The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (76 page)

“All right, my golden love,” she murmured. “You have the reference. You know when I want to go. Take me
between
, Ramoth,
between
four hundred Turns.”

The cold was intense, even more penetrating than she had imagined. Yet it was not a physical cold. It was the awareness of the absence of
everything
. No light. No sound. No touch. As they hovered, longer and longer, in this nothingness, Lessa recognized the full-blown panic of a kind that threatened to overwhelm her reason. She knew she sat on Ramoth’s neck yet she could not feel the great beast under her thighs, under her hands. She tried to cry out inadvertently and opened her mouth to…nothing…no sound in her own ears. She could not even feel the hands that she knew she had raised to her own cheeks.

I am here,
she heard Ramoth say in her mind.
We are together,
and this reassurance was all that kept her from losing her grasp on sanity in that terrifying eon of unpassing, timeless nothingness.

S
OMEONE HAD SENSE
enough to call for Robinton. The Masterharper found F’lar sitting at the table, his face deathly pale, his eyes staring at the empty weyr. The Craftmaster’s entrance, his calm voice, reached F’lar in his shocked numbness. He sent the others out with a peremptory wave.

“She’s gone. She tried to go back four hundred Turns,” F’lar said in a tight, hard voice.

The Masterharper sank into the chair opposite the Weyrleader.

“She took the tapestry back to Ruatha,” F’lar continued in that same choked voice. “I’d told her about F’nor’s returns. I told her how dangerous this was. She didn’t argue very much and I know going
between
times had frightened her, if anything could frighten Lessa.” He banged the table with an impotent fist. “I should have suspected her. When she thinks she’s right, she doesn’t stop to analyze, to consider. She just does it!”

“But she’s not a foolish woman,” Robinton reminded him slowly. “Not even she would jump
between
times without a reference point. Would she?”

“‘Gone away, gone ahead’…that’s the only clue we have!”

“Now wait a moment,” Robinton cautioned him, then snapped his fingers. “Last night, when she walked upon the tapestry, she was uncommonly interested in the Hall door. She discussed it with Lytol.”

F’lar was on his feet and halfway down the passageway.

“Come on, man, we’ve got to get to Ruatha.”

Lytol lit every glow in the Hold for F’lar and Robinton to examine the tapestry clearly.

“She spent the afternoon just looking at it,” the Warder said, shaking his head. “You’re sure she has tried this incredible jump?”

“She must have. Mnementh can’t hear either her or Ramoth anywhere. Yet he says he can get an echo from Canth many Turns away and in the southern continent.” F’lar stalked past the tapestry. “What is it about the door, Lytol? Think, man!”

“It is much as it is now, save that there are no carved lintels, there is no outer Court, nor Tower…”

“That’s it. Oh, by the first Egg, it is so simple. Zurg said this tapestry is old. Lessa must have decided it was four hundred Turns and she has used it as the reference point to go back
between
times.”

“Why, then, she’s there and safe,” Robinton cried, sinking with relief in a chair.

“Oh, no, Harper. It is not as easy as that,” F’lar murmured.

Robinton caught his stricken look and the despair echoed in Lytol’s face. “What’s the matter?”

“There is nothing
between
,” F’lar said in a dead voice. “To go
between
places takes only as much time as for a man to cough three times.
Between
four hundred Turns…” his voice trailed off.

Who wills,

Cans.

Who tries,

Does.

Who loves,

Lives.

There were voices that first were roars in her aching ears and then hushed beyond the threshold of sound. She gasped as the whirling, nauseating sensation apparently spun her, and the bed which she felt beneath her, round and round. She clung to the sides of the bed as pain jabbed through her head, from somewhere directly in the middle of her skull. She screamed, as much in protest at the pain as from the terrifying, rolling, whirling, dropping, lack of a solid ground.

Yet some frightening necessity kept her trying to gabble out the message she had come to give. Sometimes she felt Ramoth trying to reach her in that vast swooping darkness that enveloped her. She would try to cling to Ramoth’s mind, hoping the golden queen could lead her out of this torturing nowhere. Exhausted she would sink down, down, only to be torn from oblivion by the desperate need to communicate.

She was finally aware of a soft, smooth hand upon her arm, of a liquid, warm and savory, in her mouth. She rolled it around her tongue and it trickled down her sore throat. A fit of coughing left her gasping and weak. Then she experimentally opened her eyes and the images before her did not lurch and spin.

“Who…are…you?” she managed to croak.

“Oh, my dear Lessa…”

“Is that who I am?” she asked, confused.

“So your Ramoth tells us,” she was assured. “I am Mardra of Fort Weyr.”

“Oh, F’lar will be so angry with me,” Lessa moaned as her memory came rushing back. “He will shake me and shake me. He always shakes me when I disobey him. But I was right. I was right. Mardra?…Oh, that…awful…nothingness,” and she felt herself drifting off into sleep, unable to resist that overwhelming urge. Comfortingly, her bed no longer rocked beneath her.

The room, dimly lit by wallglows, was both like her own at Benden Weyr and subtly different. Lessa lay still, trying to isolate that difference. Ah, the Weyr walls were very smooth here. The room was larger, too, the ceiling higher and curving. The furnishings, now that her eyes were used to the dim light and she could distinguish details, were more finely crafted. She stirred restlessly.

“Ah, you’re awake again, mystery lady,” a man said. Light beyond the parted curtain flooded in from the outer weyr. Lessa sensed rather than saw the presence of others in the room beyond.

A woman passed under the man’s arm, moving swiftly to the bedside.

“I remember you. You’re Mardra,” Lessa said with surprise.

“Indeed I am and here is M’ron, Weyrleader at Fort.”

M’ron was tossing more glows into the wallbasket, peering over his shoulder at Lessa to see if the light bothered her.

“Ramoth!” Lessa exclaimed, sitting upright, aware for the first time that it was not Ramoth’s mind she touched in the outer weyr.

“Oh, that one,” Mardra laughed with amused dismay. “She’ll eat us out of the Weyr and even my Loranth has had to call the other queens to restrain her.”

“She perches on the Star Stones as if she owned them and keens constantly,” M’ron added, less charitably. He cocked an ear. “Ha. She’s stopped.”

“You can come, can’t you?” Lessa blurted out.

“Come? Come where, my dear?” Mardra asked, confused. “You’ve been going on and on about our ‘coming,’ and Threads approaching, and the Red Star bracketed in the Eye Rock and…my dear, don’t you realize, the Red Star has been past Pern these two months?”

“No, no, they’ve started. That’s why I came back
between
times…”

“Back?
Between
times?” M’ron exclaimed, striding over to the bed, eyeing Lessa intently.

“Could I have some
klah
? I know I’m not making much sense and I’m not really awake yet. But I’m not mad or still sick and this is rather complicated.”

“Yes, it is,” M’ron remarked with deceptive mildness. But he did call down the service shaft for
klah
. And he did drag a chair over to her bedside, settling himself to listen to her.

“Of course you’re not mad,” Mardra soothed her, glaring at her weyrmate. “Or she wouldn’t ride a queen.”

M’ron had to agree to that. Lessa waited for the
klah
to come, sipping gratefully at its stimulating warmth.

L
ESSA TOOK A
deep breath and began, telling them of the Long Interval between the dangerous passes of the Red Star: how the sole Weyr had fallen into disfavor and contempt. How Jora had deteriorated and lost control over her queen, Nemorth, so that, as the Red Star neared, there was no sudden increase in the size of clutches. How she had Impressed Ramoth to become Benden’s Weyrwoman. How F’lar had outwitted the dissenting Hold Lords the day after Ramoth’s first mating flight and taken firm command of Weyr and Pern, preparing for the Threads he knew were coming. She told her by now rapt audience of her own first attempts to fly Ramoth and how she had inadvertently gone back
between
times to the day Fax had invaded Ruath Hold.

“Invade…my family’s Hold?” Mardra had cried, aghast.

“Ruatha has given the Weyrs many famous Weyrwomen,” Lessa said with a sly smile, at which M’ron burst out laughing.

“She’s Ruathan, no question,” he assured Mardra.

She told them of the situation in which dragonmen now found themselves, with an insufficient force to meet the Thread attacks. Of the Question Song and the great tapestry.

“A tapestry?” Mardra cried, her hand going to her cheek in alarm. “Describe it to me!”

And when Lessa did, she saw—at last—belief in both their faces.

“My father has just commissioned a tapestry with such a scene. He told me of it the other day because the last battle with the Threads was held over Ruatha.” Incredulous, Mardra turned to M’ron, who no longer looked amused. “She must have done what she has said she’s done. How could she possibly know about the tapestry?”

“You might also ask your queen dragon, and mine,” Lessa suggested.

“My dear, we do not doubt you now,” Mardra said sincerely, “but it is a most incredible feat.”

“I don’t think,” Lessa said, “that I would ever try it again, knowing what I do now.”

“Yes, this shock makes a forward jump
between
times quite a problem if your F’lar must have an effective fighting force,” M’ron remarked.

“You will come? You will?”

“There is a distinct possibility we will,” M’ron said gravely and his face broke into a lopsided grin. “You said we left the Weyrs…abandoned them, in fact, and left no explanation. We went somewhere…somewhen, that is, for we are still here now…”

They were all silent, for the same alternative occurred to them simultaneously. The Weyrs had been left vacant, but Lessa had no way of proving that the five Weyrs reappeared in her time.

“There must be a way. There must be a way,” Lessa cried distractedly. “And there’s no time to waste. No time at all!”

M’ron gave a bark of laughter. “There’s plenty of time at this end of history, my dear.”

They made her rest, then, more concerned than she was that she had been ill some weeks, deliriously screaming that she was falling, and could not see, could not hear, could not touch. Ramoth, too, they told her, had suffered from the appalling nothingness of a protracted stay
between
, emerging above ancient Ruatha a pale yellow wraith of her former robust self.

The Lord of Ruath Hold, Mardra’s father, had been surprised out of his wits by the appearance of a staggering rider and a pallid queen on his stone verge. Naturally and luckily he had sent to his daughter at Fort Weyr for help. Lessa and Ramoth had been transported to the Weyr and the Ruathan Lord kept silent on the matter.

When Lessa was strong enough, M’ron called a Council of Weyrleaders. Curiously, there was no opposition to going…provided they could solve the problem of time-shock and find reference points along the way. It did not take Lessa long to comprehend why the dragonriders were so eager to attempt the journey. Most of them had been born during the present Thread incursions. They had now had close to four months of unexciting routine patrols and were bored with monotony. Training Games were pallid substitutes for the real battles they had all fought. The Holds, which once could not do dragonmen favors enough, were beginning to be indifferent. The Weyrleaders could see these incidents increasing as Thread-generated fears receded. It was a morale decay as insidious as a wasting disease in Weyr and Hold. The alternative which Lessa’s appeal offered was better than a slow decline in their own time.

Of Benden, only the Weyrleader himself was privy to these meetings. Because Benden was the only Weyr in Lessa’s time, it must remain ignorant, and intact, until her time. Nor could any mention be made of Lessa’s presence, for that, too, was unknown in her Turn.

She insisted that they call in the Masterharper because her Records said he had been called. But, when he asked her to tell him the Question Song, she smiled and demurred.

“You’ll write it, or your successor will, when the Weyrs are found to be abandoned,” she told him. “But it must be your doing, not my repeating.”

“A difficult assignment to know one must write a song that four hundred Turns later gives a valuable clue.”

“Only be sure,” she cautioned him, “that it is a Teaching tune. It must
not
be forgotten, for it poses questions that I have to answer.”

As he started to chuckle, she realized she had already given him a pointer.

The discussions—how to go so far safely with no sustained sense deprivations—grew heated. There were more constructive notions, however impractical, on how to find reference points along the way. The five Weyrs had not been ahead in time and Lessa, in her one gigantic backward leap, had not stopped for intermediate time marks.

“You did say that a
between
times jump of ten years caused no hardship?” M’ron asked of Lessa as all the Weyrleaders and the Masterharper met to discuss this impasse.

“None. It takes…oh, twice as long as a
between
places jump.”

“It is the four hundred Turn leap that left you imbalanced, hm-m-m. Maybe twenty or twenty-five Turn segments would be safe enough.”

That suggestion found merit until Ista’s cautious leader, D’ram, spoke up.

“I don’t mean to be a Hold-hider, but there is one possibility we haven’t mentioned. How do we know we made the jump
between
to Lessa’s time? Going
between
is a chancy business. Men go missing often. And Lessa barely made it here alive.”