Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Well, we've made it this far. There's still six books to go that we know of before we reach the end of the line.

This book is solely the product of Todd McCaffrey, or so the blazon proclaims.

Dragonsblood, Introduction and Chapter One: Content Notes:

If we turn to the Introduction, written by his mother, though, after proclaiming that Todd had quite the pedigree of writers and that he's also accomplished in his own right without having to rely on that pedigree, it mentions there were conflicts between them about the story and that she made him go through her regular beta readers to make sure the canon and the style started true. She feels he did the job admirably, and shows us "another point of view about Pern." One, of course, that hews to what Anne thinks about Pern, because, well...

You see, I've always been paranoid about people writing in my world. If you'd seen some of the lovingly but inaccurately written stories I've seen, including a film script that had me cringing in fear that it would be produced, you'd understand how I feel about having my literary child misrepresented.

You don't say. Much like another Anne who accused her fans of "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective", it would be an understatement to say that Anne McCaffrey hated fanfic.

It's taken us a while, but now we finally have a textual excuse for all that extratextual material I've been trying to avoid, and will continue to avoid where possible, as justifications for why Pern is the way it is. I still think it's a mark of poor storytelling if people have to use your outside-the-text conversations and statements to make your text make sense and see where you're coming from.

There were some authorized outlets where people could play characters on Pern without litigious threats, but those spaces had to obey her very tight rules about setting, sexual orientation, and many other things, to continue to exist, and her lawyers were not above sending cease and desist letters to teenagers that strayed from the path. Among other things. And while it looks like she's mellowed out some by the time this introduction is written, you can still see the white-knuckle pearl-clutching at work, so much so that even her son had to follow the rules to be able to write in the world.

Based on this alone, I don't expect things to be different with a new author at the helm, writing supposedly solo. Let's begin.

[Todd does some things better than his mother did, and many of the things that he introduces to try and move the needle toward a less terrible Pern do get taken up for this series and for the finale that he and Anne are co-credited for. Todd also does some things much worse than his mother did, and introduces some different terrible into the world of Pern. Which makes the Third Pass both better and worse than the Ninth and the Sixth. It's an accomplishment, that's for sure.]

Red Star at night:
Firestone dig,
Harness, rig
Dragons take flight.

(Fort Weyr, at the end of the Second Interval, After Landing, 507.)

[The poetry fragments that open the chapters in Todd books really start to feel less like they're fragments of some Harper song or official teaching work and more like they might be composed by someone who thinks they're good at verse and rhyme and really just needs more practice and polish. At least in the Kindan books, they seemed to try and hang together as parts of the same work. That's no longer the case here, not really.

Additionally, we're back to the After Landing timekeeping system. Because time travel is about to become extremely important, to the point where there's going to be a lot of paradoxing and then trying to make sure that the timeline already lines up with what we know, and because this series is going to move back and forth between two specific times, the Present Pass system of the Ninth gets ditched for the timekeeping system that AIVAS and the colonists would have used. For reasons that will become apparent enough as we work through this series. It still makes you wonder what kinds of catastrophes happen in between the times we have stories for that causes the loss of so much knowledge that's never really replaced over time, like a calendar system with an epoch that's not "the deadly rain started falling again." Anyway, on with the show.]

Chronologically, we've moved forward in Pern time, rather than back, so we've jumped up past the flu that killed the humans. But we're still feeling the effects of something, as the new Fort Weyrleader, K'lior, is concerned about not having enough dragons to fight Thread.

D'gan

is still Weyrleader at Telgar, despite everything we saw him do and all the reasons his Weyr could have invoked to have thrown him out by now. And while he has enough supplies, and full tithes, he's not sharing with anyone. Well, he could share, but then C'rion suggests it'll all be bronzes so that D'gan doesn't have to compete as much on the next mating fight and that pisses D'gan off enough that he storms out. M'tal chides C'rion for antagonizing D'gan, and the two haggle a bit about getting personnel in the right place, where it turns out C'rion wants to shift J'trel over to Benden so as to help them with Search...and to get over the loss of his partner.

"But he's not a scoundrel. And it's no lie that his blue has an eye for good riders, especially the women."
"Which is odd, considering his own preferences," M'tal remarked.
"Well, you know blues," C'rion agreed diffidently. As blue dragons mated with green dragons, and both were ridden by male riders, the riders themselves tended to be the sort who could accommodate the dragons' amorous arrangements.
"And you want to get him away from Ista so he can forget about K'nad," M'tal surmised. K'nad and J'trel had been partners for over twenty Turns.

And that leads into realizations of just how old both Weyrleaders are, too.

I have to note that this book was published before Dragon Harper by a couple years, so this idea of saying that blue and green riders are generally gay without insisting they are exclusively so was already on pace by the time we get to that book. New knowledge. I also wonder if this is one of the things that got fought over.

[Much like how I went all the way through Harper Hall before going to The White Dragon, even though The White Dragon was published first, it makes better sense for the flow of the story to have taken Kindan out to the end of his narrative in Dragon Harper before starting with this one, even though this particular story is published beforehand, so we had a Todd series and an Anne series happening at the same time, and both of them use Kindan, so the timelines on them really need to line up with each other. Since this one starts after the other one ends by the internal chronology, the real time fuckery doesn't happen in earnest until the two series merge back together into a single narrative for the last two books of the combined series. (This series and the other series are three books, and book 4 and 5 that happen afterward is assigned to one series and not the other, but, interally, by chronology, it's an eight-book sequence, and this is book four of eight when lined up that way.)]

The fruit that turns out to be vital in saving everyone from the plague gets mentioned here in the future time, too, and J'trel specifically as the person who brings the fruit and knows where it is, which might have caused a recordscratch about how Kindan knows this, but it's entirely possible I just wasn't paying attention in the right spots rather than this being an instance where a character knows something they shouldn't.

We shuffle over to who is likely to be our main character, Lorana, trying to sketch a bug with one hand and keep it pinned down with another. Which works until she has to wipe away sweat, and then the bug burrows away.

Lorana has two fire-lizards, Grenn (a brown) and Garth (a gold), and gets regular visits from J'trel. Who is late to picking her up, but she shows him her sketches of the "scatids," pointing out a variation between the ones in the north and the ones in the south. J'trel times it ever so slightly to make sure Lorana gets in the ship she's supposed to on time, but there's something worrying about Talith.

As the blue dragon became airborne, he gave a soft cough.
Lorana looked at J'trel with her brows raised. "I don't recall him coughing like that before."
J'trel waved a hand. "He's old. Sometimes a thick lungful of air makes a dragon cough. His lungs aren't like they used to be."
"Do dragons cough often?" Lorana asked, with natural curiosity—her father had been a beastmaster and had even tended people in emergencies, and she had learned much of his craft.
J'trel shrugged. "Dragons are very healthy. Sometimes they seem to get a bit of a bug, and sometimes a cough." He made a throwaway gesture, saying, "It doesn't last long."
"What about the Plague?" Lorana asked with a faint shudder.
"The Plague affected people, not dragons, and the dragonriders were careful to keep safe." J'trel's face took on a clouded look. "Some say we were too careful."

So dragons do get sick as well as injured. (I wonder if this was a thing that got fought about.) And it's useful to have already traced the Plague all the way through to know what had happened then.

[They can get sick, but there's going to be a significant amount of complications that comes with that and a lot of mostly-dubious genetics technobabble that comes along with it. Pay attention to the explanations, when they arrive.]

There's a quick explanation of how they time-traveled to be sure Lorana could get where she needed to go on time, and how being in two places at the same time can be exhausting or irritating or both to dragon, rider, and any passengers along for the ride. And, because it might be the first time someone is looking at Pern, there's an explanation of how paradox is avoided in the timeline: every time travel incident is a Stable Time Loop. Everything that will happen has already happened. Or as J'trel puts it:

"You can't alter the past," he told her. "As long as it never happened in the past, it never can happen in the past."
"Why not?"
It cannot be done, Talith said. A dragon cannot go to a place that is not.
Lorana looked puzzled.
"I tried once," J'trel said, shaking his head at some sad memory. "I couldn't picture the destination in my mind."
It is like trying to fly through rock, Talith added.
"I wanted to go back to when my mother was still alive," J'trel said. "I wanted her to see that I'd Impressed, that I'd become a dragonrider. I thought I could make her happy." He shook his head. "But I couldn't do it. I couldn't see her and the place clearly enough in my mind to give Talith the image."
You had not done it, so you could not, Talith explained with draconic logic.
Lorana shook her head, mystified. "Maybe if I think about it long enough, it'll make sense," she said[...]

That characterizes this like it's a failure of imagination that's keeping the dragonriders from ripping through time and doing things that aren't in the predestined Stable Time Loop. And frankly, that's weird, because portraits and drawings and tapestries are very clearly part of Pern, and available to a lot of people. If J'trel had a portrait reference of the right time period, even if it wasn't the right place, he could presumably do the time warp and then fly to the right place to find his mother once he knew where in the past he had landed. If it's really solely a problem of not having an appropriate picture, then it really isn't a problem at all, given how in the very first book of the series, a four hundred year-old tapestry was sufficiently detailed that someone could use the picture on the tapestry as their reference point. (Presumably not the tapestry itself, although being able to picture it hanging in a place where Lessa knew it would be hanging might have also been good enough for some sort of temporal hop.)

There's a possibility that envisioning something that you saw would cause you to telefrag your younger self by appearing in the same place, but Lessa already proved that didn't happen, and dragonriders presumably get the same image from others when they are warping through hyperspace, but the dragons seem to be able to sort themselves and their riders out so that everyone isn't trying to appear in the same space-time coordinate. So that's not it, either.

So what is actually keeping the dragons in check, other than narrative fiat? And, as usual, what happens on the first go-round, when someone isn't already back in time to right the wrong or otherwise create the timeline that will save someone from a particular issue?

[The commentary on the original points out here that as soon as there's a method developed with sufficient precision in imagination, like planetary positions, or the positions of the Red Star, or even the advancement of a chronometer, either forward or backward, then arbitrary time travel becomes completely possible, and the only thing that's holding the dragonriders back is the plot, rather than anything else. By the end of this cycle, the rules stated here about not doing what you haven't already done are going to be discarded in favor of rules that say "you have to do what you know you've already done, but that doesn't mean you haven't done other things that you won't know about until you do them", to the point where we get characters crossing their own timelines repeatedly but somehow also managing to stay out of their own way throughout all of these trips.]

Does anybody in SF ever really provide a good answer to these questions? [At the time, that's meant to be rhetorical. When you're reading this, maybe someone has done it well.]

But we should keep an eye on that cough from Talith, as the narrative spins back to how J'trel and Lorana met.

It turns out that Lorana had kept her brown fire-lizard from taking a one-way trip to hyperspace after he suffered a serious wing fracture, and that gets J'trel's curiosity, given that the fire-lizards usually vanish themselves when injured that badly. He inspects Lorana's work at setting and splinting, says there's a good chance the fire-lizard will live, and offers to take Lorana and her fair down to the southern continent (although not named as such) to rest and recover. Halfway through the month it took to recover, J'trel is fascinated by Lorana's drawing skill, she tells him about how the skill was developed and encouraged by her father after they held off a mob that was convinced they'd brought the Plague with them. In return, J'trel let's on that he doesn't feel like he belongs, either, because he's old, he's not the best fighter, and the partner he loved is dead. He didn't have a plan after informing the family, but now he's glad because he's pretty sure he's met a future Weyrwoman.

"I've never met a woman more fit to lead a Weyr."
"Lead a Weyr?" Lorana repeated aghast. "Weyrwoman? Me? No, no—I—"
"You've more talent than I've ever seen," J'trel told her. "Half the Istan riders of the past thirty Turns were searched by me and Talith."
He smiled briefly in pride. "And you can talk to any dragon!" he exclaimed.
Lorana crinkled her forehead in confusion. "What makes you say that?" she asked. "I've only talked with Talith."
"While it's true that a dragon can talk to anyone he chooses, only riders bonded to a dragon can address one—and usually only their own. No rider can talk to another dragon unless he can hear all dragons. Do you know how few can do that?"
Lorana could only shake her head.
"Torene is the only one I can think of," J'trel said. "And I don't think she has your way with them. It's more like you feel than talk to them."
"You don't?" Lorana asked in surprise. She looked out to Talith and smiled fondly at the blue. "I'm sorry, I—"
"Lass, when are you going to stop apologizing for your gifts?" J'trel interrupted her gently.

Oh, I don't know, maybe when your society stops being a patriarchal hellscape. J'trel is a privileged man asking why a woman isn't using her skills to the fullest. Has he noticed at all how women are treated outside of the Weyr? Has he paid any attention at all to how the Weyrwoman gets treated in the Weyr? I'll bet he hasn't, because nobody would want to risk the patriarchal wrath of misbehaving around dragonriders. Plus, although it's in the future compared to here, Aramina showed us why that talent isn't necessarily one to flaunt everywhere.

The narrative, however, prefers to say that this feeling of not feeling like you have a purpose in life a symptom of the "deep shock" that came from the utter destruction of the population during the plague and that Pern is suffering survivor's guilt on a planet-wide basis. But no, Pern doesn't need therapists, and is steadfastly refusing to reinvent them in the face of the multiple planet-wide disasters that ravage the planet regularly, both scheduled and unscheduled.

J'trel gives Lorana the possible purpose of drawing all the creatures in Pern, and they have a laugh about the recovered Grenn having a less successful first flight because he's too fat to fly from all the eating and loungng he's been doing while healing. At least the narrative isn't being fatpohobic about a human. Which is a pretty low bar to clear.

Coming back to the present, there's some gawking over the drawings that Lorana can produce versus a superstition that has no real business being on Pern about women in ships being bad luck for the sailors. The captain points out it's supposed to be a short shakedown run and takes Lorana on as Healer to see whether or not this ship can deliver on the promise of being a ship that can run between holds in the intervals between Threadfalls during a Pass.

Which goes smoothly and the chapter ends with J'trel very certain that Lorana will end up as a Weyrwoman, perhaps Pern's finest.

Nothing like expectations. And also the strong possibility that J'trel might interfere as much as possible to get the result he wants.

As a first chapter, it's a little weird, honestly. There's not a lot of foreshadowing, and I guess that Lorana's ability to draw is going to be the gun on the mantelpiece, unless it's her ability to talk to all the dragons.

Right now, the narrative seems a bit lost, like the characters claim to be. We got some useful attempts at worldbuilding, and we got to know how these characters met, but I don't know that anything very specifically contributed to plot in this chapter.

Which makes me worry that the editorial immunity that the first author had got extended to the new one, because the first author was being a helicopter parent with regard to this book.

Well, maybe the plot will work better next week?

Chapter Text

Last time...well, we met our main characters last time, found out one of them has the special "talks to all dragons" ability and is a fair hand at both mending bones and drawing whatever she sees, and that the new author was conceiving of the idea that blue and green riders didn't have to be exclusively gay any more before it showed up in the later works of the series we just finished.

Dragonsblood: Chapter 2: Content Notes: Abusive Parents, Racist Stereotypes

(Fort Hold, First Pass, year 42, AL 50)

Which establishes (and retcons the original timeline established in the First Fall-era books) that the colonists spent eight years on planet Pern before Threadfall made itself known and forced the abandonment of the Southern Continent. This is a good change, in that it gives the colonists time to deploy and get set up and get used to their way of life before having to make the drastic changes necessary to survive Thread.

Rather than a poem or song fragment, we get prose to start this First Pass chapter.

-ome (suffix): (i) the biological portion of an ecosystem. (ii) the material and genetic information required to re-create the biological portion of an ecosystem. Examples: the "terrome" refers to the biological portion of the Terran ecosystem; the "cetome" refers to the biological portion of the Cetus III ecosystem; the "eridanome" refers to the biological portion of the Eridani ecosystem.

—Glossary of terms, Ecosystems: From -ome to Planet, 24th edition

One of the nice things about science fiction writing is that you get to make shit up, and so long as it sounds vaguely science-y, not that many readers are going to give you grief about it. [I say this knowing full well that many of the thanks and acknowledgements for the Pern books credit specific scientists for their help with whichever science is being rediscovered or used primarily in that particular book. The best I can imagine with that is that the authors took what advice they were given and then resolutely ignored anything hat went against the kind of story they wanted to tell. As much as I doubt they exist, it would be really nice to have interviews with some of those scientists about the consultation they provided and what they thought of the end product.]

Which is to say that I can't imagine linguistics going in this direction, even in the far future, because Terrans are much better at portmanteau than this, and I can't see a phrasing derived from, say "biome" to suddenly take on a meaning that is only a small part of what the original was.

The chapter opens with Wind Blossom (daughter of Kitti Ping, fabled Eridani-trained dragon geneticist) being ejected from a dream, but with the important part still intact.

Even with the dream interrupted, as if against her will, Wind Blossom remembered her mother's last words: "Always a disappointment you were to me. Now you hold the family honor. Fail not, Wind Blossom."
Wind Blossom had had the same dreams for the last forty years.

[There's a Cocowhat here, but there's more of them to come.]

Do I even want to dive into figuring out which terribly executed, potentially racist stereotypes are at work here?

Actually, stick a pin in that, there's more. First, the descriptions of the two of them, in comparison, which is essentially Kitti Ping saved everyone by creating dragons, Wind Blossom is "credited with—blamed for—the creation, through similar genetic manipulation, of the photophobic watch-whers."

"Always a disappointment you were to me," her mother's calm, controlled voice came to Wind Blossom's mind--a memory over forty years old.

And yet more hagiography of the early settlers and how Kitti Ping saved them all.

Wind Blossom stares herself in the mirror as she starts her morning routine.

Her hair was still dark—it would always be dark—as were her eyes. They stared impressively back at her as she examined her face. Her skin had the same yellowish tinge of her Asian ancestors; her eyes had the Asian almond shape.
Wind Blossom completed her inspection, noting once again that the muscles around her face, which had slackened thirty years before, pulled the corners of her lips downward.
Opening her dresser, she saw the yellow tunic at the bottom of her drawer and sighed imperceptibly as she had at the sight of it every day for the last twenty years. Once, an accident at the laundry had left one of her white tunics with a distinctly yellowish tinge. No one had remarked on it. When the day was over, Wind Blossom had carefully put the tunic away in her drawers. She had worn it again, years later—and no one had noticed. Now, as always, she carefully pulled out one of her scrupulously white tunics. From the lower drawer she pulled out a fresh pair of black pants.

Okay, I think that's enough potentially-racist material for now. Let's start again at the top, with what were apparently the last words of Kitti Ping to her daughter. Her sentence construction is more Yoda than anything, which is often deployed in a "the funny foreigner doesn't have a solid grasp on English language and structure" kind of way. But also, there's apparently no warmth or love between mother and daughter, for Kitti to have said all of this so dispassionately. That sounds suspiciously stereotypical for Asian parents on Terra. Then Wind Blossom describes herself as having a yellowish tinge to her skin, which is a sign of jaundice rather than ethnicity. Yellow skin was a racist caricature of Asians on Terra, and I doubt somehow that Wind Blossom would describe herself in such a way. The almond eyes also lean into stereotype, but those I might believe are descriptors.

And I really don't know what to make of this yellow tunic story. Did nobody notice or care because she was the failure daughter of Kitti Ping? Because they thought an off-color mistake was perfect for the geneticist who created the mistakes called watch-whers? Because they thought that yellow suited her well, for fashionable reasons? For racist ones? And when she wore it again, nobody noticed the color change then, either, apparently. Same reasons? I don't know what this is doing here in the story, because there aren't any signs to point at or reasons why she held onto an "accident at the laundry" for twenty years so she could sigh at it every morning.

[There's not really an explanation for why she holds on to the tunic, but it does get mentioned here and there. Regardless of why she kept it, the "nobody noticed" part seems less likely to be true. That nobody may have commented on it to her is more likely than nobody noticing, especially if Wind Blossom's attire has been the same thing, day in and day out, for decades. My work colleagues once very specifically told a person known for wearing a button-down, collared white shirt with one of a prodigious collection of ties to not wear his usual outfit for Costume Day, specifically so the rest of the staff could don shirt and tie as their shared costume. If that person had come into work with a colored shirt, it would have been noticed. Nobody telling Wind Blossom, though, might be because, as we're about to find out, she's not a personable person.]

What I can see is that Kitti Ping gave her daughter severe mental trauma as she died, trauma that she is dealing with by herself (because again, there are no therapists on Pern and nobody ever comes up with the bright idea to reinvent them, despite the clear need for them every time we check in on Pern), and that, as we find out, her daughter is passing on the same trauma to her own daughter.

Wind Blossom spared one more moment to glare at her daughter. "Always a disappointment you were to me," she muttered before she bent over the boy.

Because a terrible thing about abuse is that it tends to cycle and perpetuate itself on the next generation as well. (And also, if I recall correctly, Kitti Ping died slumped over at her workbench, having just created the dragon program, so if those were the last words between mother and daughter, they happened before Kitti died.)

The plot, such that it is, has someone calling Wind Blossom to come out because a child has been mauled by a watch-wher and needs stitches. Wind Blossom is first amused, then acidly annoyed, by the apparently new conception of calling her "my lady", and then starts barking orders at the interns on what will need to happen, while she mentally complains that there isn't any such thing as a true, sterile operating theater to work in, even though there are apparently still sterilized gowns for surgery, and that there isn't any more supply of suture material, so surgery as medical practice is about to go out the window because technology is fading out without being replaced. Wind Blossom will say as much that learning about sutures is pointless because the technology to support that knowledge is fading, and I am wondering why, despite knowing that they wanted to degrade gracefully, the colonists seem to have not packed the necessary things to be able to create such things as sterile environments, sutures, and the like in their target technology level? Or had the knowledge of it spread widely through the populations?

[The comments on the original mention that sutures and the materials for them date at least as far back as the civilizations on the Nile River, so they're solidly low-tech enough that they should exist in this pastoral fantasy. And even within these two settings, past and present, even if Wind Blossom is concerned that the knowledge and materials are being lost, there will be, either with Lorana or Fiona, a call for needles to fix dragon wings that are arranged by the color of the dragon that will need the stitching, and they'll be curved needles for suturing, rather than having had to repurpose straight needles from weaving or other cloth-related enterprises to close up dragon wings. Of course, by the time we get to the Ninth Pass, much of that knowledge will have been lost (or will have faded to the background) so that the anti-AI faction can talk about grotesqueries made by surgery and Oldive can be extra-excited about reacquiring some amount of that lost knowledge. Whatever the catastrophe was that killed most of this knowledge, it must have been a terrible one.]

The boy turns out to be a Tubberman (although his father disavows the name that caused so much trouble on Pern), and because of bloodline records, his father can tell Wind Blossom that the child is O positive. So Wind Blossom, after ordering the preparation of the room, and telling M'hall, Benden's Weyrleader, that this is the last of the suture material, also orders blood transfusions to the boy before/while/after the surgery is going on, from the three people that can give - his father, Wind Blossom, and her daughter, Emorra. The interns are advising against a woman of Wind Blossom's age giving a unit of blood, but she thinks it would be poetic if she died giving her blood to atone for her "mistake", in the same way that she thought it poetic earlier for descendants of Kitti Ping to be helping the descendants of Ted Tubberman.

Wind Blossom passes out from giving the unit of blood, and we get another dream of hers where Kitti Ping is insistent that her designed creature, the one she received accolades for because it appeared to save Cetus III from radiation poisoning, was a visible symbiote and the unnoticed, unsung leechworms were really responsible for the salvation of Cetus III, because they ate (and therefore concentrated) things that had been irradiated by the Nathi in their attempt to wipe out all the humans on the planet. The designed creatures ate the leechworms, and were able to process the radiation. But we don't get very far in the dream before Wind Blossom wakes up. (And is informed she was out for two days from the blood donation.) Purman (the Tubberman who denies his name) and Wind Blossom then have a conversation that M'Hall will eventually join in on, but we have a few things to note before we get there. First, Purman thinks Wind Blossom is being harsh with her daughter.

"Emorra did not leave your side until she collapsed into sleep herself. I had Carelly take her to her rooms." His expression changed. "I think you treated her harshly. Was Kitti Ping like that?"
Wind Blossom examined his face before slowly nodding. "It is a great honor the Eridani bestowed on us."

Wind Blossom, for her part, doesn't try to deny it and acknowledges that her own mother was the same way, and we can see very clearly here a cycle that is being perpetuated on the next generation and yet nobody, save Purman here and now, seems interested in possibly trying to break that cycle. Purman doesn't persist in his objections, even when Wind Blossom changes the subject by asking what happened to Purman's son.

After Purman tells Wind Blossom how his son got mauled, M'hall and Emorra arrive. Wind Blossom tells them both to kill the watch-wher, because she thinks it still has an instinctive reaction that she tried to breed out of it. M'hall shrugs and says the watch-wher (Bendensk, a reminder that whers of the Holds take the name of the Hold, instead of the name of their primary handler) already killed herself from lack of a partner. Because her previous handler got Impressed to a dragon, and her attempt to bond with the young child meant he got mauled. Wind Blossom, upon hearing that the son will need to wake soon and not move his mouth, assigns Emorra to handle that issue.

"My lady!" M'hall protested, "Emorra is the administrator here. She should not be ordered about—"
"She is my daughter," Wind Blossom replied, as if that were enough. Emorra bit off a bitter response, nodded curtly to her mother, and left.
"Mother or not—" M'hall's indignation suffused his face

I think by now we can safely say that Wind Blossom lost whatever empathy points she may have picked up by having this version of Kitti Ping as her mother, because she's doing it just as much to her daughter. Like, we can see it as the tragic continuation of a cycle of abuse all we like, but that doesn't mean we have to like or excuse anything that Wind Blossom is doing with Emorra. And having that same nightmare every damn night seems like it might induce Wind Blossom to make some changes in her life so that she doesn't turn out exactly like her mother to her own daughter, but that kind of self-awareness has apparently eluded her. (Which is all too realistic.)

Plot-wise, Wind Blossom sent Emorra out so she and M'hall could talk at Purman about the actual function of watch-whers, dragons, and grubs. At least at this point in time, the function of the grubs has not been lost to time, and it turns out that Purman bred a variation that works more closely with the wine vines at Benden so that they aren't harmed by Threadfall. Which will become important when he actually says it, but for now, it's a lecture about genetics and why you want to have multiple reasons for introducing a new species into an ecosystem. Watch-whers apparently are meant to fulfill several roles.

"In fact, the watch-whers were created to solve several problems," she continued. "Dragons, by their nature, would associate with a select few people. But they must become part of the human ecology, if you will. They must not be feared."
"So you bred the watch-whers as something that most people could see?" Purman sounded skeptical.
"And they're uglier than dragons, too," M'hall added. "If you were to try to tell someone who'd never seen a dragon what they were like, you'd say like a watch-wher but bigger and prettier."
"So their first purpose is psychological?"
"It is not their first purpose," Wind Blossom replied rather tartly.

The hell is this? There really isn't any reason at all for the dragons not to be feared - they're the protectors of the planet and keepers of the way of life. Sean and Sorka seemed to think a healthy fear of dragons and their riders would make things easier for everyone, especially in not having the dragons do mundane things and in making sure their tribute trains stayed uninterrupted. And if Wind Blossom wanted to make people more comfortable with dragons in their midst, she would have done better working with others to try and breed a domesticated fire-lizard. Humans, at least, like small and cute things that are useful to them. Watch-whers fit neither of these purposes, so it seems like, at least for this part, Wind Blossom is talking out her ass.

What follows, however, is something far better, and also makes me wonder if this were something that was strongly fought over or was supposed to be the plan all along, and the first author just never got around to saying so.

"I designed their eyes to be excellent in low-light situations," Wind Blossom said, choosing her words carefully, "and particularly tuned to infrared wavelengths."
[…and also that they're empathic more than telepathic, and that she tried to make them harder-armored, but that didn't take…]
"Why not incorporate these changes directly into the dragons?" [Purman asks.]
"Two different species are safer," Wind Blossom said. "Greater diversity yields redundancy."
Purman nodded but held up a hand as he grappled with his thoughts. Finally he looked up at the two of them. "The watch-whers fight Thread at night?"
"By themselves," M'hall agreed, eyes gleaming in memory. "I've seen them once—they were magnificent. I learned a lot about fighting Thread that night."
"They breathe fire?"
"No," M'hall said. "They eat Thread, like the fire-lizards. They don't need riders, either—the queens organize them all."
[…The plot goes on to discuss things like "how do they fly?" (The same way dragons do, just with smaller wings to avoid getting Threadscored.) and "why don't we see them more often?" (it's usually too cold for Thread to survive when the watch-whers are active.)…]
A look of wonder crossed his face as he recalled the experience. "They swarmed in from everywhere, arranged themselves by their queens, and flew up to the Thread. I was above them at first, and they came up at me like stars coming out at night. And then they were above, swooping and diving for the still-viable clumps of Thread."
"They see more in the infrared range," Wind Blossom said. "They can differentiate between the live Thread and the Thread that has been frozen by the night atmosphere."

[A Cocowhat supreme!]

And yes, that's why their eyes are terrible, and also, did you know that Wind Blossom thinks of the watch-whers as the second string in case the dragons and their riders die, too?

But we've finally established a purpose for the watch-whers other than "Wind Blossom's failed attempts to recreate the dragons, which she was doomed to fail repeatedly because she was a perpetual and continual disappointment to her mother."

[Part of the reason why we wonder whether this was fought over between the two authors is because it's a radical reimagining of the watch-wher from the failed experiment to a successful design to fill a specific niche in Pernese society. And, as one of the commenters points out in the original post, if Wind Blossom is successful at creating an autonomous, self-organizing, Thread-fighting force in the watch-whers, then Kitti Ping's decision to design the bond between dragons and their riders as requiring the suicide of the one if the other dies is intentional. And, in the words of that commenter, evil, because of the way that it deliberately destroys lives. Which would also make Kitti Ping's ideas about gender that she encoded into the dragons equally evil (as well as pretty stupid.)]

I'm with Purman, who says in the middle of this new understanding, "Why keep this a secret?" Why, indeed? Wind Blossom's response is "So that people can sleep at night without the fear of Threadfall while they sleep." Which doesn't make sense. I think more people would sleep better knowing that watch-whers were the night patrol during night Threadfalls. And also, not knowing this has basically permitted the wholesale persecution of watch-whers on the planet, instead of understanding their vital role of keeping the planet safe in conditions where dragons and their riders aren't as effective. I realize that all of the Threadfall mentioned in the books up to this point happens in the daytime, but if it follows a regular pattern, at some point a Hold has to be sieged by Thread during the night. Which would be a problem for the dragons and the riders, but nobody wakes up to find their fields devastated. Now we know why: the watch-whers have presumably been protecting them during the night. But if Aleesa is right and watch-whers have been either turned away or hunted just about everywhere that doesn't have another use for them, there aren't enough watch-whers on the planet to eat a full Threadfall. (Unless they breed wild in several parts of the planet and the humans haven't discovered this.)

Which is to say, all in all, this doesn't make any sense at all. The night patrol purpose of the watch-whers should be common knowledge, and yes, while they're ugly, they should be seen as a valuable corps of Thread-fighters. Trying to stitch this knowledge in with the books that we've already experienced, near and far, is an exercise in the sort of explanations that comic book continuity is famous for. Expect headaches.

[The commenters to the original pull up a quote from M'hall about how his mother believes that secrets aren't supposed to be hoarded, but shared, and that the lack of sharing of knowledge will lead to a disaster. M'hall's mother is completely correct, as the system of guilds and their secrets that develops, as well as the dragonriders keeping their own secrets, means that knowledge is rarely shared, much less classified and organized in any findable way by Healer or Harper or Holder when it needs to be found in a hurry, like when there's a plague on. It's a complete clusterfuck, and yet, this is apparently the way that almost everybody else wants it to be.]

Further patching things on to the world, Purman is able to infer from all of this, and his own experience in having to breed a better grub because a fungus started destroying his grape vines, that Wind Blossom and M'hall suspect that disease vectors that affect fire-lizards could affect watch-whers and dragons, and that since there's been ample time for mutation, the genetic immunity given to dragons and watch-whers might not be enough against mutated strains. There's our reason for Talith's cough, and Wind Blossom, M'hall, and Purman's worries close out Chapter Two.

That's a lot of new territory for exploration opened up in a single chapter. I like the way that it redeems Wind Blossom from being unfavorably compared to her mother, because their purposes were different, but something like "watch-whers eat Thread at night" is the sort of thing that should be disseminated far and wide so that, like the grubs, people can always be on the lookout for them and to try and help establish breeding lines and spaces for them. With this new knowledge, Kindan shouldn't have had any trouble at all finding a new watch-wher to come to the mines, instead of the convoluted plot with Aleesa, Zist, and the others. There doesn't seem to be any real justification beyond the need to set up the current plot as to why vital information is being kept secret, and other pieces of information weren't being translated to the desired technology level long before Thread accelerated the loss of that technology.

This is a good chapter for worldbuilding, but it really needed to be in with the previous set of books set at the colony era, and subsequent books needed to take this into account. That way we don't have to fit it in to the pattern and stare at how poorly it grafts with everything else we've seen so far.

Next week, back to the "present," where there will be more cursing. [The genetics explanation is going to be very weird. Very, very weird.]

Chapter Text

Last time, we spent a chapter proving that the watch-whers are not, in fact, a useless failure of an experiment, but a vital part of the Thread-fighting apparatus, specifically bred to eat Thread at night when the flashy dragons aren't able to see.

We also learned that Kitti Ping, at least to Wind Blossom's perspective, was an abusive mother, and that Wild Blossom is passing this problem on to her own daughter.

Also, it was very strongly hinted that the dragons of the current Pass are about to fall victim to something that has evolved to attack dragons and make them sick.

Dragonsblood, Chapter 3: Content Notes: Plotting Rape, Suicide

(AL 507, Half-Circle Sea Hold)

Wide ship, tall ship,
Tossed on a raging sea.
Fair ship, brave ship,
Bring my love back to me.

This feels like a song, for once! Not as sophisticated as some sea shanties I've heard, but something I can imagine actually being sung outside of the Harper Hall, by someone other than a child.

The chapter begins with Lorana scrambling up the mast and sketching the sunrise. When someone calls up to ask about the weather, she calls it back and everyone groans. Lorana doesn't understand, so we get a charming piece of old Terran lore that has somehow survived all these generations.

Baror shook his head. "The old saying goes 'Red sky at night, sailor's delight; Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.' There'll be a blow for sure, but I already knew that."
Lorana had heard from others day Baror had broken his arm years back and was convinced he could tell when the weather was going to change by the way it ached.

And also, a sailor with a weather arm, in case you needed more stereotype in your diet.

[The commenters to the original point out that the adage that's being used here is only generally useful at a specific set of latitudes on Terra, where the prevailing winds move in the correct direction. While it's possible that Pern's currents in his section match those of the latitudes of Terra, I don't think the author has done enough worldbuilding to establish that, and is instead, much like his mother, throwing things in that are relevant to his cultural experience as universals, rather than recognizing them for what they are. Which is basically true about all of the Pern books, mind, but this, and the superstition about women being bad luck (despite the fact that the Pernese aren't supposed to be superstitious or religious) is one of those situations where the assumptions being made really stand out for what they imply about the world.]

I talked about the improbability of "women are bad luck for a ship" last time, but I realize that we've never really gotten a good look at just how "Parallel Earth" the planet is supposed to be. The assumption we're supposed to make is essentially "Like Earth, Except Where Noted." There's a different calendar system, though, which would suggest the Gregorian calendar and divisions of time didn't translate exactly. So there's a different revolution period. Pern has two natural satellites, instead of one, so that would mean tidal forces and the rotation period are likely different. And while Rukbat is described as a G-type star, The Other Wiki tells us "G-type star" is an imprecise categorization that contains anything from red-hot to white-hot stars and our conception of Sol's color is strongly influenced by the way Terra's atmosphere scatters light depending on the relative position of Sol in the sky.

And there's Thread, which has to have an influence on the weather patterns, and life forms that have adapted to the regular intrusion of Thread, which might do the same. And also, there are humans (and possibly humaniform ETs?) and their climate-influencing technologies like coal forges and furnaces, cows, horses, mines, and the like, that have been going for at least 500 rotation cycles at this point in the narrative.

Which is to say, Pern is nothing like Terra at all, and we don't my have a reason to believe that stereotypes like a weather arm or advice like "Red sky at morning" are actually useful on Pern without the narrative providing justification. I would think the Pernese would be more frightened of any red sky situation, given that the presence of the Red Star in the sky means Threadfall is on the way.

Which is, admittedly, me being grumbly about a lack of thought with regard to the world that's been constructed. The MST3K Mantra or Bellisario's Maxim could certainly be applied here, but it would be nice to know how all this ancient wisdom supposedly survived in a world that hasn't been described as close enough. And it's always Terran wisdom, not Cetian or Eridani.

[On further reflection, that really does irk me a lot more now than it did before. Despite Wind Blossom having some amount of Asian ancestry, she's been homogenized culturally into being white, basically, and so has her daughter and so has everyone else. That decision that got made to abandon who they were and become "Pernese" seems to have gone all the way within a couple of generations, rather than having some people keeping their cultural heritage and practices and passing them down to their descendants, even if for no other reason than they wanted to maintain at least some ties to the places they came from. There's a lot of Terran history about trying to forcibly integrate differing peoples into the culture of the majority, and none of it is good. And, as we saw with our own pandemic and the sharper focus that racial issues had for a bit, a population that's indifferent to the incredible cultural losses that happen when minoritized people die and haven't passed their traditions on is not a population that you want to emulate. The contemporary time for the author would have plenty of examples of the need to keep that cultural knowledge and tradition alive, but he also chose to follow his mother in the homogenization of the culture, rather than using this as an opportunity to showcase some of the different perspectives that would contribute to this early society.]

Anyway, the narrative continues with Colfet breaking his arm and Lorana helping to get him below to set it. Well, Lorana helps, but it's because Colfet refuses the sensible assistance the captain is ready to give Lorana.

Tanner looked alarmed. Catching sight of a seaman coming up on deck, he called, "Gesten, Colfert's broken his arm. Help him down below so that Lorana can go ahead and get set up."
"No, it's all right!" Colfet called back, putting his weight on Lorana, who nearly buckled in surprise. "Lorana's a stout lass, we'll manage. Besides, the weather's picking up—you'll be needing all hands to trim sail."
Getting the large seaman down below to get cabin was much harder than she'd figured, but Lorana felt that she'd proved herself "one of the boys" by doing so.

A couple paragraphs later, Lorana blushes under the intensity of Colfet's gaze, and the whole sequence, bar the first time Lorana tries to set the bone and misses the mark, Colfet seems to be trying to flirt by looking at her drawings (which are in high demand, and also, Lorana finds Captain Tanner nice to look at). After blithely assuming she could support his weight so he could have alone time with her. And her going along with it because she thinks it will help her standing with the boys. (Which is to say, Colfet has really tanked his possibilities, in my opinion, but my opinion doesn't count.) It's a nice example of workplace sexism and how sometimes women can't say no to the situation they've been maneuvered into.

Thankfully, there's no sexual assault, and Colfet is genuinely glad to have his broken bone set and bound properly. He also has some advice for Lorana: hop off after this stop, because Baror hates women and dragonriders in equal measure, so Lorana will be persona non grata.

"Baror doesn't like women," Colfet interrupted. "You know that." He paused and leaned in closer to her. "He doesn't like dragonmen much, either. And for the same reason."
Lorana looked intrigued.
"His first wife ran off with a dragonman," Colfet told her. "I can't say as I'd blame her—he was never much to look at, and his idea of romance would bore a fish."
Lorana made to comment, but Colfet held up his good hand to forestall her.
"I suppose he might have changed his mind," Colfet went on, "if only his second wife hadn't died in the Plague. He blamed the dragonriders for not helping soon enough."
"Oh!"
Colfet nodded. "He found a third wife, but she hounds him unmercifully. I think that's why he was so happy to go on this voyage. Still, he's no reason to think kindly of women or dragonmen."

I can't tell of this is being played for empathy or comedy or just as a straight justification for misogyny. It could be any of them, and the context around isn't helping any. If this is supposed to be "poor Baror, look at the suffering he's gone through. The women in his life were unfaithful, dead, and a harridan, respectively" then the crack about how his idea of romance would bore a fish is out of place, because it's a justification of why his wife would run off with the more sexually adventurous dragonrider. If it's supposed to be "laugh at Baror, because the best he can hang on to is a shrew," then the account of his second wife dying is out of place, because that evokes empathy.

This would read way better as "why Baror hates dragonriders and those associated with them" by keeping the first two wives and cutting off the third. That would even work for "hates women and dragonriders" with just those two, but then it's "and now he's married to a shrew, so he hates women because of her" and it's out of place. At least one of these accounts is out of place for trying to find a throughline of making Baror a consistent character. He doesn't have to be consistent, sure, but it helps.

And if he were consistent, it would be easier to find a thing to hang on to as "Pern is still a terrible place, even to men." Because there's a lot bad stereotype at work in Baror's character and justifications. He's ugly and unimaginative, so his wife ran off! He hates being cuckolded by dragonriders! And I want to know whether there were sex rays involved, and whether she had a choice to say no to the dragonrider that propositions her, assuming he did. And if she did, I want to know why she married him and whether being a lover of a dragonrider is a better station than a fishwife, so it was a mercenary decision as much of anything…yeah.

Wife number two dying and the dragonriders taking the blame makes sense, so there's another reasons to hate dragonriders: Baror had his pedestal shattered again. Presumably, he loved her.

And what happened with wife number three? Like, there's the very real possibility that he's been taken advantage and is being abused, even if not physically, and he's decided that it's fine because he doesn't deserve anything better, since better keeps getting stolen from him. And he's stuck in a toxically masculine society that thinks it weak that he's not the one doing the abusing and controlling, or thinks the solution is simply breaking the relationship and turning her out on her ear. (It's hard if you love them, because love always believes you can work it out. And abusers are very good at making it seem like you even thinking about breaking it off is a terrible offense that means you don't love them any more and you're going to make them suffer because you're a cruel and heartless person.)

Baror could be a complex character if you spend as much time thinking about things as I did. If not, it's another woman-hating grunt with stereotypical reasons to do so. I suspect the latter was meant more than the former.

[Villains are usually an excellent opportunity for an author or creator to examine the society that the heroes are working to uphold or improve. Often times, the best villains are correct in their criticism of the society, but it is the methods they use to try and fix those criticisms, or their decision about who is an acceptable target, or their refusal to participate by societal rules because of how they were first abandoned by that society that makes them a villain. Or, sometimes, an anti-hero, if they're supposed to ultimately be on the morally correct side. Baror could give us insight into how things work at this point in time of Pern. Colfet says he doesn't blame the wife because Baror's ugly and unimaginative, but he could also have said something like "being caught out in a mating flight, that's one thing, but choosing soberly to abandon your husband's another. " Or "Baror's not much to look at, but dragonriders don't ask, they take." And with the "dragonriders didn't act fast enough to save us," part, that idea of "dragonriders are selfish" could be reinforced, especially if they have any sort of rumors about how all the Weyrs never had any issues with supplies or starvation during the plague and/or about how D'gan, the asshole, has been bragging to anyone in earshot that he's got what he needs for Threadfall and he's not sharing with anyone else. Taking a little time to humanize Baror might make him more menacing as we see him decide, later on in the chapter, that he's done with playing by societal rules, and so now he's going to be like the dragonriders and take what he wants.]

The ship docks at Half-Circle after several ships try to chase and overtake them for fun and fail. They pay mooring and watching fees (which seem to be highway robbery, based on Colfet's reaction, but Tanner pays) and Lorana takes Colfet to the Hold Healer. The Healer looks over her work and says he'll recommend Lorana to the Healer Hall if she wants to go, doubly so when Colfet talks up her drawing skills. The sailors and Lorana get food. [For people who are keeping track, that's both Weyrwoman and possible Healer-naturalist that Lorana could be. With that kind of potential, she could go anywhere.]

The perspective shifts to J'trel arriving at Half-Circle and having questions about the design of the place and whether that might make it vulnerable to Thread. He nearly gets run over at the Hold entrance by people hauling stones, insulted for being old, then blamed for the insulter, Genin, tipping their wheelbarrow when Talith gives the entire group an angry bugle for the slight.

Everyone around Genin tells him that it's a terrible idea to provoke a dragonrider, but Genin is too provoked to stand down, and J'trel is determined to teach Genin a lesson.

It is a question of honor, J'trel said. Thread comes soon. Holders must respect dragonriders. Talith accepted the answer reluctantly, taking station and circling watchfully high above the crowd.

The fight itself is short and brutal. Since Genin knows he's Shunned, no matter what the outcome is, he tries to grab J'trel to break his spine. J'trel gouges his eyes, kicks him in the groin, then in the chest, and that's it. J'trel finds out where Lorana is while he's still in a snit (and still very hurt from the fight) and goes over to say hello.

We do a quick shift to Baror, still grumbling about how it's "not right" for a woman to be aboard a ship, which becomes a plot to…

"She's a bit plain for my tastes," Baror grumbled.
"She'd keep you warm at night," Minet said suggestively. "Especially if you were the captain. She'd have no choice then."
"My missus would skin me," Baror grumbled. Minet knew that all too well. He was convinced that getting away from his wife was half the reason that Baror had agreed to this voyage.
"Your missus would skin you only if she found out," Minet said, his eyes glinting. "As you said, it's bad luck to have a woman aboard a ship. And accidents can happen."

…rape Lorana while she's out to sea with them by taking the captaincy from Tannner, and then also dealing with J'trel, by causing "accidents" to anyone who would get in the way, then forcing Lorana with the captain's authority.

Because we can't let characters stew in complexity, or be ambiguous, or get hurt by their society and want to hurt others, or anything like that. [Or need more convincing than not very convincing arguments that would work better on someone who has already decided to do villainy.]

I do like the "petty" stakes for this, in the sense of "not trying to overthrow the social order," not in the sense of "the rape of a woman is not important". And yet, Baror could just be a greedy cuss, rather than having this plan spark off because dudes want to revenge-rape a woman. Not everything has to revolve around sexual assault.

J'trel sees Lorana, delivers some beaded harness gifts that proclaim Lorana to be an Animal Healer-in-training, to her "bzuh?" She learns from Grenn that J'trel was in a fight, and also that J'trel may have killed the man he fought. Before we can explore whether this is actually the case, Baror appears and plies J'trel with wine and loud praise about his fighting ability, and quiet "commiseration" about Genin's death until J'trel is too drunk to do much as Baror convinces Lorana to come with him because the ship is about to sail. Before she heads out, Lorana hears Talith cough and tells J'trel that it sounds worse than before. Baror leads Lorana so that she doesn't see the crowd gathering around Tanner, who has been knocked at least unconscious by Baror.

Baror wondered if he had killed Tanner with the blow, but he didn't really care.

Really? Baror has gone from husband at least nominally worried about consequences from his missus to a killer that doesn't give a damn? That easily? [It would be perfectly fine if this were revealing to us the depths of how far outside the social contract Baror has decided to go already, rather than this jump shift.]

I don't think the new author is any better at building believably evil characters than the old one was. [He's not, but we at least get the opportunity to have an egotistical asshole dragonrider as a main antagonist for many of these books.]

The end of the chapter is J'trel waking up from passing out from the drink, Talith's breathing sounding strained, and both rider and dragon apparently agreeing that they are old, tired, and done with life, having discharged their duties to notify next of kin. J'trel tells Talith to give Lorana his love, assuming she will be able to carry on without them, and then the two take a one way trip to hyperspace together as the last action of the chapter.

I am entirely okay with assisted death decisions, but I usually like them to have been thought out and decided on with more than just a "we're old, and it's time, isn't it?" because part of the reason for dragons and their riders bonding so tightly, as I understand it, is so that neither of them will ever have thoughts of disappearing like that while they're bonded to each other. Even if we had a bit more about how Talith and J'trel have been thinking about what they're going to do after they get done, and coming up blank, and maybe having had a discussion between themselves about whether the time was right, that would help this decision feel less like an author needed to get rid of a character and couldn't figure out a good way of doing so.

And now, I sort of want to see how a rider-dragon partnership happens when the bond of the dragon isn't enough to overcome depression or suicidal thoughts from happening, but it is enough to make those things less intense or less likely to be acted on, or otherwise sort of like being on meds that work for you.

[As we learn more about the illness that will plague the dragons, we'll find that it messes with their dimensionality perceptions and screws with the images that they receive so that they're much more likely to take trips to the wrong places, or to take a trip that's just to between, without a clear end destination in mind. So it's entirely possible that the sickness was affecting Talith, and Talith might be affecting J'trel about being old, tired, sick, and not really wanting to continue on. Because J'trel had just said a chapter ago that finding Lorana might have given him a purpose in life. So, really sick dragons might be influencing their riders. Or, as we'll find, sick dragons start taking off on one-way trips to hyperspace themselves, despite what their riders want. Like, in the time of the still-ongoing pandemic and what kind of havoc gets wreaked on people from COVID and from flu, for dragons that have never been sick in their lives, being really sick might make them feel like they're going to die, and so they go do it. Or it could be a sickness that messes with their brain chemistry and makes the dragons want to die. If so, it's a terrible pathogen, but we have plenty of Terran pathogens that are equally as stupid about trying to kill off their hosts after they've infected them.]

Chapter Text

Last time, everyone arrived to the newly-established Half-Circle Sea Hold by ship and dragon. And then proceeded to get in a fight, get drunk, and then decide the time was right to end his life (J'trel), hatch a plot to steal and rape a woman he did not particularly find attractive (Baror), and otherwise get pulled along by the narrative (Lorana).

Dragonsblood, Chapter 4: Content Notes: Abusive Parenting

(First Pass, AL 56)

It is the duty of an Eridani Adept to preserve their assigned '-ome'

-Excerpt from the Eridani Edicts

[That's a callback to the earlier principles document that suggested that -ome becomes a catch-all for describing things, but it's interesting that Pern very clearly does not follow those edicts, neither in Kitti Ping or Wind Blossom, or, for that matter, Ted Tuibberman and the Tubbermans. Preserving the -ome would be finding some method of working with the environment already present, rather than engineering small creatures into larger ones and setting them to the task of altering the environment by destroying the parasite that comes to say hi every so often. So, maybe the grubs are in alignment with the -ome, but the whers and the dragons aren't, and the attempted felines definitely aren't. Perhaps that's why the colonists got Kitti Ping in the first place, because she routinely violated the Edicts to get results.]

I could just say that Chapter Four is "Wind Blossom continues to sabotage her familial relations for reasons that are not yet adequately explained," and that would do, but there are also other bits in here that likely need more explaining, lest they bite me in the ass later when I have to understand something else.

First, Tieran, Purman's son. Tieran is physically disfigured, most strongly around the nose, and no cosmetic surgery has been applied to this state because Wind Blossom is waiting for his face to fully grow before she will consider doing the surgery, and will only do it then if she feels there's still sufficient technology left to successfully perform the surgery. Wind Blossom is well aware that Tieran has had to endure taunts and pity from everyone around because of this, but she isn't going to do the surgery or teach anyone else how. [She has a point, in that doing a cosmetic surgery on someone who isn't done growing might make things worse instead of better. But she could explain it that way, rather than that she intends not to let the surgery ever happen because the technology won't exist to do it.]

Tieran is currently destroying her lab glassware in a fit of rage because nobody will let him hop a dragon with antibiotics and go back in time to save his father from dying in a rock slide.

"One cannot break time, Tieran," Wind Blossom said softly. "Not even for your father. There is no way."
Wind Blossom had taught Tieran that dragons could not only go instantaneously between places but between times. The paradoxes and rules of time travel applied to the dragons as much as to anything else that existed in the space-time continuum. It was impossible to go back in time in a manner that could alter events that had already occurred.
"You can't alter the past," Wind Blossom said.

Why? It's always taken as incontrovertible fact that you can't change the past any more than you already have, but nobody seems to have a handy example of why not, or who was foolhardy enough to try it, or any reason other than "the paradoxes and the rules!" without ever explaining what they are, even in hints or fragments. (And they still haven't found a way around the Bootstrap Paradox, either.) It's a giant missed opportunity for worldbuilding. [Everyone just assumes that this is so, without any sort of stories about it, without any explanations about the scientific experiments to try it, without anything. Which makes it pretty rich that everyone keeps talking about not breaking time as they do their very beset to bend it as far as it will go. By the time we're done with this sequence of five books, nobody should ever believe that you can't go anywhere you haven't already gone, ontologically, but only that you can't go anywhere you've already been observed acting.

I'm also curious about how Purman could have been saved by antibiotics in a rock slide, since those tend to crush things. Maybe they tried to amputate, but sepsis or gangrene happened and killed Purman? It's never explained, of course, just that Tieran has a grudge against Wind Blossom and resents her for everything that she's done or not done with him. As we'll find out, trying to get these grudges is intentional, if without an explainable justification.]

Tieran continues to berate Wind Blossom for having him learn about genetics, even though the technology for it is failing.

Brutally he pushed away from her and stormed off down the corridor. Over his shoulder, from his left side, he called back, "You can get Emorra to clean that up. After all, you treat her like your slave."
Wind Blossom straightened up slowly. With an eye to the glass on the floor she walked over to the cot and sat upon it. With eyes that would admit no tears, she muttered bitterly, "Such a way you have with children, Wind Blossom."

The scene changes to Emorra seeing Wind Blossom clean up the broken glass.

"What happened? Where's Tieran?" Emorra asked.
"Tieran happened, and I do not know," Wind Blossom answered. She looked up at her tall daughter, careful not to let any pride show in her expression. "His father was dead before he arrived.
[…a significant amount of Wind Blossom antagonizing her daughter about temporal paradoxes and losing the art of bookbinding, leading to this after she tells Emorra to get her another recycling bin…]
Emorra frowned and leaned down to pick up the bucket. After she left, Wind Blossom pursed her lips tightly and held back a heartfelt sigh. Pain, she thought to herself, pain is how we grow. Is this how it was for you, Mother?

That does not seem to be a solid parenting strategy. Or at least one that would result in anything other than all of your children hating you. Because Wind Blossom feels like she can't show pride in her child (or grandchild, possibly). That's not a style of parenting I'm familiar with, so maybe I lack the cultural context to understand what's going on here.

After she's done sending Emorra off, Wind Blossom puts on her yellow tunic and lights some incense to the memory of Purman, musing that "the way of breeding, will work on Pern for now" because the Eridani Way doesn't think about war or technological collapse.

[I think the thing we are supposed to pick up on here is that the yellow tunic is what Wind Blossom wears when she's thinking of Purman, who might have been responsible for the tunic accident, and that she wore it at significant points in her life involving Purman. Like, they got married or something. It's not ever really formally acknowledged whose child Emorra is other than Wind Blossom's. And Tieran is Purman's child, absolutely, but it's not mentioned with whom, so it's entirely possible that Tieran is Purman and Wind Blossom's child, and Emorra is Purman and Wind Blossom's child, but that would create a situation of consanguinity later on in the story, so that's not the case. Maybe the yellow is supposed to have been an accident where Kitti Ping was involved and the other yellow time she wore it was when Kitti Ping died, and this time is also in memory of someone, but in a less terrible context than her mother. It's not really explained as much as I had hoped.]

It will be thousands of years before our descendants will once more be able to bend genes to their will, she mused. It would be a mistake to force our children to cling to our ways. They need to move on, to learn their own ways.

And apparently, the way of going about this is alienating your children so the knowledge gets good and lost.

It had been difficult to turn Emorra against her. So difficult that she had only half-succeeded: Her daughter had remained at the College and even become its dean. It had taken less effort to drive Tieran away from her, to quench his inbred curiosity about genetics.
In both situations, she had felt all the pain of a mother turning away her child. But Wind Blossom knew that if she taught them the joy she found in genetics, they would be enraptured--and stuck with knowledge they couldn't use. Committed, as the Eridani had always intended, to the Eridani Way, the way of countless generations husbanding species and planets, they would become incapable of developing solutions on their own.

Despite advanced genetics knowledge being something extremely useful to breeders, so they can figure out the traits they want and how to get them to express. Direct manipulation of genes and splicing may be getting beyond them, but the principles themselves are still sound and important to have.

And there needs to be a lot more explanation of why this Eridani Way would suck out the ability of humans to problem solve. Humans are remarkably inventive at solutions as a whole, even if each individual human might not have the whole solution in their head at any time. There's a lot of needless suffering going on without any real explanation for this. Instead, we get

Wind Blossom wondered again if Ted Tubberman had thought the same thing, and if he had turned his son against him just as Kitti Ping had turned her daughter against her—and as Wind Blossom herself had tried to alienate Emorra.

So now it's a generations-long effort to get Pern to hate genetics so much they never want to use it again? Through terrible parenting technique meant to cause harm and hate?

I really don't understand any of this. Especially since they're still going to be engaged in cultivation and husbandry! I can hope that maybe some other flashback segment will actually give us a reason that doesn't fall apart at a stern glance, but I'm not giving that hope a whole lot of anything.

The rest of the chapter is Tieran overhearing a conversation between Emorra and Sandell, a musician and likely Emorra's lover, and the drum report of his father's death. On we go.

[The commenters on the original rightly point out that the degradation of technology and the losing of knowledge was deliberate and planned by the colonists, so there shouldn't be quite as much hostility here about trying to discourage your children from learning and retaining information that will still be useful to them in their lower-technology world. They won't be able to use the advanced machines to do it, but lots of techniques of genetic manipulation, like grafting and selective breeding, are still entirely doable without needing to manipulate individual codons. It feels like the hostility involved here is there for deliberate reasons, like Todd making some commentary about how Anne treated him (or about how much she's trying to drive him away from writing this series by being so protective of her baby.)]

Chapter Text

Last time, we looked at a short chapter that detailed the ways that Wind Blossom sought to alienate her offspring from pursuing her disciplines, by making them hate her so much that they would never take up her knowledge or profession. Even though her knowledge of genes and gene splicing will still be incredibly invaluable to the people who are trying to breed their livestock and their crops so that Pern can eat and do work.

I still don't understand how this plan is supposed to work, and it's made only worse by the idea that Kitti Ping apparently attempted the same thing on her child. Or Kitti Ping was just stern and never provided praise of any sort for her child all throughout her life.

Dragonsblood, Chapters 5 and 6: Content Notes: Repopulation Through Pregnancy Trope, ablism,

Fierce winds blow.
Seas roil.
Calm, wind. Settle, sea.
Let my loved return to me.

(Wind Rider, Second Interval, AL 507)

Chapter 5 is, essentially, "Get Lorana off the boat in the middle of the storm that Borar can't sail the ship through because he's staggeringly incompetent." With help from Colfet to do so. J'trel and Talith's decision to die hits Lorana here, but the more immediate concern of getting Lorana off the ship shelves that idea. What Lorana has to do is climb down a rope from the big shop to the small ship that Colfet asked be towed behind in case someone fell overboard. She manages it, and so does Colfet after some thinking about how to do it with a broken arm.

There's an intermediate scene whose purpose is to tell us there will be a dragonrider, J'lantir, looking for Lorana to tell her the bad news about J'trel, and to express yet more interest in her bestiary project.

Unfortunately, the small launch doesn't do well in the big storm and there's a lot of scrambling to try and prevent the boat from sinking. Eventually, Lorana gets thrown overboard by a wave and tells her two fire lizards to go and save themselves, sufficiently firmly to override their objections, because Lorana is convinced she's going to die out on the sea, and Colfet too, and she wants her fire lizards to be safe with someone else. Before we spin away from her, Lorana feels happy that someone is going to take care of her lizards, based on a feeling she gets from them at the end of their journey. That's Chapter 5.

Terrome: (i) the biological portion of the ecosystem of Terra, the third planet of solar system Sol; (ii) the information and materials required to produce a functioning ecosystem based on the Terran ecosystem. (See terraforming.)

-Glossary of terms, Ecosystems: From -ome to Planet, 24th Edition

(Fort Hold, First Pass, Year 50, AL 58)

I'm still not linguistically on board with this idea of -ome becoming a suffix, but [I will grudgingly admit] Terrome does make sense to use, and also suggests the writer of the book is a Terran, or has at least decided to adopt Terran naming conventions. Because otherwise it would probably be "star system [name]." [One of the commenters on the original suggests that, for the most part, the naming convention that got used would be the one that the people who live on the planet would use. Which makes sense, and again, here we are with a Terran-centric perspective, instead of letting the rest of the worlds that are part of the FSP get a little bit of screen time here and there to remind us that, at least in theory, the world of Pern would have people of many and multiple origins.]

Anyway, it's Wind Blossom's time, and it's been two years or so since Tieran stormed out of her lab over his father's death and apparently took up residence in the Drum Tower. It's a Threadfall day, and that means everyone in their preparations has let Wind Blossom sleep in. It's confirmed again that HNO3 is the content of the flamethrower tanks, and, apparently, in the infirmary, there's a betting pool about injuries for today.

"The current pool is guessing that there'll be two severe, one minor, and three stupidities this Fall," he [Janir] said, his eyebrows quirking with amusement. Long ago Wind Blossom had started a guessing game with the students to help prepare them for those wounded in Threadfall. Long ago it had ceased to be amusing to Wind Blossom. But it was still educational, so she pretended to enjoy it.
"Two minor, two stupidities," Wind Blossom guessed.

Even if Wind Blossom didn't like it any more, it probably had taken on a life of its own. But also, I don't know why she feels the need to pretend to enjoy it, either. [It is, after all, speculation on how many people are going to get mauled by Thread or suffer injury because of Threadfall, with special care taken toward those who injure themselves out of foolishness (or possibly Darwin Award kinds of acts.) If you actually stop and think about it, it's pretty morbid, but these are the medics, so they probably would make more morbid jokes than most about this.]

Wind Blossom gives her orders, and Janir reminds her that she agreed the last time to let him run the infirmary during Threadfall. In the conference that follows, Wind Blossom expresses her worry that she's got senile dementia. Janir tells her this is the second conversation they've had about this concern, and Wind Blossom is terrified at the implications that she's losing her mind and isn't remembering it. Not that she shows any of this, and the further conversations are about finding a corpse to see if they can find the causes, and whether it would be more prudent to focus on infant and child mortality are also flagged up as repeats. Janir tries to reassure her that the memory loss seems limited to short-term memory, but that's not a comfort, as Wind Blossom is trying to learn reconstructive surgery for Tieran. [Which might suggest that the short-term memory losses are longer-term than Janir thinks, because the last time reconstructive surgery was on the table for Tieran, Wind Blossom refused and said she would evaluate again if there was sufficient technology available. She's right to be worried that she might forget the technique during the operation, or worse, she might be forgetting that something she would depend on for a successful surgery has already run out.]

Speaking of Tieran, the narrative shifts over to him as he finishes rumbling out news. We learn that he's gotten strong in the intervening time, and also that he's responsible for developing the drum code the Harpers will use over time. Emorra wants him to teach a class of younglings, in contrast to the older students he has had until now (and their ability to take his drumming skill and innovate new works in old musical styles (like jazz and old-Earth Celtic)). Tieran captures the attention of the younglings by using the code to introduce himself and then teaches them beats until they can tap out "It's lunchtime!" at the appropriate point.

Emorra catches up to him as he's ordering lunch for the Drum Tower (as he promised when he headed down to teach), is amused at the barter for labor and meringues that happens as the cost of lunch, and then accompanies him back to the tower, where there's some talk about why certain species were selected for use on Pern and not others. Terran plants, like sage, were apparently not well-suited to Pern (boron uptake is what's mentioned, which I suspect means "too much boron in the soil, such that when the plants are trying to get nutrients, they're poisoning themselves instead") or were discarded by mutual consent (okra, which makes me wonder if there were any black folk at all on the colony ship. [All signs point to yes, there were, but they were probably forced on like the nomads, and so they probably didn't have much say in what plants came and what plants didn't. Avril Bitra, I think, was the closest anyone got to actually black skin, and well, she was portrayed as all villain, all the time. So if there were black people on board, they probably also met much of the same fate as the nomads and disappeared from the narrative very swiftly,]) They also lament that neither Terra nor Pern has a complete inventory of the ecosystem.

Tieran and Emorra then take a shift in the tower, after they make sure that Emorra knows enough drum code to be in the tower.

"Sure," Tieran said. "They're a fairly basic set of sequences, many of them modeled on genetic sequences."
"Genetic sequences?" Jendel repeated. "You never told me that."

Well, that completely screws the understanding I've had of drum code up to this point. Assuming that we're talking about human genetics (which we may not be), that gives us four basic bits to work out that can be combined, each of which has to be audibly distinct so that it can be heard and repeated, even if transmitted at high speed, which week remain distinct regardless of the size or tone of the drum transmitting it, and also can eventually be translated by Fandarel's distance-writer into distinct patterns of their own. Morse code, at two bits, could use "hit" and "roll" to distinguish between "dit" (.) and "dah" (–) be go at relatively good speeds, so long as an echo didn't muddy the spaces between them. Four distinctive percussive actions? That's not impossible, but I can't imagine it would be easy to teach or learn, especially with the likelihood of echo distorting the message. Maybe someone with better percussive knowledge than I can tell me, because while The Other Wiki tells me there are four basic drum strokes, there's no way those would be distinct enough to be understood, and as of right now, 40 rudiments seems to be a standard measure of the basics of technique for snare drums. I'm annoyed at this back in time idea causing more complications than simplifying them.

Later on, Tieran will think about a drummer who has "problems with some of the more complex rolls," which makes me wonder what those building blocks are even more, and also despair about how any messages at all manage to get across, because I can't imagine complex drum rolls having enough fidelity when transmitted over long distance to be able to tell the difference between the various rudiments. It also makes me wonder about grammar and vocabulary for all of those things, rather than being able to settle in comfortably with an alphabetic representation and the drummers spelling out the messages. This becomes even more egregious when Tieran and companion talk about the impracticality of laying telegraph lines. So they know about Morse code, but I'm supposed to believe this drum code is better than that for audible communication?

[Time has not helped any of this make any more sense, because we're still in the same problem where the acoustics of the drums have to be precise enough that their patterns come across to someone else who is listening to them, without catching echoes or other interference, and those patterns have to be distinct enough from each other to be recognizable by someone with sufficient understanding. And, as we'll find out, Pernese genetics doesn't run on the same ACGT that human genetics does, so it's not just four patterns to encode for, potentially, but more.

The real reason this is here is so that Kindan can be a half-prodigy about the matter, since he's Harper drum trained, which will make it easier for him to understand which genetic sequences are more likely to work, because he'll be able to tap it out in drum code and see if it sounds right. Musically and rhythmically speaking, unless every drum tower is constructed to be anechoic and to focus the sounds rolling in to something easily audible, there's no way this drum code succeeds at all. They really should be using Morse or something with the same amount of fidelity for their long-distance audio links.]

In any case, Emorra and Tieran chat about how much of a survey actually got done (where Emorra realizes Wind Blossom not actually telling her was yet another ploy, this time to get Emorra to find the information herself), and that bacteria and fire lizards got a good genome map before Thread interfered, and a significant amount of the equipment that could help with genome work was lost from Wind Blossom's care in the crossing.

Both Tieran and Emorra console each other about not being able to stay under Wind Blossom, though Tieran stuck it out two more years than Emorra did.

"I quit cause I wasn't good enough, Tieran. I knew that I couldn't be the sort of person my mother expected me to be, the sort of person my family traditions demanded I be."

Which has a different light in the view that Wind Blossom has been deliberately trying to drive everyone away from her and her studies. It's still terrible and scarring and Wind Blossom is still well on my shit list for doing it, her regrets about it be fragged, but you want to tell Emorra and Tieran that they would never be able to succeed, by design.

The two also talk about what the survival plan for Pern is: repopulate everywhere after Thread finishes, figure out what's toxic and what isn't and what can be used to help with illnesses, and if the worst happens, hope that somewhere is so isolated they survive an apocalypse and then try to repopulate the whole planet themselves. It's not a great plan, but it's definitely the one that humans have been running on since the beginning.

Kassa, who is slated to be the next Dean of the College, appears walking toward the tower, and Emorra suggests that Tieran might have a shot with her. She's seeing someone, Tieran reports, and points out that he's not going to get anybody with "the scar from the top of his right forehead to his left cheek."

Kassa relieves Emorra, and then talks to Tieran about wanting to get married and have her kids before she becomes a spinster. Tieran tries to get away from that subject, but Kassa is of a singular mind, and insists that everyone, even Emorra, will need to find their someone and have at least four kids or the next plague will wipe them all out.

Then Kassa tap-dances on one of Tieran's triggers.

"Really, Tieran, you need to get out of this tower more," she said. "However are you going to find a mate if you don't keep up with current affairs?"
His anger inflamed him to respond, "No one," he said, pointing to his face, "is going to want me with this."
"Oh, I don't know," Kassa replied soothingly. "I'll bet there are plenty of girls out there who are willing to lower their sights."

[Have a Cocowhat for that deliberate ableism!]

Way to be an embodiment of shallow insensitivity, person who is theoretically taking over as College Dean. Because it's not "you'll find someone who loves you for who you are," it's "at some point, some lonely or desperate unattached woman will let you impregnate her because she can't get with the person she actually wants to be with." As if Kassa is envisioning some sort of future where women are kept to be breeders for whatever man can capture them and hold on to them long enough to sire offspring. Or, that she believes women will sign up to be impregnated in a world where medical technology is rapidly backsliding to the point where maternal and infant mortality will be even worse than it already is.

I hasten to remind everyone that religion supposedly did not follow to Pern, and yet here we have someone who is going to reinvent something like Quiverfull on the premise that it's every woman's duty to birth at least four children of their own to repopulate.

[Then again, this is already a world where contraception is probably being phased out and abortion is rapidly getting to the point where it's only available to those who can persuade a dragonrider to warp them through hyperspace. And the Pernese, much like the authors, probably see this much more as a fabric of their society, rather than something that has distinctly religious origins and continues to be a rallying cry for the explicitly theocratic and their sycophants, including several of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States in June 2022 and beyond.]

Tieran rightly nopes out of the conversation as soon as he's insulted and neither of them talks at each other until a big distraction comes in. M'hall swoops in, carrying a body and Wind Blossom, who directs the corpse be taken to the cold room. And then M'hall arrives, without any passengers, and his future self tries to get him not to do the course of action he has just embarked upon, even at the risk of creating a paradox, but younger M'hall won't have any of it. Future M'hall disappears into hyperspace after delivering the warning and a scold for his younger self for not heeding him. Younger M'hall asks Tieran to send for Wind Blossom, helps her up on his dragon when she arrives, and then also disappears, enjoining Tieran not to speak of what he just witnessed until he returns. And that ends chapter 6.

Chapter 7 stays in the past, so we're going to resolve this instance of two M'hall talking to each other first. At least we know that proximity isn't that much of a worry for causing paradox or the collapse of two into one.

I'm still just as confused about why Wind Blossom is parenting the way she is, and I've just gotten confused all over again about drum code. Maybe, just maybe, things will clear up some in the next chapter? [I believe the appropriate response from my future self to my past self is "lol."]

Chapter Text

Last time, Lorana escaped the ship, but ended up in the ocean. She sent her fire lizards away from her to some source of safety. And then we spent more time talking about the collapse of knowledge in the First Pass and the A+ Parenting of Wind Blossom.

Dragonsblood, Chapters 7 and 8: Content Notes: Death of a parent, Discussion of suicide, Abusive parenting,

(Still First Pass, Year 50, AL 58)

Genomics: The study of genetic material and the functions of encodes. See DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).

-Glossary of terms, Elementary Biological Systems, 18th Edition

This chapter opens with the information that Sorka Hanrahan, first queen rider of Pern, is dying. Also, Sorka is M'hall's mother, so this is extra traumatic for him.

"Is it her time?" Wind Blossom's voice was calm, flat. She had seen all her friends die, save this one.

This is something worth thinking about. This situation is not unnatural for Terrans who have been gifted (or cursed) with a body that outlives their peers. It's usually portrayed as a situation that requires remedy or companionship or some other situation, with the understanding that a person is at risk for running out of reasons to continue living. If Wind Blossom were a dragonrider, she would probably be on suicide watch, even if nobody really interfered, in the same way they seemed to know about J'trel, but nobody really tried to intervene.

M'hall went back in time to collect Wind Blossom for this conversation, at Sorka's direction. Since it's Sorka's final moments, Wind Blossom is much freer with her praise for M'hall in her presence.

"He has learned wisdom," Wind Blossom said. It was her highest praise, words she had never before uttered to or about anyone. "He is a good man. Like his brothers and sisters. Blood tells. You and Sean have everything to be proud of."

The narrative points out that Sean has been gone to hyperspace for eight years at this point after being hit by an oddly clumped piece of Thread. And that Faranth never rose to mate again after that. Which was not due to her age, but for some secret reason that only Sorka and Wind Blossom know.

[Taking another look at that remark, "Blood tells" seems a lot more essentialist in the same vein as Kitti Ping was about dragon roles and the like. And this is supposed to be genuine, unspoken about anyone praise of M'hall to his mother. It might be to comfort the dying, but the author hasn't established whether Wind Blossom is the type of person to say things that aren't true because someone's dying. (So far, her characterization suggests the opposite of that, really.)]

We don't get that reason, though, instead going through an extended flashback through a deathbed conversation between Wind Blossom and Emily Boll during the Plague Year. Wind Blossom's watch-whers had soured relationships between dragonriders and everyone else, so she went into medicine instead at Benden's request, even as she secretly kept track of all the dragon-related things anyway and Emily knew that the watch-whers were part of the plan. Emily is able to help Wind Blossom a little bit, anyway.

"Wind Blossom," Emily said, gripping her wrist tightly, "you can talk to me. I know all the plans. When we're alone, you can tell me anything. It's not right that you keep everything locked up inside you, and it's not fair. In fact, as Pern's leading psychologist, I say that for your own good." When Wind Blossom said nothing, Emily continued softly, "And I say it as someone who knows how much you've suffered."
For the first time ever, Wind Blossom broke down and collapsed into Emily's arms. For how long she cried, she did not know. Afterward, Emily gave her one last hug and a bright smile, but they said nothing.

Well, that answers one question, at least - psychological practice dies with Emily Boll, and her students apparently didn't get enough of it to make themselves useful people on Pern as toxic mindsets took over.

More questions abound, however, as Wind Blossom tends to Emily, who already knows she won't survive the Fever Year, and is appalled to learn that nearly one-sixth of the colony has already been wiped out by the disease. Dragonrider health and resistance to disease is "Some of that Eridani immune boost" given to them, but not to the general population because there's not enough for everyone and they can't make more. Emily demands that Wind Blossom autopsy her corpse to find the cause of the disease and manufacture a cure for it from there, and volunteers herself to be a test subject for measuring the dosage and strength of fellis mixed with fruit juice, since that's the sort of thing Pern will need in the future to survive.

[That's a casual admission that the genetic manipulation on Pern wasn't limited to the fire-lizards providing the template for both dragons and watch-whers, but that there's been some alteration to the humans as well to make sure the dragonriders don't get as easily sick as the rest of the people. I wonder what kind of unforseen mutations that's introduced when the dragonriders start making children that are part their modified genetic code and part the code of unmodified humans. Like, that's the kind of thing that can make Kellis-Amberlee a reality. At its best, the intermixing between dragonriders and non-dragonriders would pass along the helpful immune-improving mutations to the general population. At its worst, the mixing of the two, well, Kellis-Amberlee.

Secondly, how does creating the watch-whers sour the relationship between dragonriders and the rest of the population? Watch-whers aren't competing for the same niche that dragons and dragonriders are, and they're designed to basically be invisible, out at night, and efficient at what they do. Unless the dragons want to take on night flights and the associated risks that come with them (risks and difficulties that will be spelled out explicitly in later books), watch-whers should be seen as a net good. Unless the soured relationship is the dragonriders getting huffy about the fact that their smaller and more effective cousins are physically ugly and they're worried that the burnished image of the heroic dragonrider will somehow be replaced with the watch-wher and people will stop having the proper respect for dragonriders. Which wouldn't be too far-fetched, given the egos of some dragoniders, but making fun of them is risking that they're going to call bears from the woods to eat you in retaliation.]

In the middle, though, there's more about the Eridani Way and their philosophy on life, and why Wind Blossom thinks they've failed so spectacularly, as Emily tries to get more information out of Wind Blossom (and has a revulsion at the idea of a "pain-induced block" being possible so that Wind Blossom wouldn't be able to tell certain secrets. There isn't such a thing in Wind Blossom, but it's apparently something that could happen.)

"In the Eridani Way we are taught that harmony is everything. A good change is invisible, like the wind. It belongs—it seems like an obvious part of the ecosystem.
"You remember the ancient tailors' saying: Measure twice, cut once?" she continued.
Emily nodded.
"The Eridani Way would say measure a million times, then a million times more and see if you can't possibly find a way to avoid the cut. 'A world is not easily mended', they say.
[…more talk about how this way was drilled into Kitti Ping, Wind Blossom, and her sister, who is back on Tau Ceti, watching that world…]
"No," Wind Blossom corrected. "Every time an ecosystem is altered there must be those that watch it and bring it back into harmony."
"More than one?" Emily asked.
"Of course."
"But here, on Pern—Tubberman?" Emily was surprised. Then she grew thoughtful. "I'd always wondered why it was so easy for him to gain access to such valuable equipment. I realized that the Charter permitted it, but it had seemed odd at the time that no one had been guarding the equipment more zealously."
Wind Blossom agreed, secretly relieved that the conversation had turned in this direction. She discovered, in talking with Governor Boll, that she was not ready to reveal all her secrets.

Which makes it sound like Ted Tubberman was not one of the Eridani Adepts sent to bring the place back into harmony, or that he was, but that Wind Blossom doesn't want to confirm that to Emily. I can't tell if the author is trying to slide some retcons in there and keeps having to couch it in ambiguity, or if these are supposed to be deceptions thrown our way so that we don't find out who the other ecosystem-harmonizers are (or were.)

[No, this is definitely a retcon of earlier books, meant, though, to make it so that Tubberman was authorized to get the resources he did and use them, rather than having broken into the Stores without permission and created abominations with that information and knowledge. But grubs first, which are, again, based on what's in this chapter, far more in line with the Eridani way than what Kitti Ping and Wind Blossom have done in creating the dragons and the watch-whers. (The felines are definitely not in line, and the reading audience of today has more information about how much cats are basically a bad idea for any environment they're introduced into, since they tend to hunt and kill without regard for sustainability and breed up large litters of similar predators to do the same. Cats are an invasive species in so many ecosystems.)]

I'm also thinking that Wind Blossom is holding herself to an impossible standard. The Eridani Way might work in a high-tech galactic society with all those resources and knowledge available, but Pern is deliberately playing pastoral and has an unexpectedly hostile part of living on the planet. But if Kitti Ping tried to hold her daughter to those standards, then I can see why the resentment. And a little bit of why Wind Blossom thinks that discouraging her own children from trying to discover the secrets of the Eridani Way is a good idea. Her methods are still utter shit, though.

Emily dies, and after her death, there's another segment that I desperately would like to read queerly. And link to Wind Blossom and Sorka's knowing of the secret why Faranth never rose to mate again as another queer thing. (Not that it will happen, because queer women don't exist on Pern textually.)

After a moment, she [Wind Blossom] spoke. "When I first saw her, she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. She would light up the room, lift the spirits of everyone who met her. She did not allow even the threat of total annihilation to upset her."
"When the Nathi were bombing Tau Ceti day and night, it was Governor Boll who pulled everyone together. She worked tirelessly, always there, always ready—"
"I had heard," Pierre [Emily's husband] interrupted, "but never like this."
"I was young, still a girl," Wind Blossom continued. "My mother was often away, unavailable. When I did see her, it was for my lessons—and my scoldings." She sighed. "Governor Boll always found the time to say something encouraging to me. Even when cities were being obliterated, she would still find the time to talk to to a young girl."
"I did not know," Pierre said.
"I did not tell anyone," Wind Blossom confessed. "My mother would have been furious, and I was too embarrassed to tell Governor Boll myself."

It's more likely that it's hero-worship and someone making a positive, possibly maternal, impression in the life of a young woman who desperately needed good role models while all sorts of chaos was raining down around her, but it could also equally well read as an unrequited crush on Emily Boll, especially with the idea that Kitti Ping would be furious if she knew. [Here's another one of those places where the setting that already exists could be used to provide some useful queerness or representation without it seeming like it's been shoved into the space for the purposes of representation. Yes, Wind Blossom has a daughter. No, we don't know who the father is. But there's nothing that says that Wind Blossom could have been bisexual, and crushing hard on Governor Boll and Sorka, who is a dragonrider, after all, and while Sorka very clearly loved Sean and had his children, there's nothing past Anne's rules about gender and sexuality, as codified by Kitti Ping, that says Sorka has to be 100% heterosexual. Even if Wind Blossom and Sorka never actually acted on a mutual attraction, it could just be there, as part of this setting, and given that we already have canonically gay and bisexual men in this setting, it's not that hard to extend that outward to lesbians and bisexual women. (We'll get lesbians and pansexual women when we get to Fiona, Xhinna and Taria, even if the execution is pretty cringey on all three of them.)

Emily's donation of her body to science turns out to be the key to breaking the fever: the cause of the illness is a hybrid bacteria formed of Terran and native Pernese elements. The people who were trying to figure out the disease were looking in all the wrong places, based on the correct symptom data they had been working with. Wind Blossom is able to isolate the mutated parts, sequence their genes, and then develop a vaccine that everyone eventually gets. And that stops the epidemic, although the great cost has already been paid.

Then comes a decision that can only be described as "catastrophically unintelligent."

In private conversations first with Pierre and then with the recovered Paul Benden, it had been decided that it was better to ascribe the epidemic to a "mysterious" illness rather than a crossover infection—at least until Wind Blossom could train enough medical personnel to combat any future crossovers. Because the vaccine had been introduced along with a course of treatment, it was easy to convince most people that the treatments were only palliative and that only those with natural immunities had survived, leaving the survivors unconcerned about future recurrences.

[A What-The-Fuck Cocowhat.]

I can understand not wanting to cause mass panic, and perhaps even not wanting to cause people to despair about the superbugs that could develop at any time and wipe the rest of them out, but tell me again why the current path is chartering itself to remove as much of this learned knowledge and technique as it can? Much earlier on in publication (if later chronologically), the knowledge of vaccination through immune transfer survives and is resuscitated. And if the danger really is that mutations will develop that the Pernese can't adapt to fast enough before they all die out completely, then the survey team that said this world was a-okay doesn't get a whole lot of cookies for recommending, say, a long-term experiment was possible as a pilot. (They were also down personnel, on a mission that could have/should have been aborted once they weren't able to perform their functions adequately, so they shouldn't be blamed.)

All of this Emily data is to establish that Emily wrote a note when she died, told Wind Blossom to give it to Sorka, and Sorka and Wind Blossom eventually became good friends, so much that Emorra is a portmanteau of Emily and Sorka's names, and Pierre and Sorka were her godparents.

On the nonreligious world, we might note. Because godparents are supposed to be people who have the same religious faith and promise to bring up the child in that faith and be there for them in relation to that faith. (At least, that's how I learned it.) Yet another example of "it's actually really hard to get rid of religion, people!" that the authors haven't noticed, much less put any effort into excising. [Commenters on the original point out that "godparent" has lost a lot of its religious connotations in 21st century Terra, so this could be unexamined culture coming through, but the Hanrahans were patterned after Irish Catholics, I suspect, and so they wouldn't have been using "godparent" in a secular sense. Which again goes to show how hard it is to get rid of religion entirely, because there's always something there that either has its origins in religious practice or could be bent to the purpose of religious practice.]

As Sorka is dying, Wind Blossom is concerned that the practical knowledge contained in doing, rather than studying, hasn't yet been fully transferred from the oldest generation to the youngest. Sorka's more sanguine about it, saying that lost skills can be rediscovered, but Wind Blossom points out that rediscovery usually comes at a cost, and for certain parts of the collective knowledge, that cost can be incredibly steep. The two then discuss what their fears are about how Pern is going to turn out.

"But it disturbs me because it shows that people are beginning to adopt a caste system."
"And how does that affect the Charter?" Sorka mused.
"Sociologically, I can see why this 'elevation,' this endowing of the old lord and lady titles, makes sense in our young population," Wind Blossom said.
[…Sorka says they've been over this before…]
"The youngsters needed to relinquish a lot of control to the older colonists simply because we older people had learned the skills needed to survive. And survival on Pern is still touch and go—as these young people who do not heed their elders discover with the forefeit of their lives."
[…Sorka wants Wind Blossom to get to the point…]
"So Pern's going to have a bunch of lords and ladies in the form of Weyrleaders, Weyrwomen, and the men and women who run the holds," Sorka supplied when Wind Blossom's silence stretched.
[…Torene nearly interrupts the conversation with her annoyance at M'hall not informing her of Sorka's impending demise…]
"So our society will ossify and stratify at least until the end of this Pass."
"And then?"
Wind Blossom shook her head. "Then population pressures will force an expansion of the Holder population and the creation of new Holds across this continent. The lack of Thread should allow the dragonriders several generations in which to increase their numbers and recover from this first Pass; the dragonriders in the next Pass should be much more able to handle the onslaught. There will be pressure in both the Weyrs and the holds to consolidate what they have and to build conservatively. Any skills not directly needed in expansion or retention will atrophy."
"That's already happening."
"By the next Pass the skills needed to maintain our older, noncritical equipment will have been lost."

It's an interesting commentary from this author that when faced with an existential threat, what humans do is revert to feudal social structures and ruthlessly prune any knowledge not deemed immediately useful to survival. The older people who know how to survive are going to be pushed into leadership roles, yes, because they theoretically have the wisdom and experience to be able to lead. Then again, Admiral Paul Benden and Governor Emily Boll might know a thing or two about how to get large groups of people to do what you want them to do and things like logistics and infrastructure and public health. It is entirely possible that the colonists could have adhered to their libertarian form of governance, held together by Charter and other agreements drafted and enacted as cooperative entities. They could have decided on a democratically-elected oversight and governance body. They could have assented to a temporary dictatorship to be dissolved at the end of the Pass. They could have elected two consuls, each with veto power over the other, and then had their decisions promulgated by an administrative staff that also served as peacekeeping officers.

The possible governance situations on Pern in the face of the disasters didn't have to be "vassalage feudalism in the style of Terran Europe, 400-1700 C.E.", and the explanations given here by Wind Blossom and Sorka don't give any reasons why this form of government, guild specialization, and mounted military is actually better than any other. It is going to be this way because the author has to make sure that it goes this way, or his mother won't approve of what he's done with the place. I have heard many an author say that restrictions sometimes help make the stories come out better and stronger, but it didn't seem to help here.

[I'll admit that I'm laughing a lot more now at the possibility of a libertarian utopia managing to hold itself together long enough to fight back against thread, when such things in the small scale, like cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other blockchain-related material that was supposed to be a libertarian utopia turned out to be breeding grounds for grifters and other unscrupulous people. Turns out that either libretarianism carries a certain amount of amorality toward the society that it tries to build or there are a lot of people who think libertarians are easy marks. Could be both.

It's still not adequately explained how the Charter, with its mostly libertarian, everyone is an autonomous individual who can freely enter into and break alliances with everyone else, ideas ends up calcifying into an authoritarian system of vassalage feudalism for some, serfdom for others, and a clear caste ranking that everyone is supposed to intuitively understand and respect at all times, even in their own minds. I say "adequately explained," rather than how it's possible, because I can see how it happened. From the perspective of 2022, after the attempted insurrection and the sycophantic judiciary and the obstructionist legislatures trying to prevent things, while the sympathetic legislatures attempt to enshrine in law the discrimination they want to exercise, it's not that hard to see how a document like the Charter could have led to such an authoritarian state. And, probably, how after a few generations of reality not living up to the hype in the Charter, there are some people who are in positions of power that want to consolidate that and set themselves up as Dictator-for-Life for their specific area. Which gets other people to do the same, since they're afraid of losing their power to someone else, and then we've landed here. I would have liked to believe that the colonists were smarter than this and would have decided on a different means of governance, but these are the colonists we are talking about, who sometimes appear to have trouble finding their way out of a wet paper bag.]

Plot-wise, Sorka tries, as Emily did, to pry some secrets and knowledge out of Wind Blossom, to get her to admit that some of her failed watch-wher eggs were deliberately that way to make Wind Blossom look less skilled than her mother. And Sorka's not entirely sure she accepts why Benden and Boll were so willing to fling themselves at Pern when their skills were still needed in the civilized world. We learn that the Eridani usually assign three bloodlines to the task of watching over an ecosystem, and that Pern is the only assignment they made without fully knowing the ecosystem backwards and forwards. Sorka and Wind Blossom agree that dragons and watch-whers are a weak point, because there aren't nearly enough of them to ensure the species survives, even if several individuals get wiped out by a new bacterial or viral strain before the herd can adapt well enough to fight it off or become immune to it.

The rest of Chapter 7 is "Sorka sees her family in turn, expresses her will that her body is to be autopsied by Wind Blossom, echoing Emily Boll from many years before, and dies, surrounded by the people that love her and that she loves. After Wind Blossom makes Sorka's body ready for transport, M'hall takes Wind Blossom and Sorka back to Fort, arriving shortly before his departure." The only thing that's worth mentioning in the entire sequence is this:

"What—" M'hall swallowed, and continued more strongly, "What did you do?" He did not need to say "when your mother died."
Wind Blossom reflected on the question. Then she looked up and answered him honestly: "My mother never loved me. When she died it was my obligation to assume her dishonor, and she savored passing it on to me."
Wind Blossom gestured to Sorka. "She showed me some of her love. I felt like the desert in a cloudburst," she continued softly. Her voice hardened. "For my mother, I could never be good enough."

I'm still not fully cognizant of what this dishonor supposedly is (breaking with the Eridani Way?) nor why Wind Blossom describes Kitti Ping as savoring passing it on. And there's still this continued unwillingness to show any sort of love or affection for Wind Blossom. Is this Kitti deliberately trying to get her descendants to abandon the knowledge they have? Or is Kitti at least as shitty a parent and fully blameable for how Wind Blossom parents, as well? I don't know, and of this is supposed to be a big mystery with a reveal, the author is doing a terrible job of keeping my interest.

[With time and rereading the quoted passages, it does seem more and more like we're supposed to see Pern as odd compared to how the Eridani usually do things, and that there's a strong likelihood that Kitti Ping did not follow the precepts she was taught in creating things, and therefore the dishonor she passes to Wind Blossom is that she's part of the family that did these large sweeping changes that weren't necessary and weren't well-thought out, and that now everyone is stuck with. Wind Blossom seems to understand this, and thinks the best way to handle it is to make sure that none of her descendants or students know enough about enough that the dishonor would also be passed to them, even though there will be talk about whose responsibility looking after everything will be when Wind Blossom dies. Kitti Ping is still a shitty parent, even if the narrative is constructing it in such a way that there's possibly an ulterior motive, one that might even make sense to the reader, as to why Kitti Ping was a deliberately shitty parent to Wind Blossom.]

Proteomics: The study of proteins, typically those created by genetic codes, and how they work.

-Glossary of terms, Elementary Biological Systems, 18th Edition

Chapter 8 is also short, and consists of Wind Blossom's return, collapse from exhaustion due to time travel, cerebral biopsy on Sorka, her inability to use Sorka as a training cadaver for Tieran's facial reconstruction (which was one of Sorka's permissions to Wind Blossom), which leads to Emorra comforting Wind Blossom (and realizing that Wind Blossom never comforted her this way, and neither did Kitti Ping comfort Wind Blossom this way,) and Tieran calling an emergency because two fire-lizards have appeared at his drum tower, one dead, one deathly sick. Tieran wants the fire lizard to get general antibiotic to survive, Wind Blossom tells him there may not be enough to bring the fire lizard back, and if they use it, there won't be any for his facial reconstruction surgery. Tieran thinks about it, and then demands the antibiotic for the fire lizard again, saying "It's the only chance he has, Wind Blossom." And that's really it. One time loop resolved, another started, because I'm betting heavily that the two fire-lizards now on scene in the First Pass came from Lorana. [They do.]

Chapter 9 next week. And also, I'm getting really tired of these definitions as our text for the First Pass segments. They're not really being any sort of helpful in any way.

Chapter Text

Last time, we went on a tour of parallels about the deaths of Emily Boll and Sorka Hanrahan, with the heavy implication that the story we have learned about how everything went wrong has actually been part of a bigger plan to help shepherd the colonists into their lower tech lives safely, despite the presence of things they have no immunity to, and will likely suffer greatly from. And the big fear is that the dragons or watch-whers will catch a mutated bug of their own and die out, leaving everyone defenseless against Thread.

Dragonsblood: Chapter 9: Content Notes: Suicidal Ideation, Sexism,

(Back to Bender Weyr, Second Interval, 507 AL)

Jump,
Catch air,
Bound into the sky.
A wink
Between; beyond the eye.

Of course, I would also like less nonsense in the poetry, too.

Chapter 9 starts with Lorana getting found by Tullea, one of the Weyrwomen of Benden, and B'nik, someone who has an interest in her (and/or his dragon has an interest in hers).

"She'll rise to mate soon," B'nik told her calmly not a sevenday before. His eyes were clouded with an unasked question. Tullea knew the question but perversely decided to keep the answer to herself. Oh, she was pretty sure which dragon Minith would mate with, but she felt a sneaky thrill at the notion of keeping B'nik on tenterhooks. Besides, she thought to herself, it's really the dragon's choice.

Which it is, in the sense that the dragon's mind seems to be the dominant one in the gestalt, once the tasks of making sure that she doesn't feast on the flesh of her prey and that she stays outside of hyperspace are handled. But it also seems like the humans sometimes have a choice in the matter, if they like an eligible rider? How much of politics comes into play when jockeying for the Weyrleader position, anyway?

[We never find out, of course, because both both authors are allergic to showcasing the Weyr's internal politics, except obliquely at best, and almost always focused on catty Weyrwoman behavior instead of what goes on with the dudes.]

Also, I'm not on board with the characterization of Tullea being "perverse" about keeping her suspicions from B'nik. There are so few things that a woman is allowed to keep to herself on Pern, so it makes perfect sense to me that she would hold on to a secret for as long as she could.

The real reason for Lorana to be found, though, is to reintroduce Kindan to the narrative, this time as a full-fledged Weyr Harper at Benden. (Publication-wise, though, this book came out before we had fully finished with Kindan at the Harper Hall.) Kindan is given care of Lorana in conjunction with K'tan, the Weyr Healer, and there's a short segment about why Lorana isn't particularly bothered by the information that she was nearly dead from starvation.

"The Plague." She remembered how hard she and her father had fought to save her mother, brother, and sister. And how, after battling for a fortnight, they'd lost first her sister, Sanna, then her brother, Lennel, and finally her mother.
After the fever had taken her mother, she and her father had cried in each other's arms. Neither she nor Sannel had wanted to live. And then she'd caught the plague herself and her nightmares intensified to fill her waking days. The only pleasant thing had been her father peering down at her as he gently wiped her forehead or held her up and spooned down broth. She had wanted to go, to join her mother and siblings, but she couldn't—the thought of leaving him behind was too much. And the fever had passed, and she'd recovered.
She sensed a motion or a change in posture from Kindan and looked at him carefully. His face had many smile lines on it, but it was carefully schooled; she could see the pain he was hiding and she knew that this man had seen people—many people—die.

Or Kindan is specifically remembering Koriana dying, but whatever. It hurts, and Lorana can see through the façade.

Lorana's memories all come back in a rush, and she asks to make sure that Colfet is looked for, and is told there's been no sign of her fire-lizards. In the next scene, at night, Valla (Kindan's fire lizard) starts sneezing, so Lorana rouses Kindan by herself and finds K'tan's dragon and asks him to send K'tan over. During the diagnosis, where everyone agrees they've never seen this before (except Lorana, who mentions Talith's cough), Lorana mentions a herdbeast medicine. Kindan provides the paper and stylus, Lorana writes, K'tan assembles the ingredients and brews it up.

While the brewing happens, Lorana sketches Colfet and shows it to Kindan, who is impressed with the sketch, and the sketches she puts down of the variations in the bugs. He wants to know how good she is with colors, and Lorana points out she couldn't afford colors, so she doesn't know.

Valla's not a fan of the brew, and Kindan leaves to go find him, and Lorana says if she needs to get a hold of anybody, she'll go talk to K'tan's dragon, which gets both of their attention, and K'tan mentions there's going to be a Hatching soon. Lorana mentions that J'trel thought she would be a Weyrwoman because of being able to talk to any dragon, but nothing happens immediately.

It also turns out that Sannel and Lorana have been given more information about germ theory, proper quarantine, and sickness practice than some of the humans seem to have been.

She knew, from her work with her father, how some herdbeasts would get sick and pass the sickness on to others. She knew from bitter experience that people could also pass sickness from one to another.
Her father had taught her that the best cure for sickness was among herdbeasts was isolating the whole herd if one became ill.
"Even the healthy ones?" young Lorana had asked in amazement.
Her father had nodded. "They might be healthy today and sick tomorrow. That's why the quarantine. We keep the sick from the healthy."
"And if they don't get sick?"
"Well, we leave the herd isolated long enough to be sure no more beasts are getting ill," he'd told her.
When the first incidents of Plague had been reported, and worried rumors were flying thick amongst holders and crafters, Sannel had said confidently "This is a human illness. It may affect the herdbeasts, but it won't affect the dragons or fire-lizards."
Lorana knew that had something to do with the differences between native organisms and those transplanted from Earth. Could it be, though, that humans or herdbeasts could carry an illness that would affect fire-lizards?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It's generally pretty rare across species that don't share a lot of common genes, but it's always possible that something that's harmless to humans could be lethal to fire-lizards. Or, say, that ingesting certain prions from infected cattle could cross the blood-brain barrier and be very harmful to humans. Or that the zombie apocalypse is carried on mosquitoes. It's entirely possible that humans are a disease vector for things lethal to fire-lizards and their family, and that fire-lizards and dragons are a vector for things lethal to humans.

I mean, I knew that genetics would have to be taught among the Beastcraft, and they would learn/know certain things about infection disease vectors, but how is it that the daughter of a Beast-herder knows more about these things than a Weyr Healer and a Harper that literally rediscovered things like barrier methods to prevent infection? As usual, the science on Pern makes no fucking sense.

[One of the commenters on the original says this is the kind of thing that happens when everyone decides to compartmentalize their knowledge and try to keep it secret from everyone else and never let it outside of their own specialization. Which, yeah, that's probably true, but also, there's an entire worldwide spy network called the Harpers who could be exfiltrating all of that data back to themselves, for sharing with people that they think should get it, or doling it out as favors to the people that are on their good side. Even if there would be a depressing likelihood that the people receiving the information would dismiss it out of hand because it came from some other Craft.]

Lorana is eventually entranced (perhaps aided some by feeling light-headed) by various pieces of glass set into the Weyr that reflect and direct light into the darker places. And, apparently, they form a network of light reflected from and to all sorts of places. I guess this was what M'hall was talking about when he said he was forced to polish the mirrors until they shone? Lorana follows the light out to the Weyr Bowl where she sees all sorts of dragons and fire-lizards cavorting. It's a beautiful scene that she tries to catch on paper, but the beauty is also marred by the presence of some unmistakable coughs among the dragons and fire-lizards present. There are sick dragons and fire-lizards, and yet everyone seems to be going off the cultural insistence that dragons don't get sick.

Lorana gets better. Valla doesn't. Valla will eventually die, and so Kindan is bereft of yet another thing that he loves and cherishes to illness. But in the interim, Lorana gets an excellent drawing of the green sputum that Valla is coughing up, using colors that Kindan has brought. Kindan and Lorana share their stories of having Plague tear their people from them. We get the summary of Dragon Harper, with emphasis on Kindan being fourteen and all alone after the Harper dies to do the best he can.

"You must have been very brave," Lorana said in awe.
"I was very tired," Kindan said with a shake of his head. "I was too tired to be brave."
"Very brave," Lorana insisted.
"They needed me," he said simply, his voice full of emotion. "I couldn't leave them."
"What about your family?" Lorana asked, trying to change the subject to something less painful for the harper.
"I have a sister still alive," he told her. "My father and all my brothers are dead." He grimaced. "Most died in a cave-in, the last died of the Plague."
"I'm sorry."
"My story's not that different from many others," Kindan replied with a shrug. "And better than some."

Keep this sympathetic portrayal in mind for the next part, which is after Valla has died, and M'hall and K'tan make the hard decision to ban fire-lizards from the Weyr as potential disease vectors. Kindan is not holding up well from the death of his fire-lizard, despite Kindan having "survived the loss of a watch-wher, and he lived through the Plague." (To his credit, K'tan says Kindan is holding up "As well as any," so it's decidedly ambiguous about how well Kindan is actually holding up versus what the expectation of his holding up would be, based on his survivor status. So, this is Kindan now:

"You must leave," K'tan said to her.
Lorana looked up from her drawing of fire-lizards, eyes stricken. Behind him she could see Kindan, his eyes burning with hate.
"You killed the fire-lizards," Kindan snarled at her. "You brought the sickness."
"You must leave," K'tan repeated.
Yes, I must leave, Lorana thought to herself. This is my fault. I must go into quarantine. Until...until...
Lorana woke with a start, sweating. She looked around, trying to place herself. It was late, dark. She had been dreaming.

Oh, well, nevermind then. Lorana's still mostly keeping to herself, though, because she's still an uncertain risk for fire-lizards and dragons. With this dream, though, she resolves to get out of Benden Weyr and quarantine herself until she knows she's not dangerous.

Her plans are derailed quite firmly by the gnawing hunger in her stomach. Which turns out not to be her stomach at all, but a dragonet's. A dragonet that has specifically left the Hatching Ground looking for her, which wipes out Mirrim and Path as being unique characters on that front. The gold's name is Arith, and Lorana Impresses because she helps Arith get her claws untangled from her wings. And then, as the company Lorana is in, who have been chasing the dragonet, introduce themselves, Lorana realizes she's meeting Nuella (who was worried for a moment that the dragonet was coming to Impress her) and M'tal, and that this Impression means she doesn't have to go anywhere, to get away, or anything else, because now she has a home and a purpose as a gold dragonrider.

Plus, having a dragon helps to erase your worries and sadnesses.

All the pain, the loss, everything that had gone before in Lorana's life was redeemed, erased, made nothing in the warmth of Arith's love.

That's some pretty powerful shit, man. It's consistent with what we've seen and heard from other dragonriders about their Impressions, but all that tragedy and sadness in Lorana's life gets wiped away by her new dragon? That seems pretty terrible, actually, if it were a human set of relationships—all your pain and suffering goes away, but at the cost of being utterly obsessed with someone and having them set a psychic bond to you for the rest of your life. If that bond ever goes sour, or the relationship does, that's going to suck. (It never does, because this is Pern and the dragons are the best therapists on the planet, because they basically absorb whatever emotions get sent at them and don't particularly care about a whole lot themselves past eating, sleeping, bathing, and spitting fire at Thread.)

Ten of the thirty-two eggs never hatched, Kindan tells Lorana the next day, which is an infinite percentage more than the zero stillborn eggs that have happened with Breth up to this point. We won't know if any of them would have turned into a Ruth, of course, but given what Jaxom did was considered a severe breach of protocol, they probably wouldn't even think of it. Nor are they necessarily going to open the eggs and see if there's anything inside that could provide a useful clue through autopsy. What they are going to do, though, is have Lorana keep sketching any sputum that comes out so they can track changes, talk with other Weyrleaders and see if they have similar rates of stillbirth with their clutches, and otherwise pick Lorana's mind about herdbeasts. When Lorana protests that dragons aren't herdbeasts, Kindan points out that they're not so different that the knowledge pools can't cross over.

At which point I wonder why dragonriders don't apprentice out to the Beastcraft, or whether the Weyrlingmaster should always be hired or Impressed from the Beastcraft, and why there isn't nearly as much cross-pollination of knowledge as there really needs to be so that there are reserves of people who know what they're doing when animals or people get really sick and there's a worry that some significant amount of the population isn't going to make it through the night. [Even if in any other situation, the Beastcraft would refuse and claim Craft Secrets, we already know that dragonriders have a major tendency to take what they want and intimidate anyone who thinks they can refuse into going along with it anyway, so dragonriders should already have this knowledge and plenty of people training them on it because being attached to a Weyr is one of the best things that can happen to you, assuming your Weyrleader isn't an asshole.]

Also, Lorana meets Tullea, and I swear the authors couldn't have made her characterization "BITCH" any more than if they had decided to tattoo it across her forehead for everyone to see.

"Are you going to wait until she dies from hunger, or were you perhaps hoping that her keening would disturb the whole Weyr?" a voice from behind her demanded caustically.
Lorana spun around to come face-to-face with a woman not that much older than herself. The woman's face had a pinched look, as if she had been caught in a perpetual sneer. Her blue eyes were pallid and her lips were pulled tight in a thin line. Blond hair was pulled together behind her neck.
"I don't know where the Feeding Grounds are," Lorana said apologetically.
"Peh! Some Weyrwoman you'll make!" the other returned. "Didn't bother to listen to the orientation, did you? Too high and mighty. Expect the rest of us to look after you, do you?"
"No, I—"
"It's not as though we all don't have our own dragons to look after--"
[…Minith, Tullea's dragon, helpfully directs Arith to the right place, and Lorana thanks her, which seems to wind Tullea up more when Lorana admits she can talk to all dragons…]
The look on the other rider's face quickly disabused her. Trying to be civil—after all, the queen had helped Arith to the Feeding Grounds—Lorana stretched out her hand and said, "I'm Lorana."
The other eyed her hand dubiously but did not take it. "Tullea, Weyrwoman second," she said, still looking like she'd just bitten into a bitterfruit. [Lemons! Limes! They exist! Why have they not been mentioned until now?] "Salina asked me to check on you," she added in a tone that made it clear what she thought of that imposition.
"That was very kind of Salina," Lorana replied, desperately trying to place the name, but failing. She knew she'd heard it before, but she was too groggy to dredge up the memory.
"You don't know who she is, do you?" Tullea asked accusingly.
"Her Breth is Arith's dam," Lorana temporized, feeling overwhelmed by the other woman's manner.
"Salina is the senior Weyrwoman," Tullea snapped. "Don't you know anything?"" She didn't give Lorana time to respond before continuing. "Well, obviously you don't. I can't see what sort of help you'll ever be. Perhaps it would be best if--"
Minith erupted in a loud disapproving roar, cutting Tullea off. Tullea looked up at her dragon, her eyes softening somewhat.
"Now look what you've done, you've upset her."
"I'm sorry," Lorana muttered. Silently, she said to Minith, My apologies, gold dragon.
Minith gave Lorana a pert nod, eyes whirling red-green.

This is my impressed face.

Seriously, is there some sort of rule of literature or storytelling that if you have people in some sort of hierarchical order, whether de jure or de facto, that at least one of the people the protagonist will have to deal with will be someone whose plot purpose is to make life miserable for the protagonist? I'm fucking sick of Mean Girls politics showing up in this world every single time, and apparently everywhere as well, because it happened with Menolly and the Harpers. It probably would have happened with Kelsa and Nonala eventually, but they were the curiosities. And also, there's Kylara and Brekke. Going back to the well of old ideas in new era does not mean that you have done wonderful storytelling. It means that you've managed to avoid growing and changing and making your world better, having had several decades of criticism to absorb and either respond to or ignore. Why don't we have a Weyrwoman hierarchy where "junior" means "still responsible for stuff, but not the final decisions" and "senior" means "chooses the Weyrleader and has final say on the things that the Weyrwomen have jurisdiction over." (Of course, what they Weyrwomen have jurisdiction over is far, far less than they should, despite being high-ranking officials in the Weyr.)

And what does everyone think Tullea's problem is? She needs to get laid, apparently.

M'tal pursed his lips tightly before saying, "Tullea seems to—"
"Have problems dealing with people recently," Salina finished.
"M'tal arched an eyebrow in disagreement. "Recently being the past three Turns," he corrected.
"You mean she's like that with everyone?" Lorana blurted and then clapped a hand over her mouth in surprise. The other three laughed.
"I'm afraid so," M'tal said when he'd recovered, eyes still dancing with amusement.
"You shouldn't feel singled out," K'tan added.
"I'm sure she'll settle down when Thread comes," Salina said.
"Or her dragon rises," M'tal added.
"Preferably when her dragon rises," K'tan murmured.
"Her dragon hasn't risen yet?" Lorana asked, feeling the beginnings of some sympathy for Tullea.
K'tan leaned in close to Lorana, to murmur, "We're hoping that a mating flight will calm her nerves."
"Or something," Salina added, arching an eyebrow at K'tan.

Because the cure for whatever makes a woman bitchy (although, on Pern, it's for whatever makes a dragonrider bitchy, so I suppose that's an equal-opprtunity facepalm?) is to get her laid. Or, in this case, to get her dragon laid. And that seems to be exactly as far as anyone has investigated into this matter, assuming that it will work itself out once there's either Thread to flame or mating to be had.

I'm pretty sure this is not seen as normal behavior for a dragon, and especially not for a queen dragon. And yet, the incuriosity of Pern persists. They assume that they already know the answer to the problem. Certainly not something they need to be concerned about, and especially not now, when they've already seen that dragon fertility might be affected by whatever this ailment is that's being passed around. (I mean, it's entirely possible the dragon is ace, or not interested at all in any of the dragons in the Weyr, but they should be trying to rule out biological causes and make sure the dragon is healthy before going on to other theories.) And they've had several years to investigate this phenomenon and try to determine what the cause really is, because whatever it is, if there's no rising to mate, then they can't test that as a solution and should look elsewhere. Why has the scientific method not survived to Pern? There are several professions and guilds on the planet that could use it, even if it were one of their closely guarded secrets. Argh. The patchworkness of what knowledge survives and what doesn't is basically plot-driven, and all of these flashbacks to the First Fall era aren't convincing me that there's an overarching plot at all.

[What's Tullea's actual problem? She's currently living in two times at once, and has been for the last three Turns, but because the event where they figure out what happens hasn't happened yet, everyone presumes the Tullea's just being bitchy because she hasn't gotten laid yet. Or recently. And all throughout this book, even though J'lantir foreshadowed it in the very beginning, the experienced dragonriders aren't going to go, "Huh. Tullea has the classic symptoms of someone who is currently timing it, and has been for years, far longer than [likely sexist excuse involving menstrual cycles because this is Pern.] Perhaps we should try and figure out if Tullea is, indeed, existing in two places at once?" Which they won't, because all of the time travel in these books is specifically the kind where they're deliberately trying to hide themselves and not interact with the world around them as much as possible, but anyone who knew Tullea before this three-year personality change should still be wondering what the hell happened to her, and have a list handy of "well, we tried all of these things already, and they don't seem to have helped any, so I guess we'll keep looking for things?"]

Getting back to the plot, Arith is apparently a prodigy of a dragon, according to K'tan, who may have observed the entire exchange without doing a damn thing to stop or divert it. Since Arith pops between and back and is making her own kills ahead of schedule, and K'tan says it's not completely normal for Lorana to always know where Arith is, even when Arith is in hyperspace. Before K'tan can say more, Salina and M'tal arrive to talk to their newest Weyrwoman. Salina asks what it's like being able to talk to all the dragons, and Lorana suggests it's like constantly being a room with your best friends. Which sounds like hell if you're someone who wants to have time alone in your own head (with, perhaps, your own dragon), but Lorana is apparently extroverted enough that this is good for her. Lorana swears up and down that she's not eavesdropping intentionally, and mentions that the dragons do a lot of conversing among themselves that the humans really don't know a whole lot about, if anything. Salina speculated on whether Lorana can talk to watch-whers, too, but Lorana says she's never tried. (Also, it requires a completely different set of visualizations, as we know.)

Salina and M'tal are relieved to hear that Lorana's experience with fire-lizards includes mating flights, so they don't have to have an awkward talk with her about those things. Although it seems the dragons are filling in the gaps.

"Oh," M'tal responded, his tone both enlightened and relieved. "So you've been through a mating flight."
Lorana nodded emphatically, "Yes, definitely through," she agreed, her eyes flashing with amusement.
"It's a bit more intense when a queen dragon mates," Salina cautioned. M'tal grabbed at her possessively and pulled her close to him. Salina smiled and curled against him, wrapping an arm possessively around his waist.
"So I've been told," Lorana said. The dragons had just filled her in, and she couldn't help but smile.
"The dragons told you?" M'tal asked.
"Well, not told, as it were, more showed," Lorana admitted.
"When?" M'tal asked incredulously.
"Just now," Lorana answered.
"Showed?" K'tan asked.
Lorana frowned thoughtfully. "Sort of like a flurry of images and emotions," she reported. She caught the alarmed look that passed between Weyrleader and Weyrwoman and quickly added, "All very dragonish."
M'tal and Salina looked relieved, and Lorana guessed that they'd entertained the notion that the dragons might have conveyed intimate details.

Which makes me wonder whether dragons have porn, or enjoy replaying their own and others' memories of mating flights for enjoyment. Or whether they have those images of their humans, and enjoy replaying those images and memories of the humans mating. Xeno-pornography would definitely be a booming business, if you could get more than just what was looking on screen as part of your experience. Also, given how much sexual activity happens in the Weyr, and the regular orgies, I am a bit unsure as to why M'tal and Salina would have much embarrassment on modesty grounds about themselves. It's likely Lorana will be seeing them naked at some point, unless they manage to always get to privacy before the gestalt takes over and they screw like dragons, and Lorana has already pointed out to them that she's familiar with the emotional states and other things that come with fire-lizard mating. It's a difference of degree, as Salina points out, rather than of being completely new to the experience.

There is food, and conversation, but Lorana doesn't pick up on the subtext until it becomes a little too textual, with Breth coughing rather loudly and apologizing for it, as to why everyone might be very interested in Lorana's knowledge and sketching abilities.

There's a segment here, but it essentially boils down to "D'gan [ASSHOLE] doesn't care that one of his riders' dragons is sick, seeing it as yet another challenge to his leadership, even as the Weyr Healer says it's potentially the stuff that the fire-lizards have had. He insists, against common sense, that all his riders must fly their appointed training, without any assistance from the Weyr Healer at that exact moment."

Why is that asshole still in charge at Telgar? By this point in time, he's long since proven himself woefully incompetent at leadership, uninterested in things that he really should be paying more attention to, and he's a terrible person, to boot, all ego and no substance. Why hasn't he been murdered or run off on an errand somewhere when there's been a mating flight, or had a conspiracy put against his leadership to make sure that he never gets anywhere near that kind of power ever again? What he seems to have going for him is that he's a bully who's not above being violent to his riders. But. Just. Why is he still here?

Also, the sick dragon and rider get lost in hyperspace because their Weyrleader is an asshole. We find this out after we've shifted back to Kindan, K'tan, and Lorana, as they try to puzzle out how long it takes for the infection to mature and how the illness progresses in the fire-lizards, since they seem to run a faster course with it, so they can figure out what the dragons will be like, too. All they get out of it is the idea that they should try to prevent any fire-lizard or dragon from warping themselves into hyperspace when they're sick. Which is a nice idea in theory, but Breth proves to them that they can't hang on to a dragon in practice, Lorana tries to follow Breth to her destination through hyperspace, even though it's a very long trip, but she can't hold on to the queen, and then she seems lost and can't bring her consciousness back to her. Only after she bumps up against an "other" and is "rebuffed" by them does Lorana pass out. [This is also a time travel thing, where it's either Fiona or Lorana or someone else who knows to go looking for Lorana in the weft of hyperspace and give her a mental dope slap to get her back into her body. But the really weird stuff is still to arrive.]

And that's chapter 9. The fan is just beginning to warm up for all the things that will be hitting it soon.

Chapter Text

Last time, we found Lorana, and so did a queen hatchling. Now with a place cemented in the world, Lorana is being sought after for her expertise in animal husbandry and her skills in art to see whether or not it will be possible to figure out what's going on with the fire lizards and the dragons.

Lorana also met Tullea, whose queen hasn't yet risen to mate. Rather than treating it as a serious problem, though, the dragonriders seem convinced that it will sort itself out soon enough. Which comes back to bite them on the ass when the seniormost queen of Benden Weyr goes into hyperspace and doesn't come back, based on the cough.

Dragonsblood, Chapters 10 and 11: Content Notes:

(First Pass, Year 50, AL 58)

All life functions are the product of the interaction between thermodynamics and chemistry.

—Introduction, Elementary Biological Systems, 18th Edition.

That would be a lot more helpful to someone who understood both of those things, but perhaps if this is your textbook, you already have a fairly solid understanding of those things.

The chapter starts with Wind Blossom awaking with the certainty that there is danger to dragons, before she convinces herself that it was just a dream. There's then a rundown of what could have been done, with the technology and knowledge that the colonists had before Thread, that would have been extremely helpful in identifying what the green sputum is and how to best counteract is. As it is, the general purpose antibiotic has worked sufficiently that Grenn has recovered. Which means the humans can look forward to the end of their decontamination protocol. This is after the dead fire lizard was dissolved in nitric acid, and just about every available surface the fire lizard or the people handling the fire lizard have come in contact with has been sterilized (with ammonia or boiling water) or will be burned (which includes the quarantine tent and the clothes of the people in the quarantine.)

It turns out Wind Blossom's dream was Kassa's dream and Emorra's dream as well, but none of them put any significance to it. Instead, among all the talk of quarantine protocol and Wind Blossom slightly lamenting the lost technology, there is one interesting bit.

In their time together, Wind Blossom has come to respect the young woman and understand that Kassa had been willing to look beyond Tieran's disfigurement to the young man beneath the surface.

Which is probably about as close as we'll ever get to a ringing endorsement from Wind Blossom about anyone. Hopefully it also means that Kassa has realized how her previous attempt at cheering Tieran up went and that she might be able to do better the next time, if she is so interested. [It also pretty well paints Wind Blossom as thinking in ableist terms and that Tieran shouldn't try to do anything else than settle for the one possible woman who might have enough of an interest in him to stay near him.]

The final decontamination procedure promises to be cold.

She had arranged with Janir to to get them a mild acid solution. When they were ready for the final decontamination, they would strip, remove all body hair, leave the tent, and scrub each other with the acid solution.
The acid would instantly turn the oils of their skin into soap and kill any germs on their bodies. It would be a very chilling process, and Emorra had argued against that treatment for her mother, but Wind Blossom has been adamant.
"So we're all going to be standing out there naked as the day we were born?" Kassa squawked.

It doesn't sound particularly pleasant, either, considering the "have to remove all body hair", which I suspect includes intimate hair, and then getting scrubbed up with an acid solution. Also, the science seems quite wrong, as most soap-making that I can find involves the use of a strong base, such as lye, rather than a mild acid, to produce soap from oils. Kassa might also be a bit more worried about being naked around the person she's interested in and people who may very well have functioned as his mother and grandmother.

Now that we're done talking about the indignities to be suffered, they seem to have finally figured out something useful about the infection.

"Threadfall's over, the dragons don't have to fight," Emorra said. "If the infection is just in the lungs—"
"Are you suggesting the shock of between killed the queen fire-lizard?" Wind Blossom asked.
Emorra frowned. "If so, would going between kill infected dragons?"
"So the dragons would be unharmed as long as they could be prevented from going between?"
"If the infection itself isn't deadly," Emorra agreed. "And hopefully the dragons will build up an immunity."

They then talk more about how anything that can infect a fire-lizard is likely to infect a dragon and/or a watch-wher. Wind Blossom thinks the infection is bacterial, because it responded to an antibiotic, but Tieran suggests the bacteria might have been opportunistic, and the actual infection something else, but doesn't elaborate, and Wind Blossom considers the possibility as valid.

What I want to know, though, is if the potential solution is to keep dragons and fire-lizards from going into hyperspace, then what else is going on that the dragons and fire-lizards are deliberately ignoring their pair-bonded partner's insistence that they not go into hyperspace? If the bond is as strong as it has been portrayed up to this point, then there should be significant incentive for dragons not to do something that will endanger their bond and is against the direct wishes of their bond partner. Is this some sort of draconic toxoplasmosis, perhaps? [It's never specifically pinpointed, of course, but whatever the problem is, it seems to be addling the brains of the dragons to get them to want to go into hyperspace with an improperly-envisioned destination, much like how toxoplasmosis might work with mice, but that also the shock of going into the cold of hyperspace might shut down the lungs and cause death. Which could mean a combination hitter, or that it functions something like HIV/AIDS or SARS-CoV-2 where the virus does the damage to the system so that some other thing can kill, usually a pneumonia or something like that where a weakened immune system or a damaged set of organs can't fight off what it would normally be able to.]

At breakfast, Wind Blossom requests a significant amount of nitric acid be stockpiled for emergencies. Emorra has to translate it into HNO3, which insists the linguistic corruption is already well underway after only a couple generations. Which is really quick, in my opinion, for a useful lay-ish term like "nitric acid" to be replaced with its chemical formula. Even if they've had fifty years of the culture calling it by that name. And, as far as I know, this is the only chemical compound to be replaced in such a way. Wine, beer, and liquor still exist, instead of being called EtOH, for example. (Which is a pretty terrible name to have to trip off your tongue.) After some further thought, actually, it seems like "nitric acid" and "HNO3 / agenothree" are both terrible words to use to describe the chemical that is used primarily for the function of killing Thread burrows, and secondarily for fertilizing the ground. I would expect the non-scientifically trained person to call it "Thread-killer" or something that specifically makes reference to its use, as humans tend to call things by names that, at least obliquely, indicate what their function is. Maybe in the Farmercraft the word fertilizer survives and gets applied to the nitric acid as well. Anyway, the point is that the name agenothree doesn't make sense and this is a really short amount of time for it to completely take over as the standard name for that particular chemical compound.

Gren's bead harness is a source of additional confusion, as nobody in their time and world has done anything of the sort. But mostly, the rest of the chapter is everyone worrying about the possible devastation to the dragon population if the illness in question turns out to infect them as well as fire-lizards.

Here's how Chapter 11 starts:

Bronze for golds,
Brown, blue, for greens
So do the dragons
Follow their queens

That sounds not right at all, given that we've already established that gold dragon queens command everybody, not just the bronzes. Green dragons don't command blues or browns, and I suspect the entire dragonrider society would laugh at such a prospect. What we're seeing here, instead, is the enforced sexual stratification of dragonriders. We know full well that bronzes will chase greens sexually, but only bronzes get to chase gold dragons. And while there's a shitload of determinism in dragon color choices based on the extratextual material and Kitti Ping's statements in Dragonsdawn, it can't be a source of contentment among the not-bronze dragonriders that they're never going to be part of the leadership past a certain point. At least in most militaries in our time, a person can go to officer training school and continue to rise in the ranks, should they prove themselves competent and able to stay alive.

[What it might also be referring to is the common belief that were green dragons allowed to be fertile, they would only ever produce brown, blue, or green dragons from their eggs, and that bronzes and golds only come from gold dragons. That is going to get blown up completely in the fifth book of this set, involving time travel and mass repopulation of dragons, almost all of whom come from fertile green dragons that don't end up sterilized from firestone usage. And there will be a little grudging something about how obviously all of the colors of fire-lizard should be possible from the very first type, which was a green, so there we are. But because that mass repopulation is a secret incident never to be spoken of, the later Passes and Turns can claim it's always been the way they were taught it was, and there won't be all that many records in existence that flatly contradict them.]

We're back in the Second Interval, year 507 AL at Telgar Weyr, which means that D'gan [ASSHOLE] is involved in this chapter. And is yet again begging the question of why he hasn't been disposed of as a Weyrleader yet. First, he does the reasonably cautious thing of banning fire-lizards from coming near the Weyr at all, in case they turn out to be disease vectors, but then he decides that there's no reason to share information with anyone else, and his justification is pure toxic masculine ego getting in the way of rubbing two brain cells together.

"We should tell the other Weyrs—" L'rat began.
"We will tell them nothing!" D'gan roared. He turned away, facing east, away from the Weyr Bowl behind him, away from his Wingleaders, his face into the wind.
"But surely they will have the same problems," D'nal said.
"Listen, all of you," D'gan said angrily, whirling around, jabbing a finger at each of them. "Telgar Weyr will take care of itself," he declared, pointing at D'nal. He turned to L'rat, saying, "I will not have that addled M'tal or that cretin C'rion making fun of us, telling us what to do.
"Remember how they chided us when we brought the two Weyrs together? How jealous they were when they hadn't thought to absorb poor Igen when our last queen died? How envious they were once we started winning Games, Turn after Turn?
"We are the largest Weyr, the strongest Weyr, the best-trained Weyr," he said, emphasising each point by slapping a clenched fist into the palm of his other hand. "We will be the best at fighting Thread," he declared. He turned eastward toward Benden Weyr, then south toward Ista Weyr. "And then they will come asking us for advice."
To the healer he said, "If you can figure out a way to defeat this illness, then we'll have something to talk to the other Weyrs about."

D'gan then orders the isolation of the sick dragons, on the same idea of isolating sick herds that Lorana expressed in an earlier chapter. K'rem is hesitant to do it, because moving sick dragons might kill them, and when he raises an objection about who will look after the sick ones, because his dragon isn't sick, D'gan says some of the weyrfolk can look after them.

This is written well before the political disaster that was the United States 2016 presidential election, but there's a certain similarity between the way that D'gan talks about his Weyr and the way that Donald Trump talks about the United States. Lots of bellicosity, braggadicio, machismo, and the insistence that they're the best in everything and need no help from anyone. And the total ignorance of a serious problem staring them in the face that betrays their complete inability to lead such a large and important operation such as a Weyr. The authoritarian strongman streak is right there, easy for everyone to see, but D'gan has surrounded himself with people either too afraid to gainsay him or who believe in his leadership enough to follow him as loyal lackeys. This won't be good for Telgar at all, because battle plans have a nasty way of becoming mostly useless when contact is made with the enemy.

[With some additional perspective, D'gan is absolutely an authoritarian, and the kind of authoritarian that seems uninterested in sticking to the social contract that everyone else has agreed to, because if it's not codified somewhere, he doesn't have to obey it. Which makes him the worst person to put in a position where he gets to make the rules instead of having to obey them. For as much as Donald Trump attempted to prevent the orderly transfer of power through allegations of mass fraud, attempted political intimidation, and a whole lot of behavior and speech that may or may not be charged as an attempt to incite the insurrection of 6 January 2021 in service of trying to claim that the rules didn't apply to him, he didn't get what he wanted, and the rules did apply to him. (Although, at least in 2022, it seems like there's plenty of evidence the local authoritarian party is working as hard as possible to prevent the rules from applying a second time.) In contrast, D'gan seems to have succeeded at his attempt to take over Telgar Weyr after having run Igen into the ground and lacking any sort of queen egg to keep the Weyr going. There's plenty of evidence that D'gan shoulld never have been allowed near anyone's mating flight, but apparently, he somehow managed to be the rider of the dragon that got chosen. Which is why I wonder how much human choice goes into the picking of the Weyrleader, because it seems pretty obvious that if there had been a choice involved, D'gan would not have been chosen for his leadership ability. (And maybe he wasn't. Maybe his dragon happened to be cleverer than anticipated and succeeded with a cunning nobody thought was possible.)

The two of them definitely have the same streak of believing that any show of weakness or care is unacceptable and ruins the perfect image they're trying to project as invincible and strong, and while it at least temporarily bites D'gan in the ass (and the jury is out still out in 2022 as to whether we'll get to find out if it bites Donald Trump in the ass), D'gan will eventually get to retake his control of Telgar and displace the people who were doing a far better job of running it than he ever was. So even though he's going to do something foolish that leads to the temporary loss of his entire Weyr, once that decision gets undone, everyone is just going to let him come back to power, rather than rightly saying that he's run two Weyrs into nonexistence at this point and someone else should be allowed to run the place.]

Thankfully, the narrative switches over to M'tal at Benden, doing the same thing that D'gan is doing at Telgar - examining the Star Stones to see how soon Thread will arrive. This is grim news for M'tal, because the signifiers say that it won't be long now at all before the Third Pass begins, and the dragons are still suffering sicknesses and fatalities that will leave the fighting wings lighter than they need to effectively fight Thread. (That's all the Weyrs, as unlike Telgar, the remaining Weyrs [save High Reaches, who we will discover has been closed to the outside for three Turns, another clue overlooked by the dragonriders that Tullea and High Reaches being closed might be related] are freely communicating with each other about their losses and their difficulties and trying to pool their resources together to see if someone can come up with a solution.)

Lorana has volunteered to be communications hub for everyone, since she can talk to any and all dragons, and it's faster to relay through her than any other communication method on the planet. Kindan has reservations about that, because Lorana also feels dragons, including when they die, but Lorana soldiers on. Which puts her in contrast to Tullea.

"Shouldn't Tullea be here?" he [Kindan] asked M'tal.
M'tal pursed his lips. "She decided that she needed her rest," he said. It was obvious he was torn between disapproval and sympathy. Kindan could understand that--the toll on all of them had been great.
"What about the other bronze riders?"
"B'nik said he would trust my observation," M'tal responded. "The others agreed."
With the death of Breth, Tullea's Minith was the senior queen at Benden Weyr. When she rose to mate, the leadership of the Weyr would pass to the rider of the bronze she chose. Everyone expected it would be B'nik, even though Tullea had already found the time to tease several of the other riders. M'tal had pointedly not risen to any of her taunts, preferring to spend all his spare time consoling Salina.
In fact, that was where Lorana was at the moment—with Salina.

If you're getting Kylara-Brekke vibes about all of this, you're not wrong. If Pern were explicitly a series that was explicitly about cyclical things, and how things repeat each generation, but perhaps in slightly different forms, then this recycling of characters and their dynamics wouldn't be quite so disappointing. There are definitely hints that this kind of "into every generation, a Slayer is born" story was a way that things could have developed. I've produced a lot of bytes about how aggravating it is that things supposedly learned in one generation keep getting forgotten remarkably easily when it comes to the next generations, and may of you in the comments have been annoyed right along with me. Had the series stuck more closely to the fantasy-type world that it had sketched out at the beginning, we might very well have landed in that kind of cyclic story, whether you believe in the monomyth or not, because it would be easier to let gaps appear where knowledge gets lost because disaster, plague, invasion, Thread, whatever, and it's just a thing that happens. It's part of the fantasy genre that what happens after the great age is always incomplete or more terrible and they're trying to get back to what they knew of as a mythic age.

But the story wants to be science fiction, and one of the things that science fiction is usually known for is a sense of progress over time. Often in a terribly Western conception where everything is always moving toward a more technological and scientific future. While there might be the occasional hitch, the arc always moves in a direction that qualifies as "progress" over time. And with Pern, that presents some serious problems, because the future was written and explored first, and now we're coming back and trying to show the past that will lead to that future. A past that necessitates a gigantic loss of knowledge and technology over time, much of it the sort of thing that seems extremely valuable to preserve. And also, a past that seems to be showing that the future that came first isn't innovating, discovering, or having anything new happen, but it's a retread of things that have happened. The future books emulate the past's books, which causes future Pern to emulate past Pern. Cyclical stories, treading water, and then suddenly the rediscovery of ancient, still-working technology, and the promised "moving forward" starts happening in leaps and bounds. It's a Renaissance - a rebirth, like what happened on Terra during those time periods CE when older knowledge that had been preserved in different parts of the world were reintroduced, and then expanded upon once the world had returned to about the same technological and societal level. Pern finally gets to break their cycle once they find the AI. But that has the knock-on effect of making only the Ninth Pass science fiction-as-envisaged. Everything else can't go too far ahead, or it breaks what's already been established.

Never mind that in Terra's history, there were plenty of time periods where one nation-state, empire, or political division was able to make leaps and bounds of scientific discovery, gain power, and then collapse, starting again from a new baseline of knowledge. Each of these Passes could be their own empire space.

I guess I expect Pern to function a bit like Foundation did, to bring an old white dude into the discussion. First Pass Pern can be the original Empire, doomed to destruction but seeding its knowledge in such a way as to shorten the amount of time needed to return to itself. Then each Pass and Interval after that can rediscover something, reinvent something, understand something better and then pass that knowledge on in such a way that their descendants can use it. (Seldon selected a goal of capturing and preserving as much knowledge as it could in an encyclopedia, which they could then conveniently use when it came time to rebuild.) This is what a Western audience expects, because it comports with the history they've been told about Terra, with Empire and the Dark Times, before being reborn again into successive iterations of Empire. And yet, Pern is mythic rather than progressive. And I think that decision has really come back to bite the authors in the ass so, so much.

And now, for some mood whiplash, the author does something extremely right for worldbuilding and the setting. Kindan lags behind after M'tal confirms that Thread is on the way, and the narrative has Kindan appreciate the construction of Benden Weyr, because he's trained as a miner and therefore knows, in ways that dragonriders who don't share that background, what kind of architectural marvel the Weyr actually is. Kindan observes the water stream, that services each of the levels of the Weyr, before the waste water stream ends up in a "huge septic dome way beneath a lush field far below and south of the Weyr itself." Septic fields!

Kindan could always tell newer stonework from the original--while there was clear craftsmanship in every bit of rock carving done in the Weyr, the new work was never as smooth or as clean as the original. The stairs leading from the top level of the Weyr up to the Standing Stones were a case in point. Instead of a handrail of smooth-melted rock, a rope had been bolted at intervals into the wall. The stairs themselves were nearly perfect, but Kindan's legs noted a subtle unevenness as he descended to the Weyr.

This is good characterization! Kindan has the eye and the skill from growing up in the mines to be able to appreciate the differences in the stonework and catch the details that others might miss. Through his architectural eyes, we can learn about details of the world and the Weyr that would be clunky if delivered by any other character. Other characters have been able to appreciate the work of the Ancients, but not in the same way. It helps build a better picture of what the place is like, which can be difficult sometimes if an author skimps on the description out of insecurity or a lack or not actually having visualized the spaces their characters live in in any sort of meaningful way.

As he comes back to the Weyr, Kindan proves again why he would have made a reasonably good Healer, if Kindan had stuck with his secondary career and hadn't been promoted after the Plague years. I wonder what a Healer-trained Kindan would have been able to do, if this is what he can still do alone.

"You dragonfolk are a hearty lot," Kindan said, "I wonder if it's the thin air—"
He cut himself off, as his words sunk in. K'tan's eyebrows furrowed thoughtfully.
"Are you thinking that if thin air is good for riders, thinner air might be better for dragons?" the healer asked.
"Or worse for whatever ails them," Kindan suggested. He mulled over the idea over then shrugged it off. "Well, it's a thought."
"Worth keeping," K'tan replied, finding a stylus and making a note on his slate.
"If thin air is good, what about between?" Kindan mused.
K'tan shook his head. "The illness seems to disorient the dragons—they would never come back from between." Kindan frowned and gestured to the records. "You've seen nothing about dragon illnesses?"

That's incredibly useful information, K'tan! It could even explain why the dragons go into hyperspace, despite there being extremely good reasons and anchors on the ground to stop them from doing so. A disoriented dragon might engage their hyperspace drive by themselves, thinking they had a perfectly good destination in mind or sent to them by their rider. Considering how difficult it is to get information out of those who have had their dragons disappear on them, as weird as it sounds, K'tan might want to ask dragonriders to relay to…someone, Lorana, maybe? what they or their dragon is thinking right before they take the last hyperspace hop. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything all that concrete, but having some last accounts might make it so they can figure out commonalities and what causes dragons and fire-lizards to send themselves into hyperspace where they can't get out.

K'tan mentions he's only looked back fifty years. Kindan sympathizes with the disarray of records past that point that K'tan has to deal with, because the Harper Hall's Archives were similarly disorganized (Resler, you utter incompetent) while he was there. Lorana suggests they go to the Harper Hall and raid the records there for clues, startling them both. She apparently heard their conversation, and it seems like she would make a good Archivist, if Verilan could give her some training.

"I thought Kindan's idea about thin air might make some sense," she said, sipping her klah. "Also, cold kills germs, too."
"So if we could get our sick dragons to cold high places--"
"Without killing them," Kindand interjected.
"--without killing them," K'tan agreed, accepting Kindan's amendment with a nod, "then perhaps..."
Lorana shrugged. "It depends on the infection."
"We don't know enough about this infection," Kindan [K'tan?] swore. Kindan and Lorana sighed in dejected agreement.
"But what about the fire-lizares? Have they ever gotten sick?"
"Not according to these records," K'tan said with a wave of his hand.
"Maybe we're looking in the wrong Records," Kindan suggested. "Maybe we should be looking in the Harper Hall--"
"Or Fort Weyr," Lorana interjected. When the other two responded with questioning looks, she explained, "Isn't Fort Weyr the oldest? Wouldn't the oldest Records of dragons--and firelizards--be there?"
K'tan and Kindan exchanged looks.
"She's right, you know," Kindan said.
"Mmph," K'tan agreed. "But the Weyrs are closed to anyone but their own now."

The plot doesn't pick up this research thread any further, which is too bad, because I'm enjoying seeing Lorana be a competent and knowledgeable person about things. Also, inter-library loan is totally a thing, and if Fort's in the cooperative trying to figure out how to beat the infection, all it would take is Lorana passing a few messages along for the Weyr Harper and/or Healer at Fort to go digging in their archives for mentions of fire-lizard or dragon sickness. Another message might ask Verilan if he can spare some apprentices to go rooting through the Harper Hall archives. As far as I know, Harpers can work together on the same problem, so why aren't they? Yes, Verilan is still in the process of standing the Archives back up and making needed improvements over Resler's neglect, but since they're looking through stuff already, Verilan could put a bug in his apprentices' ears to look out for something if they should see it while copying and transferring the data. [One of the commenters on the original suggested the possibility that Verilan, or one of his archivists, might already have come across the answer and doesn't know that's what they're looking for, because nobody is communicating with each other!]

Where the plot goes, instead, is M'tal sending out riders to be on the lookout for the telltale signs of frozen Thread, on the hope that they might be spared some extra time before having to fight the real thing. Lorana, Kindan, K'tan, and M'tal figure out a way to ask Nuella to have the watch-whers join the network of informants, by having the watch-whers report to Nuella, and Nuella to relay that information to Lorana (likely via a conveniently nearby dragon or tuning in to Arith). They also discuss the possibility that watch-whers might fight Thread, something that we know is true, but that Kindan dismisses out of hand because of watch-whers being nocturnal. As the plot goes, riders report back that there's black dust, and that sets the schedule for the first Threadfall of the Third Pass.

Which is where I'm going to take a breather, because this chapter is long, I've been longwinded, and there's still more to analyze from what comes up next.

Chapter Text

Last time, a lot of speculation about the illness that's attacking fire-lizards and dragons, and an indication that Kindan might have done better as a Healer, and Lorana as a Harper. Additionally, an asshole was an asshole.

Dragonsblood, Chapters 11 and 12: Content Notes: The A+ Parenting of Kitti Ping

We're still in Chapter 11, and the alarm has rung out that Thread will be falling, and we pick up on the scheduled day of Threadfall over Bitra. Since this is the first live-fire exercise against actual Thread, everyone at Benden Weyr is a bit more keyed-up than they might otherwise be.

Tullea and B'nik are late to the muster. Tullea says they were just getting to bed, which doesn't garner sympathy from anyone, but makes me really start wondering whether Tullea and B'nik are involved in a time-travel plot of their own, and Tullea's mood and issues come from being double-timed or otherwise existing in two temporal realities at once. It's been described as something that makes people very irritable, possibly in the same way as when someone expects a dragon to rise to mate [And if I was figuring that out at this point, with so much more of the narrative to go. Someone in a Weyr somewhere should be thinking about this as well. And, perhaps in a better book, be getting shushed by everyone else because so long as nobody actually acknowledges the likelihood of the thing happening, it doesn't get locked into happening. Or some other indication of having some knowledge about how the time travel rules work so that there's a point to telling someone to be quiet about the possibility.]

The sick dragons are flying in the Threadfall, apparently, because the illness didn't have the courtesy to only affect full wings at a time.

For over twenty turns, M'tal had led Benden Weyr. In all that time, he had had just one thought: to prepare for Thread. This day—now—was the culmination of all he had worked toward.
It was a disaster.
Three dragons failed to come out of between. Their loss cast an immediate pall on the fight.

Did anyone think to tell M'tal about their speculation that sick dragons get disoriented and are way less likely to come out of hyperspace alive? Because if you knew nine days in advance where Thread was scheduled to fall, that's enough time for dragons to try and get there the long way. Assuming they're healthy enough to try. [No. Why would anyone share? In a better book, it would be "That's useful information, but we have to take the risk anyway, or Thread will destroy us all."]

Worse, it threw off the organization of the wings. The teamwork that M'tal had drilled his riders so assiduously in maintaining fell apart before the first of the Thread arrived. Ruefully, M'tal reflected that he had not considered training his dragons in sustaining losses.

I…don't get what kind of training was going on, that the absence of a person in the wing causes such disarray. There aren't any utility riders, or reservists whose job it is to fill a hole should one appear? There aren't backup wings who train but don't actually fly unless they're summoned to the battlefield to fill gaps? Riders don't know how to reform themselves and be effective if they're one short, or two short, or one extra? I realize that training doesn't account for every situation, but the possibility of being one or two down in your wing, or having to account for an extra from another wing seems like something that should have been at the forefront of M'tal's mind, since he is going to be leading people to their potential death or injury. You hope to have no casualties, but you train in such a way that even if everyone around you has to leave, temporarily or permanently, you can continue to be effective by yourself or with others that you may not have personally trained with.

And then everything unraveled. The first cry of a Thread-scored dragon seared M'tal's ears like a hot poker, thankfully cut off as the dragon went between where the freezing cold would destroy Thread.
Then another dragon went between, and another--and that one did not return.
M'tal issued sharp orders to his wingleaders to regroup, but try as they might, the increasing casualties meant that they never quite recovered from the initial disorder.
The battle against Thread turned more dangerous, desperate. Worse, Gaminth informed him that many of the dragons going between and not returning to the Fall had not returned to the Weyr, either.
The pain of that additional loss weighed heavily on the remaining riders. Those riding ill dragons responded by doing their best to avoid going between--often with worse results. Four, then five dragons were Threaded at once and went between so terribly Thread scored that M'tal knew nothing could be done to save them.
And then it was over.

It's not quite a rout, in the sense that the Thread doesn't drive the dragonriders away, but it's certainly not the resounding victory that M'tal had in mind, and I still want to blame the training methods of the dragonriders for this. Because in my significantly lower-stakes collegiate marching band, for each rank of twelve marchers in a halftime show, there was one person whose job it was to know that line well enough to step in in case someone got injured or sick and couldn't go on. And other reserves off the field practicing, who could go in at any time, and who did the uptempo pregame routine themselves in various roles of where they might be, in the hope they might make it to the show themselves. Yet, despite the fact that it's almost guaranteed there will be injury and dragonriders that might have to withdraw from either the formation or the battle at any time, M'tal hasn't trained anybody on what to do if you find yourself a dragon down? That seems…like another piece of knowledge somehow got lost in the Interval that really shouldn't have. I would expect the dragonriders to keep meticulous records about what happened, who was injured, who was killed, and all of those things. So it should have been immediately apparent to anyone that chose to look, and that has had twenty years to look, that injuries are going to happen and that the dragonriders need to be able to adapt to a changing situation at any time. Instead, it seems like once there's one tiny disruption to the plan, everything goes out the window. The dragonriders have supposedly been drilling and playing the All-Weyr Games as well, but of course, the only thing we saw from that is distance flying and precision-shooting. If it was supposed to be drills for the real Threadfall, the competitions should not have been just individual riders and five-person wings, but groups of two, three, four, and six as well.

Still alive to fight another day, M'tal heads home, where there's a lot of bustle about getting ready for the inevitable injuries that will bring dragons back to the Weyr. Which is to say, somehow the Headwomen and those in the Weyr know there will be casualties, and yet M'tal never trained his fighters for this eventuality.

[Have a cocowhat at the differing levels of understanding about how this fight was going to go down.]

That's sloppy writing at best.

[Seriously, the dragonriders are supposed to be a "renewable air force," in the words of Anne, but they aren't organized like any military operation. Or even like someone's fantasy idea of one. And they definitely should have trained in their roles such that they could be mix-and-matched in case of casualties or fatalities. Having been caught in this disaster of a situation, there will be an immediate pivot to starting this kind of training so that everyone can be reformed into wings on the fly, but nobody thought they were actually going to die before they started dying, apparently.]

Lorana, during all of this, is trying to make sure that Arith stays asleep, but Arith has to pull Lorana back from trying to grab a dragon that's going to hyperspace to die, even though Lorana feels like she might have been able to pull them back and keep them there. Salina's arrival keeps Lorana occupied in trying to keep Salina occupied, but the arrival of the wounded completely subsumes Lorana's attention, and replays several incidences of the horror of watching a dragon go to hyperspace to die for Salina, which can't be good for her mental health. There's another bit of scientific knowledge that's survived, about blood contaminations, after K'tan stops Lorana and orders her to wash her hands after she gets rider blood on them:

K'tan shook his head and gave her a pat. "Dragon ichor isn't the same. You can mix it any time," he assured her. "It's just human blood that can cause problems. People have different blood, and mixing it can cause fevers."

Despite not having the technology to type the blood, and not really knowing about what sorts of diseases can spread through blood to blood contact, they know that mixing blood is a problem. I suppose that makes sense. [It doesn't, really, but at this particular point, I'd be willing to believe they're working on humor temperament for blood and believe that people of different humors can't have their blood mixing. What survives and what doesn't is such a grab bag.]

When Lorana nearly faints from hunger, Kindan is there to direct her firmly to the kitchens to get food, since she's apparently been working a ten hour shift of stitching up dragons and humans. [So sutures and their technique definitely survived, Wind Blosson.] So has Kindan, so he also sensibly takes a break. The kitchen staff do their best to stuff Lorana full of food with cheeriness.

When Tullea and B'nik arrive for food themselves, they don't get immediately served, as Lorana's server says sotto voce that she's helping those who help the Weyr, with clear implication that Tullea has not been. M'tal descends immediately on them as soon as he arrives in the Cavern. (There's a small bit earlier that I haven't quoted where Lorana realizes that Tullea should be out helping the wounded dragons as well, and she's not here.)

"What are the casualty figures?" he asked as he closed the distance.
"What?"
M'tal rephrased his question. "How many riders and dragons are too injured to fly in the next Fall, and how long will it take them to recover?"
"I don't know," Tullea snapped. She thrust a hand toward Lorana. "Ask her."
W'ren, M'tal's wing-second, entered the Cavern and placed himself by his Weyrleader.
"I am asking you," M'tal said. "With the loss of Breth, you have become the Weyrwoman of Benden. It's your duty to keep track of the injured."
Tullea recoiled from M'tal's words and then, as the full import of them dawned on her, her eyes gleamed and she gave him a wicked smile. "That's right, I am, aren't I?" she said with unconcealed glee. She gave B'nik a knowing glance and returned her gaze to the Weyrleader. "And when Minith rises, who knows who'll be Weyrleader then? Mind your manners, M'tal, you wouldn't want to upset your queen, would you?" Tullea purred.
M'tal gave her a hard, penetrating look. "Your duty is to the Weyr, Weyrwoman."
"I'll do my duty," Tullea snapped, "when my queen mates. As for now, ask her." She cocked her head toward Lorana.
"Tullea," B'nik said pleadingly.
Tullea looked down at him and merely shook her head. "And there'll be changes in the Caverns, too," she said in a louder voice before she sat back down.

Tullea is set up in contrast to Salina, who gets a fire back in her eyes as the habit of being the Weyrwoman takes over when everyone sits down to eat. Salina makes very certain that M'tal is eating, then K'tan, then W'ren, and finally, herself as well as she has Lorana run off the casualty and fatality list that K'tan delivered to M'tal right after this spat with Tullea. First for Benden, which will be down about seventy dragons due to death and injury, with thirty more that will need a week to recover, and so will be sitting out the next Fall, and then Lorana mentions that she felt each of the dragons that died, regardless of whether they were Benden's or not, and she thinks there may have been around a hundred fatalities across the planet for this Fall.

[Something I didn't notice on the first run of this is that throughout a lot of these stories, dragonriders will lose their dragons, and will not end up committing suicide right after them. Salina, for example, is put on watch, and then is able to beat the depression by essentially resuming her duties as Weyrwoman. So, again, it seems like knowledge that should have been preserved about how to to keep dragonriders alive to talk and teach the next generation is to make sure they don't have a moment that's not busy after they lose their dragons.]

I am again looking for a more complex reason as to why Tullea is being portrayed this way. We know that dragons choose their riders, and gold dragons are looking for strong-willed people with excellent telepathic abilities. Presumably, the Weyrleaders and bronze riders are looking for someone with leadership capability (and someone who will accept their leadership or want to lead with them). The trickiest part is that if a candidate turns out to be Tullea or Kylara or Lessa, you end up with someone who the bronze riders have to negotiate with, or someone that needs a specific bronze rider they can either control or who is willing to put up with them. Because the dudes don't like acknowledging that the queen dragon rules the roost, and so, theoretically, her rider does, too. [A commenter on the original suggests that Weyrwoman are instead selected because of how much they cause pantsfeels in the bronze riders, which is true for a lot of the Weyrwomen, except that if they're coming from outside the Weyrs, and they're selected by the blue riders, who are canonically the receptive partners and generally pretty gay, it's odd that they're the ones who have figured out who's going to be hot for the bronze rider.]

And yet, because Pern runs on The Patriarchy (thbbbpth), any time a strong-willed woman shows up, the narrative makes quite sure to portray her in a terrible light. With Kylara, it was that she enjoyed sex too much, and had sex with people who weren't other dragonriders, and thought that her position as senior meant she didn't have to do any of the work. With Tullea, she's seemingly not interested in sex at all, unless with B'nik(?), but she's portrayed as far too enamored of the power she can wield and the prestige she gets from the position to contribute to the running of the Weyr. Lessa, before she decides to work within the system, is regularly beaten for being a woman with opinions and a desire to see them implemented.

We didn't see Tullea or Kylara (or Jora, if we're going to go back some distance) Impress, so the only characterization we get from them is their behavior around the dragonriders. Even though Lorana could, albeit accidentally, ask what's going on with Tullea. And then apologize profusely for it afterward, but it would give her information she desperately needs, and it would humanize Tullea enough for us to form an opinion about her, rather than the suspicious reaction I have because the narrative does not do well by their women characters.

However, before we get back to this puzzle, the narrative shifts over to D'gan [ASSHOLE!] who is absolutely livid about his own losses, which were much more severe than Benden's. He blames it mostly on the winds making the Thread fall unpredictably. But if he's drilling his the same way that M'tal drilled his own, then they had the same inability to react to the changing circumstances.

And speaking of getting backstory, we get the reasons why it bruises D'gan's ego so greatly to have had such a disaster. Because all of the other Weyrs apparently begged off on supplying Igen with a new queen egg, and D'gan made it his mission to Show Them All by becoming Weyrleader of Telgar and then the very best Weyrleader there ever was.

Thankfully, we don't stay with D'gan, and instead kick over to C'rion, who is dealing with losses, a big clump of sick dragons, and a lot of people who are losing theirs (which causes a bit of having to remember to not contract the name anymore, as the honorific disappears when the dragon dies. Which is pretty shit behavior, I might note, to change someone's name as a reminder of what they lost. [And is probably counterproductive for actually helping those dragonriders survive.]) and who aren't able to necessarily cope with the loss of their own dragon or comfort others who are doing so. On that downer note, the chapter ends.

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." This is as true in ecosystems as it is in physics. Any new species will incite a reaction from the ecosystem.

--Fundamental Principles of Ecosystem Design, 11th Edition

Chapter 12 opens with the end of the First Pass. M'hall feels that he's made it to the end, and while they still set sentries to be sure there aren't more, the dragonriders (and others) apparently set themselves to the business of having a good drink and party at having survived all the way through to the end. With the first toast to absent friends, of course.

Then we spend a moment with Emorra, who realizes that she's particularly drunk, wondering where Tieran is, since he wasn't at the Drum Tower, and then, upon hearing his and Wind Blossom's voices in the same room, bursts in on the suspicion that they might be knocking boots. That's not happening - instead, they're still trying to work out whether the infection in the fire-lizard can cross over to the dragons. Emorra doesn't have much to contribute to the conversation, being blitzed, but it does allow the narrative to then jump forward to a sober Emorra having a conversation with Tieran, Janir, and Wind Blossom as they each stake out their positions about whether or not the infection is bacterial, or whether the bacterial infection the antibiotics killed was opportunistic, and the fire-lizard managed to fight off the real infection thanks to the antibiotic killing everything else that was trying to get in while the walls were down.

The drunken Emorra scene could probably have been cut, since all it serves purpose is to make Emorra look bad and accuse her mother of favoring Tieran, less elegantly than she would have liked to. I don't understand the purpose of the scene.

It's also taken the larger group this long to actually pay attention to the details of the harness, apparently, so be they know to call Grenn by name.

Emorra was studying the beadwork carefully.
"This symbol here—do you see it?" she asked, holding the harness up to the others. "What do you make of it?"
"There's the caduceus of Aesculapius," Janir said. "The standard symbol for medicine—"
"Or a doctor," Emorra interjected. She peered more closely at the beadwork. "But what's beneath it?"
"It looks like some sort of animal," Tieran suggested tentatively.
"But it's hard to tell," Janir complained.
Emorra looked at them all. "I just received a message from Igen, detailing a plan to begin a beadworks," she told them. "To my knowledge, there were no beads brought over from Landing, but any that landed with the original settlers."
She fingered the small beads sewn into the firelizard's harness.
"These beads should not exist."

There's your proof, then, that Grenn's from the future and they are now involved in a time travel plot. Although in the next scene, Emorra seems to be arguing with Wind Blossom that the fire lizard is still from their time, which doesn't make sense at all. This is the sort of thing that an editor would hopefully catch and ask for clarification or a reworking of the scene. And since what it really does is give time for M'hall to arrive so they can talk about how it's pretty close to definite that this fire lizard is from the future, the scene itself could be excised without worries. Especially since M'hall and Wind Blossom point out everyone knows the time travel trick of dragons and that "oh, some beads must have been missed in the trip" is only a plausible explanation to those who don't know or want to accept time travel, and for those who don't believe in Joel Lilienkamp's meticulous records.

M'hall and Wind Blossom discuss the worst case scenario of the illness being communicable between all three fire-lizard family species. Wind Blossom says she hopes the watch-whers will be immune, because they're a deviation from the original fire-lizard genome ("Dragons 'writ' differently," she says, in response to M'hall saying dragons are fire-lizards writ large.)

Wind Blossom says she doesn't know enough about the problem to do much about it, and M'hall correctly surmises that getting more information would require more subjects, which might mean bigger subjects.

"Is that why you ordered all that agenothree?"
"Do you mean nitric acid, HNO3?" Wind Blossom asked primly.
The redheaded dragpnrider blushed. "Yes, I do," he said, looking chagrined. "When you're flying Threadfall, you tend to slur words, so it becomes agenothree."
"Mmm," Wind Blossom murmured noncommittallly.
"You're teasing me!" M'hall exclaimed suddenly with a startled laugh. "I don't believe it! You're actually teasing me."
Wind Blossom lowered her eyes shamefully for a moment and then raised them again to meet his. "It is very rude of me, I know," she said sheepishly.
"I never even knew you had a sense of humor."
"My mother would berate me for it," Wind Blossom agreed. "However, it has kept me company in trying times. I had hoped to keep it under control but apparently it got away from me again."
"Oh, you enjoyed that all right," M'hall said, wagging a finger at her. "Don't deny it, you enjoyed it."
Wind Blossom nodded. "I do not deny it."

[There's another Cocowhat!]

Not for Wind Blossom having a sense of humor, which is entirely healthy, but that the A+ parenting of Kitti Ping demanded that Wind Blossom suppress her sense of humor. This is probably another artifact of parenting in other cultures I don't understand, but it seems entirely monstrous to me that a child and woman should be expected never to show humor. Everything would be far less cheerful and colorful and worthwhile without the ability to crack a joke and get / give a few smiles. About the only reason I could see someone wanting to squelch a sense of humor is if it was cruel "humor", rather than genuine laughs. We can't tell what Wind Blossom's actual sense of humor is, based on this small excerpt, but that we don't know what her sense of humor is (other than "perceived nonexistent") is a problem. It suggests even more how much Wind Blossom was messed up by her mother.

M'hall and Wind Blossom then talk about Wind Blossom's short-term memory issues and how the Eridani system of specific bloodlines shepherding ecosystems is a disaster for this planet, given the inevitability of the native ecosystem of Pern providing pushback and the complete lack of knowledge that later generations will have to effectively manage their ecosystem, barring some basic genetic knowledge. Wind Blossom pins her hopes that some "thousand years or more", the people of Pern will "re-establish contact with the Yokohama or the other ships in orbit," and get all that knowledge back.

Of course, we know they will, and they'll use that knowledge to get rid of Thread as a problem. What happens after that, nobody really wants to write, except perhaps in fanfic, because writing a society that is grappling with the discovery of highly advanced technology left by their ancestors nearly twenty-five hundred years ago isn't interesting without the dragons and the otherworldly menace.

The chapter ends with M'hall offering what help he can give, and also suggesting that Wind Blossom take a vacation. Which, after thought, Wind Blossom decides to take him up on.

Chapter Text

Last time, we saw the effects of the first Fall of the Third Pass, and things went disastrously for everyone, because nobody had apparently decided that casualties were a thing that happened.

And an asshole continued to be an asshole.

Dragonsblood, Chapter 13: Content Notes:

(Benden, Third Pass, 4th Day, AL 508)

Dragon, turn
Dragon, climb
Dragonrider, watch for sign
Firestone, chew
Dragon, flame
Char the Thread, make it tame

I know we've complained about the quality of the poetry here, but this is terrible. I can't even figure out what it's supposed to be, much less anything to say about how effectively it does it.

This chapter opens with M'tal declaring they're going to run training exercises with mixed wings, and every so often, one of the riders is going to be "injured" to the point where they be to leave the battlefield and everyone else has to pick up the slack. None of the sick dragons are flying. There's a little grumble about how that realization is a day late, and a persistent grumble that Tullea doesn't seem to be helping anyone at any time, despite being the Weyrwoman now (and the traditional person to examine Records, rather than Lorana and Kindan, who are.) [Having seen how terrible things went in the immediate aftermath, things are now shaping up to do what they were supposed to be doing previously to it.]

It takes them most of the morning before M'tal feels "cautiously confident" they might be able to handle the next Fall.

The narrative hops back to Kindan and Lorana in the archives, and someone has finally put up an answer to the question of why there aren't fleets of apprentices copying Records, despite obvious signs of disintegration.

"Spoken like someone who never spent days copying old Records," Kindan responded. "Do you know how boring it is, day in, day out, copying musty old Records?"
Lorana allowed herself a slight smile. "I imagine there would be a lot to be learned," she said.
Kindan shook his head. "No, not really," he said. "Most of the Records are repetitious. There are only so many ways you can record crop yields and rainfall. Occasionally there's a note of a wedding or a birth but—honestly—you'd think whoever wrote those Records was numb! Not a single joke, no songs, nothing but dull, dry facts, Record after Record."

Data points are pretty compact to copy, and don't take up much room, I would have thought, and also, I would have expected shorthand and other space-saving ideas to develop quickly so as to make that pain less. Or, again, for someone to have sensibly summarized the dull dry facts into something useful, like "the average rainfall for the First Pass during the wet season was this many millimeters per day" and paying more attention to things that were strong variances in the pattern. Because, for the most part, they don't need that level of detail to be copied exactly. The trends are important, the data less so. Songs and jokes might also get compressed some, on the mistaken assumption that, say, all Harpers will understand if you say, "Key of C, tempo allegro, 12-bar blues" and then just write the lyrics and where the key changes, rather than copying out complete sheet music.

When faced with more information than you have storage and time to copy, decisions have to get made about what gets kept and what gets compressed and what gets discarded. [This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if the Pernese ever learned how to or relearned how to make graphs, so that all of that boring data that's been tabulated year in and year out gets compressed into a very visual form, making it easy for a Harper or anyone else to skim. Because bored people do things like illumination, or finding new ways to represent the data, or writing secret messages to themselves. That kind of thing.]

In any case, the two have been using a "sandglass" to time how long between calling dragons to drop out of the practice run, and after selecting one more dragon, Lorana suggests they start not at the most recent, but the oldest Records to see what can be found. It's a good plan, and Kindan acknowledges it, even as he dreads it, but nothing comes of it, and Lorana's good humor disappears into frustration.

"Musty, old, useless Records!" she swore.
Kindan gave her a shocked look.
"I'm sorry I ever suggested we start with the oldest ones," she apologized, stifling a sneeze. "My nose is running and my eyes are watering with all this dust. The writing's barely legible and I've probably missed something important because it's buried in a mass of gibberish!"

And now I wonder how these Records are organized. Because it would seem likely that "The Annals of Benden Hold's Crop Yields" would be in a different volume, or at least signposted differently, than "The Exploits of the Dragonriders of Benden Weyr". What it sounds like, though, is that we have a single volume called "Benden" or something like that, where records have been thrown together on the page without even the rudiments of an organization system, no headings for pages, no navigation aids, no date markers, just solid blocks of text that you have to read every word of to find the needle in the haystack.

In a society that prizes literacy and has at least some idea that they want to preserve things for next generations. I'm not saying they have to be perfect at organization, but it's been a running gag since the beginning of the series that any time someone has to go through the records, they're always disorganized, disintegrating, and otherwise useless, unless the plot demands that character get lucky and spot the right reference in a book. There are enough times that this happens that someone, somewhere, has to have developed a system to keep the Records straight and easily accessible, even if it is their personal system and nobody else necessarily knows it, and presumably has written that system down in a Record somewhere.

I realize I'm giving this way more thought than the authors have, collectively, but it is a truth of humans that once there's enough information that some of it has to be referenced, rather than remembered, organization systems are sure to follow. It would be a better plot for the volume that's needed to be misfiled, rather than the information needed being a single line in a random work.

[At this point, I also think it's worth mentioning that the first magistrate of Landing was also a librarian, and probably was very good at organizing and figuring out what the archives would want to keep and what they could safely not collect. And then revised that information regularly. Her descendants, and apprentices presumably would have carried on those practices, regardless of where they ended up getting their archives. So yeah, it would be much better for this story to be about not being able to find the things because someone else has the book checked out and doesn't know where it is, or something like that, rather than all of this archive-diving and trying to pore over terribly-organized records.]

Right after Lorana swears, Salina arrives and offers to continue while Lorana takes a break to care for her dragon, get food, and otherwise not be devoting all of her waking time to this problem. Salina quips that this is the sort of thing the Weyrwoman is supposed to do, or so she's heard, and Kindan decides (wisely, in my opinion) he's not going to say that those grumbles are talking about Tullea instead of Salina.

The next Threadfall has M'tal more confident (and better prepared) except for one giant spanner in his plans - Minith and Tullea appear, which causes problems in the carefully planned wings as, as we saw before, bronze dragons start following their instinct to protect a queen rather than what they need to do for Thread. Tullea insists she's doing her duty as the Weyrwoman, and M'tal eventually has Lorana explain to Minith that she needs to not be there, and the chaos subsides after the queen disappears.

That royally ticks Tullea off, and she's ready to give Lorana a knuckle sandwich, but that Arith appears, ready to protect her rider, and Salina shortly after. Lorana explains why she ordered Minith back at M'tal's insistence.

"I'm sorry, Tullea, but M'tal explained that if Minith were injured, she might not mate."
Tullea's eyes widened as the words sunk home. "I was doing my duty," she said dully. "I'm supposed to take on the duties of the Weyrwoman."
"When they're is only one mature queen," Salina told her, "those duties do not include flying against Thread."
[...Tullea acknowledges this, but insists again that Lorana has no right to order her around. Lorana shrugs it off and heads to her next patient...]
"This isn't over," Tullea growled at Lorana's back.
"If you're interested in a Weyrwoman's duties, Tullea, now is a good time to start," Salina said from behind her. "There is numbweed ready and those who need it."
Tullea's hands clenched at her sides and she turned sharply to glare at Salina, but the old Weyrwoman merely gestured toward the Lower Caverns.

And the narrative continues to portray Tullea as someone who can't do right by anyone and is determined to make every situation worse by being a part of it. In Kindan and K'tal's conversation in the next scene, K'tan says that Tullea used to be charming to the point where it's strongly implied he slept with her, but this was before she Impressed. (There's also a bit that says Kindan was considered to ascend to a Mastery, but he turned it down to stay at Benden, but I note only because we had so much trouble figuring out what Kindan was actually good enough at that would warrant his promotion in the last book.)

Nobody considers Tullea's behavior strange enough to have wanted to investigate it then, or to continue to wonder and request examination by the Weyr Healer to see if there is something they can detect that would indicate what's going on with her abrupt personality shift. It very much snacks of "wimmins be bitches, amirite?" and not wanting to do much examining of someone who will eventually be a Weyrwoman. Plenty of comments have talked about the lack of curiosity on Pern, and here's yet another example of it.

As was also pointed out before, Tullea might be the senior queen, and Lorana the junior, and Breth gone, but that should mean there are a couple more queens around, right? Unless, and this is reaching back very far into memory, someone decided that three was the maximum number of queens in a Weyr based on the early books instead of the later five or so, at which point everybody's accounted for. [The easiest explanation of the missing queens is that they died from Plague, either human plague or dragon plague, of course.]

K'tan wants to know how the other Weyrs fared in their Threadfall, but since Weyrs are autonomous, and some of them don't feel like sharing, Kindan hatches a plot to send an innocuous-seeming message to Zist so that he can get more information without having to be too obvious about it.

While that echoes, M'tal calls his war council and wants to get an update on his fighting strength. He wants B'nik to lead the next Fall to give him practice and experience at leadership, since it's extremely likely that B'nik will be taking over once Minith goes into a mating flight. To that end, he wants B'nik to know what sort of reserves they have, given that the casualties from the last Fall have cut in to their strength again. B'nik says he's up to the task, even with the projected casualties and sickness that K'tan suggests.

Then things resolve at the Harper Hall, where Kindan's message comes through - he wants Zist to "trade him news about the Weyrs." Zist takes his meaning and rouses Masters Jofri, Verilan, and Kelsa (you go, girl!) to discuss the request and its ramifications. Verilan has come up empty so far in searching for previous instances of sick dragons, fire-lizards, or watch-whers. The narrative trolls us again about the shoddy state of the Records.

The Master Archivist shook his head. "They'd much rather be copying your songs than dusty old Records that mean nothing to them."
"I suspect that in the days to come, your apprentices—and all the students at our Hall—will find their interest in preserving our old Records increasing," Master Zist said.
Verilan nodded in agreement. "These times do make us appreciate the need to preserve our history."

…because we haven't made it startlingly obvious how a classification system and summaries would have to be invented of they didn't already exist. Rote copying is for sacred texts that have to be done correctly or the magic smoke gets let out. "The Masterharper's Guide to Planet-Wide Anomalies" should already have any such events. Or something. [What, instead, we should be having is the summaries and indexes and compression of data as it gets copied from place to place instead of being copied verbatim, wasting space in a world where writing material is still at a premium.]

Kelsa is charged with both looking into songs to see if any of them sound like they were composed about or in response to sick or lost dragons / fire-lizards and composing a song so that other Harpers can collect the information Kindan wants.

Now that we know what Kindan asked for, we pop back to the Weyr, where Tullea is storming M'tal's quarters, demanding to know what sort of shenanigans are going on.

Tullea's nostrils flared angrily. "You will not make B'nik lead the Fall!" she shouted. "You're trying to get him killed so that your dragon will fly Minith!" She drew herself up to her full height. "Well, it's not going to happen! I'll not let it happen, no matter what!"

Lorana and Kindan are drawn by the noise. Lorana volunteers herself to go get some food. Kindan suggests lacing the wine for Tullea with fellis to knock her out, a suggestion B'nik confirms as Lorana meets him in the way down. B'nik is chagrined by Tullea's outbursts, but manages to calm Tullea down significantly with a well-placed hug after Tullea expresses a heartfelt concern about B'nik's well-being. Tullea's behavior is offered an explanation, by Salina, that's not "she's a raging bitch" for once.

"Stress does strange things to people," Salina murmured when their steps faced away.
"She wasn't like this before," M'tal muttered, looking puzzled.
"She said she's always tired, always edgy," Salina commented. She looked at Kindan. "Could it be something in her diet?"
[...Kindan demurs to K'tan, and suggests Lorana might know a thing. Lorana says that sometimes the animals just go off their feed for no explicable reason...]
"We'll, Tullea's been 'off her feed' for the past three turns now," Kindan commented sardonically.
"I think she's just scared," Salina said sympathetically. "And who can blame her? These are very worrying times."

Salina, unsurprisingly, turns out to have a reasonable explanation, as the only one of the lot who has gone through what Tullea has. And yet, despite everyone knowing that things have been strange for a long time, nobody seems to have been investigating or otherwise working on trying to solve the issues that Tullea clearly has. (Grumble. Therapists. There should be therapists.)

And Tullea tells B'nik something, when they're alone together that should set his hair on end, assuming he knows everything there is to know about dragons and their abilities.

"I never used to be like this," Tullea continued. "I feel pulled apart, dizzy; I can't concentrate. I feel out of control all the time, B'nik. And it's been like this for Turns."
B'nik nodded sympathetically.
"I want me back," Tullea cried. "I want to be who I was, not angry all the time."
She looked into his warm eyes and told him her deepest fear: "And if I lose you, I don't think I'll ever be able to do that."

I mean, there's an amount of unhealthy dependence here, if you think Tullea's in her right self at this moment, but now, I'm wondering how you can check, discreetly, to see if someone is existing in two places at the same time. J'trel told Lorana at the beginning of the book that being in two places at once produces irritability, and we saw how spending significant amounts of time in the same place as your past self is very unhealthy to your mental state. And it's been going on for so long, it probably would have ruled out most of the causes they would look for. A brain chemistry change, being twice in time, or an Impression that went off seem like the things that would most obviously cause a strong personality shift. Two of them can be potentially checked for with the level of tech and time travel Pern has.

[Based on the amount of twice and thrice-in-timing that happens in the later books, this is positively quaint, but the way that Tullea describes herself, how this is a big change from herself, and that it's been going on for this long, someone ought to be wondering if she really is twice-in-timed or something like it, just so they have an explanation of what's going on. And, based on this experience, the first time someone goes through the time-loop, they're irritable and distracted and annoyed. It's only the last time through where someone isn't affected by the fact that someone has been going through that time again.]

The rest of the chapter is Kindan, Lorana, and K'tan trying to figure out the method of the disease spreading, with several hypotheses suggested about how based on data that dragons lower down are more likely to be infected, and that more dragons have gotten sick since the quarantine went into effect. Lorana eventually recalls that isolation was the first step toward stopping diseases from spreading in herdbeasts and calls M'tal back to discuss things further. She also suggests a field trip to Fort Weyr to examine their records for anything interesting, following a pattern Lorana and Kindan found in their own search. M'tal says no, because they can't risk infecting Fort. And the chapter ends without a full set of data for us to draw or own conclusions, and with Lorana not pushing M'tal on the visit to Fort while they wait for Zist to come back with information.

We're nearly halfway through the book, so things should start resolving soon, right?

Chapter Text

Last time, Kindan and Lorana continued to prove they should have apprenticed to the Healers, while Tullea continued to show signs of being time-split without anyone putting two and three together, and the dragonriders continued to scramble to try and put together enough dragons to successfully fight Thread.

Dragonsblood, Chapters 14, 15: Content Notes: Consent Issues, Dragon Mating Flights, Cruelty to Clearly Intelligent Species

(Fort, Third Pass, Day 6, AL 508)

Thread Falls
Dragons rise
Dragonriders scan the skies
Dragons flame, Thread dies.

So, a variation on the poem from the last chapter, then.

The chapter starts with the Fort Weyrleader, K'lior, preparing to fly his first Pass against Thread. What's interesting about this is Cisca, his Weyrwoman, almost certainly has human-human telepathy, in the repeated ways that she can figure out what he's thinking, even as he tries to hide it from her, and even when he didn't say anything aloud at all. This is not remarked upon by the narrative in any way outside of K'lior's confusion at how his thoughts can be so transparent to Cisca. Despite, outside of a small and select number of sentences in this entire series, human to dragon telepathy has been the norm and what is expected. The narrative is not drawing attention to the oddity, and therefore it is important in some way for us to remember that telepathy works between humans, as well. [The commenters to the original are more inclined to believe that it's a trope where men are just so obvious in their emotional states, even when they're trying to hide them, that Cisca can read K'lior like an open book. That seems less likely, given who's writing this kind of book, and also, I think that we've also already had examples of the thing in the past and this might be this author wanting to bring some of those Esper abilities back.]

More immediately, K'lior can't help but be a monogamous Weyrleader, although he at least goes far enough to acknowledge that there should be all sorts of relationships in the Weyr.

He and Cisca had already formed a strong attachment before her gold rose for the first time, and while he understood and accepted the ways of the Weyr, he was honest enough to admit that he did not want any other dragonman entwined with her.

And there we are again. Good bronze and gold riders are monogamous and het while bad ones aren't, and all the other colors are freewheeling orgy factories. It's like there's a stereotype on display here about gay people and promiscuity but someone is trying really hard not to be as obvious about it as their mother was.

Anyway, we cut to D'gan [ASSHOLE] proclaiming yet again that all his dragons will fly, including the sick ones. And justifying being an abusive asshole by wondering why nobody takes his shooting at the level he intends it.

"We have only two hundred and twenty-two fighting dragons," he repeated, ignoring the startled looks on the faces of the other dragonriders milling about the Lower Caverns. They should be used to his shouting by now, he reflected. They should know that his roar was always worse than his flame.

]

That's not saying much, given that his "flame" is making sick dragons fly, accusing them of "shirking" if they don't want to train because they're sick, physically abusing people he considers beneath him, not caring who gets press-ganged into dangerous and deadly work, and so on, and so on. Yet here he is, proclaiming in his own head that he's not really all that bad. Just loud. It's not like he does anything to warrant terror.

Except, you know, that when, yet again, he says no to the idea of the sick dragons taking a Fall off to recover ("Harper, I heard no 'buts' in the Teaching Songs."), he characterizes it as a "repeated revolt" against his leadership.

But no, to listen to him tell it, it's everyone else that's the problem. Why hasn't he been replaced, deposed, exiled, or otherwise had, say, a massive amount of desertion in protest of his "leadership" before the Weyrs quarantined themselves? [The commenters suggest it's because the Rules say that the dragonrider whose bronze bangs the seniormost queen is in charge, regardless of whether or not he can actually lead, and the people of Pern have had such a respect for authority bred into them that they just never question anything if the Rules say that it has to happen. The Benden Weyrleaders of the Ninth Pass are able to do a few things with the tradition, but here, it's just allowing an asshole to remain in charge and to continue flattering himself to believe that he's not actually the bad guy. The more we still have to subject ourselves to the increasingly unhinged ranting of Donald Trump, though, and the more we learn about how he wanted to make sure he surrounded himself with sycophants, the more I feel like D'gan staying in charge despite all of this makes a perverse amount of sense, since, after all, despite two attempts to get rid of Trump, he had enough people who believed in him (or at least believed that getting rid of him would be unacceptable to their image) to keep him in power. Sometimes for the sole purpose of achieving what ends were available to them. I still feel like D'gan should be suffering more attempts from others to displace him from leadership or displace him from life, though. If Tullea can yell about someone trying to get rid of a rival, some of those rivals can try harder to get rid of D'gan.]

Then on to C'rion, who is hoping that a small area to cover in Fall and the new tactics to account for losses will make his Fall one without casualty. His Weyrwoman, Dalia, reflects on the losses and on a gain: Jassi, filling in for the lack of a Weyr Healer after his dragon died, has essentially become an authoritative figure in running the Weyr. So much so that Dalia thinks she should stand as an egg candidate.

Back to K'lior, who arrived in the right place, but apparently, facing away from the Threadfall's approach. They get reoriented in time.

Back to C'rion, who pops in with a small concern about the weather, which is affecting the fall and making it unpredictable. It's his terrible luck that a Thread clump lands directly on him from above and scores him and his dragon, Nidanth, so much that they both go to hyperspace to die, leaving J'lantir in charge of running the fall.

Then to Kindan and Lorana, and the reality that Lorana continues to feel each dragon's death quite keenly, and Kindan, after being summoned by Arith, discovers that Lorana had been sketching each of the dragons and riders as they die. Not in full detail, but enough to get the point across. To his credit, Kindan asks for scented oil. To his detriment, he doesn't actually explain that he wants it so he can give Lorana a massage, which he does, first with her neck, then up her hands and arms, and then her feet and legs. He's skilled enough that Lorana enjoys it greatly, and basically falls asleep after he is done, but the narrative doesn't even bother with the two sentences it would take for Kindan to explain and ask Lorana if that's what she wants. He does say that it's obvious her hands are cramping because of the number of drawings, but he doesn't, say, ask if she wants to be touched while she's having some serious grief and trauma.

Which makes it that much sharper of an issue when the next scene starts.

In the morning, Lorana woke suddenly with a burning passion, fierce and nearly frightening in its intensity.
Kindan ducked his head in, eyes snapping with emotion. "Tullea's Minith has blooded her kills."
"She will mate soon," Lorana said, stretching her senses and feeling the young queen's passion. She looked up at Kindan, her eyes warm but also challenging. "Stay with me?"
Kindan gave her a surprised, half-hoping look. Lorana sat up in her bed and patted it.
"I've never been near a dragon's mating flight," she explained.

I…find that hard to believe, to be honest. Just because the regularity of them would suggest as much, but Lorana has also been in the Weyr for a while. Unless the sickness is also curbing a dragon's sex drive, the greens should be still trying to get someone to chase them. And, presumably, being in the Weyr for this long has given Lorana ample opportunity to understand what goes on during a mating flight, if she hasn't had it drilled into her directly because she's a queen rider and will have to follow the procedure herself soon enough. The way the narrative phrases it, it's like they want Lorana to say she's never had sex before, so that her first time can be with Kindan, the golden boy. The way they've phrased it, though, I'm way more worried that Lorana hasn't been given enough information to understand and consent to what is about to happen to her. Except Lorana had fire lizards, and back a few chapters, she specifically mentioned that she's been through fire-lizard mating seasons, so the difference should be understanding the degree to which the emotions affect people. Except Lorana is already well-poised to understand this, given how keenly she's been feeling everyone's death. So Lorana might understand completely. But I still don't think she would say that she's never been near a flight before.

Kindan moved to her and, at her beckoning, sat on the bed beside her.
"The emotions from dragons mating are very strong," he said, his voice low.
At that moment, Lorana gasped as she felt Minith being caught in her mating flight and—
When she could speak again, she leaned up and captured Kindan's mouth with hers, kissing him deeply.
Kindan responded by clutching her more tightly, returning her kiss as ardently as she had given it. Like dragons entwined, they drew together, burning with a passion born on dragonwings.
Afterward, they broke apart, still touching each other loosely. Lorana looked at him as he lay beside her and traced the line of his jaw lovingly. Kindan turned his head, caught her hand, kissed it, and released it again, all with a gentle smile.

[There's a Cocowhat.]

Not so much the fade to black, but for the swiftness involved before Kindan can, say, explain to Lorana anything at all and see whether she really wants him there. It will be explained later that the mating flight was shorter than usual, so perhaps Kindan thought he had more time to explain, but when Pellar was with Aleesa, they had time to arrange everyone and gather some form of consent, or at least acknowledgement of what was about to happen. Maybe the author felt that Lorana patting the bed and asking Kindan to stay was consent enough, but by that point, Lorana is probably already being influenced by Minith. Kindan, likely, too, but any of the bronzes in flight. So meaningful consent is shot by the time it could be sought. And also, depending on how much of other books had been plotted or written at this point, how is Kindan reacting to this based on the trauma of Koriana's death? Has it been long enough that Kindan feels a pang but has moved on? Is he still mourning for her more than thinking about new relationships? Was he working up the courage to ask Lorana? That it's essentially "Kindan and Lorana are totally fine with this and very affectionate toward each other after the mating" skips over a lot of very important questions about how the mating drug works and what everyone actually thinks about it afterward, when they're not under dragon-influence. [And, at least when Pellar was being paired off, they had time and inclination to engage in gathering consent and to explicitly point out that what happens during a mating flight doesn't mean anything, either in making or breaking any contracts, even if there are some people who want to stay with the person they were paired up with after the flight happens. So that doesn't get explained, and Kindan doesn't ask for consent with regard to the massage, and we don't know whether Kindan actually wants to be overrun with the mating emotions, even though he's been in Benden for several Turns at this point. Maybe he does want that, specifically because it means he doesn't have to choose and he doesn't have to feel like he's betraying the woman who died on him. Maybe he does because he thinks it will help him stay over Koriana. Maybe he wants it so that he can point at the mating emotions for the actions he wants to take that would otherwise not be okay. We don't know, and it's so fast that neither Kindan nor Lorana has time to explore it with their partner. And they also don't talk about it aferward, either.]

The next scene, after Lorana tells Kindan that B'nik's dragon flew Tullea doesn't help.

Tullea walked with the obvious soreness of a woman recovering from her dragon's mating. B'nik looked equally uncomfortable.
Lorana, on the other hand, moved through her pain, a smile close to her lips, her hand entwined in Kindan's, projecting the sense that the pain served a purpose that she accepted and welcomed.

[Another, stronger, louder Cocowhat goes here.]

SEX SHOULD NOT BE PAINFUL.

Seriously. And I would like to believe that dragonriders, to this point, have figured out that if mating flights are going to involve a lot of sex and friction, that there would be lube of some sort easily to hand. And also, perhaps, something to help keep weight off and muscles from getting sore, like hammocks or swings or other things. These should all be solved problems at this point out of necessity. Because the Weyrs are used to this and are culturally much less uptight about sex, or so we get told. And they have mating flights fairly commonly. [And, as I realized in the comments, if most of the sex is between men, then lube should just be an extremely normal part of any dragonrider's kit, or present in the orgy rooms, or otherwise, because Pern is not omegaverse and therefore we don't have self-lubing assholes.]

K'tan (who is narrating) continues to dissect the flight, wondering why Tullea and B'nik don't look nearly so happy, before recounting that Tullea couldn't or didn't want to control Minith (likely didn't, given that Tullea looked at B'nik, screaming at her to get her dragon under control, "with a smirk in her eyes"), which led to eating whole beasts rather than just sucking them dry of blood, and that the flight part was pretty short, with Minith diving into the pack of bronzes and getting flown by B'nik's Caranth.

A short mating flight, gorging on her food—those spoke of a small clutch and more problems for the Weyr with a Weyrwoman who would not control her dragon.

Given that Tullea then acts extremely swiftly to evict Kindan and Lorana from doing research in the Records Room and tells M'tal's wing to move themselves, essentially, as far away from her as she can send them, I don't think the problem they should be gearing up for is an out-of-control Weyrwoman.

Lorana still wants to go to Fort to raid their records, but there's no pathway to that until B'nik shows up and offers to personally escort them while Minith and Tullea are still asleep. Which gets Kindan to Zist for a conference, but first, B'nik (who is way better, in Lorana's opinion, when he's not having to be Tullea's man, just to continue driving home how much we're supposed to think of Tullea as a shrew) explains to Lorana and us about the consequences of timing it, although he only mentions extreme tiredness, rather than the other consequences that we've seen happen from prolonged time splitting. [And even then, he still doesn't think Tullea might be timing it in some major way.]

B'nik and Lorana conference with K'lior and Cisca about numbers and strength.

Cisca was even taller than her Weyrleader, a brown-eyed, brown-haired beauty with a strong, cheerful face. She was much more buxom than Lorana, but she carried herself proudly, her stride neither apologetic nor flaunting.

It's not quite "She breasted boobily down the stairs", but I'm not entirely sure how Lorana can tell that Cisca has achieved the socially acceptable balance between apologizing for her rack and shoving it in everyone's vision.

After talking about fighting strength, we switch to the Harper conference, where no real headway has happened there at all. The only message from High Reaches has been "Wait", and all Verilan has is the certainty that each successive incident of Thread and sickness is roughly halving the number of available fighting dragons to the point where there won't be enough to succeed in all of two more Falls, based on the attrition rate. [The message to wait, from High Reaches, is not anything that gives away the fact that High Reaches is being used to breed up enough dragons that will be able to resist the plague, but they could have done a better job of sending a message that should get everyone on the same page.]

There's a jump back to the Weyrleader conference, all now ensconced in Fort's Records Room where, finally, after a full day of nothing, Cisca finds a mention that a very specific room was built, after much argument, at Benden Weyr at the end of the First Interval. Then back to the Harpers, where everyone has confirmed Verilan's figures, and Kelsa brings up having rediscovered a fragment of a haunting song, which kickstarts Kindan's memory enough that he is able to sing back the song he had only a glance at before he had to try and help put out the Archive fire. Kindan is now certain the song refers to Lorana, the "young healer lass", even though the rest of the song is still opaque. Before more can be put to use on the song, Lorana bursts in and tells them, tearily, that Arith has gotten sick. And that's chapter 14.

Ecosystems are constantly changing, adapting to new life-forms, while simultaneously life-forms are adapting to the ecosystem. To engineer a change to an ecosystem is to commit to a lifetime of monitoring.

--Glossary of terms, Ecosystems: From -ome to Planet, 24th Edition

(Tillek Hold, First Interval, AL 58)

Chapter 15 starts with fog as Wind Blossom begins her "vacation" at Tillek. It's very apparent it's not a real vacation, as Wind Blossom has requested "a bell, a coil of rope, and some planking" from the local Lord, Malon, to accompany a shelter. Malon has no idea why Wind Blossom would want such things.

Insert another caustic rant about how fast knowledge gets lost on Pern, with extra spice because it stands credulity that in fifty years, everyone just about everyone has forgotten that the dolphins talk and can be summoned by bells and are otherwise quite happy to work with people.

It's premature, because within a few pages, the narrative will tell us that Malon "soon guessed" the reason that Wind Blossom came to Tillek and he tries to dissuade her with the thought that the water is too cold this far north. Wind Blossom is persistent, though, and intends to get the result she is looking for. My point still stands, though, that if Malon can "soon guess" that Wind Blossom is trying to call the dolphins, then he shouldn't be nearly as clueless as he appears about the materials she requested earlier.

I realize this is an author trying to avoid spoiling a very important point of the series up to this point, but it has the effect of unnecessarily complicating every section after this point and not being clear about what is going on, leaving a new reader without a clue, even as the older readers nod and smile, assuming their own memories are good enough to recall how someone summons a dolphin.

Plus, the title of the leader of all the dolphins is The Tillek. So that particular Hold should have a longer, not shorter, memory.

In between those events, though, we have another instance of foreshadowing, where Wind Blossom discovers that the watch-wher of Tillek has been chained up.

Wind Blossom turned to Tillek's leader and looked up at him with deadly intensity. "Why is it chained?"
"Oh, Tilsk here was always getting into mischief," Malon said dismissively. "It's for its own good."
"Watch-whers are 'he' or 'she'," Wind Blossom corrected sternly. [Which means the editors missed her calling Tilsk an it not two sentences above. Wind Blossom would have said she, because…] "This one is a green; that makes her a 'she'."
[&hrllip;Wind Blossom is very annoyed that nobody has been training with the watch-wher and what that means for the loss of knowledge…]
"What if we start chaining up dragons?" she asked, nodding in satisfaction when both Malon and M'hall recoiled in horror. She looked back up at Malon. "It is the same thing, to chain a watch-wher."

Wind Blossom also pointedly remarks that chained watch-whers can't accomplish their purpose of eating Thread when it falls at night, which surprises Malon to learn. And then he agrees to keep that knowledge secret so as not to alarm the Hold, rather than spread out widely so everyone knows to take good care of their watch-wher. So that knowledge will get lost at the next major disaster. [Because, again, this weird insistence that nobody understand the purpose of the watch-whers. At least with the grubs, it was a misunderstanding about why they needed to watch for them and beware. Here, there's a handwave in the direction of "people will panic if they knew the truth," but there's never a panic with all the people who do know the truth.]

There's a quick scene between Emorra and Tieran as they try to reduce the surface of the dragon illness problem, with no apparent success, before returning to Wind Blossom, who has successfully contacted the dolphins and had them retrieve some things that were "lost" during the Crossing. M'hall notes the success and Wind Blossom points out to him that these things are on loan, rather than retrieved, and at some point will need to be lost again. Which makes me wonder again about what the plot actually was in terms of throwing away all the equipment during the fleeing, as if that was the exact point decided where there would be no further need for their high tech.

Especially, as the equipment is unveiled, they have significant amounts of power still left in them. The equipment turns out to be a genetic code viewer and sequencer, as well as a mapper that will help those reading genes to understand what they're looking at. The chapter closes on Wind Blossom agreeing with Tieran that it would be easier for their future descendants to use the equipment in their time, if only they could be taught how to do it.

And one last note, the ships in orbit have collected the name Dawn Sisters from the astronomy students looking at them through a telescope.

So, we are setting ourselves up for a giant time-twist plot that is likely going to make me wonder a lot of things before all is said and done, and only some of them are going to have anything at all to do with the paradoxes that are being invoked or sidestepped because the authors wanted a plot to work more than they wanted to think about the consequences of that plot. That is definitely not a headache I am looking forward to. [And this is the tame plot. When we get to Fiona, things start becoming even more time-twisty and having people cross their own timelines on multiple occasions, including having to remember where Lorana and Tullea are, and utilizing Lorana for even more shenanigans than she already is getting into at this point.]

Chapter Text

Last time, Wind Blossom retrieved things she "lost" during the Crossing that will allow either them or their descendants to learn how to determine the origin of the dragon and fire-lizard disease and synthesize a cure to keep them all alive. In the future, nobody has answers or ideas, other than cryptic messages, and Arith has now caught the sickness. Even so, nobody seems to be doing a whole hell of a lot in trying to determine how to protect themselves against the sickness.

Dragonsblood: Chapter 16: Content Notes: Casual Ablism,

Firestone, dry
Dragons fly.
Firestone, wet
Riders die.

(Benden Weyr, Third Pass, Day 6, AL 508)

This used to be true, when everyone was using the volatile firestone that exploded on contact with water. But since C'tov discovered the safer firestone and Fire Hold has been mining it everywhere they can find it, this should be less of an issue. Unless wet firestone somehow doesn't produce enough gas in the second stomach of a dragon for them to belch fire. [The closest thing we get to the reason for this in this chapter is the difficulties that happen with Threadfall and inclement weather. Although, supposedly Thread drowns in water, so now I wonder whether Thread passing through a sufficiently forceful rainstorm would die before it made it to ground. And we're not quite to the point in the narrative where dragons are used as low-orbit spotters to know.]

The chapter opens with the return of Kindan and Lorana. Lorana peels off to find and comfort Arith about her sickness, while Kindan reports finding the records of the secret rooms at Benden Weyr, and B'nik has only the suggestion that those rooms, once built, have suffered from cave-ins that obscure them, and the assurance that they'll dig them out if they can. Arith assures Lorana that she'll be fine, and since Lorana's around, Lorana should continue trying to find a cure.

We pop over to Ista, where J'lantir has been appointed as interim Weyrleader by Dalia and elected with unanimity by the Wingleaders, and now he has to fight Thread with a severely depleted fighting strength, and in terrible weather. Dalia is fighting showing emotion about the fact that there will be more dead dragons by the time Threadfall is done, because the reality is far different than what you read in the Records. There's a quick pop back to Benden, where Kindan is diverted from his task of finding the cave-in spaces to be emotional support to Lorana, because dragons fighting Thread means Lorana feels it all and she might want someone there to comfort her. He provides Lorana with a massage and Arith with pats and scritches through the entirety of the fall and the deaths that come to Lorana. Then it's back to Ista, where J'lantir has to deal with the casualties of the Threadfall.

M'kir's left arm was in a sling, his shoulder heavily bandaged where Thread had gouged it, the left side of his head bandaged to hide the gaping hole that had once held a fierce blue eye.
[…everyone looks terrible and tired. J'lantir is staying upright mostly through force of will rather than any real reason to do so…]
S'maj was the only Wingleader left beside himself. B'lon was favoring his left leg, wrapped in a bandage placed over his now-useless flying pants—a long thin line of blood showed where Thread had eaten through it and into his leg, but the score was not deep.

[Given that dragonriders aren't particularly mobile during fighting and Fall, (they have to reach their firestone sacks and feed their dragons, and possibly steer their dragons into the fight, but that's it) one wonders whether the fighting pants, which are probably thick leather (that's still organic enough for Thread to eat through) could be supplemented with metal greaves and various plates of armor so as to better protect their bodies in flight. Even with the restriction of "iron is a rare and precious resource," we know that dragonriders would be able to requisition, politely or otherwise, whatever supplies they are interested in having, so they could produce things to help them avoid damage and protect their sensitive bits. And that the Smiths would probably have at least one division dedicated to trying to figure out how to make effective protection against Thread that doesn't rely on "don't get hit" that might be able to figure out how to create blast furnaces and the other technology to re-create ceramics as a potential defense against Thread. Or to figure out if there are animals that can take hits from Thread and stay alive and replicate that in their own work. Because it's tragic that so many riders die in Threadfall, it really feels like there should be work done on trying to keep them alive. Or at least to explain that the dragonriders are so poisoned by toxic masculinity that they would categorically reject safety equipment as anathema to their image.]

Dalia then comes in with the casualty figures for the Fall, and it's clear that Ista now lacks the fighting strength to do that again.

But before we can talk through the implications of that, we pop back to Benden and Kindan and Lorana, who are covered in dragon snot and have to get cleaned up before they can take Arith out to get a drink. Where they run into Tullea, who is still being written as someone who is jealous and lazy and indolent.

"Well," someone behind them drawled, "now that the two of you have deigned to join the rest of us, perhaps you'd care to look for these special rooms I've heard so much about."
They turned to see Tullea leaning indolently against Minith's foreleg. B'nik was beside her.
"Arith was sick," Lorana explained, turning back to catch sight of the young queen as she splashed back to the shore.
"All the more reason to search, then," Tullea responded. "Unless you two are more inclined to cavorting?" She cast a disdainful look at Kindan's bare chest. "And get some clothes on."
With that, Tullea turned away from them and headed back to her weyr, B'nik following, stony-faced.

At this point, the narrative is just giving us grief, and letting us yell at all the characters everywhere that they are still not entertaining the weird, not-usual suggestions for causes of Tullea's problem, because all the usual ones seem to not be working. Tullea can't necessarily answer the question "are you time-displaced?" because she doesn't know, but it's still the most logical explanation for her sudden behavioral shift.

[Tullea lacks a leg to stand on here, since she was not that many chapters ago being castigated for not being present with the implication that she and B'nik were canoodling. But now that she's Senior, apparently she's lost any empathy she might have had from when she wasn't. I can chalk that up to being time-displaced, but again, nobody is actually looking for this as a solution right now.]

The part that immediately follows here, though, is good writing, and I wanted to highlight it, if for no other reason than to point out that the new author has at least an inkling of an idea of the female gaze and can use it.

"Tullea giving out to you, was she?" Kiyary asked, smiling evilly. "I can see why, too—your bare chest is enough to make a dragon swoon."
Kindan, who knew full well that most dragonriders were, of necessity, more muscled than he, took Kiyari's mocking in the well-intentioned manner it was delivered. "it's all that hard work with my guitar," he said, grinning.
"And those drums up on the heights don't hurt either," Kiyari responded, giving him a more thorough appraisal than when she'd been teasing him. "Come to think of it, maybe Tullea has a point."

This is good writing. It helps to establish Kindan's frame (lean and strong, rather than overtly muscular) as well as establishing, generally, that dragonriders are buffer than most people from their work.

Well, dragonriding men, anyway. I would absolutely love to see a Weyrwoman described as buff and muscular from all the work she does feeding and caring for her dragons, because, at least while they're Weyrlings, it seems like queen riders do exactly the same things for dragon care as everyone else. So there's plenty of opportunity for them to get strong and muscular as well. [Additionally, with the Weyrwomen having to do surgery and haul things and run logistics, especially during Falls and their aftermath, they're probably also hauling heavy shit around on the regular, so they would also tend toward the athletic build rather than something that's supposed to be all soft curves and fat reserves. With the very bro-culture way that the dragonrider society is organized, a Weyrwoman with curves is prized as the best, but I'd have to guess that at least some of the bronze riders are perfectly happy with a strong and muscular woman who has stamina and can keep up with them. (That whole "sore from mating flight sex" bit, for example, in a less gross presentation, would suggest that the bronze riders want someone who can have lots of sex when it's desired.)]

There's a brief interlude where Lorana's riding gear arrives, with metal caps for the steel studs engraved with her animal healer design. Lorana is very, very happy about this, and we get something that's got a certain amount of gender-subversions in it, even though I'm not sure on which end to put the most subversiveness.

"And I love the brightwork, Kindan. It's very well done."
"A friend of mine," Kindan told her.
"Well, please thank her for me."
"Him," Kindan corrected with a grin. "But I'll pass the thanks on."

I think what we're supposed to pull out of this is that dudes generally don't do fine detail work on precious metals. Except, you know, that Mastersmith Fandarel has pretty well been a fixture of being a giant man with the ability to do detail work from the beginning of the series? And I personally would have expected dudes to do that kind of work right from the get-go, so perhaps the gender-subversion is that Lorana defaults to assuming the person who did the fine-detail work is a woman instead of a man. Either way, there's something going on there. [The commenters on the original suggest that it's the fact that it's decorative work that makes it gender-subversive, because men don't do decoration, that's the kind of thing that women do, making things pretty and finished and beautiful, instead of merely functional and efficient. Which strikes me as weird for an author to assert given how much fine art there is that's made by men that people hail as beautiful on Terra. But, I suppose, if you have a conception of the world where, despite all of the settings where men are creating both functional and fine pieces, that ornamentation is done by women, well, there you are. It doesn't make sense to me because I can't get into the right mindset.]

Still frustrated at not finding any sign of the secret rooms, Lorana and Kindan decide to put the isolation plan into action and group all the sick dragons together. They can't decide on whether to put them up at the top and hope the cold helps or at the bottom so they can't infect anyone underneath them, so they ask B'nik about what to do. And B'nik isn't any help, because he wants to make sure they use the right quarantine protocol rather than one that might end up infecting the whole Weyr. This might go better, except that Tullea is there, and in her infinite wisdom, she decides that Lorana should have to go looking for the secret rooms herself and not to use any more Weyr resources. And she orders Kindan to play for the Weyr tonight with some sprightly, happy songs. During this, Tullea "pressed a hand to her head, as though to ease pain," which goes uncommented on.

[B'nik's not exactly the example that dragonriders want as a manly man in control of his Weyrwoman. More interestingly, however, he's a lot better at making decisions and giving orders when Tullea's not around. Which suggests that time-twisted Tullea is perpetually critical of everything he does or doesn't do in her presence, and while we haven't yet had it explained to us, the things that seem to leave when someone is twice-in-time are the things that keep emotions under control, so Tullea's basically running without a filter, and that's not pleasant for anyone, including her. With how much he lets her do what she's doing, I wonder how much he already knows that she's moving through time again and the best thing for him to do is not to aggravate her further, but to hope that whatever's sent Tullea back in time gets started soon, so she goes back to the person she was.]

Instead, once everyone is dismissed and Lorana's alone, Salina appears to help Lorana find the secret rooms. With only a little bit of description of the secret rooms and their absence, Salina immediately twigs that the secret rooms are hidden behind rockslides and cave-ins and immediately goes to get help, because she immediately knows where to go. M'tal, once she explains what she wants to do, says to wait and snag Kindan when he's done singing, because he's miner-bred, and therefore either the very best to handle the situation or the very best to get help if the situation goes south. The two hear Kindan singing as they go toward collecting him, first with a change of "The Morning Dragon Song" (boy, there's a call-back) to make it a gold dragon, and then Kindan decides he wants to sing the song he barely remembered in the Harper Hall Archives, which absolutely pisses Tullea off, and both her and B'nik tell Kindan to cease immediately. Kindan looks ready to pursue the point, but manages to demonstrate some small amount of wisdom and goes back to more traditional songs.

Which leads to Lorana wondering why she had that song about her, and her fear that everyone will see her as the person that brought the disease and hate her forever. Salina has a brief flash of anger at Lorana if it's true, but it immediately dissipates when she realizes that Lorana stands to lose her own dragon. Because Salina has had that experience, and knows full well that nobody would deliberately do that to their own dragon, and so she pledges to help Lorana solve the problem of the secret rooms and the disease.

Kindan is remarkably upset for having made those particular decisions. For a Harper, though, he's remarkably at a loss for creative words.

"Of all the stupid, ill-considered, blockheaded, unthinking—"
"Don't stop," K'tan told Kindan as the harper poured out a litany of self-contempt. "You forgot fardling."
"—fardling, moronic, imbecilic—" Kindan paused, groping for more words.
K'tan shook his head sadly. "A harper at a loss for words when they're so desperately needed."

Well, apparently fardling doesn't exist, but the other ones do, and point out that a lot of the words that we use for talking about our lack of smarts are generally ablist in nature. Remarkably, there are no slip-ups where religious terms can sneak in. Also remarkably, nothing scatological makes it into the list, nor anything related to dragons, so it seems like there's a distinct lack of swearing involved here, despite Kindan being more than upset enough with himself that a long string of swears would be utterly contextually appropriate. But we don't learn anything more about informal language choices on Pern.

Instead, K'tan and M'tal recruit Kindan to go look at the rockslide space that's near the Hatching Ground. One that K'tan never went near because it was dangerous as a child. That is, again, near the Hatching Ground, a space that just about everyone would be near or around at a large part of their lives. While the ability to miss something in plain sight while you're concentrating on something else is a well-documented effect, certainly, given that it's a hazard and it's around the Hatching Grounds, why wasn't it marked on the map of the Weyr? Plus, Kindan's been here a long time - surely he would remember the presence of the rockslide? Or any of the other riders tip them off to it, especially since it's "back by the way we used to come and look at the eggs back when we were candidates"? I'm very glad that Salina is the one to crack the mystery, because hooray for agency for women! But also, it seems like such a prominent feature of the pathway wouldn't be forgotten so easily. But I'm probably thinking too hard about this, or have unrealistic expectations about these characters. [It seems like the kind of thing that the miner-trained Kindan would have thought about occasionally, or been curious about, or wanted to make sure wasn't dangerous or going to slide more because rockslides near where the dragonets is a great way to lose a clutch, or a gold dragonet.]

They dissuade Kindan from trying to excavate the space himself, so instead, Kindan calls on Camp Natalon and brings back Dalor, Renna, and several of the miners from the camp to excavate the cave-in. Once they see the space, Dalor is pretty convinced that this is the right spot to mine. Plus, Camp Natalon immediately acquits themselves as the right people for the job.

"Look here," Dalor said, pointing. "You can see where the rock faces are formed. They must have hoped the two layers would never slip over each other, or they must not have realized what they were dealing with."
"Slip?" M'tal, who had been following along, asked.
"Aye, my lord," Dalor said with a nod. "There are two different layers here, see?" He pointed to the spot where the different colors were close to each other. "You can tell by the color. The layers can slip over each other, which happens when there's an earth shake."

An excellent explanation. Not a couple paragraphs later, after trying to figure out how much rock might need to be excavated, Regellan suggests that it's only a meter or two if the rocks slipped at the layers, so that the roof was the only thing that gave out. Dalor compliments Regellan as "quite the thinker" and then sets his work crews to get things out, telling Kindan and M'tal to get out because they lack miners' hats. It takes them about a day to get through to the door, and Dalor accidentally refers to M'tal as the Weyrleader in Tullea's presence, which doesn't make her happy at all.

Tullea marches in to the corridor, glow in hand, and starts examining the newly-opened space. And the narrative gives us another reason not to like her.

"This looks like a door," she exclaimed. She hunkered down, peering to either side of it. "What's this?" she asked, seeing a square plate to the left of the door. She pressed it just as Dalor, who had been watching her actions with growing alarm, shouted "Don't touch it!"
Too late.
With a rumbling groan, the wall began to slide open and light flooded in from the other side.
Dalor raced to Tullea and pulled her back away from the door. Even as he did, she slumped toward the floor so that B'nik had to catch her other side to prevent her from falling.

Tullea's just passed out from the "bad air", thankfully, but I think this is supposed to be the feather in the cap of the way she's been portrayed as impulsive and selfish as well. She doesn't know what dangers are there, she doesn't have protection, and what she did could have endangered everybody there if it caused, say, a second rock slide.

This seems like a good place to stop, as we're about halfway through the chapter, and there's a lot to be described coming forward that will hint at what is to come. Because we have now discovered the solution that the First Interval left for the Second. Assuming they can figure it all out.

And there will be more Tullea-bashing yet to come, and I've basically had my fill of it to this point. More next week.

Chapter Text

Last time, the Benden Weyr crew called in Camp Natalon's miners to help them clear a rockslide that turned out to house one of the secret rooms mentioned in very old records. The narrative went out of its way to portray Tullea as selfish, jealous, and otherwise the perfect example of a terrible Weyrwoman, in comparison to the all-loving Lorana and the full-of-determination Salina.

Dragonsblood: Chapter 16: Content Notes: Misogyny, Authorial Railroading

Where we left off, Tullea had just opened the secret room and passed out from the old air that came rushing out. The Natalon miners are sent on their way, despite there being more rockslides to clear that are likely to contain secret rooms, because what they've discovered is enough for B'nik and Kindan to believe they'll be occupied for a while.

What have they discovered? Something wondrous, but the narrative is still very insistent on showing us at every opportunity what a brat Tullea is supposed to be.

Tullea elbowed her way past the others and raced to be second into the rooms. She paused just past the threshold, not so much for fear of bad air but in amazement at what she saw. Most the far wall was covered from floor to ceiling with a drawing of several ladderlike columns composed of weird interconnected varicolored rods and balls.
"Look at this!" Regellan called out, pointing to the drawing, as the others flooded into the room.
Tullea glanced at the wall drawing, made a hasty scan of the room, and then headed unerringly for something glittering on an open shelf at the other end of the room.
Kindan entered the room and stared wide-eyed at the drawing. Then a flash of movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention and he turned just in time to see Tullea pocket a small, silvery object. Before he could move to intervene, she was picking something else up from the counter.
"What are these?" she asked, holding up a crystal clear glass vial. She shook it, examining the powder-like substance inside, then casually placed it back on the counter and picked up another.
There were four vials in all, Kindan noticed. The countertop bore not only dust-free spots where the vials had been placed. Each clear spot was centered over a colored mark: red, green, blue, and yellow.
His eyes widened as Tullea negligent;y put the fourth vial back on the countertop, well away from any of the colored marks.
"Do you remember which vial went where?" he asked her shortly, trying to see if he could guess the original position of the last vial she'd picked up.
"No," Tullea replied with a shrug.
"I think it's important," Kindan told her. B'nik came up beside him and frowned at the misplaced vials.
"I'm sure you'll figure it all out," Tullea replied with a dismissive wave of her hand, turning to explore a set of cabinets. After some fiddling, she discovered they were magnetically locked and spent several moments opening and closing them before noticing what was inside.

At which point B'nik hastily ushers Tullea out with the need to send the Camp Natalon miners home, and that she needs to let Kindan and K'tan do their work.

There seems to be an adjective the author is going for here. "Childish" is what comes to mind when describing Tullea's behavior, elbowing her way in for the prestige of having been in there early, then stealing something and letting something else get put out of order, without any consideration as to whether it might be important, and then breezily dismissing it as something other people will fix, before getting distracted by the magnetic enclosures on the cabinets. Curiosity isn't a thing to discourage in this case, but there's also precious little information available about what this room is and what it's for, unless you recognize the drawings on the wall, which I do, since I'm used to seeing models with rods and balls used to describe the genetic makeup of things. But these generations of Pernese down the line do not, or at least, their understanding of genes doesn't include this particular representational model.

Anyway, the author seems very interested in making us want to hate Tullea, for all the potential damage she's doing to making Benden Weyr find themselves a cure, stealing things, rearranging others, and otherwise not caring. It's a marked departure, actually, from the Tullea that we've seen so far, who is cold and calculating and ultimately wants to protect her position more than anything. Unless we're supposed to have always seen that Tullea tries to protect her position, and B'nik, by aggressively trying to bring everyone and everything under her control. (Which we have seen exactly how well that works to this point, so…)

[If we're going by the thought that being stuck in time with yourself means you lose a lot of your emotional and impulse control, then Tullea's behavior makes sense. Also, magnetic locks should probably bring Smiths and others in to examine them and see how they work, since I think this is the first time that they've appeared in this series. There's just a lot of ancient technology and ideas in here, and the first instinct of a society actually interested in its history would be to document everything that's there and then let people at it to try and experiment.]

Kindan and K'tan discuss the contents of the room and talk about what the use of the various vials is likely to be, in conjunction with the syringes for injection discovered, but they get nowhere. They do find another door, but it's not responding to them in any sort of way. Lorana comes down to the room, because Arith is coughing and not sleeping well, and that means Lorana's not sleeping well. By herself, Lorana is already able to make a lot more sense out of what the room's purpose is, because she notices similarities between all the drawings on the wall, but more importantly, she realizes that there are four patterns on the wall, and there are four vials, one underneath each drawing.

Were the patterns supposed to tell someone which vial to use? Could it be the knowledge represented by those drawings had been so common when they were first drawn that no one had ever considered that the method of them might be forgotten and that was why there were only the vials and the drawings? Read the drawings and pick the vial?

Yes, indeed, friends, why would you put cryptic drawings somewhere that you expected your descendants to find and then not leave them a key to interpret those drawings and discover what the solution to their problems might be? There's no instruction manual, no paper or plastic copy of information that might be useful to decoding what's going on. Sure, what you would need to teach someone how to interpret a genetic code and get useful information out of what's there is not an easy undertaking, but it would behoove someone to leave a complete copy of information in as many places as there are supposed to be supplies or other things. And, also, that's the reason why the Camp Natalon miners should have moved on to the next rock slide, because if there were specific rooms (plural) mentioned in the record, discovering one does not mean you've discovered all of them.

[Now, in a world like ours, where 450 years is sufficient to change, say, from Old English to Middle English, or to move from a traditional Chinese to a simplified form, leaving detailed instructions to your successors might not work as well as hoped, if there's nobody who studies the language and you don't leave something like a Rosetta stone behind that would allow for your descendants to figure out what you're saying. But since Pern is specifically a world where the language hasn't shifted enough in 2500 years to make the AI and the Ninth Pass mutually unintelligible with each other (only needing to correct for "drift" rather than build a translation dictionary), there should be lots and lots of copies of complete instructions everywhere they can be stashed, just so that nobody misses them when they discover this space again. And that specifically point out whether this is the beginning classroom or the advanced classroom, so that your descendants know whether or not they're starting in the right place.]

Had they been working on other rockslides to see if they contained secret rooms, Lorana might not be feeling a significant time crunch on curing Arith and keeping her from dying. As it is, she can feel Arith's life ebbing away, and Arith knows it as well. So Lorana grabs a little of each of the vials and a syringe to inject it into her in hopes that the combination of each of the vials will be enough to save her dragon.

There's a quick interlude where Tullea is once again trying to interfere with Lorana's progress.

B'nik was shoved roughly awake. He tried t squirm away from his tormentor, but the shaking continued.
"Get up!" Tullea shouted in his ear.
"Mmmph, what is it?" B'nik asked blurrily. He turned on his side, facing Tullea, his eyes blinking furiously as he tried to see in the dim light.
"I need to talk to you," she told him.
"Can't it wait until daylight?" he asked.
"Of course not," Tullea snapped. "It's about Lorana."
"What about her?"
"I don't want her going to the Oldtimer room." Tullea said. "She's to be kept away."
"Why?"
"For her own good," Tullea snapped back. Her eyes darted to her dressing table. B'nik's sleep-muddled mind recalled that she had been playing with something silver and small before she'd gone to bed. He didn't recall her having a silver brooch or jewelry box.
"What harm could she get into?" he replied, sitting upright.
"I don't know," Tullea said, not meeting his eyes. "I just don't want her there. It's not her job anyway."
"She knows something about healing," B'nik protested. "She's been helping K'tan—"
"—Let her help with the injured dragons," Tullea said. "But she's not to—"
"Shh!" B'nik said, raising a hand. "Someone's coming."

That turns out to be J'lantir, who's come to beg for more dragons to fly Thread with in three days' time. B'nik promises reinforcements, and J'lantir pops back to Ista.

Let's pull back to what Tullea is doing. She doesn't know why, but she needs to keep Lorana away from the room, and while this could be put down to antagonism and jealousy (and, I think, having just read how Tullea behaved around the secret room, that's the conclusion we're supposed to draw), but we still have this giant problem of nobody wondering whether Tullea's time-split.

As with everything else, there isn't enough detail over any of the books to let an astute long-time reader know with certainty that this is the case, but Tullea's behavior has been markedly different for the last three Turns. If it were consistently parts of her personality that are not present, it might suggest that being time-split means some aspects of your personality disappear to constitute the other person at the same time. Tullea's obsession with Lorana and what she's doing might also be a clue that Lorana is the key to whatever caused the time-split, although Tullea is the least reliable narrator about Lorana's role and what should be done with her, because she's literally splitting herself between two places at the same time, and that can't be good for the mental health.

In this light, Tullea's intense curiosity and theft might be important to making sure the paradox doesn't happen. Which would be both neat and complicating if it turned out the Tullea that jumped back in time has some sort of control to make sure the events of the past happened as she remembered then. (Bootstrap paradox still applies, though: what happens on the first run?) Or can send her past self messages that get distorted in transit.

We'll never know, and by this point, I think the narrative wants our patience with Tullea to shatter, right before Lorana suffers a tragedy with Arith, so that we'll be in the frame of mind necessary to agree with whatever punishment gets sent Tullea's way for her incivility. [The blanket interdiction against "breaking time" does a lot of lifting to try and explain why people who know better can't give their past selves some useful things to work with that doesn't spoil it all. Like High Reaches saying "Wait." That's not enough. "Wait, it'll all turn out well in the end." is better. Or, as Hari Seldon did it, essentially, "wait until you no longer have a choice, then do the choice that remains to you with vim and vigor, for it is the correct choice." Plus, Tullea's jealousy of Lorana and everyone else betrays a deep insecurity about herself and whether she will be able to lead and whether everyone will actually like her enough to follow her, as opposed to someone who is smarter/prettier/more pleasant to be around. Tullea never really loses her edge, even when she reintegrates, but her complete is much better than her fragmented.]

The chapter closes out with Lorana mixing and injecting Arith with a mixture of all four serums. It does not go well for Arith, who complaints that it itches, and then that everything is very, very wrong, before Arith disappears entirely from Lorana, never to return. Lorana thinks Arith might have felt some other presence to go to, based on a very small sliver of feeling, but basically, Lorana is without her dragon, because Arith has gone to where she can't be found, and is likely dead or has accelerated the process of Arith's death. To put it mildly, Lorana screams as that part of her psyche is ripped from her, and collapses, having passed out from the strain of trying to hold on to Arith.

[This is not a bad thought to experiment with. When we find out about what is in those vials, we'll realize that it's a tragedy of not knowing and not having enough time to know, but it does suggest that the people who were designing this facility didn't think quite enough about what they were doing, in putting all four of the vials together. At least, that's how I envision it is, that each vial is underneath its picture, but they're all together, rather than having three of them on one end of the room and the fourth on the complete opposite of the room, so as to make it very, very clear that this fourth one is different than the other three and shouldn't be combined with them. Of course, the creators of these rooms probably also didn't anticipate their descendants finding the wrong one first and design with that idea in mind. Again, with all of those instructions present, so as to make clear that this is classroom #2, that should have been avoidable, but I can't really say much, because I doubt that people 500 years from now would be able to understand how our classrooms work, where the instructor is assigned the room and classes of various skills rotate in and out of it, rather than assuming that each of our rooms are numbered to indicate the skill of the learners, or the progression of the lessons and the grades.]

Chapter 17 next week.

Chapter Text

Last time, our Second Pass team discovered a present left behind by the previous generation for them. They don't have an actual clue how to use it, though, and Tullea's increasingly paranoid behavior is getting in the way of making actual progress. This didn't stop Lorana from attempting to cure her dragon with what was left behind. Unfortunately, all it appeared to do was accelerate the sickness, and Arith popped out of Lorana's reach, leaving her devastated and unconscious.

The dragonriders of the Second Pass are running out of dragons.

Dragonsblood: Chapters 17, 18, and 19: Content Notes: Standing on triggers

(College, First Interval, AL 58)

Any Eridani Adept willing to change an ecosystem must commit her bloodline to maintaining that ecosystem eternally.
--Edicts of the Eridani, XXIVth Council

[Shout-out to the screaming Cocowhat.]

Sorry, no, firm believer in individual choice here. Those descendants get the option as to whether or not to continue the family line and the family business. Which I think is what Wind Blossom is trying to engineer, given that Kitti Ping and Ted Tubberman and their first-generation descendants, save herself, are dead. [That is, Wind Blossom is trying to engineer a way of making sure her descendants, and the Tubberman descendants, don't have to continue maintaining the ecosystem because of the decisions of their ancestors. Because committing all of your descendants to this is a nightmare scenario for them. (It's probably supposed to make someone stop and think before they do things with consequences, but I would be really pissed if I were the seventh generation and locked into looking after an entire ecosystem because my ancestor made a decision to improve it some.)] It just doesn't make much sense to get rid of everything that could monitor the dragons, as well as the knowledge of how they work, unless you believe that the genetic program that created dragons is basically flawless and won't ever run into any issues down the line as evolution does its slow and steady movement toward finding vulnerabilities in your program. Or that those problems will be your descendants' issues and you don't have to care about that because you'll be dead and gone by that point.

Wind Blossom is having trouble getting to sleep as the chapter opens, and the arrival of Arith from the future doesn't help any. Instead, she's up and directing everyone to dissolve the dragon's corpse in acid to kill the infection still living on it. Tieran salvages some of the riding gear, so they can identify her, although he sinks the material and his hand into a vat of acid to make sure it's purified.

While the sterilization is ongoing, Wind Blossom is trying to understand how she knew to go outside, and how she knew when the fire lizards were arriving, and this mysterious connection she seems to feel to someone else, but the situation on the ground moves her mind on from such extrasensory musings to wondering why seeing the dragon the way it was had significance to her mind, but she can't quite put her hands on it. [It'll become clear when they figure out who Lorana is the descendant of, but the full ramifications of what's going on won't be clear until the really complex time-travel plot with Fiona gets going.]

Emorra calls her to breakfast, Tieran offers to stay behind and supervise the construction of Arith's grave, and Wind Blossom goes on. It's a short foreshadow chapter.

Thread scores
Dragons scream.
Thread burns
Freeze between.

That doesn't scan right, to me. Too many syllables? Or perhaps the /i/ sounds are too close to each other in the last line? [Most likely, nobody ever said these couplets allowed and realized what kind of problems they present.]

(Benden Weyr, Third Pass, 12th Day, AL 508)

Losing her dragon has not been kind to Lorana. Kindan has been sitting vigil with her for a couple of days, but Lorana isn't interested in anything. Salina evicts Kindan on the reality that he also needs sleep and rest and goes in with M'tal to keep watch on Lorana.

Turns out that Lorana can not just hear all dragons, she can block them all from talking to her as well. When K'tan arrives to check in on Lorana, he asks Salina what made her keep going after Breth died.

M'tal gripped Salina's hand tightly. The ex-Weyrwoman's eyes shimmered with tears, which she wiped away hastily before explaining, "I couldn't go. I was needed."
M'tal circled behind her and hugged her tightly against him. K'tan nodded, uneasy in the presence of their intense emotions.
"Then let's hope Lorana feels as needed," he said softly. He looked up at Salina, his lips showing the hint of a smile. "I'm glad you decided to stay—it'd have been much harder without you."
M'tal felt Salina stiffen in his arms and, through years of intimacy, correctly interpreted her gratitude at the healer's words. The ex-Weyrleader eyed the healer, however, with the eyes of a leader of dragonmen.

K'tan, you're standing on a big trigger of Salina's. In the most charitable interpretation, you don't know you're doing it, but that discomfort at intense emotion is a warning sign.

Also, I am not having this "many years of intimacy means M'tal knows Salina freezing up is a sign of gratitude" bullshit. Like, if we knew already that everyone knows K'tan is all abut the gallows humor, this world read differently. Instead, it looks like K'tan stands on Salina's trigger, then possibly hits on her (what's with the slight smile?) with the idea that had she completed suicide, the boys would be much sadder if they didn't have her as eye candy to look at. Salina freezing up makes sense, if she thinks she's in danger and she's already in a bad headspace, but as best I can tell, there's no gratitude in any of her body language, and M'tal is behaving protectively toward her in this line of questioning. Like, K'tan getting thrown out on his ass and M'tal and Salina sharing a cry would be what I would expect. It's like the author (or a beta reader) looked at the passage and said, "Dude, no, not cool." and the response was "I'll just put something in here about how she's secretly pleased and grateful, and my Hero can intuit this, so it's less creepy and wrong because I say so."

[Knowing a little bit more about things, and having received a lot more knowledge from people telling their stories of being assaulted or coerced, Salina's freeze response makes perfect sense as reacting to trauma or anticipating trauma, and that leaves Todd in the position of either not knowing what he's written, or more likely, Todd and his dragonriders are like those dudes who see a very clear sign that the woman they're harassing is uncomfortable and decide that because she hasn't articulated her no, she's giving them permission to continue. Todd mostly keeps a lid on his authorial preferences for the sexual practices of Pern through these books, but once we get to Fiona, all bets are off.]

Having been dismissed to get some rest himself, K'tan happens upon Kindan, singing the strange song he saw in the Archives. Kindan has a breakthrough and remembers the last of his verse, proving the whole song is essentially "There's a password on the vault in Benden. Say it, and the way will open."

Not that Kindan understands, and a drum message coming in distracts him.

Kindan smiled at him. "And the watch-whers fought the fall," he said, taking delight in the way the healer's eyes grew wide with astonishment.
"Nuella led them," Kindan went on cheerfully. "Looks like Wind Blossom's creatures have more of a purpose—"

Which unlocks the title of the song in Kindan's memory: "Wind Blossom's Song." (Not exactly inventive or creative on the title part, even if the music part is definitely that way for it to have stuck around long enough to be rediscovered.)

I'm also still…marveling a a good word to use, about how the fact that watch-whers can fight Thread at night has been forgotten and needs rediscovery. If Thread is the end-all destroyer of lives and livelihoods, as we are about to find out, then it should be seared into the cultural memory who can fight Thread and when. Especially when they can fight in the time that's not good for dragons because of visibility issues. We shouldn't have to deal with an understaffed Fort Weyr and Hold reckoning with the consequences of burrows that includes setting fire to old-growth (forty year-old) forests and thinking about the fallout of the subsequent erosion and the unemployment of the loggers and developers of that forest. A good Hold would have a fleet of wherhandlers on standby to deploy for night Falls.

Then again, it's been suggested plausibly that the Pern colony ship is more of a B ark than anything expected to succeed, and perhaps this is showing through for the convenience of the narrative to have other dragon-related plots.

[The commenters on the original say that not sharing knowledge is baked into Pern as a fundamental concept, which, at the time, made me rebel at the idea that Pern is a science-fiction novel, since many science-fiction novels are about the discovery and sharing of knowledge to solve problems, rather than hoarding it and never letting any of it go. We were still in the middle of the dystopia publishing sweep at the time, and also, it was right before SARS-CoV-2, where information, rather than being shared, was hoarded and distorted for political purposes, and disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation were provided instead so that politicians could claim that their narrative about what was happening was right. And also, QAnon and several of the other conspiracy theories that used to be comfortably fringe got extremely mainstreamed, and the President at the time attempted to leverage that to keep himself in power, despite reality intruding. The kind of stuff that we would go "there's no way you could sell this as a science fiction story, it's too unrealistic."

So, it's a little more believable at this point for Pern to have, as a bedrock of its society, a complete unwillingness to share information and a desire to keep all information secret, even when sharing that information would be helpful on a society-wide scale. Phooey.]

Right before this serious talk, Tullea has a heart-to-heart with Lorana that strongly suggests she's having strong emotions of her own in relation to Lorana and Arith. Of the "stages of guilt" variety.

"I said get out!" Tullea shouted for the third time at Tilara. "I'll call you when you're needed."
With a worried look toward Lorana, Tilara retreated from Tullea's anger.
"It's not like she needs a whole guard," Tullea muttered to herself as she heard Tilara's feet hasten down the corridor. "Probably going to tell Mikkala. Well, let her. I'm the Weyrwoman. Not even Salina can criticize me."
She looked down at Lorana, lying on her back, motionless, in her bed.
"I tried to keep you away," Tullea said, almost apologetically. "But you had to do it your way. Wouldn't tell anyone. The first we hear is you and your dragon shrieking in the middle of the night."
Her voice rose as her anger grew. "You didn't deserve that dragon, you know? You were so sure, so certain so willing to risk everything. You deserved to lose her, do you hear? You deserved it!" Tullea realized she was shouting at the top of her lungs into Lorana's ear and pulled back, both appalled at her own behavior and amazed by Lorana's unresponsiveness.
"You can't die," Tullea said. "Salina was with her Breth for ten times more Turns than you had months with your dragon and she didn't die.
"You can't die. You're not allowed, do you hear me? It wouldn't be right. You're not allowed, you're not..."
Tullea found herself on her knees at Lorana's bedside, cradling the woman's head in her arms, her tears falling onto Lorana's hair like rain.
"Please don't die," Tullea whispered, begging. "Please."

I mean, it's nice to give the reader evidence that Tullea does care, but it's happening out of sight of everyone else. If they observed this, maybe they might come more swiftly to the conclusion that Tullea is twin-timing and work to remedy it? [Strong emotional displays with no filter and swinging wildly between them, like someone would. The evidence is all there, but because Todd can't conceive of his characters being smart enough to figure this out, or because he wants to make the reader feel smart that they've figured it out well before the character have, or perhaps because Todd enjoys writing Tullea as bitchy and getting everyone to hate her, in the same way his mother got everyone to hate Kylara, we keep getting all of this happening without anyone twigging that it's not normal, except Tullea.]

After this outburst is the Fall over Fort where burrows happen and forests have to be burnt to ash to kill the Thread and stop it from burrowing. K'lion is upset that they don't have enough time to do anything, and then remembers that dragons can time-travel. So he hatches a plan to send the Weyrlings and the injured back in time so they can train and grow up and pop back ready to fight the next Fall with numbers. [And here is the first point, almost to the end, where someone finally conceives of a useful idea on how to bolster your numbers through using the skills and knowledge you already have.]

Before we hear much more about the plan, we shift to K'tan seeking Salina's advice about what it's like to lose your dragon, because he knows he's running on false hope. And he does cry at the impending loss of his dragon, because losing your minbonded friend is traumatic, no matter the toxic culture that demands he regain his control after he leaves Salina's presence. After relieving Tullea and making sure she didn't hurt Lorana, his dragon takes the one-way leap to hyperspace, which hurts K'tan entirely, but also brings Lorana back to consciousness. Between themselves, they swear to stop the illness. And there is Chapter 18.

Symbiont: A life-form that lives in harmony with its host, often performing valuable functions for the host, e.g.: E. coli in the human gut.

(College, First Interval, AL 58)

The College is in quarantine for dragons, so M'hall has to set his dragon down a ways away and approach on foot. Tieran explains to M'hall (skeptical that a dragon of that size was that young and also a queen) that Arith is about the right size for development at the thirtieth generation, confirming she's also from a future where the illness got to the dragons. Additionally, the piece of harness Tieran preserved had Benden's mark and the same animal healer mark Grenn had on his harness. At the hastily-called assembly of the Lords and Weyrleaders, Emorra tells them all it's a dragon from the future, shocking the Lords that didn't know time travel was possible and introducing the paradox that needs resolving: Since Arith shows signs of genetic manipulation, there has to be a way for that knowledge to persist into the future. Wind Blossom says she would likely die from the shock of being thrown into the future, and says there's no other person that could probably successfully defeat the illness than her, which neither Tieran nor Emorra object to. It's not likely the knowledge will pass down through the generations, given how few people know about it now, so to resolve the paradox, the College has to figure out how to get their knowledge and equipment to survive until the time it is needed. They resolve to do just that, and the chapter ends.

So now we are on track to likely cause a paradox in the future so as to resolve the problem of draconic illness. Of course, they could have also figured out a way to clearly communicate that Tubberman and Purman's grubs were beneficial to the planet, so that they had time to spread everywhere in the Interval and all the people have to do is go inside during Fall, but then we don't get dragons throwing flames in the sky.

I am again reminded of the message that states, simply, DO NOT MESS WITH TIME TRAVEL. But it's a staple of Pern by now, and so we probably shouldn't try to map out the continuity and figure out which of the many possible timeliness is the one that we are actually on.

More on constructing the methods of paradox next week.

Chapter Text

Last time, Lorana woke up and several more dragons died, between the illness and Thread. K'lior hit on the idea of time-splitting riders to give them enough healing and maturity time to come back and fight Thread, while in the First Interval, the College is making preparations to find a way of giving their equipment and knowledge to their descendants to defeat the plague.

Dragonsblood: Chapters 20, 21, and 22: Content Notes: Dubious, alcohol-influenced, consent(?) with no evidence of coercion,

(Benden, Third Pass, 22nd Day, AL 508)

Impression:
Mind to Mind
Heart to heart
Breath for breath.

That actually feels like poetry, for once. [It's also interesting that these poetry fragments seem to bounce around in style regularly, from lyrics to songs to more sparse, haiku-like constructions. And since we never get sources for where these things come from, we never get to know if some of these are the workings of the Pernese equivalent of Basho and others Dante and still others Maya Angelou. It would have been more work, of course, to put these kinds of details in, but it would build the world out much more richly.]

The chapter begins with the preparations for flying Threadfall, with the newly bereft Weyr healer Ketan (the narrative is cruel) having a chat with B'nik and Lorana about the conditions. A dragon coughs during the sequence, and Ketan waits until after everyone leaves to ask Lorana who the latest victim is. It's B'nik's dragon. But Caranth gets everyone through to the Fall okay and there's a sigh of relief.

It does prompt Ketan to ask Lorana if she would try to stop the Weyrleader from sending anyone if their dragon was sick enough. Lorana says she might just, before asking what would happen if they were allowed to teleport with a sick leader dragon. Ketan bluntly tells her it would be a mass telefrag. [Stick a pin in that thought, because K'tan's not quite right about what happens, but he's close enough that functionally, it would be the same as a mass telefrag. Unless you're Fiona, but we'll get to her in time.]

Despite their best efforts, and the clear success of the tactics of having a wing sitting in reserve to plug holes in the formation as they develop, B'nik also has to set fire to a forest to prevent burrows from killing everything around themselves, which aggravates the local Lord (Bitra, this time). At the debrief, Kindan advocates for getting the miners back to force their way into the sealed door. Tullea is dismissive and scornful of the idea, but Lorana makes the case that their last and best hope is figuring out what the past has left them, given there are enough clues to suggest things have been arranged to this point from the past. B'nik eventually agrees to send for the miners, and the narrative swaps over to K'lior, who is receiving a report from the riders he sent back about the experiment of being in two times at once.

"I would never recommend it, Weyrleader," T'mar replied, fighting to keep on his feet, "except in direst circumstances.
"The dragons were fine, but even the youngest riders felt...stretched and constantly drained," he went on. "I even had fights among the injured riders, tempers were that frayed by timing it."
He gave his Weyrleader a strained look.
"We were in the same time for too long, we could hear echoes of our younger selves, it was—" He shook his head, unable to find further words.

If we've been reading since the beginning (or we happen to be working on this while sometime else is reading from the beginning), this has been attempted before, and the Brown Rider Rapist did not come through in a perfectly good condition when finished with his own extended stay in the past. But because this future story is chronologically past, they don't have his example.

They also went back to abandoned Igen a mere ten Turns in the past. At some point, I'd like to see a squadron go back into the past beyond any of their birth dates and see if they suffer the same effects. It's dangerous to do, but that's what an entity with foresight could help with by recording the wheres and whens of any temporal travelers. Moreta traveled beyond her death day and things seemed fine, other than that she was cut off from her dragon. [The commenters to the original suggest that coordinates provided by someone who is older than all the riders being sent back would cover the problem of going before your birth day easily. And also, Lessa went well before her own birth-time based on the tapestry, and therefore that shouldn't be an issue. But, of course, because nobody plans ahead to designate times and places where they're all going to collectively say "Nope, there's nobody here to observe you," and the records of the place are kept meticulously about who will be there and when, everyone only takes short hops back in time to do things, which results in characters like Lorana and Fiona being multiply-in-time in the same time period, with the attendant additional exhaustion and disassociation that comes with it.]

Also, now that we're hurtling toward the end, the narrative is really starting to lay it on thick that Tullea's behavior is likely due to time displacement sickness, not that any of the characters in the book have picked up on this yet.

Going back to Benden, we find Kindan looking for maps to help direct Dalor to where to excavate. Dalor points out there's another rock slide of suspicious origin right next to them and asks to excavate it as well. Lorana says yes, Kindan tries to confess his love to her, she says she loves him back, but then she's distracted by seeing a map of the rooms that their all hunting for, indicating there are three places that need to be opened. The first slide produced two rooms, one openable, one not, and there's a big room hiding behind the slide Dalor wants to clear away.

The narrative shows us combined Weyrs fighting, then B'nik wisely taking coordinates rather than giving them, based on Caranth's sickness, before the news settles in from Ketan that sick dragons have a maximum of twenty-one days from first signs of symptoms before they die. Which doesn't give B'nik much time at all to stay Weyrleader. And more dragons are sick.

Tullea crashes the meeting and is unhappy at Lorana's presence, but asks for information, anyway.

"How long has Caranth got?" Tullea demanded of Lorana.
Lorana gestured to Ketan, indicating that he was properly the one to answer.
"I'm asking you, dragonkiller."
"Tullea!" B'nik shouted, his voice carrying over the angry growls of the others. "You will apologize."
"Why?" Tullea responded silkily. "She killed her dragon, there's no denying it."
"She was looking for a cure," Kindan told her, his eyes flashing in anger.
"If I had known, I would have done the same," Ketan added. He nodded apologetically toward Lorana. "And she's paid the price in full already, without your sniping."
Tullea bridled, clearly not anticipating the outrage she had provoked. "I am Weyrwoman here. You owe me allegiance, Healer!"
[...Ketan points out that since he no longer has a dragon, he doesn't owe her shit. He leaves in a rage, and Kindan follows, dragging Lorana with him...]
B'nik broke the shocked silence that followed. "What do you think you were doing?" he shouted at Tullea. "That was completely uncalled for!"
The blood drained from Tullea's be as she looked from B'nik to M'tal and back again, the full impact of her words registering as she absorbed their angry expressions.

I can't get a sense of how inappropriate that insult was, though, because Ketan and Kindan removed themselves after speaking a piece. Nobody flipped a table as soon as she said it, nor did they respond with vitriol of their own. Given how tightly bonded dragons are with their riders, and, I presume, what kind of visceral horror the reaction would be at the suggestion that a rider let their dragon die when they could have saved them, much less actively killed their dragon, Tullea should be staring down the equivalent of having said a seriously offensive ethnic slur in the presence of people from that ethnicity, and then the compounded problem of having brushed it off with "What? Everyone here has D-Word privileges. Stop being such a snowflake."

Except there's the problem of not knowing how much of Tullea's behavior is Tullea being herself and how much of it is brought on by the fact that being split in time over long periods seems to make you much more inclined to sociopathy than you might otherwise be. And that makes it much more of a question about the narrative's decision to include this and to set the lack of reactions the way they did.

Because we get "Ketan's pissed and stalks off, Kindan's pissed and stalks off, dragging Lorana with him, B'nik yells at Tullea for impropriety, Tullea's clueless and defiant until B'nik yells at her, and then she understands, but it still takes her a while to decide to apologize." We don't see Tullea being worried she's pushed B'nik past the breaking point, even if she really doesn't give a damn about Lorana. We don't see Tullea suddenly acting confused about what she had said, as if she had just returned from an episode of whatever condition time-splitting induces. We don't get to hear what Lorana thinks about any of this, even though she's the one who's been directly insulted. Instead, we have men telling us what happened and then dragging her away so that she can't register a (likely sympathetic) opinion on camera. Despite throwing hints at us that Tullea is not in her complete mind and hasn't been fit the last three Turns, the narrative continues to have the characters act and behave like Tullea has always been this way (they explicitly say she hasn't) and there's nothing they can do to identify or fix the problem (which they totally can). The narrative might hinge on the characters not getting confirmation of their suspicions until after they have accomplished their appointed tasks to preserve the paradox that will keep them alive, but the characters should have formed opinions and theories (and possibly attempted to test them) by now, and they should not necessarily all be "Tullea's flipped her bitch switch, and because women are unknowable black boxes, we'll never know why she did it." [If time sickness lowers your ability to control your impulses and emotions, then everyone should be trying very hard to keep Tullea away from anything where the wrong word in the right ear will cause problems. Honestly, based on how Tullea has been behaving for this entire time, she should have an entire conspiracy of dragonriders trying to keep her away from anything where she might set someone off, since it's pretty clear that B'nik can't do the job all by himself, regardless of whether they twig to the idea that it might be time sickness.]

In fact, if it were necessary to keep the secret of knowledge until the appointed time, that might even make for some interesting characterization, as those who know can't tell those who don't, but over time, there might be more people joining the conspiracy and trying to let on that they know to people who already know. Any of these solutions would be better than everyone accepting without question that Tullea suddenly changed and there's no reason to need to know or investigate.

Anyway, the narrative continues that Tullea finally gets up the remorse to apologize, but has to track Lorana down, since she's moved quarters, and the news about Fort's successful timing it with the injured arrives and the apology goes swiftly out the window before it could actually happen. Ketan volunteers to go, which coincides with B'nik's plan to send Ketan back so he only has to deal with healthy and growing dragons for those three turns.

And it is at this point where someone gets a clue, or at least acknowledges they might have a clue about what's been going on.

"Rineth reports that it doesn't bother the dragons at all," Lorana said, inserting herself into the conversation with an apologetic look at B'nik. "But the riders are all confused and get very irritable."
M'tal nodded, then stopped, looking thoughtful.
"Is there something you want to add, M'tal?" B'nik asked.
"Hmm?" M'tal roused himself, then shook his head. "No, no, just an odd thought that crossed my mind."

Because apparently, despite J'lantir knowing about the symptoms of time-displacement well enough to warn Lorana she'll feel it, it is only now that anybody seems to be thinking about whether Tullea is feeling it as well. This seems like the sort of thing that should have been passed down from Weyrleader to Weyrleader, like the secret of dragon time travel, perhaps as a way of spotting those that have figured out the secret and are putting it to use. [In fact, in an earlier book, there were Weyrleaders and Weyrlingmasters and plenty of other high-ranking dragonriders who knew the signs and were on the lookout for them specifically to discourage their riders from using time travel all that often. So much of Pern relies, essentially, on having to rediscover things that should be common knowledge and should be passed between the generations as so fundamental and basic that everyone knows it as soon as they join that particular caste.]

And then we switch over to D'gan [ASSHOLE] fuming about how the same news gets passed to them.

"This is utterly untraditional!" D'gan declared in outrage to his wingleaders as they met at Telgar's Council Room. "I cannot believe that an ex-dragonrider would have the nerve to address herself to my dragon and not me."

That's because you're an asshole, D'gan, and Lorana couldn't address you directly anyway. And if she had, would you have taken her word? (It's a sign of our times, I think, that D'gan goes to ex-dragonrider and not woman first[, but the implications are there all the same.] )

While D'gan seems ready to scrap the idea because someone else came up with it, his entire council is completely on board with the idea and get D'gan to grudgingly go along with it. The only potentially important thing from this exchange is that D'gan's own dragon has the sickness now.

Flipping back to Lorana and company, the other rockslide has been excavated. Tullea is distinctly not invited to this opening. Lorana is equipped with something to open the door and run with, but she gets awestruck by seeing what's inside, and so passes out from the bad air herself. Once she's recovered, she is immediately ready to go, because she fears they'll all run out of dragons before finding a cure. And that's the end of chapter 20.

Mutualistic: A symbiotic relationship on which each species benefits.

Back to the College for this chapter, just past the meeting from chapter 19, where everyone is puzzling out how to teach their long descendants what they need to know to fix the plague. Power is a difficult thought, because while there's enough to do active things, there's very little chance those systems will make it all the way if they're continuously on. So it had to be engineered to stay dormant and sip power until it's needed. The Eridani equipment will be fine, since it's rated for centuries on standby and decades of active use.

M'hall's brother, Seamus, contributes the reason why he thinks Benden is the correct place, because there are fault lines that the rooms could be built near, guaranteeing they'll stay undisturbed until needed through rockslides. Or "rockslides". All they'll need to do is convince someone else to part with the stonecutting machines. Mendin, Lord Holder of Fort, and skeptic of the plan, is said person that needs convincing. To convince him, the Benden boys steal the equipment with their dragons from him. In perhaps the most sensible thing anyone has done when the dragons have grabbed their stuff, Mendin shrugs and says, "Okay, so we're doing this. We support the idea fully now." [It's also a wonder that the dragonriders haven't resorted to this tactic more often on page than they do. Mostly, it seems to be used as a ay to wag their fingers at D'gan, but obviously, all the other riders aren't above just taking what they want when they feel they want it.]

Before they get down to the business of building the rooms, there's this.

"Tieran," Emorra said as the effects of the wine belatedly registered on her, "I've drunk more than I should. We'll need our rest. Mother will be certain to want to start early in the morning."
Tieran looked reluctantly at his half-full glass, tossed it back in one gulp, and rose. "May I escort you to your room?"
Emorra dimpled, and allowed Tieran to help her to her feet.
Tieran realized he was taller than Emorra; he couldn't remember when that had happened. Her cheeks were flushed with wine and her eyes—her almond eyes were warm and enticing.
"If I made a pass at you," he suddenly asked, "would you mind?"
"No," Emorra said softly, leaning toward him.
Tentatively, Tieran leaned forward and kissed her.

[Have a cocowhat. They're plentiful.]

Like, this manages to get over the extremely low bar of what happened to Brekke. But this is not the kind of consent scene that I want to see. Because while nobody was using the drink as a way of trying to take advantage of the other, people impaired by alcohol don't make the same decisions sober people do. And I'm probably projecting a post-#metoo idea about consent backward onto a writer and culture who haven't been willing to publicly admit that things are terrible, but "they're drunk, and that's how they get together" says a lot about how much value the narrative places on Tieran's disfigurement preventing him from ever getting someone to love him, and how much Emorra's "almond eyes" or her strict mother or the fact that she's the fucking dean of the College, and therefore a powerful woman in her own right, might have gotten in the way of anyone making a pass at her.

I don't care that they get together, I do care that apparently they both have to be plastered to do it, because that says a lot about how the society around them thinks of their attractiveness. [Remember how Kassa said much earlier in the book about how a woman will eventually lower her standards so as to accept Tieran and have sex with him? And y'know how alcohol lowers inhibitions that people might have about things they would do with others? Yeah, that's not a prophecy I wanted to see fulfilled in this story.]

Wind Blossom gets put in charge of figuring it all out, with Tieran and Emorra as her assistants. Wind Blossom's plan is essentially "build classrooms and teach them what they need to know, in layperson's terms." Solid plan. With that out of the way, Tieran wonders why we haven't seen signs of mutations or illnesses or basically any such before, which leads into a discussion of how Pernese orgnasims differ from humans. Rather than quote the whole thing, it's this: Terran genes are a double helix with two strands and four base pairs (A, T, C, G.) Pernese genes (PNA) is a twisted triangle with three strands and seven base pairs (A, A', B, B', C, C', N,) Both DNA and PNA group their base pairs in sets of three called codons. DNA has a START and a STOP codon for gene sequences, and other codons that make amino acids. Out of the 64 possible amino acids, Terra-based creatures only use 20, plus START and STOP, giving ample room for error and mutation to creep in. Which is awesome, when it lets us evolve immunities and cool powers, and terrible, because it means we get sick and sometimes, a person comes up with the short end of the genetic stick and has serious illnesses and problems. PNA, on the other hand, uses all 27 of their possible combinations in 23 amino acids and two separate START and STOP sequences, leaving no room for mutations that affect "junk" material.

As Wind Blossom points out to Tieran's explanation, that means that Pernse creatures mutate on a slower basis and their mutations tend to be immediately fatal, so it appears that the fire-lizards and dragons of the future have drawn the short straw against an organism that has evolved to attack them.

[I have no idea if the proposed Pernese genetics actually works, much less the idea that a creature with no "junk" space in their genetic coding would be more likely to die from an organism that managed to get them sick or vulnerable to other infections. It feels a little like someone extrapolated from the idea that monocultures of plants are extremely vulnerable to certain types of blights and pests because they lack the genetic diversity to be able to survive attacks and applied it to all the creatures of the fire-lizard family. Excepting the watch-whers, who have enough genetic diversity to be able to fight off the infection. No watch-whers ever get sick with whatever is affecting the dragons and the fire-lizards. Of course, we don't spend a lot of time with the watch-whers, either, to see if that's what actually happens.

That said, if this is the reason for the vulnerability of dragons and fire-lizards, then Kitti Ping is far less good at her work than her hagiography suggests. Or we have to handwave it by saying she was working under intense pressure to produce something that worked and didn't have the time to properly design it and put in redundancies and capacity to avoid this kind of situation. Even though she did have enough time to encode in stupid gender essentialism into the dragons. Perhaps if she had a more complete understanding of the genome before undertaking the work, but again, time pressure. All the same, it still feels like fire-lizards and dragons are an incredibly genetically fragile species and continue to be so, despite all the time they've been in existence. Surely there's some amount of generic variance and things that would be passed on through the generations to defeat these kinds of pernicious infections?

Of course, I wrote this before SARS-CoV-2, which is one of those pathogens that looks at human immune systems and laughs, because it spreads too quickly and mutates too rapidly to get pinned down and eradicated through our technological innovations. Unless we could somehow manage to get a 100% vaccination rate on something that would get the R down sufficiently to control and then remove all the possible places that it could go, it's going to stay with us for a long while. And be aided in its spread by politics that refuses to actually give humans a chance at getting that R down through sustained instances of not letting it jump from host to host. So even with our junk space, sometimes we roll a 1 on whether any particular pathogen can be beaten by human immune systems.]

As they draw up their lesson plans, however, there's one problem still staring them in the face.

"There is too much data," Wind Blossom repeated. "With all the information on the various immune codings, there is at least three times more data than the mapper can store."
"So we eliminate some," Emorra suggested, matter-of-factly.
"What if we eliminate the wrong data?" Tieran asked her, shaking his head.
"So we don't," Emorra replied.
"And how can we do that?" Tieran demanded. "Are they just supposed to tell us what they need?"
Emorra's eyes widened as she absorbed Tieran's words.
"Yes," she said. "And that will be the key to opening the second door in the classrooms."

And on that cryptic remark, the chapter ends.

Emorra is deliberately provoking a paradox here, on the assumption that the people of the future will be able to send a message back in time to their ancestors about what data they need, so their ancestors can provide them with the information they can use to cure the dragons and let their ancestors know what information they need to cure the dragons.

It's another Stable Time Loop, but this one's aggressive. It assumes there are no timelines where Grenn and Arith did not come back into the past from the future and these preparations were made. Because, on any timeline where the dragons didn't appear, the ancestors did nothing to prepare their descendants, and the dragons die out because nobody was smart enough to figure out genetics in time. It also aggressively prunes out any timelines where the ancestors guessed wrong and provided unhelpful data to their descendants, because the dragons die out, again, leaving us with a sole timeline where the Ancients guessed right the first time and the descendants then cement that guess by providing them with the information needed.

Pern's a big Timey-Wimey Ball, I'm saying, and that's not necessarily good for your narrative.

We'll pick up with what happens when those descendants find their way into the classroom set for them next week.

Chapter Text

Last time, the dragonriders twisted time and sent their younglings back to grow up and get the injured healed so that their dwindling numbers could be reinforced in time for Threadfall, while in the past, Wind Blossom was put in charge of developing a curriculum and laboratory space for the Third Pass folk to discover and learn enough about the genetics of their dragons to gene-splice in immunity from the infection that's killing them.

Dragonsblood, Chapters 22, 23, 24, and the Eiplogue: Content Notes: Mass draconic telefrag, author twisting the knife,

Harper, teach.
Miner, mine.
Smith, forge.
Healer, cure.
Dragonrider, protect them all.

(Benden, Third Pass, 26th Day, Al 508)

This chapter opens with Lorana and Kindan entering the classroom constructed, along with Ketan, and eventually M'tal and Salina join them. Upon entering the room, a message from Wind Blossom plays, advising them that if they are here because of an emergency involving dragons, they should proceed, but if they are not, they should leave immediately. Since they're here for authorized purposes, they stay in the room, noting there's a door in Day-Glo paint sealed with the verses of "Wind Blossom's Song" that tell them they have to find the vector of infection before they can have access to the tools that will help them fix it. A recording of Emorra's voice begins, directing them to a cabinet with binders full of information and telling them to sit at the seats so that the lessons can begin. [Ah-HA! They do have the instructions, but they're in a cabinet instead of having copies out prominently for the curious to immediately pick up and start examining.]

"Instructions will be played while the door is closed and everyone is seated. If you wish to take a break, simply either all stand, or have someone open the door. The instructions will resume from where they left off when the door is again closed and people are seated.
"Please note that there is no way to know how many of you are present, so if one of you must leave, be sure to leave the door open until that person returns, or she will miss parts of the instruction." There was a pause. "Now, the first thing to do is to read the first chapter of the booklet. If you have problems reading the text, you will have to see if you can locate someone who can read it for you. If you do have such problems, please leave the room immediately. The power required to light this room and provide my voice is limited and will eventually fail."
"At the end of the first chapter you will find instructions on how to indicate that you have finished the first chapter and understand it."
Kindan furrowed his brows in puzzlement. "That will be some trick," he said.
"You may start reading whenever you are ready," Emorra's voice said. "Please do not stand on courtesy, as I am not present—this is merely a recording of my voice."

I do like that there was foresight enough to think of the case where someone illiterate might discover the place and need someone who could read to be able to achieve their goals. If literacy as a skill had been completely lost in those 500 years, they would be up a creek, but the Harpers do what they can. [And that's someone thinking about linguistic drift, as well, and whether the written instructions and the audible instructions might not be legible or audible. Good thinking, Emorra. I have some questions about how the room knows that everyone is sitting, unless it's keyed to butts in all the available seats, at which point I want to know how they came to the conclusion of the number of seats to use that would qualify.]

Having been instructed to begin, the students go at it. Lorana turns out to be the fastest reader of the bunch, looking to do an experiment at the end of the second chapter while Kindan, the slowest reader of the lot, is still working his way through chapter one. It's a balls-and-rods experiment, where Lorana puts together a strand of PNA. Blue-yellow-beige (A, A', N) works with red-beige-blue (B, N, A) and the two click together to indicate their compatibility. Lunchtime arrives, and Kiyary makes sure people take their time to eat and savor the food that's been made for them, also leaving a pot of hot klah for them to continue working with. The afternoon provides a small amount of progress, and the group breaks for the night. At breakfast the next morning, there's a breakthrough for everyone, because, like any good drummer, Kindan is constantly practicing on every available surface.

Shortly after that [having his tapping called out the first time], both of Kindan's hands were on the tabletop again, tapping softly.
Lorana gave him a look but shook her head.
"Kin—" Ketan began, but Salina's look cut him short. The ex-Weyrwoman was looking intently at Kindan's fingers.
Lorana noticed her look and frowned, closing her eyes in concentration. A moment later, she opened them again and exclaimed delightedly to Kindan, "You did it! You learned the sequence!"
Kindan, startled out of his reverie, gave her a surprised look. "I did?" he asked. As her words registered, he shook his head. "No, I was just practicing some drum codes…" His voice trailed off thoughtfully. "The drum codes are sounds."
"But they're grouped the same way as the PNA sequences," Lorana insisted. Tentatively, she tapped out a sequence and then looked challengingly at Kindan.
"That was the START sequence," Lorana said.
"No, it was the ATTENTION sequence," Kindan corrected her. He frowned in thought and quickly tapped a different sequence. "What's this?"
"That's the STOP sequence," Lorana answered promptly.
"It's the END sequence for the drum codes," Kindan told her. "What's this?" He tapped a set of sequences.
"ABC, CBA, BCA," Lorana translated.
"You're right! PNA is based on drum codes!" Kindan declared.
"I'd say it's the other way around," Ketan remarked after a moment.
Kindan frowned. "I suppose you're right."
"But it makes sense," M'tal said. "The genetic code is designed to store the most information possible in a group of three, so for simple drum codes it would be just as efficient."

Bzuh?

[And a giant Cocowhat as well.]

All that I know about music is from many years of being just good enough to be able to play an instrument, but I really, really have to know how this drum code works, because if it is based on the PNA code, that still means that a Harper has to be able to pick out any one of seven rudiments rumbled on a big drum with possible echo getting in the way of clear discernment, and all of this has to be done at tempo, of which there is such a thing as being too slow to understand and process so that they can keep on top of the message. Those rudiments are furthermore grouped into sets of three, presumably, and from there you can create nearly all the words in the language somehow (without the code being based on spelling or phonetics, since they can't do "Blossom"). This is not a simple method of communication in any sort of form. What was the inspiration for drum code, I want to know, so I can try and understand how it came into this mangled form. It makes no sense at all.

Kindan, inspired by his new understanding, soon caught up with the others. Several times, in fact, they turned to him for guidance in difficult sections. He would close his eyes in thought and tentatively tap out a sequence, and correct it.
"How do you know whether it's right?" Lorana asked when thay'd solved one particularly difficult problem.
"I've been drumming for Turns," Kindan told her. "It wouldn't sound right unless it was.

That I will believe, but I also have to go "Wait, what?" because Tieran, recall, built drum code off of PNA before there was any indication that it would be used in this way for helping people learn and remember the sequences they needed. It's entirely possible that after the disaster started, Tieran tuned the code to be mnemonic for Harpers to carry the information they need in their own bones and ears, but that's a big coincidence if it turns out that the drum code has been structured specifically to help keep this information alive for the people that desperately need it.

[The commenters on the original mention that drum code might be based on specific kinds of fixed-code codebooks, where there was a limited vocabulary, and arbitrary sequences were used to transmit, such that a single word might stand for an entire sentence's worth of instruction or description. Which could explain the holes in the code that can't be used to describe names or other things, because there's no code point for them, but also suggests that the PNA codons, all 27 of them, manage to do a lot of transmitting of information in a severely restricted environment, rather than, say, if Pernese is based on an alphabetic language (it wouldn't even have to be English, just something that could fit into all of the codons, plus having START and STOP to indicate things) where you could pass through an arbitrary amount of characters and information at drum speeds. The original commenters also suggest that this origin space could go down to four rudiments for A, B, C, and N (and perhaps knowing when they're being played forward and when they're being played in reverse to get A', B', and C' into the mix as well.) to transmit. But that's still four rudiments that have to be accurate enough to be heard at speed of transmission. The existence of "talking" drums was suggested as a way of getting some of that clarity, but that means that the transmission has to come in with the right pitch to be understood, and I can't imagine that being the case when it's big drums being used to transmit over distance. All of us agree, however, that trying to make this system work will require a lot more effort than the author put into making it and just styling it as "Drum code transmits the information it needs to transmit when the plot requires it." At whatever great offense to musicians who understand how drumming works and people who understand how acoustics works over distance is given.]

Also, there's an assumption that this is the only time that this particular problem will happen in the future history of Pern. What happens if in the Fifth Pass something else finds the magic key to attack the dragons and fire lizards again? Will the genetic knowledge and tools have been passed down enough to that point so that the descendants there can do the same thing? Will the Eridani equipment still work that many years into the future? Will the instruction sheets survive, and the recordings with them? We don't know. [Or maybe we do, if the secret room uncovered in the very first trilogy is the same one as this one, many, many thousands of years down the line, and can then be used to inspire the manufacture of better lenses this time around, rather than teaching the long descendants about genetics and the way that dragon genes work.]

B'nik is hoping for rapid progress, given that his own dragon has a doom clock counting over him, and Lorana wants a lot of progress, given that she can feel it when the clock runs out on all the other dragons, but while they've learned lots, they're still not any closer to figuring out the root cause of the infection so as to open the sealed door. The narrative shifts over to D'gan [ASSHOLE!] surveying his fighting strength before him after the trip through time they took. Kaloth, his dragon, is very sick and coughing, but D'gan won't have it for a minute that he should sit the battle out, and he's too busy blaming the healer for not coming up with a solution to think about what he has or hasn't been doing for his dragon. D'gan also orders his son not to fly in the Fall today, wanting him to instead ferry firestone and messages.

Back to Benden, who are doing their own preparations for Fall, and Kindan and Lorana, who have gone back to the classroom to try and figure out what the sealed door needs to hear before it will open. Kindan tries to help Lorana logic out what the thing is they need to know, since it's related, according to the texts they've been studying, of the problem we learned about in the last chapter - behind that door will be the correct answers, but the past needs to learn from the future what those answers are going to be. While they work, Kindan points out that there's a really terribly creepy element to the song, since it seems to be talking about mass dragon death or illness, but Lorana isn't hearing him, because her hears-all-dragons skill has just kicked in, and D'gan [ASSHOLE!] is doing something phenomenally stupid.

Just as the cold of between enveloped D'gan, he felt Kaloth give another shuddering cough.
Not long now, he told his dragon. Kaloth coughed again. D'gan began to think that perhaps he would keep Kaloth back on the next Fall. Let D'nal or L'rat lead—it would do them good.
Kaloth coughed again. A chill ran down D'gan's spine, colder than the cold of between.
Between only lasts as long as it takes to cough three times, D'gan recalled.
Kaloth had coughed three times.
Kaloth coughed again—and in that instant, D'gan realized his error.
All the dragons of Telgar Weyr had gone beyond between.
The Weyrs! They must be warned! D'gan thought in terror as the last of his consciousness slipped away.
[…D'lin catches the warning form his father…]
Come on, Aseth, between! And with that, overwhelmed by despair, hopelessness, and pure courage, D'lin urged his dragon between—
—without envisioning his destination.
Two thousand Turns later, their bodies would be discovered, entombed in solid rock at Benden Weyr.

D'gan causes the death of the fighting strength of his Weyr because his pride wouldn't let him sit back and let someone else lead. Because he wouldn't listen to the sensible advice around him. Because he bullied and fought and refused to step down, and nobody could or would replace or depose him. Mass telefrag, just as feared. [Which turns out to not strictly be true, but it will become an impediment for Fiona to have to work around until she can figure out, with Lorana's help, how to re-tether Telgar Weyr to reality and bring them back from their enforced stay in hyperspace. Which is a lot better than what happens to Moreta, and is again, one of those things that should be passed down as knowledge about why you have to give good coordinates to your dragon. Not that it would have helped, in this situation, because we already know that sick dragons have their coordinate systems messed with.]

And there's an extra fuck-you to D'lin, because the rider entombed in rock is just a piece of lore that didn't necessarily need to be answered, and it's a further indictment of how dangerous and without safeties these dragons are envisioned. In grief and terror, you're telling me that D'lin couldn't visualize somewhere safe over Benden, or some part of the place that would give his dragon a place to appear, but instead just said "To Benden!" and the dragon chose a random point in space-time to appear out of, not knowing if it was safe or not? That doesn't make sense to me, especially if drilling on waypoints is something that Weyrlings do to the point where they're supposed to be able to envision them by reflex. [It's more of the problem with dragons not being designed with basic safety measures in their head. And if D'lin can manage to articulate "Benden" in his head, presumably, he's got Benden envisioned in his head, to the point where he's not going to just warp to a random location into several meters of stone. What would work here, actually, is if D'lin's dragon is also sick, perhaps without him knowing until the crucial moment, which wrenches his good picture such that they instead emerge into the stone, instead of above Benden as D'lin envisioned. It's still a tragedy and a fuck-you, but it's at least not on the same level of facepalm as "Moreta didn't give her dragon clear directions because she was tired, so they both warped themselves into hyperspace instead of to a known safe default.]

All of this sets up the condition in Wind Blossom's song. Caranth heads out to try and find the missing Weyr, and Lorana tries hard to pull him back and anchor him to this plane, but she needs the strength and ability of all the other dragons of Pern to do it, and to search for the missing Weyr.

High Reaches is odd to Lorana - not enough dragons, and they echo weird, but she's looking for more important things. Lorana doesn't find Telgar with the massed power of dragons, but she does find someone else: Garth, and attached to Garth, someone who desperately wants to know how the dragons are getting sick. Lorana knows, somehow, having connected to this mind, and shouts and sends the message to the other person that the infection is transmitted by air. Which is the keyword that the sealed door needs to open. Not that Lorana is actually conscious enough to recognize this, as the effort has knocked her out totally. That's the end of Chapter 22. [The "using the dragon gestalt to transmit information or beacons through time" will reappear in a later book.]

Parasite: A life-form inimical to its host, often killing the host to ensure its survival.

(College, First Interval, AL 58)

The chapter starts with Tieran wondering exactly how they're going to pull off this paradox, before a thunderclap interrupts them. Which sets Tieran in motion to check on Wind Blossom, because Kassa said the weather was going to be clear, and Kassa's never wrong about the weather. They find Wind Blossom in time her her to shout "Air" as well, and hear her explain the connection she forged with the powerful girl from the future. Emorra promises to write a song so the future knows that Wind Blossom has a question about this they need to answer. And then Wind Blossom expires, feeling triumphant that she's managed to free her bloodline from the Eridani edicts.

Then, without saying a word, she [Emorra] moved to her mother's dresser, opened the top drawer, searched quickly, and pulled out the yellow tunic. She returned to her mother's side and gently lifted the lifeless body, deftly maneuvering it until she had exchanged the yellow tunic for the white one in which Wind Blossom had died.
"I did notice," Emorra whispered, tears streaming down her face.

But never said anything about it, of course, because that would have been weird or improper or otherwise not okay. But at least Wind Blossom gets to be buried in the thing she wanted to be buried in? Possibly, if she's lucky, next to Purman, who she might have loved?

The rest of the chapter is essentially Tieran and Emorra telling everyone they can do the job of instruction to the future riders, now that they know which data to load into the equipment, Seamus helping out with power generation and hooking up ways of playing back recorded instruction, and setting up the idea that they want three rooms: one for instruction, one for lab work, one with the potential cures. And also, that the last-ditch plan was to alter watch-whers so they could be turned into dragons.

It's all that I can give you,
To save both Weyr and Hold.
It's little I can offer you,
Who paid with dragon gold.

(Upper Crom Hold, Third Pass, 28th Day, AL 508)

Last chapter, since that's the end of the song, and we now know everything that the song entailed has come to pass. This chapter opens with the possibility that Upper Crom will end up with no protection at all from the Thread falling, before a group bursts in from High Reaches and chars all of it in short order.

We pop back to Benden, where Lorana is awake again, shakes off any insistence that she should rest, notes the second door is open, opens the final door and realizes they discovered the rooms in the wrong order, and then discovers a microscope and some prepared specimen slides to get them used to using it. They have all the equipment needed. The problem is, people are coming back from the Fall and the adventure, and Minith is now sick with the disease. This is potentially good, if the group can convince Tullea to let them take a sample from Minith to examine, sequence, and then develop a retrovirus for. They succeed at this task, and there's more time spent with the narrative telling us about Lorana using the sequencer to isolate likely gene targets to build against, and they breach the problem that I was just talking about: fixing now only means that the next group has to do the same thing again, and there's no guarantees they'll get this option. Lorana also explains the watch-wher solution was included, and that she accidentally gave Arith that cure among other possibilities when she didn't know any better. [So, yes, she did kill her dragon, but by accident, rather than by design, and because the final room wasn't designed well enough to set apart the last-ditch effort of "turn watch-whers into dragons" from the regular "alter draconic PNA so as to make the current deadly infection unable to work" solution.]

Tullea interrupts the proceedings, storming in and complaining about Minith's clutch having five stillborn eggs in it, and because of that, she wants Lorana evicted immediately, calling her "dragonkiller" again, which prompts B'nik to forcibly eject Tullea from the room, "grabbing her and propelling her out of the room[…]manhandled her from the room." There's just one problem.

M'tal nodded sternly. Then he stopped and looked up at Kindan. "When did Minith clutch?" he asked.
"She hasn't," Ketan replied, his face showing obvious surprise.

The entire exchange gives Lorana the inspiration she needs to figure out that they're going to build a parasite shield into the dragons' genetic code, by altering either the STOP or START sequences so that any later-generation attackers have to find the keys to the kingdom all over again before they can make any headway. There's enough material in the various vials to produce exactly one dose of the retrovirus, and the best thing for them to do is to give it to a dragon that will pass down the new genetic code to their offspring. Which means that Minith is the only candidate to receive it. Which means convincing Tullea. Who is, predictably, not having it out of a desire to protect the last queen of Benden, and because she doesn't trust Lorana at all.

"No!" Tullea jumped up, scything toward Lorana with her nails. B'nik rose and clutched her, keeping her from striking Lorana. "No, I won't let you! You are not Minith's rider! Minith, go between! Now!"
No, Minith replied firmly. Tullea's eyes widened in surprise. I am Benden's last queen, it is my duty.
"Minith says she will do it," Lorana calmly informed the others.
"No," Tullea protested. She turned to B'nik, pleading, "You can't let her. She killed her dragon and now she wants mine!"
[…Minith is going through with it anyway, as it's their last, best hope for victory…]
"Well, do it then," Tullea growled. After it was done, she speared Lorana with a glare. "You can talk to all the dragons, can't you?" She didn't wait for a resopnse. "Do you hear them die?"
"And feel them," Lorana admitted quietly.
"Good," Tullea replied heartlessly, storming from the room into her dragon's quarters. "Then whatever happens to Minith, I hope it hurts you as much as anything."

Like, those are sensible reasons not to do the thing, because the track record here so far, at least from Tullea's perspective, doesn't look good at all for trusting Lorana. By now, of course, we've spent so much time invested in the idea that Tullea's just not to be listened to, and is otherwise just being a bitch, that we're supposed to dismiss her out of hand. Except now that we're finally at the point where all the preordained things have happened, the narrative can finally let the characters get clued into what they should have already known before now.

"She didn't use to be like this. She's as bad as those who timed it."
M'tal's eyes lit. "She is, isn't she?" he said slowly. His brows furrowed in thought.
[…Time to go, boys…]
"But if I'm right, I know why Tullea's acting this way."

And they turn out to be right. They go back in time to High Reaches Weyr (the one that got closed off and sent the very terse reply to wait when asked by Zist), where there's a perfectly healthy and thriving Weyr that has the necessary immunities to beat the infection, thanks to Lorana's cure working and Minith laying several very healthy eggs. To close the time loop, however, that means that Tullea has to go back in time and convince D'vin to close High Reaches into quarantine. Which she does, and then reappears soon after she has gone, but it's the older, wiser, and much more appreciative Tullea, who is no longer being time-twisted. She apologizes to Lorana for all the terrible things she said when she was existing in two places at once, and has a distribution of dragon ichor to have injected into every sick dragon so they can be cured and have their own genetics rewritten to fight off the infection.

Tullea has the brightware she stole from the classroom to give back to Lorana, as well as a case with a locket inside that has the part of Arith's riding gear that Tieran preserved, as well as a locket that has a picture of Wind Blossom on one side and Tieran on the other, who has been drawn with Grenn, so Lorana knows that at least one of her fire-lizards survived in the past. That's the end of Chapter 24.

[It's worth noting at this point that it was said some time ago that dragons aren't affected by existing in two places at once, even though their riders are, so the easy solution to figuring out whether or not anyone is time-twisted that's starting to act like it, or has been acting like it for Turns, is to ask their dragon whether they're also in another place at the same time. Minith would probably shrug and say "Yes," and that would be the information everyone would need to know. Unless, for some reason, admitting that she's in the same place again would wreck time by giving away information that someone isn't supposed to have.

Also notice that the Tullea and Minith that have come through the ordeal of being in the past is perfectly cordial and apologizes immediately for all the things in her past that she knows she's done. Such that the person who Tullea was is the correct personality, the integrated and compete one, not the one who was basically suffering under the strain of being herself in two places at once over a long period of time. This entire book's "Tullea's a bitch" could have been easily resolved, had the narrative let anyone get a clue about what the cause might be (and that they should have been examining for that very possibility from the start) and ask the right entity the question.

Furthermore, what's actually saying that this solution would work? Because it's basically "create the same organism, but STOP becomes START and START becomes STOP." I have no idea how many generations it would take for the infection to reverse itself, but it doesn't seem like it would take all that long, in human-scale time, to get there from here, especially since the attacker will still be able to bind to appropriate parts of the code to try and replicate itself. It could work as a very short-term solution, but it seems like providing better or more long-lasting immunity would either be teaching the immune systems of the dragons how to recognize the attacker and mobilize beating the snot out of it, in the way that human vaccines often work, or in adjusting the way that certain proteins are encoded, so that the attacker tries to find a space to replicate on, but it can't actually fit into them and the genes tell it to fuck off with its improperly-coded instructions. Of course, since these are later books written for earlier eras, we don't end up having a resurgence of a dragon disease later on in the timeline to prove that the ancestors either did do their work properly, because it's bad, but not that bad, or where there has to be more time travel weidnesses and the descendants have to do it the long way, sending several strains of descended dragons, bred for specific potential traits, into the hot zone to see if they survive until they find a way of beating the infection. (Imagine being the person trying to oversee this and collect all the data while you have generations of dragonriders that are both in the target time and several generations before then. Of course, if the riders and their dragons die before they are born, then there won't be quite as much personality shear, even as someone has to do the difficult work of recording this information without risking infecting the past.)

Maybe it's a good thing that Todd has stopped writing Pern after this sequence, and that Gigi has so far basically gone back to the standard Ninth Pass well to tell a gaiden story, instead of trying to forge ahead with making bigger changes to the world and the timeline.]

And the children shall lead them.

(Benden Weyr, First Interval, AL 59)

Which is here mostly to tell us that Emorra and Tieran did more than just hook up, they had a kid, as Tieran looks for a place to hide the locket in the classroom. And to say that Lorana is one of the direct descendants of Wind Blossom, and that's why she could find the connection to her ancestor so easily. "And have you ever known one of us to not get our way in the end?" Tieran quips as the last line of the book.

It's done! There's an acknowledgements section, where Todd graciously thanks his mother for allowing him to play in her sandbox, notes that she gave him a smiley face on his first outline of the story, and then proceeds to give thanks to the people that help make a story come into being, including a Doctor Natascha Latenschlauger that helped out with the genetics parts and illnesses, and an editor, Martha Trachtenberg, who helped bring "Wind Blossom's Song" into a better form with her songwriting knowledge.

This was certainly…something as a story. The time travel plot seems a bit dodgy, and I wonder how the system was able to distinguish between someone making a definitive statement about the origin of the disease and someone, say, discussing air speed or air currents or getting fresh air or any other context where the word air might be uttered in the presence of the doorway to open it. Perhaps they keep the doors closed and the people out when not actively studying, but even then, while studying things, they could have said the keyword.

I am also entirely displeased with how long the narrative waited to let one of the characters have a thought that maybe, perhaps, Tullea is experiencing the effects of extended existence in two periods of time at once. The narrative suggests that it only comes to mind after people have experienced it already, but even at the beginning of the story, there are dragonriders who talk about the fact that being in that situation has effects on people. I know there are suggestions on writing that say you want to make the reader feel smarter than the characters in the narrative, but it's a long stretch to say that nobody had an inkling of checking to see if Tullea's sudden behavior change had external origins. Even if all the boys are being lunkheads about it, maybe Salina or someone else could discreetly check. And they finally only check in the last chapter, right before the situation itself has to happen.

This is the first effort, however, by a new author, and there's the possibility that this was a bit on the rough side because it's a first effort. (Or because there were quite a few fingers in the pie making sure someone didn't stray too far outside the boundaries.) We'll have to see if things get better in the next offering. Which starts next week.