Dragongirl

FOR READERS NEW TO PERN

Thousands of years after man first developed interstellar travel, colonists from Earth, Tau Ceti III, and many other worlds settled upon Pern, the third planet of the star Rukbat in the Sagittarius sector.

They found Pern idyllic for their purposes: a pastoral world far off the standard trade routes and perfect for those recovering from the horrors of the Nathi Wars.

Led by the hero Admiral Paul Benden, and Governor Emily Boll of war-torn Tau Ceti, the colonists quickly abandoned their star-traveling technology in favor of a simpler life. For eight years—“Turns,” as they called them on Pern—the settlers spread and multiplied on Pern’s lush Southern Continent, unaware that a menace was fast approaching: the Red Star.

The Red Star, as the colonists came to call it, was actually a wandering planetoid that had been captured by Rukbat millennia before. It had a highly elliptical, cometary orbit, passing through the fringes of the system’s Oort Cloud before hurtling back inward toward the warmth of the sun, a cycle that took two hundred and fifty Turns.

For fifty of those Turns, the Red Star was visible in the night sky of Pern. Visible and deadly, for when the Red Star was close enough, as it was for those fifty long Turns, a space-traveling spore could cross the void from it to Pern. Once it entered the tenuous upper atmosphere, the spore would thin out into a long, narrow, streamer shape and float down to the ground below, as seemingly harmless “Threads.”

Like all living things, however, Thread needed sustenance. It was highly evolved—it ate anything organic: wood or flesh, it was all the same to Thread.

The first deadly Fall of Thread caught the colonists completely unawares. They barely survived. In the aftermath they came up with a desperate plan: Having abandoned their high technology, they turned to their remaining ability in genetic engineering to create a shield against the recurrent threat. They used life-forms indigenous to Pern, six-limbed, winged, fire-lizards that were genetically modified and enhanced to produce huge, rideable fire-breathing dragons. These dragons, telepathically linked at birth to their riders, formed the mainstay of the protection of Pern. In their haste to provide protection to their new homeworld, the colonists devised many other solutions. Some were forgotten or dismissed as ineffective.

The approach of the Red Star brought not only the mindless Thread but produced tremendous additional stresses on Pern itself. The tectonically active Southern Continent heaved with volcanoes and earthquakes, providing an additional menace that proved too much for the colonists—hastily they abandoned their original settlements and moved to the smaller, stabler Northern Continent. In their haste, much was lost and much was forgotten.

Huddled in one settlement, called Fort Hold, the colonists soon discovered themselves overcrowded, particularly with the growing dragon population. So the dragons moved into their own high mountain space, which they called Fort Weyr. As time progressed and the population spread across Pern, more Holds were formed and more Weyrs were created by the dragonriders.

Given their great losses, particularly in able-bodied older folk, the people of Fort and the other Holds soon found themselves resorting to authoritarian systems under which one Lord Holder became the ultimate authority of the Hold.

The Weyrs, with their different needs, developed differently. Unable to both provide for themselves and protect the planet, the dragonriders relied upon a tithe from the Holds for their maintenance. Instead of a Lord Holder, they had a Weyrleader—the rider of whichever dragon flew the Weyr’s senior queen.

And so the two populations grew separate, distant, and somewhat intolerant of each other.

The Red Star grew fainter, Thread stopped falling. Then, after a two hundred Turn “Interval,” it returned again to rain death and destruction from the skies for another fifty-Turn “Pass.” Again, Pern relied on fragile dragon wings and their staunch riders to keep it Thread-free. And, again, the Pass ended, and a second Interval began.

Just at the beginning of the Third Pass, a new disaster struck—dragons started dying of a strange unknown disease. With his Weyr’s ranks decimated not just by injuries and losses from fighting Thread but also from the deaths caused by this new plague, Weyrleader K’lior of Fort Weyr decided upon a desperate course of action and sent his injured dragons and riders ten Turns back in time to abandoned Igen Weyr where they might heal and return in time to fight the next Threadfall.

That same night, Fiona, Fort Weyr’s newest and youngest queen rider, was wondering how the convalescent riders would fare, when a strange queen rider arrived and offered to bring her and her weyrling back in time to Igen Weyr. Fiona and the other weyrlings accepted. Their desperate jump between time proved fabulously successful and, after spending three Turns living and growing in the past, they returned to Fort Weyr with the recovered dragons and riders—a mere three days’ time after they’d left.

But the plague is still killing dragons, the Weyrs are still fighting shorthanded—and no one knows whether Pern will survive.