Chapter Text
I honestly didn't know I was going to get this far, and it's been really neat having you along with me for the ride. This is the currently last known book in the Dragonriders of Pern, and reading some of the promotional material for this book, they're styling it as the 50th anniversary work, which might suggest this is going to be a one-shot from Gigi, the third and final allowed author to write in Pern. Also, it's a whole twelve chapters! One of the shortest offerings in the Pernese canon, as a way of letting us down gently, I guess.
Okay, so, it has been just about seven years since Anne died and six or so since Todd published Sky Dragons. In the interim, we've advanced all the way through the end of the Obama presidency and are sitting in the middle of the subsequent administration. We're still a year and a couple months out from the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and the nightmare that will be, as well as the way in which the entire United States will watch the truth of racist policing played out in front of them, but things are still terrible in the United States and the United Kingdom, almost totally attributable to the politicians in charge and the oligarchs that support them. Let's see if some actual feminism can permeate this book. Here we go.
[The comments on this chapter also suggest this work might have been created not just as an anniversary special, but as a way of trying to get Pern on the ballot for the Best Series Hugo Award, which required a new installation in the series to have been publised in the year the nomination was made. So Gigi might have been tapped to write something for several reasons, some self-aggrandizing, and others because perhaps the series was strongly starting to fall into the hands of the fanficcers, with nostalgia and so forth.]
Dragon's Code: Prologue and Chapter 1: Content Notes:
We have a new prologue! This one acknowledges the existence of the Nathi war in the first line, and might be the most effective one of the lot, in terms of storytelling and setting up the understanding that we'll need to go forward if, by some chance, this book ends up being the very first one that someone picks up as the introduction to Pern. It takes the style of the kind of story you tell children where everything is fine, until a disruption arrives and has to be solved. Once that disruption is solved, everything is fine, until the next disruption arrives, and so the entire prologue leapfrogs its way through the first arrival of Thread, the volcanic eruption, the great migration north, the establishment of the Weyr-Hold-Craft system, the Interval, the return of Thread, the Long Interval that has reduced the Weyrs from six to one, and the return of Thread. It does not mention the return of the time-skipped, although as soon as we get into Chapter 1, they will immediately be relevant, because our main character is Piemur, and the start point for the story appears to be a little bit before the part in the White Dragon where the queen egg gets stolen and Jaxom engages in a daring night raid to retrieve it. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. There's a choice quote right up front in the Prologue that's worth looking at:
Pern, as this world was named, was beautiful, habitable, and far enough from the standard trade routes that the colonists felt comfortable turning their backs on the past to build a new future.
And after the arrival of Thread, "Pern's tenuous contact with the mother planet was broken." There's promise here already in the acknowledgment that the colonists were deliberately turning their backs on the future society they lived in to go play at an agrarian pastoral fantasy, and it would be a neat feather in this author's cap if the wording about leaving the past to build a new future is deliberate, because from the reader's perspective, Pern has left the future to play in the past instead, and the juxtaposition there is excellent.
Anyway,
even as dragonriders and their dragons fight the valiant war against Thread, dissatisfaction and dissent have begun to simmer in parts of the world…
…and Chapter 1 begins at Southern Weyr with Piemur covering his face and head against the sandstorm that gets kicked up by dragons taking off. Welcome to the Ninth Pass once again. It remains to be seen whether this is Ninth Pass 1.0, 2.0, or Gigi's very own Ninth Pass 3.0, hopefully making sure that many of the really terrible things (and hopefully some of the more subtle things) about the first two things have been fixed for this run.
[There's always been dissent and dissatisfaction in parts of the world, even with the very beginning of the pastoral experiment, but I will admit that this author is the first to give us this kind of a hook into the story that's going to come. That could mean some competence at work in the craft of writing. It's also interesting that this prologue is the one that allows for the incorporation of all of the other things that might have happened in other FSP-related books, and also that there might now be an official backstory and origin that can take advantage of both authors' works to build itself into something that finally puts all the errata on the page. rather than having to know all the places where there were clarifying statements or other bits of after-the-fact canon.]
The dragons of Southern, however, are not well, and this sounds suspiciously familiar to anyone who suffered through the last author's books.
Piemur heard the comments the dragonriders called to one another as they took flight; heard, too, the muffled sounds of dragons coughing as they rose higher off the ground. Listening, he wondered—not for the first time—what pernicious ailment still affected the dragons of Southern Weyr, and why the Weyr Healer couldn't find a remedy to shift it from their lungs.
The last time we had dragons with a cough they couldn't get rid of, it took Lorana swapping their genes to get rid of it and provide immunity. As I recall mentioning at the time, all that did was reset a clock and that organisms and other infectious agents would, eventually, start evolving a means of infecting the dragons again. Now, I would wonder whether those organisms would end up in a situation where they could infect dragons regardless of which gene combination was start and which one was end. Some other gene combination would be needed at that point, and even then, it's still just buying time. At least, at this point in the universe. Once it's been truly determined that there won't be any more Thread, eventually the dragons will die out when something gets them that they can't get rid of. As will the fire lizards, unless they're able to adapt or develop immunity in the remaining time that they have. Which, I suspect they did, because I don't think any of the fire-lizards ever received any vaccinations, and they're still around in the Ninth Pass.
Still, we have an infection here in the exiled South that wasn't there before, and that managed not to spread or deliberately be spread through contact with other dragons. Southern is also apparently a social experiment, if unintentionally:
The [time-skipped] dragonriders had cut ties with Benden, the premier Weyr in the northern hemisphere, effectively alienating themselves from their peers and, ultimately, everyone else. Never in living memory had any group broken free, seeking to go it alone in the hostile environment of Pern without the support of the other elements of their social structure.
This would be an issue, except Piemur said "living memory," and therefore, neither Aleesa nor Halla gets the chance to stab Piemur repeatedly to remind him of their existence. I think we're still before Thella, or at least before Thella becomes a notorious figure, so she doesn't get to stab Piemur either, which I suspect she would really enjoy.
Since we still have the time-skipped present at Southern, the AI hasn't been discovered yet, and so our most useful point of reference for this book is the end of the Harper Hall trilogy and The White Dragon.
Piemur was here at the behest of his mentor, Masterharper Robinton. He hadn't started out as a spy. Three Turns earlier, Piemur had been virtually wrenched from his comfortable position in the Harper Hall and sent to the Southern Hold to teach the resident harper the new drum measures, vital for maintaining communications with neighboring smallholdings. But it hadn't taken long for Saneter to memorize the new measures…and for the Masterharper to task Piemur with a seemingly endless stream of structureless chores, almost all of which were completely outside his training as a singer. If it weren't for his deep-rooted sense of loyalty to his craft and his mentor, Piemur would have gladly foregone the exhausting and never-ending job of mapping Southern, a vast continent far larger than anyone had ever imagined and, in many areas, actually impassable.
This is not the Piemur I remember, Piemur of Pern, the one who really enjoys being there first and seeing things before others do, the one who would be entirely at ease just mapping and exploring and being by himself, where he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he and Jaxom both have feelings for Sharra and that Jaxom is going to win eventually, because Jaxom's a Lord and Piemur's a Harper. Also, the Piemur I remember for this kind of space is one who enjoys keeping secrets and getting into mischief every now and then. And yet:
Piemur's most unsatisfying task by far, and the one he found so disturbing to perform, was as a spy: observing and assessing the demeanor and welfare of the dragonriders of Southern Weyr. He gleaned no joy in snooping around the noble dragons and their riders, pretending to be someone he was not, visiting the Weyr on one pretense or another while trying to catch every snippet of conversation or grievance he could. It felt grossly wrong to Piemur to behave so duplicitously toward a group of dragons and riders who had spent a lifetime defending the planet. But the Masterharper, in his role as Pern's custodian of culture and heritage, and the discreet harmonizer of her interconnected social relationships, was anxious to know how the outcasts were faring. He regularly stressed how important it was for Piemur to take note of any little details in the Weyr's daily life that might be the slightest bit out of the ordinary, and report these. The most trivial snippet could be what helped to reunite Southern Weyr with the rest of dragonkind—and as a Harper, Piemur was trained to observe details.
[There's a cocowhat, nice and early, even for this author.]
This is not the Piemur I remember, nor the one described in the books that have gone before this one. The Piemur I remember is fiercely loyal to Robinton, yes (and Robinton's role as a manipulator is acknowledged and foregrounded), but he's a hell of a scamp who has to repeatedly be told not to be so flippant with the titles of the peerage, even in his own head. This Piemur has suddenly developed reverence for the dragonriders. The goal of bringing the time-skipped back into the fold is certainly one that Robinton would want to have, so as to maintain the frozen state of Pernese society, but Dragondrums Piemur and White Dragon Piemur are a lot less reverent than this one, so we might yet have a Ninth Pass 3.0.
[We absolutely do have a Ninth Pass 3.0, and we have done great violence to Piemur's character to do this. 1.0 Piemur stowed himself away and spied and survived and otherwise managed to do what he needed to and seemed to enjoy almost every minute of it. This Piemur is more sullen and mopey and apparently has a greater respect for authority and the social structure of the planet, such that he doesn't like spying on people who have very specifically declared their independence from Benden's leadership. 1.0 Benden would not have any such thing allowed to exist, even for a little bit, because that would then suggest to other people that Benden's order could, and maybe even should, be defied and others might have better ideas of how to run their spaces. If this declaration of independence has happened in any kind of way that Benden has heard of its existence, I would expect Benden to be doing their very best to bring the time-skipped back under the full control of Benden's authority.
I think this setup is supposed to give us more context and understanding of why the queen egg theft plot happens, to give the time-skipped a real need of desperation, rather than what the 1.0 reasoning was, which was pure spite and flipping the bird to Benden. This doesn't look like a promising addition.]
The plot proceeds to have Piemur eavesdrop on a conversation between T'reb and B'naj, where T'reb describes that Mardra is trying to coax Loranth, her queen, off the Hatching Grounds, while Loranth is making very large sounds of grief and Mardra is trying to get Loranth to forget her grief. This strikes Piemur as odd, because there aren't any eggs available to Southern. So, perhaps we have to re-set our time marker to after Jaxom has already stole back the egg that Southern stole, if Loranth is having grief about a loss and is having trouble with leaving the Hatching Ground. It could also be that there weren't any viable eggs from Loranth, and there haven't been in a long while, and Loranth is grieving that she's never going to get to raise a clutch again. There's another disaster that might be the cause of the dragon cough mentioned.
"Youre right. Loranth has been off-color since that shaft collapsed when the Weyr was mining firestone. I'm glad I didn't go with you and the others."
"We should never have gone on that cursed venture—over half the Weyr was exposed to those noxious fumes.
Noxious mine fumes? That doesn't sound good. And if the shaft collapsed and there were dragons nearby, maybe the cough they have is related to black lung disease (The Other Wiki says I'm looking for Coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) as the correct name), which causes chronic bronchitis and is incurable.
As things progress, B'naj gets told that T'reb is going to try and make an alliance with Nabol.
"When they sought help over a family feud, Benden said they couldn't interfere in Hold matters. Benden—F'lar and Lessa so high and mighty, as if their Weyr rules all the rest! Some leaders, yeah? Left those Nabolese out in the cold just like those other meddlers, the harpers. Honestly, B'naj, I hardly listened to all the details of their silly feud. The nub of it is they want us to help secure a holding promised to their father by Lord Meron."
"Meron," B'naj said, enunciating the two syllables slowly and with so much distaste in his voice that Piemur had no difficulty imagining the dragonrider's facial expression. And no surprise there: the late Lord Meron had been cruel and uncaring: even Piemur had fallen afoul of the Lord Holder. "He was always a sneaky lick of a man. We never should have traded with him."
"But we did, and strange as it now seems, his kin may actually have thought of an idea that will benefit our Weyr. We just have to assist them in securing lands to hold."
"They can have plenty of land down here—as much as they like."
"They won't travel south."
"Why not?"
"They say they can't stomach the sea crossing. And anyway, they want lands in the north—just as we promised to them."
"And what would we get in return?"
"Exactly what we need, B'naj. New blood."
"How in the name of the First Egg—" B'naj's response increased in volume until T'reb cut him short.
There is then a whispered conference which Piemur cannot hear, and at the end of it, T'reb storms out angry at B'naj, saying that he can't be stopped. (Piemur's swear here is "Shards and fire blast!" so that's a new addition to things.)
It's kind of nice, actually, to see such openly anti-Benden, anti-Harper sentiment on display, and that T'reb, despite supposedly getting ready to make an alliance with people, doesn't really care about why the little people want to do something, just what the dragonriders of Southern can get out of it. B'naj seems like the kind of person who would like to stick to his principles, but understands that surviving to another day is likely going to be more important than standing on principle, and if your dragons are going to die out anyway, you'll be willing to sacrifice a lot of your principles at any shot of survival. We've already gotten a more nuanced picture painted of the exiles of Southern and what this exile is doing to them than we had in the Benden-centric books. It remains to be seen whether this story is going to be still very protagonist-centered in its morality, but at the very least, we don't have mustache-twirling antagonists, so that's already an improvement.
Piemur calls Farli to him with a "sharply-pitched, three-tone whistle that sounded just like a birdcall," which seems an odd choice, given that fire-lizards are, as Piemur will note a couple of paragraphs down from here, telepathic, so presumably Piemur could just summon Farli with a thought, rather than a noise. Piemur sends Farli to trail T'reb and his dragon, Beth, and report back what sort of information she can find about where they've gone, but in spending that much time, apparently, he's been noticed by B'naj, who calls out to him, and Piemur does a quick act like he's responding to some other person about an order before disappearing into the forest and trying to put some distance between himself and the dragonriders.
Once he returns to his camp, we find out that he still has Stupid, now a fully-grown runner, and there's some amount of description of getting Stupid ready for travel that sounds a lot like someone who has been raised around horses and how to manage them putting that knowledge to work in an infodump, because sometimes all that research or knowledge feels like it has to go into the book somewhere or it was wasted time. [We know that Anne raised horses, and therefore, Gigi probably picked up a fair amount of that information just by being around them.]
Piemur made short work of readying the runnerbeast, smoothing the hair on Stupid's back and quickly checking for any insects that might have burrowed under the skin.
Finally, he slipped the bridle over Stupid's head and gently eased the left ear into the loop of the single-ear strap. Then, still hum-buzzing, he placed the saddle pad on Stupid's back, behind the last neck bone. The runner blew through his muzzle gently, a sure sign he was relaxed, and shifted his weight from one forefoot to the other. Piemur tightened up the saddle pad cinch, which was positioned behind the two pairs of front legs, doing so slowly to ensure that Stupid wouldn't be pinched by the saddle girth, a seemingly minor injury that could result in the dreaded, hard-to-cure girth galls. Stupid stomped his rear feet, but didn't seem upset.
Piemur passed a critical eye over his handiwork, still pleased, after all this time, with the way he had modified the design of the saddles he'd grown up with in Crom. His customized saddle suited the specific needs of the Southern Continent's warmer climate, where a hide-made, wood-framed saddle would be far too hot, heavy, and cumbersome for both rider and mount. Piemur had not been in Southern long before he'd realized that a soft saddle pad would work much better. It was easier to make and maintain, it dried more quickly, and it was far less likely to harbor and pesky bugs or biters that could riddle the back of a runner with poxy ooze-sores and painful lumps.
There are two things I want to note in this, because I am not a horse person and wouldn't know if this is indeed the right way to saddle a horse (and a quick duck out to The Other Wiki suggests that what Piemur has here is a treeless saddle, which is popular here on Terra but may be trading one set of issues for another set). The first is "front pairs of legs," which suggests to me that we may have finally found the difference between runners and Pernese horses, because runners have more than four appendages. How that translates into riding style, cadence, and comfort for the rider, I haven't a clue, but this is a good example of slipping in a detail for the reader that reminds us that "parallel Earth" doesn't mean "exactly like Earth". So, maybe the runners we have here are hybrids between the horses that the colonists brought with them and some native species of Pern. Or, perhaps, the horses have all died out because *handwave* (one of the many plagues that has ripped through the populations) and instead, there's been a concerted breeding and domestication program of a native Pernese life-form, which like all native Pernese life-forms, is six-limbed instead of four, but it turns out most of the craft of horse-raising and saddling translated adequately to these new life forms.
Or it's a typo and what was really meant was "pair of limbs" and it didn't get caught. For worldbuilding purposes, the first is more intriguing. [Sean and Sorka definitely bred horses. What would have been interesting would have been if basically all of the creatures that came in the sperm and ovum banks and the like all failed to thrive, and that at some point while Kitti Ping or Wind Blossom were alive, it became clear that all of the life forms that came with them, save maybe dolphins, could not thrive and reproduce on Pern, and therefore they all had to be genetically modified, and six-limbed-ness was one of the necessary modifications for it. Alas, this line of inquiry never gets followed, because none of these authors ever want to put a lot of worldbuilding on the page itself.]
Second, I'm really annoyed that the idea of Randian superpeople has managed to persist into the third author, because an invention like that shouldn't be the province of a single person and otherwise something that Piemur came up with and hasn't done anything with other than to saddle Stupid with. I would have expected something like that to be a thing that would have been discovered long before Piemur comes up with it. Because Southern isn't the only hot climate where a saddle of that nature would be really useful for someone to use. Also, that means Piemur has also managed to get whatever amount of materials he needs to fashion such a saddle, and I'm pretty sure that means he needed the materials to fashion that kind of saddle multiple times, because there's no way that Piemur would have gotten that design exactly right the first time. (Yes, we know that he has a beast upbringing, but he was also pretty rubbish at instrument making, since they were trying to teach him how to do it while he was going through puberty and getting bullied.) I can't imagine Piemur the spy having all that much time to source and prototype different saddles until he got one that he liked, and also to then keep the idea to himself instead of trying to make as much profit off it as he could, because the Piemur I remember would more than happily find a way of profiting off of any sort of invention that he came up with. (Or that someone else came up with.)
As things are, we have an extended sequence of Piemur recounting what's happened so far, but with an eye toward how it affected the time-skipped as they came through. After pointing out that that Southern is in decline, with no queens rising to mate, "that left only the few smaller females, the green dragons, as an inadequate source of release for the virile males." Which, of course, as fighting dragons, they've already ingested firestone and been sterilized, so they can't be used to repopulate Southern. From what we've experienced, and how common it seems to be for there to be crises of too few dragonriders, it seems like it would be a common practice to keep a green or two fertile in case population needs to ramp up in a hurry or something. But, of course, everything that happened in the past has been long since consigned to the memory hole. Plus, since this is aiming toward the idea of the original generation of dragonstuff, I have a feeling there's not going to be a whole lot of the Todd era mentioned in this book. [If we wanted to look at the extratextual canons, I'm sure we'd have plenty of reasons why green dragons always get sterilized. Mostly, those reasons are that greens are hypersexual and they lay big clutches, so even one fertile green could easily overrun a Weyr with dragons, and ones that are assumed to be low-quality and low-grade, even though Todd established that green dragons could lay gold eggs, and that would allow for a repopulation. But, of course, Jirana and the entire experiment there has been swept under the history rug, rather than fixed in songs that talk about what you do when you have dragon sickness and your populations are dying out. Everyone presumably should know about it, whether by rumor or experience or by a teaching song. But if the obvious answers were available, then we wouldn't have a plot.]
While thinking about the situation at Southern, Piemur is really sympathetic to the idea of people who have been time-displaced, asked by their descendants to come fight Thread once again, right after they finished doing so in their own era, and who probably felt like they couldn't refuse the call again.
In the four centuries that had elapsed between their time and the current Pass, attitudes, customs, and even aspects of the language had changed, and while most of the [time-skipped] had managed to adapt to their new lives, some of them had collided disastrously with the newer generation of weyrfolk, craftspeople, and holders.
Piemur knew all about the numerous clashes and claims of foul play that had occurred while the [time-skipped] resided in the Weyrs of the north, clashes that had grown so frequent that they culminated in a group of more than two hundred [time-skipped] moving to the Southern Continent where they could live by their old ways, unchallenged. But in a cruel twist of fate, while their northern peers embraced a new life for heroes, the Southerners' inability to accept change not only made them exiles but also tarnished their reputations, turning them from heroes to castoffs.
That's a solid point, actually. Think about what would have been common practices in the 1600s CE, in whatever society you would like to imagine, and then pluck them out of that context and drop them into our current environment. Even better, take someone who is used to being in charge and being obeyed and who doesn't have to answer to anyone, and then drop them into this society.
Now, admittedly, since this is still pre-industrial Pern, it's much more like taking someone from about the 1200s CE to the 1600s CE. In the "progress" form of history, that's going from solidly in the Middle Ages to the Italian city-states, and so while a lot of things might look the same, like castles and swords, the whole society involved in how those castles and swords get used would have completely changed. It's also nice that this time around that even Piemur recognizes that, despite their best attempts to keep the society static, there's been a significant shift, even in the language. Plus, y'know, they've gone from being the top of the heap to slightly not the top of the heap and, worse, everyone else is expecting all sorts of different behaviors from them as if they were born and raised in this era, instead of having to relearn it all.
But also, it's interesting to see this portrayed as a choice the Southerners made, as opposed to being sent that way by Benden, so this Piemur is also a lot more sympathetic to the plight of the time-skipped, even though he's supposed to be reporting on them back to Robinton. Which seems like a change in characterization from the Piemur from before, as well, so I'm still having trouble trying to figure out how this fits.
So why is Piemur sympathetic to the time-skipped?
Piemur felt a stab of empathy for the [time-skipped] of Southern—he felt like a discard, too. No longer of any use as an apprentice at the Harper Hall, where his young singing voice had been extraordinary until the dreadful day when it broke, Piemur was now, at the age of just seventeen Turns, a castoff, stuck doing odd-jobber tasks until his Master found an alternative role for him. He clenched his jaw and and shook his head slightly, determined not to let his feelings of misfortune engulf him again. He'd been working hard to get past the loss of his voice and had no wish to wallow in self-pity anymore. What's done is done, he reflected.
[There's cocowhat number two, and we're still not out of the first chapter.]
Hang on, so this is post-Dragondrums Piemur, because Saneter has arrived as an official Harper, and he's trained him, but yet this Piemur is feeling like an outcast, rather than having felt like he's found himself again as the wanderer or as the person who's foiled the great scheme, so I'm really confused about this characterization of him. And where we are in the timeline and how this book relates to the other ones that have Piemur in them. Because at the end of Dragondrums, Piemur had been installed as a Harper and a journeyman and was well on his way to feeling very fulfilled. And past that point, Piemur seems to be entirely okay with mapping the world, or at least not having to deal with other people for a good long while as he got over his crush on Sharra before ending up being part of the favored class of people to deal with the artificial intelligence. So I guess we really are in a Ninth Pass 3.0, one where things are different between Piemur and Southern and there's more sympathy for the time-skipped. [This Piemur is definitely an AU of Ninth Pass 1.0 Piemur, in a world where he didn't go on quite the same adventures as that one did. I wonder if he also suffered all the bullying at the drumheights or not, because this Piemur is much more invested in the social order, and seems to still be sulking about puberty wrecking his singing voice. Without the bullying, he'd have time to sulk more, I suppose, so maybe that's one more point of divergence here into this timeline. We'll have to keep an eye out for more signs of divergence as we go along.]
Getting back to the plot, since he's curious about what's going on, Piemur sneaks on to the Hatching Ground to see what's got everyone so riled up, and there's a lot of clumps of tissue, feces, and eggshells, strewn about in defiance of the sparklingly-clean Grounds he's used to seeing for dragons, and then a malformed egg. There's something clearly not going well for the Southern dragons here. After he leaves the Hatching Grounds, Farli returns to Piemur, and after reviewing the imagery of where T'reb went, Piemur feels it's urgent enough that he has to ride quickly to there so that he can learn more about the plan that T'reb is trying to hatch. And that's the end of the first chapter.
So, be prepared for more alternate universe weirdness, I guess. And maybe, just maybe, we can hope for a Pern that's more favorable to the audience of 2018.