From: jsbell@acs.ucalgary.ca (Joshua Bell)
Subject: Short story... pt I (And comments Re: Ahem.)
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 92 01:36:55 GMT
Organization: The University of Calgary, Alberta

Okie, I started this whilst a'back Deltath to Orlando Weyr... And
thought I'd toss it netwards for (constructive?) criticism. Be
kind. :)

No title yet, I'm open to suggestions.

----------------------------------------------------------------------


        << Someone comes. >>

        N'vell was startled from his contemplations of the Xanadu
holding. Tith's tone was not one that he was used to; something
unusual for a dragonpair, even if they had only been bonded a
scant handful of Turns.

        "Who could be out here at this time of night, dear
heart?" It was unlike Tith to mention the arrival of a holder, or
wanderer, as the dragon often followed N'vel deep into thought.

        << Not.... here. Far away. But someone _is_ coming. >>

        N'vel sat up from his reclining position on the blue
dragon's back. Knowing Tith would hardly otice, he stood on the
smooth, freshly oiled hide and peered around the inky blackness
of the valley. The lights of Xanadu Hold itself stood out,
throwing streams of color out onto the nearby fields. On the
western horizon, he thought he could make out Honshu Weyr,
perhaps even the watchdragon posed on the edge of that ancient
cliff. A few smaller cotholds dotted the landscape, making their
presence known only by light spilling out through windows onto
the terrain, but nothing he wasn't long familiar with.

        << No, >> echoed the dragon's voice in his mind. << Not
here. >>

        "You make as much sense as a spit canine, beast. Where
then?"

        << Up. >> Tith sounded uncertain, as if that answer
wasn't quite satisfactory, even to himself. << Up, but it feels
wrong. >>

        N'vell walked along the dragon's spine, then unstraped
and rummaged about in Tith's packbacks lashed to the riding
straps, looking for the double-farviewers he kept with him. After
a few moments he gave up, and craned his head back to gaze at the
stars, picking out the constellations he knew, drilled into his
mind as visualization coordinates. "Is there danger, Tith?"
Dragons normally didn't react this way to things.

        << No, not that I can tell... but something definitely
comes. >>

        "Lets not worry until.... whatever it is does get here,
okay Tithy?"

        Tith snorted back at N'vell for his teasing, but
aquiesced as his rider gently scritched the great blue's
headknobs, then settled between Tith's last two neck ridges and
strapped in for the ride back to Honshu.

...

        "Hyperbolic insertion on course, nominal to profile.
We'll be there in a month or so, captain."

        A squeeling, chirping laugh was the pilot's answer over
the 'com system. Estevar's tour with Kl'ti'ee'kl, already into
its second year, had taught him many of the dolphin's nuances. It
had taken him a month to realize that the numbers he had so
dutifully reported to his commanding officer were of no use to
the aquatic mammal, the sonar generating computer feeding him
more detailed information in an instant about their path through
the stars than a human could recite in a week. Rather than
staring dumbly at a screen for the duration of the mission, the
repore they established kept them both amused. Neither quite
understood _why_ the other found something amusing, but they were
both quick to pick up on _what_ the other would get a chuckle out
of.

        Estevar felt honored that Kl'ti'ee'kl had chosen him as
mission pilot. Dolphins were far superior in that field to
humans, being born to a life of three dimensions as aquatic
hunters. But when one of the great leaders in the latest Nathis
conflict asked you to fly his starship, one didn't complain.

        Estevar sighed, his mind wandering. He didn't regret
being selected for this mission, but... he had hoped it wouldn't
be quite as dismal as it had turned out to be. Thousands of years
ago the EEC had passed through the Saggitarius Quadrant,
selecting likely colony sites. The Federation had plunked down
settlements on a great number, in the rush to expand after the
First Nathis War. What colonies had not been destroyed by other
misfortunes had often been... sterilized by the enemy in the next
war, with little regard for the agrarian lifestyles taken up by
so many of those colonists disgusted with the damage the
technology of war had wrought to humanity.

        The next system, the one that they were slowing to enter,
showed even less promise. FSP reports indicated that all
survivors of some catastrophe, only ten in number, were rescued
from the colony only sixty years after the establishment of human
and dolphin life on... Pern, that was the name. Third planet of
the G-class star Rukbat. Sounds like home, he thought. Except for
the interdiction order, its details long since lost in a database
purge. Well, the mission was to give every colony the once over,
so Pern would get a second chance. Perhaps, if that catastrophe
that had doomed the first settlers wasn't recurring, it could
even be recolonized.

...

        'A watchful eye on the heavens.' That was the historical
charge of the Starsmithcraft. Thread hadn't threatened Pern for
hundreds of Turns, and even the Weyrs were quick to say it had
been defeated forever. Wiped clean from the face of the Red Star,
and the Red Star itself shifted in orbit, the records said,
though even musty old records from the days when the printing
press was a common item couldn't be trusted or understood.

        A talking wall indeed, thought Journeyman Drezeret. Even
the lights of the room some hailed as the most precious of places
had stopped glowing generations ago, in the wake of Mount
Garben's return to life. Never again was knowledge quelled from
the records some said were alive. Preposterous!

        Yet... noone could debate that there was now but a single
Dawn Sister. Its two siblings vanished during the Ninth Pass.
There had been three, there was no mistake about that in the old
hides or paper leaves. Too many ballads, observations, idle
scribbles. Songs said that riders had thrown the two younger
Sisters at the Red Star itself, driving Thread away forever.
But that couldn't be! The heavens couldn't be changed. Even the
merest of apprentices knew that. They could _change_, but not
_be_ changed.

        Rarely, maybe once in ten Turns, a new firetrail would
appear in the skies. But that was just a lump of firestone, or
its celesial cousin, that sped through their solar system,
burning in the heat of the sun and leaving a brilliant trail
across the night sky of Pern for sevendays, until it moved too
far from Rukbat to burn and its flame slowly went out. Figuring
with beads, or some of the gear-adders the Smithcraft was
starting to produce showed that the stone at the heart of the
firetrail would return every hundred generations or so. But that
was still predictable.

        This new sighting, the one he was supposed to be plotting
instead of letting his mind wander, wasn't. Noone had managed to
plot its elipse, or even a parabola - the path of a firetrail
destined never to return. This... whatever it was would slow
quickly, ending its pass around Rukbat near Pern itself. If it
kept to its strange behaviour of slowing as it drew nearer Pern's
sun rather than speeding up as it fell towards Pern's sun, that
is.


        Noone had been able to explain that. Wansor's laws said
that it couldn't happen. Things sped up as they drew closer to a
large body. It wasn't a law that a Holder would tan your hide
for, it was simply unbreakable. Yet something nagged at him. He
doubted it was one of the mathematical laws, he never quite saw
those the way others did. His talent lay in the worded laws. The
laws of the skies, the laws of forces, the laws of motions.

        Drezeret sat bolt upright at his desk. An object would
continue its motion in a straight line in its own reference frame
unless some force was applied to it, externally. Or internally.
Certainly it could be shown that an elipse or circle was a
straight line from the point of view of a planet being pulled on
by a star. Which meant, therefore, that something was pushing on
this object.

        Or it was somehow pushing itself through the heavens!

...


----------------------------------------------------------------------


In article <#9!n1fc@lynx.unm.edu> quirk@pioneer.unm.edu (Gym Z. Quirk) writes:
>In article <1992Aug19.222413.15296@u.washington.edu> kaja@milton.u.washington.edu (Mission and Revenge) writes:
>>I subscribed to this newsgroup because, (suprise, suprise) I thought
>>it was discuss Anne McCaffrey's books. Silly me. All I see here is a bunch
>>of bickering over some computer game. Alt.fan.pern doesn't mean to me
>>that it's Alt.fan.pern.gaming (or whatever). If that truely is the point
>>of this newsgroup, then change the name.
>
>I guess we were about due for one of these complaints...
>
>>Personally, I'd like to discuss the books. There are a lot of societal
>>commentary in them to be worthy of rational, intelligent discussion.
>
>Ok.  What would you like to discuss?  Remember, If you want something
>done on the net, you bloody well have to do it yourself.
>
>>--Which is a far cry from the infantile mewing going on in here that
>>could've been better addressed in e-mail.
>
>Or the bitching about people not providing what you want to read?
>

Gym's too tactfull to say it, but 'Put up or shut up'. Hopefully,
I just did that. :)

The MUSHes are a large part of Pern on the Internet. It boggles
me, at times, that there are more Pern MU*s (I count 5 all-Pern
MU*s, and at least 4 Pern areas on other MU*s) than Trek MU*s.
Guess Science Romance lends itself more to playing on MUSHies
than Treknology does. :)

Joshua
   _  _      "Thats a good idea!"  "I have those every once in a while."
 -(_)(_)-      "Why do you listen to me when I'm wrong?!?"
 \      /          - Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine
  |  . |      
  -____-      jsbell@acs.ucalgary.ca 
 /  \/  \     Academic Computing Services, University of Calgary