“Training! Is that how you measure a man?” Tieran demanded. “Is that how you see me? No scars, only an apt student? And what am I learning? A lost art, a dying way of doing things-all for your pleasure!”
“Your father wanted you to-”
“My father’s dead,” Tieran cut her off. “And now it’s only you who wants me to learn all this genetic foolery. Splicing genes we can’t see-the last electron microscope failed last year, or don’t you remember?-for ends we don’t know. We could introduce mutations without knowing about it, and for what? For nothing. A might be!”
Brutally he pushed away from her and stormed off down the corridor. Over his shoulder, from his left side, he called back, “You can get Emorra to clean that up. After all, you treat her like your slave.”
Wind Blossom straightened up slowly. With an eye to the glass on the floor she walked over to her cot and sat upon it. With eyes that would admit no tears, she muttered bitterly, “Such a way you have with children, Wind Blossom.”
“Mother! What are you doing?” Emorra demanded as she strode into her mother’s quarters.
“I am cleaning up,” Wind Blossom replied from her position on the floor where she was delicately picking up individual shards of glass and depositing them into a recycling container.
“What happened? Where’s Tieran?” Emorra asked.
“Tieran happened, and I do not know,” Wind Blossom answered. She looked up at her tall daughter, careful not to let any pride show in her expression. “His father was dead before he arrived. He wanted to time it with some antibiotic to save him.”
Emorra gasped, eyes wide. “That can’t be done, can it?”
Wind Blossom sighed, using one of her better sighs. “It cannot, as you should well know.”
“At least not in any literature,” Emorra replied, her face heating as she caught her mother’s implied rebuke. “Mother, what’s the use of learning about temporal paradoxes when they can’t occur? It’s more important to pass on a good fundamental knowledge than to deal with such esoteric issues.” Emorra found herself harping on her favorite issue and discovered, as always, that she couldn’t help it with her mother. “Songs that people will sing and remember-an oral tradition, that’s what we have to rely on.”
“What’s wrong with books?” Wind Blossom quipped.
Emorra frowned. “Mother, you know I love books,” she said with a deep sigh. “But find me someone who’s got the time to make them. Bookmaking is a labor-intensive industry, from the felling of trees to the making of inks and the binding of the pages-things that are impossible to do when Thread is falling.”
“So easy it is to blame Thread,” Wind Blossom said. “Nothing can be done, so we’ll sing about it.”
Emorra stifled a groan and waved her hands in submission. “Let’s not go through this again, please.”
Wind Blossom nodded. She gestured to the recycling container. “This one’s full; get me another.”
Emorra frowned and leaned down to pick up the bucket. After she left, Wind Blossom pursed her lips tightly and held back a heartfelt sigh. Pain, she thought to herself, pain is how we grow. Is this how it was for you, Mother?
“Is there anything else I can get you?” Emorra asked, as she heaved herself up from the floor and grabbed the last bucketful of broken glass. She surveyed the floor carefully, looking for the reflection of any last shards.
“No, thank you,” Wind Blossom said. Emorra’s nostrils flared at her mother’s dismissive tone but she said nothing, nodded curtly, and left, closing the door quietly.
“Well-trained,” Wind Blossom muttered to herself. She kept her gaze on the door for a few moments, assuring herself that Emorra had indeed departed.
Then-a subtle shift, a slight relaxation, and the merest hint of a smile played on her lips. It was short-lived, chased away almost instantly by a frown.
“Your face is like a window,” Kitti Ping’s voice echoed in her mind. “I can see everything you think.”
You see what I want you to see, Wind Blossom thought back to the ancient memory.
She moved to her dresser and opened the drawer with her tunics. Gently she lifted them and found the yellow one. Yes, she thought to herself, Purman would like this.
She pulled the tunic out of the drawer along with the small bag she’d carefully hidden underneath it. She quickly shrugged off her regular tunic and pulled on the yellow one. Then she took the bag and walked over to the laboratory end of her room.
The room was huge and had been a supply room when the Fever Year had hit. Wind Blossom had occupied it in the haste of those deadly days and had never been asked to leave. She lived simply in the room, with only a bed, a dresser, and a bedside table for her comfort. The far side of the room was given up to her laboratory and studies. She liked the room because of the large windows running floor to ceiling on one side.
She opened a locked door in her tall cabinet and pulled out a crucible, ancient ceramic tripod, and grazier. She put these on the workbench along with the bag from her drawer and another bag she had pulled out from the cabinet.
She eyed a stool and shook her head slightly, grabbing her things off the workbench and putting them on the floor beyond it, concealed from the window by the large workbench.
She fished a small lump of charcoal out of the second bag and placed it on the grazier. She lit it quickly, her fingers well-practiced, and slid the tripod stand over it. Into the crucible she placed a selection of herbs from the bag she had taken from her drawer. After a moment, she pulled a number of strands of hair out of her scalp and curled them up into the crucible.
Satisfied, she placed the crucible on the tripod and let the flames of the charcoal lick at it.
I am glad you decided not to join us here at the College, Wind Blossom admitted silently to her memory of Purman. You would have been welcome, but I do not know if you would have accepted the course I’ve chosen for us all.
It will be thousands of years before our descendants will once more be able to bend genes to their will, she mused. It would be a mistake to force our children to cling to our ways. They need to move on, to learn their own ways.
“Make your own mistakes,” Kitti Ping’s voice echoed in Wind Blossom’s mind.
The Eridani Way is not the only way, she thought, partly in response to her mother’s words. Their thinking is deep, but they never thought of war. They never thought of the Nathi. They never thought of a time when no one could twist genes into new shapes.
Wind Blossom’s eyes flicked to the crucible and she brought her thoughts back to Purman. Your way, the way of breeding, will work on Pern for now.
She sighed. It had been difficult to turn Emorra against her. So difficult that she had only half-succeeded: Her daughter had remained at the College and even become its dean. It had taken less effort to drive Tieran away from her, to quench his inbred curiosity about genetics.
In both situations, she had felt all the pain of a mother turning away her child. But Wind Blossom knew that if she taught them the joy she found in genetics, they would be enraptured-and stuck with knowledge they couldn’t use. Committed, as the Eridani had always intended, to the Eridani Way, the way of countless generations husbanding species and planets, they would become incapable of developing solutions of their own.
Wind Blossom’s head shook imperceptibly as she recalled her own internal conflicts, how she had determined that the future of Pern could not rest on the shoulders of a few, select bloodlines-the Eridani Way-but on the actions of all Pernese.
As the last of the smoke rose from the crucible, Wind Blossom wondered again if Ted Tubberman had thought the same thing, and if he had turned his son against him just as Kitti Ping had turned her daughter against her-and as Wind Blossom herself had tried to alienate Emorra.