Further investigation revealed a number of cold cuts, plenty of fresh-sliced bread, honey, mustard, and Alandro’s own special invention, a sage vinaigrette that doubled as a dressing for the greens and as a condiment for the sandwiches.
There were no chairs at the top of the Drum Tower, but the lower parts of the crenellations were wide enough to offer comfortable, if sometimes windy, seating.
“Alandro’s dressing is superb, as always,” Rodar said to no one in particular.
“We’re lucky to have it,” Emorra agreed. Jendel raised an eyebrow at her, so she expanded her comment. “The botanists had a very hard time getting the sage to take.”
“Why was that?” Rodar asked.
Emorra shrugged. “Mother said something about the boron uptake rates. In the end they finally got it to go by grafting it onto a native plant. Mother says it doesn’t taste quite the same as the original.”
“She’s one of the few left who’d know,” Jendel said.
“I like the flavor,” Tieran declared.
“What’s the difference?” Rodar asked Emorra.
Emorra shrugged. “I never asked her.”
“The dean of the College not asking?” Rodar was amazed.
Emorra shook her head. “I was a student of my mother’s at the time.”
“Oh,” Tieran said. He and Emorra exchanged looks of understanding.
“Did they adapt all the Earth fauna, or what?” Rodar wondered. He looked at Emorra. “Would you know?”
“Most of the adaptations were done before Crossing,” Emorra answered. “But I believe that the botanists and Kitti Ping had to drop a few adaptations. Some of it was a question of resources.”
“And some of it?” Rodar prompted.
Emorra grinned. “Some of it was by choice. Apparently there was something called okra that was dropped by mutual consent.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t drop spinach, then,” Jendel noted sourly, pushing a few spinach leaves about his otherwise empty salad bowl.
“Ah, but that’s good for you!” Tieran said.
“They were pretty selective about their animals, too,” Rodar noted sourly.
“They had complete gene banks at Landing,” Emorra said, adding dryly, “I think the original growth plans were interrupted.”
“Did they have elephants in the gene banks?” Rodar persisted.
“Not that again,” Jendel groaned. Tieran shook his head and smiled.
“Yes, they had elephants,” Emorra said.
“We sure could use them,” Rodar complained.
“As beasts of burden they are not as good as horses,” Emorra said, ignoring Tieran’s alarmed look and Jendel’s agitated shushing gestures.
“Who wants beasts of burden?” Rodar replied. “Their feet were very sensitive to subsurface vibrations-”
“They could hear noise over thirty kilometers,” Jendel and Tieran joined in chorus with Rodar.
“Oh,” Emorra said, suddenly enlightened. “That would make them good for picking up your drum sounds, wouldn’t it?”
“If you could train them!” Jendel said.
“They were very smart!” Rodar said.
“But how would they have got them from Landing to here?” Emorra wondered.
“On a ship,” Rodar answered.
“How could you get an elephant on a ship?” Jendel asked.
“Once you got it on, how could you get it off?” Tieran added.
“And what would you do if it actually liked ships?” Jendel continued.
“I suppose you’d have to take it on a cruise around the world,” Tieran finished with a laugh, which Jendel joined in, much to Rodar’s disgust.
Tieran leaned to Emorra and confided, “We tried to warn you. Rodar’s always going on about elephants.”
“Anyway,” Emorra continued, back on the original topic, “they couldn’t take over the Pernese ecosystem completely-”
“Did they ever completely categorize the Pernese ecosystem?” Rodar asked.
Emorra shook her head. “Hardly. On Earth they had never completely categorized the ecosystem, and they had millennia.”
Jendel rose from his seat with a shudder. “Oh, this is too much for a simple percussionist!” he said, waving the conversation away. “Tieran, seeing as you forgot to bring along your partner, how do you plan to run your watch?”
“I’ll stay,” Emorra offered. “You two can bring the trays back and send the other replacement over.”
Jendel pursed his lips consideringly.
“She knows the sequences, Jendel,” Tieran said.
“She does?” Rodar was surprised.
“Sure,” Tieran said. “They’re a fairly basic set of sequences, many of them modeled on genetic sequences.”
“Genetic sequences?” Jendel repeated. “You never told me that.”
He grabbed a tray, passed it to Rodar, and grabbed the other for himself, gesturing for Rodar to precede him down the tower stairs.
“All right,” he said from the top step. “Tieran, you can use the small drum to drill her on some of the basic sequences just to be sure. You know, attention, emergency, stuff like that.”
“Will do,” Tieran said, throwing the chief drummer a mock salute. Jendel returned it with a nod of his head and began his descent.
Tieran dutifully drilled Emorra on the drum sequences, gave her a quick test, and pronounced her fit to take watch with him. The whole procedure took less than a quarter of an hour.
“That’s twice in one day you’ve taught a class,” Emorra remarked dryly. “Keep it up and we’ll have to put you on the faculty.”
Tieran didn’t respond to her comment. Instead, he carefully hung the small drum by its harness on one of the small hooks pounded into the wall nearest the stairs. Then he peered out into Fort’s lush main valley, watching people tending the fields.
Finally, he turned back to Emorra. “What did they have, the settlers, before the first Thread fell? Eight years, less than that, and then they had to abandon everything and come here to the North.”
Emorra nodded. With a sigh, she rose and walked over to him.
“They didn’t have any time to do a proper survey, did they?” Tieran asked.
“Especially when you add the need they had to engineer the dragons,” Emorra agreed. “Mother would never tell me, and the reports are very vague.”
She frowned as she said that, wondering why her mother hadn’t insisted on making her read every report of the original landing survey.
“So what did they get? Five percent, ten percent?” Tieran wondered.
Emorra shook her head. “The best I could ever discover was about three percent.”
Suddenly she realized why Wind Blossom hadn’t told her about the survey: Her omission had encouraged Emorra to look up the information herself.
Mother, you manipulated me-again! Emorra thought angrily.
Tieran snorted, unaware of Emorra’s feelings. “Three percent of the entire ecosystem, that’s all?”
“They got a very good description of the fire-lizard genome,” she answered. “That’s almost complete, say ninety-seven percent or more. They mapped two or three other genomes, including one of the more basic bacteria.”
“What about Thread?”
“You know,” Emorra responded. “Mother says that they got a complete decode on the Thread genome-”
“-but it was lost in the Crossing,” Tieran concluded. He glanced guiltily at Emorra.
Everyone knew that Wind Blossom had been responsible for a large part of the equipment and records that were lost overboard on the storm-tossed ships bringing the survivors north from the Southern Continent. He continued hastily, “And the Fever Year was caused by a mutation of one of the viral strains from Earth.”
“Yes, as far as we know,” Emorra said. “It was far too early for any crossover infection.”