Red Star Rising
by: Anne McCaffrey
NOTE: this book has two names, in the uk where this book was purchased
its entitled: “red star rising” but in the U.S. its called dragons eye
Synopsis:
When the volcanoes rumble and the powerful storms begin brewing on Pern,
it means one thing: Thread. For 257 years Pern has been free of the
life-destroying Thread, but now the Red Star has reappeared in the sky
and soon the deadly Threadfall will follow. In the holds and weyrs
across the land, the genetically-engineered dragons of Pern and their
human riders begin feverishly training to combat the Thread, for only
dragon fire can destroy the silvery invaders. But, incredibly, one Lord
Holder refuses to believe the Thread will fall again, and he may
endanger the entire planet.
Prologue
Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden o-type star.
It had five planets, two asteroid belts, and a stray planet it had
attracted and held in recent millennia. When men first settled on
Rukbat’s third planet and called it Pern, they had taken little notice
of the stranger planet, swinging around its adopted primary in a wildly
erratic orbit – until the desperate path of the wanderer brought it
close to its stepsister at perihelion.
When such aspects were harmonious, and not distorted by conjunctions
with other planets in the system, the wanderer brought in a life form
which sought to bridge the space gap to the more temperate and
hospitable planet.
The initial losses the colonists suffered from the voracious
mycorrhizoid organism that fell on them were staggering.
They had divorced themselves from their home planet, Earth, and had
cannibalized the colony ships, the Yokohama, the Bahrain and the Buenos
Aires, so they would have to improvise with what they had.
Their first need was an aerial defence against the Thread, as they named
this menace. Using highly sophisticated bio-engineering techniques,
they developed a specialized variant of a Pernese life form which had
two unusual, and useful, characteristics: the so-called fire-lizards
could digest a phosphine bearing rock in one of their two stomachs and,
belching forth the resultant gas, create a fiery breath which reduced
Thread to harmless char. The second of their unusual qualities were the
ability to teleport and an empathy which allowed limited understanding
with humans. The bio-engineered dragons’ – so called because they
resembled the Earth’s mythical creatures – were paired at hatching with
an empathic human, forming a symbiotic relationship of unusual depth and
mutual respect.
The colonists moved to the northern continent to seek shelter from the
insidious Thread in the cave systems which were called holds’.
The dragons and their riders came, too, housing themselves in old
volcanic craters or Weyrs.
The First Pass of Thread lasted nearly fifty years and what scientific
information the colonists were able to gather indicated that Thread
would be a cyclic problem, occurring every two hundred and fifty years
as the path of the wanderer once again approached Pern.
During this interval, the dragons multiplied and each successive
generation became a little larger than the last, although optimum level
would take many, many more generations to reach. And the humans spread
out across the northern continent, creating holds to live in, and halls
in which to train young people in skills and professions. Sometimes
folks even forgot that they lived on a threatened planet.
However, in both Holds and Weyrs, there were masses of reports,
journals, maps and charts to remind the Lords and Weyrleaders of the
problem: and much advice to assist their descendants when next the rogue
planet approached Pern and how to prepare for the incursion.
This is what happened two hundred and fifty-seven years later.
Early Autumn at Fort’s Gather Dragons in squadrons wove, and interwove
sky trails, diving and climbing in wings, each precisely separated by
the minimum safety distance so that occasionally the watchers thought
they saw an uninterrupted line of dragons as the close order drill
continued.
The skies above Fort Hold, the oldest of the human settlements on the
northern continent, were brilliantly clear on this early autumn day:
that special sort of clarity and depth of colour that their ancestors in
the New England sector of the North American continent would have