“Down beyond what people are beginning to call the Sea of Azov, as far away from Landing as he can get but on rather a pleasant plateau, to judge by the probe report,” Emily replied. She hoped that the meeting would conclude soon. Pierre had promised her a special meal, and she found that she was enjoying those quiet dinners more than she had thought she would.

“Howinell is Kenjo going to get those tons of fuel there?” Benden asked.

“I suspect we’ll have to wait and see,” Ongola replied with the trace of a smile on his lips. “He’s got the same right as everyone else to use power sleds to transport his goods, and he’s done some close trading with work units at the commissary. Shall I have a word with Joel about Kenjo’s requisitions?”

Emily glanced quickly at Paul, who was adamant in his defense of Kenjo. “Well, I don’t like unsolved riddles. I’d prefer some sort of explanation, and I think you would, too, Paul.” When Benden nodded reluctantly, Emily said that she would speak to Joel Lilienkamp.

Which brings us back to that third tremor,” Paul Benden said. “How’s work progressing on buttressing the stores warehouses and the one with all the medical supplies?

We can’t afford to lose such irreplaceable items.”

Ongola consulted his notes. He wrote with a bold angular script that looked, from Emily’s angle, like ancient manuscript ornamentations. All three of them, as well as most section heads, had made a point of reverting to less sophisticated methods of note-taking than speech processors. The power packs, whose rechargeability was good but not infinite, were to be reserved for essential uses, so everyone was rediscovering the art of calligraphy.

“The work will be completed by next week. The seismic net has been extended as far as the active volcano in the eastern archipelago and to Drake’s Lake.”

Paul grimaced. “Are we going to let him get away with that?”

“Why not?” Emily asked, grinning. “No one’s contesting it. Drake was the first to see it. A community settling there would have ample space to grow, and plenty of industry to support it.”

“Is it scheduled for a vote?” Paul asked after an appreciative sip of his brandy.

“No,” Ongola said with another hint of a grin. “Drake is still campaigning. He doesn’t want any opposition, and whatever there might have been is now worn down.”

Paul snorted, and Emily cast her eyes upward in amused exasperation with the flamboyant pilot. Then Paul pensively regarded the remainder of the brandy in his glass. As Emily went on to the next point on their informal agenda, he took another sip, rolling the liquor around in his mouth, savoring the soon-to-be-exhausted beverage. He could and did drink the quikal but found it harsh to a palate trained to subtleties.

“We are proceeding well in general terms,” Emily was saying briskly. “You heard that one of the dolphins died, but Olga’s death was accepted by her community with considerable equanimity. According to Ann Gabri and Efram, they had expected more fatalities. Olga was, apparently,” she added with a grin, “older than she said she was and hadn’t wished to let her last calf go into the unknown without her.”

All three chuckled and followed Paul’s lead as he raised a toast to maternal love.

“Even our . . . nomads . . . have settled in,” Emily went on, after checking her notepad. “Or, rather, spread out.” She tapped it with her pencil, still unused to handwriting notes but struggling to get accustomed to archaic memory assists. The only voice-activated device still operable was the surface interface with the main computer banks on the Yokohama, but it was rarely used anymore. “The nomads’ve made rather a lot of inroads on clothing fabrics, but when those are depleted, that’s the end of it and they’ll have to make their own or trade, the same as the rest of us. We have located all their campsites. Even on foot, the Tuareg contingent can travel astonishing distances, but they camp for a while, in two separate sections.”

“Well, they’ve a whole planet to lose themselves in,” Paul said expansively. “Have they posed any other problems, Ongola?”

The dark man shook his heavy head, lowering the lids of his deep set eyes. He was agreeably surprised by the nomads’ smooth transition to life on Pern. Every week each tribe sent a representative to the veterinary sheds. The forty-two mares brought in coldsleep by the colony were all in foal, and the nomads’ leaders had accepted the fact that a mare’s gestation period was eleven months on Pern as it had been on Earth.

“As long as the vets keep their sense of humor. But Red Hanrahan seems to understand their ways and deals with them.”

“Hanrahan? Didn’t his daughter find the dragonets?”

“She and a boy, one of the travelers,” Ongola replied. “They also provided the corpses which the bios have been clucking over.”

“Could be useful creatures,” Benden said.

“They already are,” Emily added stoutly.

Ongola smiled. One day, Ongola thought, he would find a nest at the critical hatching point and he would have one of those charming and friendly, nearly intelligent creatures as a pet. He had once learned Dolphin, but he had never been able to overcome his fear of being constricted underwater to share their world properly. He needed space about him. Once, when Paul was sharing one of the long watches with him on the journey to Pern, the admiral had argued most eloquently that the dangers of outer space were even more inimical to human life than those of inner sea.

“Water is airless,” Paul had said, “although it contains oxygen, but when and if the Pure Lives’ hold on human adaptations is broken, humans will be able to swim without artificial help. Space has no oxygen at all.”

“But you are weightless in space. Water presses down on you. You can feel it.”

“You’d better not feel space,” Paul had replied with a laugh, but he had not argued the point further.

“Now, to more pleasant matters,” Paul said. “How many contract marriages are to be registered tomorrow, Emily?”

Emily smiled, riffling pages of her notepad to come to the next seventh-day sheet, since that had become the usual time for such celebrations. In order to widen the gene pool in the next generation the charter permitted unions of varying lengths, first insuring the support of a gravid woman and the early years of the resultant child. Prospective partners could choose which conditions suited their requirements, but there were severe penalties, up to the loss of all stake acres, for failing to fulfill whatever contract had been agreed and signed before the requisite number of witnesses.

“Three!”

“The numbers are falling off,” Paul remarked.

“I’ve done my bit,” Ongola said, slyly glancing at the two staunchly single leaders.

Ongola had courted Sabra Stein so adroitly that neither of his close friends had realized he had become attached until the couple’s names had appeared on the marital schedule six weeks earlier. In fact, Sabra was already pregnant, which had led Paul to remark that the big gun was not firing blanks. He had let his bawdy humor disguise his relief for he knew that Ongola still grieved for the wife and family of his youth. Ongola’s hatred of the Nathi and his implacable desire for revenge had sustained the man throughout the war. For a long while, Paul had worried that his favorite aide and valued commander might be unable to alter that overpowering hatred even in a more peaceful clime.

“Emily, has Pierre consented yet?” Ongola asked, a knowing grin lighting a somber face that even his present felicitous state did not completely brighten.

Emily was astonished. She had thought that she and Pierre had been discreet. But she had recently noticed in herself a tendency to smile more easily and to lose the thread of conversations for no apparent reason.

She and Pierre were an unlikely combination of personalities, but that was half the pleasure of it. Their relationship had begun quite unexpectedly about the fifth week after Landing, when Pierre had asked her opinion of a casserole composed entirely of indigenous ingredients. He administered the mass catering of Landing, and very well, she thought, considering the wide range of tastes and dietary requirements. He had started to serve her special dishes when she ate at the big mess hall. Then, when she would often have to work through the lunch hour, Pierre de Courci would bring over the tray she ordered.