out of his chair, ready to take the young sprout to task for such insolence.
“K’net,” F’lar’s voice cracked authoritatively, “do you really like flying the Igen Patrol so much you want another few weeks at it?”
K’net hurriedly seated himself, flushing at the reprimand and the threat.
“There is, you know, R’gul, incontrovertible evidence to support my conclusions,” F’lar went on with deceptive mildness. “‘The Finger points/At an Eye blood red…’”
“Don’t quote me verses I taught you as a weyrling,” R’gul exclaimed, heatedly.
“Then have faith in what you taught,” F’lar snapped back, his amber eyes flashing dangerously.
R’gul, stunned by the unexpected forcefulness, sank back into his chair.
“You cannot deny, R’gul,” F’lar continued quietly, “that no less than half an hour ago, the sun balanced on the Finger’s tip at dawn and the Red Star was squarely framed by the Eye Rock.”
The other dragonriders, bronze as well as brown, murmured and nodded their agreement to that phenomenon. There was also an undercurrent of resentment for R’gul’s continual contest of F’lar’s policies as the new Weyrleader. Even old S’lel, once R’gul’s avowed supporter, was following the majority.
“There have been no Threads in four hundred years. There are no Threads,” R’gul muttered.
“Then, my fellow dragonman,” F’lar said cheerfully, “all you have taught is falsehood. The dragons are, as the Lords of the Holds wish to believe, parasites on the economy of Pern, anachronisms. And so are we.
“Therefore, far be it from me to hold you here against the dictates of your conscience. You have my permission to leave the Weyr and take up residence where you will.”
R’GUL WAS TOO stunned by F’lar’s ultimatum to take offense at the ridicule. Leave the Weyr? Was the man mad? Where would he go? The Weyr had been his life. He had been bred up to it for generations. All his male ancestors had been dragonriders. Not all bronze, true, but a decent percentage. His own dam’s sire had been a Weyrleader just as he, R’gul, had been until F’lar’s Mnementh had flown the new queen and that young upstart had taken over as traditional Weyrleader.
But dragonmen never left the Weyr. Well, they did if they were negligent enough to lose their dragons, like that Lytol fellow who was now Warden at Ruath Hold. And how could he leave the Weyr with a dragon?