Let's hope I can think of a way to get Saska home before the end of October when I'll be too occupied with other projects to write this story. That's a promise, by the way, not a threat!

After lunch, a collection of cold meats and salads eaten on the terrace where most of the living of Honshu seemed to occur, Saska asked if she could look around the Hold.

"You've made a start on the new technologies AIVAS gave you," she said to F'lessan.

"Yes, solar panels and such like, to give power to the computing power we have. As for the rest of Pern - I know some of the Holds still, fifty turns on, don't embrace everything."

"What about solar power at the Weyrs? I suppose the thermal power is still there at Fort and Benden?"

"Yes. There's talk of setting up solar farms at Igen once the Pass is finished for all time. Those desert cliffs would lend themselves to the beginnings of a power grid."

He grinned at her, and Saska found she had to smile in response, because she had "felt" his dragon Golanth probing at her mind to see if she would agree or disagree with F'lessan's vision of the future.

"The dragons riders will come south," she said at last. "That was planned, wasn't it? I can tell you without compromising the future, that that happens."

"So long as they don't all come to Honshu and expect to live here! I've raised sons and daughters and shooed them all away to live their own lives."

"What about your parents?"

"I visit, they visit," F'lessan said briefly. "You call them my parents, but you know I was fostered, as most weyr children were fostered."

Saska nodded, and watched as he called up the star charts they had made, the calculations of how the Red Star was beginning to drift away.

"Suppose it finds another solar system?" F'lessan said abruptly. "I have nightmares of that, that the zebedees as AIVAS called them, wouldn't work properly, that another system would be infected."

"The perturbation of the orbit of the Red Star was to take it far out into interstellar space," Saska said, pointing to the calculations on the screen. "The space between worlds is huge, you know, and an object drifting through space would take aeons to reach anywhere at all."

F'lessan nodded.

"I do know that, but to a dragon rider, the idea of live Thread - all right, dormant Thread - heading for somewhere else is a nightmare I still have occasionally."

"I doubt if that fear will go, not properly, until the last person alive now, who has witnessed Thread, passes away," Saska replied slowly. "Then it will be a story, a subject for the history books, for the ballads, but the deep-down gut-wrenching fear will have gone."

"You speak as if you know of that fear," F'lessan said quietly as they left the computer rooms and went to raid the kitchens, giving Saska a weird double-take of the two kitchens overlaid.

"Not with Thread, of course not, but I was working on other bio-hazards, the way a native species can cross-contaminate a colony world."

"Like the plagues that came from the southern continent through the ages?"

"Yes, very like that."

"What about dragons and their riders in your time? Do they get infected?"

"Like killing Thread during Threadfall, a quick snap into and out of between usually sterilises anything nasty."

"Interesting."

"Healers' Hall might have thought of it, but of course, until AIVAS, there was very little invasive surgery on Pern."

"And some people still fail to report anything that needs surgery," F'lessan said, his tone turning grim. "We still have deaths in childbirth, and people becoming incapacitating because the holders won't seek help with serious injuries."

"That, in the end, is their choice," Saska replied.

"You sound like the Weyrleader," F'lessan said. "Here we are - don't tell anyone we raided the cakes!"

Saska smiled at him and sat down to check her case, disconnecting the solar collectors that had charged it fully. She folded them away and locked the case, seeing that Tai had been making notes on the scribbled notes Saska had made.

"Just a few pointers," Tai said. "I think you could usefully look through this line of descent of the dragons, to see if they remain at a steady size. Do you have records in that far future of the eggs hatched?"

"They do, at the base," Saska replied. "Thank you! This will be a great help, I'm sure, but I think that once we adjust for the reduction in size from the bottle-neck of the Long Interval, everything will fall into place."

"I hope to get you back there to make those observations," Lord Jaxom said. Tai stared at him.

"You? You won't be going, will you? I mean - I know Ruth always knows when and where he is, but all the same - you won't risk yourself, surely?"