Thanks again for your reviews of my story, and I hope it follows canon in the way the Weyrs are still structured.
On the following day Karela, the Headwoman of Honshu, came to sit with Saska for the morning meal, and then took her to the records room.
"These are the earliest records, when Honshu was first founded. Here you'll find the records from the Ninth Pass when it was rediscovered, and these are the continuing records. There's nothing very spectacular, I'm afraid, just lists of dragons and their riders, supplies brought in, surveys and expeditions into the far south. Are you sure that's what you need to know?"
Saska shook her head as she looked around the room, seeing desks and chairs, cabinets that must hold records, paintings on the walls.
"I don't know. I've been tasked to look into why the dragons are getting smaller - "
"Why?" Karela asked bluntly. "I mean, why should it make a difference? There's no Thread to fight, and to be brutally frank, with smaller dragons, there's less strain on the food resources. Clutches are getting smaller - in the days of Thread a queen would regularly lay forty or even fifty eggs, but nowadays fifteen to twenty is normal, and a queen might only come from one in three clutches."
"Is there a bias to any one colour?"
"Greens always predominate, but apart from that, there's an even balance between blues, browns and bronzes. Bronzes might be a shade larger than browns, still, but there's little difference in size between green and blue."
"And do greens still Impress males?"
Karela glanced at her, then at the lists in front of them, and finally shook her head.
"No, that's about evenly balanced now, as I suspect it was supposed to be. If you look at the history, you'll see females Impressed greens at first, then it changed to males - the excuse being that men fought better."
"Er - didn't the dragons do the fighting, rather than their riders?"
Karela laughed.
"You've put your finger right on it! Yes, of course, the dragons did the flying and flaming, but somewhere in those first few Passes it became a fixed idea that greens only Impressed males. Women never Impress bronze or brown, even now, but there have been incidences where a woman Impresses a blue."
"That would make sense, in that a gold rider is always female, so brown and bronze should be male."
"You need Kitty Ping's original records. Those are kept at Landing, in the original AIVAS rooms."
"Am I allowed access to those?"
"I don't know. I'll speak to the Lord Holder of Southern, I think, and ask him to speak to the High Council. You're staying for a couple more days?"
"Yes, I think I will."
"Fine. Make a start here, then, and I'll have some food and drink delivered to you later in the morning. Oh, and if you want to bespeak any of our dragons, please don't feel inhibited in any way."
"I couldn't hear them in Respite."
Karela made a face. "I shouldn't speak out of turn, I suppose, but Myryn isn't the best Weyrwoman I've ever met!"
"Has she been Weyrwoman long?"
"About ten turns, since Wyeneth made her first flight. It was quite sad, really, P'dar's Weyrwoman and weyrmate Glamista, took sick and died, and so of course Panath suicided, and then they had to wait for Wyeneth to grow - she was the only gold at the Weyr. But Myryn had to be Weyrwoman in deed, if not in name, and I think myself she was too young for the responsibility, and hid it behind that smiling softness which is all that most people see."
Saska nodded.
"I had the impression she didn't welcome me because she thought I was a challenge to her with the bronze and brown riders."
"That would be Myryn all over! She can't have them, but they form her court, and no one else can have them either! Drat the woman!"
Karela left to make her calls to the Lord Holders, and Saska sat down and stared at the reams of records. She could hear odd snatches of dragon conversation, she realised, nothing directed at her, and nothing she wanted to break into, but it was comforting to know she could still hear the dragons.
At midday H'rat, a blue rider who had danced with her last evening, came to bring a tray of drinks and food.
"Here you are! What's that? I don't recognise that!"
"It's the schematic of one of the Dawn Sisters, I think. I was just comparing it to the Ancestral Ships of Terrvert."
"Is that what your people call them? May I sit down?"
Saska nodded, and H'rat studied the schematic.
"We used the Dawn Sisters to get rid of the Red Star," he said at last.
"Yes I know."
"And then we started to go out to the asteroids and bring back metal ore and minerals and stuff that's scarce on Pern, and then someone had the bright idea to enclose the dragons in a ship and let them move it to other planets in the system."
"We're taught that as well."
H'rat shook his head.
"I wish I knew the history of Terrvert as well as my own! All we were told was that Terrvert never lost its space-faring abilities, and is far in advance of Pern in a technological sense."
"That's true in part. I think we lost something by being able to land on planets that weren't one hundred percent suitable, and having the technology to build domes and live in them whilst terraforming."
H'rat looked enquiringly at her, and Saska explained about the enclosed spaces.
"You could put domes in the Northern Continent," H'rat observed. "That way, the winters wouldn't be so severe."
"Yes, I think that's true."
"There's a thing called geothermal heating, isn't there? If you closed that in, would the temperature be the same as here?"
Saska called up a schematic of Benden Weyr and studied the contours.
"You could put domes here - and here - that would cover the main entrances to the Lower Caverns and the Hatching Grounds. It would operate like an airlock, perhaps, so that the heat didn't escape."
"Are you going to put it forward as a suggestion?"
Saska shook her head.
"That's none of my business - "
"But we are all supposed to work together," H'rat said. "Or at least, that's what my parents always taught me. Think about it."
"I will do," Saska replied, saving the diagram to her own file.
H'rat tidied up where they had been eating, leaving a full jug of watered fruit juice.
"Bespeak Noreth if you want anything else," he said. "I've no patrols to fly this afternoon."
"I'll do that. Thanks."
Saska turned back to the screens and studied the schematics. She pulled up plans and maps of Pern, seeing the layout of the various Holds and Weyrs, appreciating the ingenuity of a people under periodic attack. AIVAS had been buried, she realised, and memory of it had been lost as the remnant of the colony forged a new life in a safer part of the world.
"Why indeed should it matter, if the dragons are getting smaller?" she said aloud as she closed the records.
- we will not be able to fly the ships