Thanks for the first reviews! Weyrship One, of course, I should have looked back and found the title properly.
Saska leaned her head back against the pillows and closed her eyes.
"I don't come from Pern," she murmured. "I come from a Terrvert world, and so do my parents. All right, I grant you this world will have a dragon-base - perhaps even a Weyr - and dragon-ships visiting, but Terrvert itself was founded by a different set of colonists."
"And you can hear voices in your mind, which is fairly unusual for a Terrvertian," Ron said, and she could image the smile on his face.
"Benden is named from Pern," she said at random.
"Yes. One of the Weyrs of Pern."
"Does it still exist?"
"Oh yes." He stood up and leaned across, and unexpectedly dropped a kiss on her hair. "Go back to sleep, Saska, and I'll see if I can break you out of this place soonest."
"I hate white sheets," she said at random. "At home they were all home spun and woven, and a lovely colour."
"And so they will be again," he said, and Saska listened to the door open and close, the distinctive hiss of disinfectant against anything Ron might have carried in with him.
"And there's a red sun on Benden as well," she said aloud, and realised that she missed that slowly dying sun more than anything else.
The following day the doctor discharged her and issued her with a medi-flash so that no one would pump anaesthetic into her unknowing.
"What happens if I fall down and it's under me?" she asked childishly, fingering the pendant around her neck.
"It gives off a micro-signal to any medical personnel equipped with the necessary equipment."
"All right. Thanks. I don't need to go to Benden, you know, I can carry on with my work here."
"As far as I can see, there is no work here," he replied briskly. "The lab has specified it needs no more than two workers, and there isn't anything else that remotely resembles your specialisation."
"I could clean the tanks in the eco-deck."
"Robotically controlled. You'd take in too many life forms. We all carry them around with us all the time, but that eco-deck doesn't have any."
Saska stood up and picked up her discharge papers, smiling at him when she wanted to shout at him, and walked out, nodding to the receptionist and nurses who were hanging around the coffee machine. The thought of coffee turned her stomach, and she realised she was far too tense to do any good to herself or others. She set off, therefore, to walk around the dome, a walk she often took, around the inner fortifications, near the ducts where the robotic cleaners kept constant check against damage to the outer shell of the dome.
"Like an egg," she said aloud, staring out of the clouded panels that shielded the fierce light from a young blue sun. "An egg we're ready to break out of, but not here, not on this place."
She turned and exited the walkway and came to one of the canteens. She did not want food or drink, but there were people here, talking, doing ordinary mundane things. None of them had come from Benden, she realised, but she had known some of them on A-Zed-One where she had gone when she left the University on Benden. She fetched the obligatory coffee from the machine and sat down to scan the newsvids.
What would it be like to ride a dragon, she wondered. Not just sit in the bowels of a ship the dragons were moving with their minds, but actually to ride a dragon.
- the big man says you are welcome to ride dragons.
Laroth?
- are you coming to see us? You have been very sick and I couldn't hear you properly.
yes I was sick. Can I ride you?
- anyone can ride a dragon.
"Hullo, Saska."
She looked up sharply as Jo sat down opposite her. They stared at each other in silence.
"Sorry," Jo said abruptly. "They've credited it to me, now. Nothing I can do."
"Make sure of your every step," Saska replied. "Don't take any shortcuts, Jo, because that's how the last viral invasion happened. And write it all down."
Jo studied her curiously.
"Don't you mind?"
"Well - yes of course I do - but I'm not a pure researcher like you. I get paid, a pittance admittedly, to do this, Jo, I'm still on a retainer from the University on Benden, and I have that cushion."
"They're sending you back, aren't they? What's Benden like?"
"Didn't you come through it on the way here?"
Jo shook her head. "I came from the other direction, from Terrvert Three through A-Zed-One to reach here."
"I don't remember the Terrvert world where I was born, my parents went to Benden when I was just barely walking."
"But you lived out in the open?"
"Yes. We had a small dome to live in and do the science, but I grew up in the woods of Benden."
"So - more like a colonist than a scientific type?"
Saska smiled. "I suppose you could say so. You came through Terrvert Three - are those Terrvert worlds - alive?"
Jo stared into her coffee, and then nodded.
"Alive and full of our kind of life," she said. "There's not an inch of a Terrvert world that hasn't been cultivated and terraformed and shaped by us. This place will be the same, sucked dry."
Saska watched her sip her coffee.
"If it bothers you so much, why don't you protest about it?"
Jo shrugged, staring at the walls as if she could see outside.
"I don't know that it bothers me that much," she admitted. "I was born and brought up in eco-domes, more sophisticated than this one, that's for sure, but in the end, that's the way the worlds are, with some of them beginning by being totally enclosed like this. There aren't enough free worlds with the right mix for humans to live, not like we were told to expect at school and University."
"Just the right air, just the right water, just the right distance," Saska said with a rueful smile, and Jo nodded, crushed her cup into the recycler and left the canteen. Saska watched her go, and shook her head. She was seconded from Benden University on a tiny bursary, it was true, but she still needed to find a decent paying job that would enable her to pay off her Committee loans at more than the speed she was managing at the moment.
She saw Ron come in, glancing behind him as if he had glimpsed Jo, and then the lab worker came across and sat down opposite her.
"So they let you go?"
"Couldn't keep me," she replied lightly.
"And you're off back to Benden?"
"There's not a lot I can do there either, with my particular specialisation," she admitted. "I'll probably go back to University and retrain at something a bit more generalised."
"Have you told many people you can hear dragons?" he asked and Saska stared at him in shock.
"Hear - dragons - of course I don't hear dragons!"
"What else is talking in your head, then, unless you suffer from a particularly spectacular form of Schizophrenia?"
Saska blinked and looked away, but she could sense Ron was still friendly and concerned.
"I didn't know they were dragons," she said at last. "Why are you interested? This isn't a Pern colony world, why should I think they're dragons?"
"The Committee asked for a dragon-base to be built here," he pointed out. "So dragons do come and go, and you can hear them, like you could hear on them on Benden, I'd suppose?"
"I never heard them making speech before, there was just a sound in my head. Why should I suddenly start hearing speech?"
"I'm hoping the answer to that is on Benden. The two colonies went in very different directions once they were founded, but they set out with the same purpose, to get away from the wars and start their own societies."
"Terrvert didn't have Thread?"
She heard an odd rumble in her mind as she said that, and a sudden flashing image of something grey and glistening, and shook her head to get rid of it.
"No, they didn't. Terrvert wasn't such a bargain as Pern when it came to agriculture and industrial processes, which is how they came to be such specialists at terraforming."
"Didn't that put Pern at a disadvantage when the two cultures met? I mean - what amount of science do you need to build a dragon-ship?"
"Metal," Ron said at once. "Wiring. Electricity. Air filters. Nothing the Pernese had developed in their two thousand years of isolation from AIVAS."
"And when that did reconnect? They took what they wanted? But both Pernese colony worlds are under yellow suns and have a breathable atmosphere."
"Yes, because that's what the dragons were looking for. I don't think the average Pernese will have much concept of science as we term it, but they have the basics of industry now."
Saska sipped her coffee and thought about that, aware that Ron was watching her. He had an agenda, she was sure of that, otherwise he would not be seeking her out; several years older and much more highly qualified, Ron was still an oddity on a new colony world.
"But - we don't have contact with Old Earth? Neither set ever went back?"
Ron stared thoughtfully at her.
"How would they do that?"
"If you had a picture, a dragon could go there," she replied. "Isn't that the essence of training a dragon, that you teach it the co-ordinates by means of pictures and star patterns?"
"That was how Lessa brought the Weyrs forward."
"That - is so far in their past - you're right, no one here ever mentions Pern!"
"But on Benden there are dragons," he murmured. "You may never have seen them, but Benden is one of the contact points, one of the vectors of the dragon-ships. I'd like you to go and meet them."
Saska stared around the canteen.
"I think I might go mad if I lived in one of these domes all my life," she said at random. "All right, Benden is a red dwarf world, but at least the wind blows there, and there's weather."
"There was no weather on A-Zed-One," he responded with a smile.
"That was a space station with no pretensions to being anything else, a staging post if you like. This place - they're going to build more domes, aren't they? That's the reason for the sudden influx of engineers?"
"Yes, another dome or even two. There's riches in the rocks, you see, and you can mine it from the domes and ship it out."
"By dragon-ship?"
Ron shook his head slowly. "Very occasionally, they might touch here and exchange goods and news. I don't know what's happening to the dragon-ships, Saska, if they're getting fewer, if there's a reason they don't touch the Terrvert Vector Points very often, but I was going to ask you - if you go to Benden - if you could find out."
"For you?"
"For me and the interested parties I represent," Ron admitted.
Saska nodded.
"I wondered why you were always asking questions," she said. "All right, I'll report back to you if I find anything out of the ordinary - but I doubt if there is anything very wrong - perhaps the dragons don't come this way because it's inimical to them, have you thought of that?"
"They can move ships," he replied. "Move ships with all the air they need to live and function. Perhaps you could let me know?"
"I won't spy for you," she replied bluntly. "Anything I find out, I'll tell it out loud. I'm not going to be party to some covert operation, Ron."
He shrugged as they both stood up and moved to the exit.
"I told them that would be your answer, but I'd be grateful if you'd tell me as well as anyone else."
"I can do that, certainly," she replied.
"And let me know what colour that dragon is, in your head," he said with a laugh and a wave, striding off down the corridor.
"Green," she said aloud. "All the colours of green you ever saw, Ron, if you ever bothered to look."