“Can’t you guess?” she asked sarcastically.
“No,” he lied.
“When else but the dawn I wakened, feeling the Red Star was a menace to me. Three days before you and Fax came out of the northeast.”
“It would seem,” he remarked drily, “that you were your own premonition both times.”
She nodded.
“Have you had any more of these presentiments…or should I say, reinforced warnings?”
She shuddered but answered him with more of her old spirit.
“No, but if I should, you go. I don’t want to.” F’lar grinned maliciously.
“I would, however,” she added, “like to know why and how it could happen.”
“I’ve never run across a mention of it anywhere,” he told her candidly. “Of course, if you have done it, and you undeniably have,” he assured her hastily at her indignant protest, “it obviously can be done. You say you thought of Ruatha, but you thought of it as it was on that particular day. Certainly a day to be remembered. You thought of spring, before dawn, no Red Star…yes I remember you mentioning that…so one would have to remember references peculiar to a significant day to return between times to the past.”
She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.
“You used the same method the second time, to get to the Ruatha of three Turns ago. Again, of course, it was spring.”
He rubbed his palms together, then brought his hands down on his knees with an emphatic slap and rose to his feet.
“I’ll be back,” he said and strode from the room, ignoring her half-articulated cry of warning.
Ramoth was curling up in the weyr as he passed her. He noticed that her color remained good in spite of the drain of her energies by the morning’s exercises. She glanced at him, her many-faceted eye already covered by the inner, protective lid.
MNEMENTH AWAITED HIS rider on the ledge, and the moment F’lar leaped to his neck, took off. He circled upwards, hovering above the Star Stone.
You wish to try Lessa’s trick, Mnementh said, unperturbed by the prospective experiment.
F’lar stroked the great curved neck affectionately. You understand how it worked for Ramoth and Lessa?
As well as anyone can, Mnementh replied with the approximation of a shrug. When did you have in mind?
At that moment, F’lar had had no idea. Now, unerringly, his thoughts drew him backwards to the summer day R’gul’s bronze Hath had flown to mate the grotesque Nemorth, and R’gul had become Weyrleader in place of his dead father, F’lon.
Only the cold of between gave them any indication they had transferred; they were still hovering above the Star Stone. F’lar wondered if they had missed some essential part of the transfer. Then he realized that the sun was in another quarter of the sky, and the air was warm and sweet with summer. The Weyr below was empty, there were no dragons sunning themselves on the ledges, no women busy at tasks in the Bowl. Noises impinged on his senses; raucous laughter, yells, shrieks, and a soft crooning noise that dominated the bedlam.
Then, from the direction of the weyrling barracks in the lower Caverns, two figures emerged; a stripling and a young bronze dragon. The boy’s arm lay limply along the beast’s neck. The impression that reached the hovering observers was one of utter dejection. The two halted by the lake, the boy peering into the unruffled blue waters, then glancing upward towards the queen’s weyr.
F’lar knew the boy for himself, and compassion for that younger self filled him. If only he could reassure that boy, so torn by grief, so filled with resentment, that he would one day become Weyrleader…
Abruptly, startled by his own thoughts, he ordered Mnementh to transfer back. The utter cold of between was like a slap in his face, replaced almost instantly as they broke out of between into the cold of normal winter.
Slowly, Mnementh flew back down to the queen’s weyr, as sobered as F’lar by what they had seen.
Rise high in glory,
Bronze and gold.
Drive entwined,
Enhance the Hold.
Count three months and more,
And five heated weeks,
A day of glory and
In a month, who seeks?
A strand of silver
In the sky…
With heat, all quickens
And all times fly.
“I don’t know why you insisted F’nor unearth these ridiculous things from Ista Weyr,” Lessa exclaimed in a tone of exasperation. “They consist of nothing but trivial notes on how many measures of grain were used to bake daily bread.”
F’lar glanced up at her from the records he was studying. He sighed, leaned back in his chair in a bone-popping stretch.
“And I used to think,” Lessa said with a rueful expression on her vivid, narrow face, “that those venerable Records would hold the total sum of all dragonlore and human wisdom. Or so I was led to believe,” she added pointedly.
F’lar chuckled. “They do, but you have to disinter it.”
Lessa wrinkled her nose. “Phew. They smell as if we had…and the only decent thing to do would be to rebury them.”
“Which is another item I’m hoping to find…the old preservative technique that kept the skins from hardening and smelling.”
“It’s stupid, anyhow, to use skins for recording. There ought to be something better. We have become, dear Weyrleader, entirely too hidebound.”
While F’lar roared with appreciation of her pun, she regarded him impatiently. Suddenly she jumped up, fired by another of her mercurial moods.
“Well, you won’t find it. You won’t find the facts you’re looking for. Because I know what you’re really after and it isn’t recorded!”
“Explain yourself.”
“It’s time we stopped hiding a rather brutal truth from ourselves.”
“Which is?”
“Our mutual feeling that the Red Star is a menace and that the Threads will come! We decided that out of pure conceit and then went back between times to particularly crucial points in our lives and strengthened that notion, in our earlier selves. And for you, it was when you decided you were destined,” her voice mocked the word, “to become Weyrleader one day.
“Could it be,” she went on scornfully, “that our ultraconservative R’gul has the right of it? That there have been no Threads for four hundred Turns because there are no more? And that the reason we have so few dragons is because the dragons sense they are no longer essential to Pern? That we are anachronisms as well as parasites?”
F’lar did not know how long he sat looking at her bitter face, nor how long it took him to find answers for her probing questions.
“Anything is possible, Weyrwoman,” he heard his voice replying calmly. “Including the unlikely fact that an eleven-year-old child, scared stiff, could plot revenge on her family’s murderer and—against all odds—succeed.”
She took an involuntary step forward, struck by his unexpected rebuttal. She listened intently.
“I prefer to believe,” he went on inexorably, “that there is more to life than raising dragons and playing spring games. That is not enough for me. And I have made others look further, beyond self-interest and comfort. I have given them a purpose, a discipline. Everyone, dragonfolk and Holder alike, profits.
“I am not looking in these Records for reassurance. I’m looking for solid facts.
“I can prove, Weyrwoman, that there have been Threads. I can prove that there have been Intervals during which the Weyrs have declined. I can prove that if you sight the Red Star directly bracketed by the Eye Rock at the moment of winter solstice, the Red Star will pass close enough to Pern to throw off Threads. Since I can prove those facts, I believe Pern is in danger. I believe…not the youngster of fifteen Turns ago. F’lar, the bronze rider, the Weyrleader, believes it!”