Sean was indeed thoughtful as he ran fingers along the shadowed “open” areas within the crater walls shown on the plasfilm, finally laying his hand on the lake site. He nodded once, gulped down the last of his klah, and rose.
“Have you finished, love?” he asked Sorka with a brief apologetic nod to Torene.
“Yes, actually, I have.”
“Keep the diagram handy, would you please, Torene?” Sean added. Then one hand under the elbow of his weyrmate, he walked away with Sorka.
Torene let out a whooshing breath of relief and, dipping a piece of bread in her soup, began to eat, more out of a release of taut nerves than from hunger. The appearance of Sean Connell had taken away her appetite. The sop of bread was cold, but she ate it. One didn’t waste food, and even cold the soup tasted good.
“She’s brought matters to a head, Sean,” Sorka said when they arrived at their apartment, a series of five adjoining caverns that had needed only minor alteration and addition to be a comfortable, and private, living space. “There’s a group of forty-seven young people who dream of occupying that place.”
“Probably more,” he said, hanging his riding gear on the pegs near the entrance.
“You knew?”
He shrugged, once again smoothing back his now-dry hair. “It’s honest speculation, according to Dave Caterel, Paul, and Otto. It would come sooner or later-a need to split into separate groups to cover the ground that’s going to be cultivated and keep it Thread-free. Red had a go at me last time Thread fell on Ruatha lands.” He shrugged again and, taking a seat, held up his right leg. Sorka straddled the leg, braced herself for his push, and hauled the boot off; automatically, she repeated the process for the left boot while they talked. “Torene would have done better getting your dad to intercede for them.”
“Now, Sean. . .” Sorka began, ready to defend Torene.
“Don’t ‘now, Sean’ me, woman,” he said. She glanced quickly over her shoulder to test his mood and decided that she could speak bluntly. “She’s right, for all I think she’s a tad young to be so. . . so beforehand.”
“There isn’t an ounce of malice in Torene Ostrovsky,” Sorka said staunchly.
“I haven’t suggested there was, lovey,” he said. Scattering his boots, he pulled her by the waist onto his lap. “But it’s obvious we’ll have to move quickly on this, now that the ball’s rolling.”
He laid his head between her shoulder blades as he often did, not amorously, but because he was better at using gestures than words and had many ways of expressing his love for her.
“Have you decided who will lead the new Weyr?” she asked, covering his hands on her waist with hers and leaning into the close embrace.
“Weyrs,” he said, giving her a final hug before he gently put her back on her feet.
“Weyrs?”
“Yes. Plural.” He rose and, stripping off his shirt as he walked toward their bathing room, gestured with his head for her to follow.
“We’ve more than enough dragons, with three clutches hardening, to populate three, maybe four Weyrs. . .”
“Torene’s dream site, Big Island, that crater in Telgar’s holding, and where else?”
He paused on his way through their bedroom long enough to step out of his pants and heavy socks, and ball them up to throw into the laundry basket.
“We’ve got two other choices, one down on that mid-eastern peninsula and another up in the High Ranges, the crater with all those spiky peaks. But, to make the necessary improvements even in the east coast place, we’ll need to monopolize the remaining functional stonecutters. . .”
“Is there enough fuel?”
“Fulmar Stone’s got all of ‘em rigged to run off generators.” Sean grinned at Sorka as he stepped into the steaming bath. Having a copious supply of thermally heated water was one of the luxuries he enjoyed. The excess water ran off down the pipes that helped keep the Weyr warm. Far underground the water went through a filtering system and returned, cleansed, to the reservoirs, to be pumped up again. Other pipes brought drinking water from the cisterns that were kept topped up by mountain streams.
“But the actual cutting surfaces are wearing out.”
“True, but Telgar’s trying to make replacement abrasives that’ll slice rock. There’re enough industrial diamonds near Big Island to give us a fair approximation of the cutting surface. ‘Tany rate, I dealt with the Ierne group. They get the second east coast cave system and give us a workforce to make our own adaptations.” He grinned both with pleasure as he sank to his chin in the warm water and with an understandable pride in the success of his machinations. “With them there, and in a fertile area, they’ll have enough to tithe to the new Weyr.”
“You thought all this up?”
He opened his eyes and grinned at her, suddenly boyish. “Hell no, your old man gave me the wink and the nod, and stood by me while I fought it all out with Lilienkamp.” After Paul Benden’s death the previous winter, Joel Lilienkamp had been voted into the management of Fort Hold. He was, in some ways, much harder to listen to in the further disbursement of people-whom he regarded as renewable resources-and of irreplaceable material, which the colony had to conserve.
“You mean, you weren’t hunting south with the others?”
He nodded once and then shook his head and began vigorously soaping himself. “Nope. Carenath made do nicely with an injured bullock that had fallen into a crevasse that your father said we could have. I didn’t want any more rumors to circulate than necessary.” He grimaced. “There seem to be enough.”
She had to wait until he had ducked his head to clear the soap suds from his hair before she asked the next question.
“Who’re to be Weyrleaders?”
He gave her an enigmatic smile and she knew why he was going for three new Weyrs: that way he’d avoid any complaint of nepotism. The young people who had been born on Pern, especially those orphaned by the Fever eight years ago, were quick to make that charge when the children of still living fathers and mothers were promoted more often than any from their numbers. Mihall expected to become a Weyrleader. Sorka knew that, and she knew that Sean was aware of those aspirations even though their eldest son never made any allusions to his hope. Indeed, he pointedly did not, scrupulously serving as Wingleader, helping to train weyrlings as part of the duties of his rank, and, except when Brianth lifted in a mating flight, never stepping out of line on any matter, despite his relationship to Sean and Sorka. “Because of it,” Sean had once said to Sorka.
So Mihall, if Brianth flew a senior queen designate, would reach the objective he had set himself from the moment he had stood on the Hatching Ground at twelve, the youngest ever to Impress a bronze. There had been mutterings about that among older candidates, but Sean’s answer had been firm. “The dragon chooses. Mihall could have been left standing.”
There’d been a few private words between the new bronze rider and his father, the Weyrleader, but Mihall had never once taken advantage of the relationship. In his group of weyrlings, he had almost been shunned for trying too hard, for always doing more than was necessary and showing up the others.
If Sean had been self-contained and private as a boy, Mihall was doubly so. Her own firstborn and she didn’t really know or understand him, Sorka thought. . . and yet, she did.
The boy had been mad about dragons as soon as he was old enough to understand what his parents did, and despite being mainly raised by his grandparents and with his own siblings, he spent as many waking hours as he could up at the Weyr, making the long hike by himself if there was no one to escort him.
“We’ve got twenty mating queens-discounting you, because no one flies Faranth but Carenath-” He cocked a stern finger at her, provoking her to grin smugly. “And the three injured. . .”