Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Before we hop all the way back to the Ninth Pass and pick up the thread left off so long ago at the end of The White Dragon, we're going to make a stop for one more short story, written well after many of the books we'll be getting to. It's out of sequence for the list that I've been following, but I suspect that this story, much like Rescue Run, isn't going to do much more for explaining or expanding anything vital. So we head back to the Sixth Pass.

Beyond Between: Content Notes: Death Crisis

The foreword starts with a very shortened version of the spoiler prologues, with specific mentions made of the way that death causes terrible issues in dragons and humans, and Moreta is summed up thusly:

In an effort to perform this unusual delivery [of vaccines], dragons and their riders relied on a little-known, or -understood, ability in the dragons to teleport not just anywhere their riders could visualize, but anywhen. It was very dangerous to cross not only distance but also time and, when tired and confused, even the best-trained dragon and rider could make mistakes.

So the official story is still that Moreta died because she was tired and confused from multiple time-hops, instead of sensibly just taking a nap in the field until she was recovered and then going home from there. It's also officially still said that the time-hopping power is not known or understood well, despite the ease in which everyone seems to be able to figure it out in the clutch, and the official information from Moreta that time power is a tightly kept secret among the bronzes and golds.

The story proper begins at a runnerbeast farm, with Thaniel missing his wife, who died in childbirth, and having what might be best described as a midlife crisis about the finality of death and his adjusted role in his own hold ever since one of the beasts kicked him and put him in the duty of what used to be his wife's job of keeping the place clean and the people fed. The time cue for the story comes with Thaniel remembering his hold is due for plague vaccine, and the arrival of a clearly exhausted dragonrider and dragon carrying the vaccine. Thaniel knows she coming, because Rusty, his favorite runner, always gets frightened at the presence of dragons.

Holth is described as a very pale gold. Moreta isn't faring much better.

He remembered her as a very pretty woman, with short blond hair and deep-set eyes. Now her eyes were underscored by dark circles of fatigue, her body was listless, and her skin was tinged slightly grey, making her look far older than he knew her to be.

Moreta has done far more short hops in the same time frame rather than the Brown Rider Rapist's ten year stint, but the effects appear to be the same regardless of how long the warp takes place.

Thaniel is confused as to why Ista riders aren't out delivering, but he buys Moreta's excuse that she knows the area better. Right until he remembers Moreta addressed Holth, but by that point, the tragedy has already happened. He also heard Moreta say that everything was finished with this final delivery, and so we once again have to shout at the narrative that this tragedy was entirely avoidable if they had just rested at the very end of the journey.

At the evening meal, the oldest daughter insists on giving the vaccinations, but they are interrupted twice, once by Rusty screaming as if he was seeing a dragon, and once again by Masterharper Tirone, who rode in on a queen dragon, thus spooking the horse. Tirone has two other dragonriders (and dragons) with him, as well as Desdra, explaining that they're tracking Moreta's movements for the day. With Thaniel's information, everyone comes to the conclusion that Moreta missed her visualization, while Desdra applies the vaccination to everyone present. Thus satisfied of their conclusion, the visitors return to their own narratives.

We stay with Thaniel, and the next night, while he's alone, Rusty once again shrieks about draconic presence, but there's nobody visibly there, despite Rusty's clear agitation.

Suddenly Thaniel felt as if he'd been touched on the arm by a shaft of sheer ice. He pulled his arms to his body, muttering quietly, "What was that to make me shiver as if this were midwinter and me catching a cold?" And then more loudly, as a horrifying thought hit home, he said, "Am I getting the plague after all?"
Trembling violently, Thaniel turned and ran, terrified, to his hold, slamming the door shut behind him.

Yeah, that sounds about right for someone suffering from the existential crisis - completely triggered by the thought of contracting a disease that has proven fatal to a lot of different people. I don't think that's the intent of this story, but as with many descriptions of trauma and life-altering events, those that aren't trying to describe them often get them exactly right. The kids find Thaniel clearly in the middle of an anxiety attack, but they get through to the end of the night okay.

The next day, dragonriders check to make sure they're all vaccinated, but Thaniel has a sneaking suspicion they're there because he might have been the last person to see Moreta alive, which is triggering his own anxiety. So much so that his children are reluctant to leave him alone in fear that he will end up having another anxiety attack. Unfortunately, a runner gets itself caught in such a way that all the kids have to go out and rescue it. True to story, as soon as the kids are gone, Rusty starts acting up again.

The dust kicked up by Bill's and Jerra's mounts had only just settled when Thaniel was overcome by a terrible sinking feeling that was punctuated by a frightful scream from Rusty. Heart skipping several beats, Thaniel crept to the door, holding a thick stick as long as a man's arm. He opened the door and scanned the horizon for any sign of dragons. All he saw was Rusty rearing on his hind legs, striking out with his forefeet at some invisible foe. Within a few moments the runner started to calm down, only to start shrieking again. He was so frightened that he backed away from the fence as fast as his feet could move.
[...Rusty's panic increases to running around the paddock to the point where Thaniel is concerned he's going to have to put the animal down for a clear mental illness. Except...]
And so Rusty's wild behavior continued, night after night, until the fifth evening after Moreta had vanished until between. That night, Thaniel was watching at the right time. To his utter amazement, the full moon illuminated the ethereal forms of a dragon and rider.
Hollering louder than Rusty, Thaniel dropped his club, turned, and fled back to his hold, where he slammed the door quickly behind him.

Oh. We're in a ghost story, then. Instead of something that would be a meditation on living in a world where death rains from the sky and you have to implicitly trust a group of people you don't know at all to keep it from destroying you completely. And, having revealed what our story actually is, the narrative does a flashback and perspective change all the way back to Moreta's jump to supposedly nowhere.

As soon as Moreta realizes something is wrong, she asks Holth mentally about it.

"Holth?" she cried. "What has happened? We are not back at Fort Weyr!"
"We are between. I did not 'see' where we should go," replied Holth in a querulous tone, bugling in distress.
Panic welled in Moreta's chest and she tried to think back to what she had said to Holth as the tired old dragon had lurched off the ground. She shook her head.
"I had to have visualized Fort Weyr for you, Holth!" she protested, forcing her time-wearied mind to recall exactly what she had said. "I've been a rider too long to make such a weyrling mistake."
"We are both tired," Holth replied blandly. "We went between, as you said. That is all we did."
"Why didn't you ask me where?" Moreta demanded sharply, wondering how a dragon so experienced could have forgotten something so basic.
'You have been telling me where to go, Ave at what time to get there, all day. You always gave me the directions. Specific directions, according to the sun. This time you only told me to go between. Despair crept into the dragon's mental tone.

[Triple cocowhat here, because that's nonsensical, even for Pern.]

Dragons have no self-preservation instinct, apparently. That's the only way I can figure that Holth would do something that clearly causes death. Or whatever this strange place is. I'm sure we've talked about the lack of safety measures present in dragons after they were engineered, but there's no dragon or fire lizard that I know of with a live partner that would willingly plant themselves into hyperspace. And yet Moreta and everyone else refers to this as a weyrling problem, still meaning in all the years that humans and dragons have been partnered, nobody has yet figured out a way to impose the most basic of sanity checks on what their human is about to do. There has to be an instinctual panic button somewhere that functions as a default, even if everything else is blank or otherwise incapacitated. It just doesn't make logical sense otherwise.

Having gone into full panic, Moreta tries to get Holth to jump back home to Fort, but the dragon apparently can't do that, which I raise yet another eyebrow at. Nor can Holth or Moreta raise Orlith or anyone else to tell them about what happened. I would think that if someone can will themselves into an alternate dimension, they should be able to will themselves out of it as well.

[However, since this is the afterlife, rather than merely an alternate dimension, of course Moreta can't will herself back to life. Truthfully, this story would work a lot better if it were an alternate dimension and there was a possible way out, but Marco either hasn't found it or has been staying behind in this timeless dimension so that he can help everyone else who gets stuck here to go on to their final destination, back in their own reality. Which could actually make for some interesting everything if Marco also occasionally had to guide pilots who got lost in hyperspace back to their jump points. But, since this story is narratively functioning solely as closing the story of Moreta, many of these worldbuilding concerns are pushed to the side in favor of a more straightforward narrative.

Furthermore, the lack of safety protocols for dragons and riders is, to put it mildly, one of the things that makes the least sense about Pern and the dragons, because Moreta is entirely in the right here - why didn't Holth say it was a bad idea to do that last jump? Why would she willingly put herself into oblivion on Moreta's say-so? Why don't dragons have a default destination they always use when someone doesn't give them good enough coordinates? Who designed these things, anyway? We'll get to that in the First Pass books, and then we'll see a situation where an entire Weyr of dragons kills themselves because they're all using the coordinates of the leader's dragon, and the leader's dragon is sick and not able to give good enough coordinates. It's plot-important, so while it's still a pointless waste of life, there's an explanation for why it happens. But more about that act of colossal foolishness when we get there.]

To help make sense of this strange situation, another dragon and rider appear to Moreta. Moreta believes she is hallucinating, but the dragon and rider are real enough to her.

The old dragon put her nose forward and made the expected courtesy touch with a newcomer. Then Holth backed up with far more energy than she had previously shown.
Duluth? the gold dragon asked, surprised.
"What's happening? Who are you? Why can I hear and see you?" Moreta cried. The panic was rising in her again. The old queen backed up a further step.
"I'm Marco Galliani," the young rider said in a measured, calming tone.

So the caretaker of this part of hyperspace is the first pair to have gone there without a destination in mind. They make it a daily task to examine the area and welcome any newcomers. Marco offers to take them back to Paradise River Stake on the Southern Continent so they can warm up. With nothing better to do, they follow Duluth back to warmth, and the exhaustion finally catches up with them and both dragon and rider sleep for a long time.

After sleep, Moreta's much less panicked, but she's still stuck, apparently. And trying to make sense of where she is and who he is. It's more than a little overwhelming for her, that Marco has been in that place for so long. He mentions that there have been a lot of other riders passing through this space onto some sort of final destination.

Yes, we've found purgatory, Pern style.

Next week, we'll explore what exactly that might mean as Moreta tries to figure it out for herself and Holth and why she's still stuck here haunting someone instead of in the dragonrider equivalent of Valhalla.

Chapter Text

Last time, Moreta discovered there's an afterlife to Pern, basically throwing everything we thought we knew about the planet out the window. And then proceeded to haunt the last place she was seen alive at, while the first dragonrider to go between without a destination gives her support and encouragement while he wanders the afterlife and shepherds the lost souls.

Beyond Between: Content Notes: Suicide, Assisted Death

When we last left Moreta, she had met Marco and Duluth, the first riders to go into hyperspace without a destination. At this point, she's still operating under the idea that she can get home by using the right trick to unwarp herself away.

Some new knowledge comes our way about this particular zone that they both inhabit.

"Cats?" Moreta exclaimed nervously.
"Yes, cats. The big felines that Ted Tubberman bred and let loose down here."
"Oh! But they're the creatures that brought us the plague. Don't let any of them come near you!"
[...they talk a bit about the cats and the plague...]
"Riders and dragons died, too?"
"Yes," she replied sadly. "How did you know that?"
"I saw quite a few of them," he said, grimacing. "Far more than would have been accounted for in a heavy Threadfall."
"But if you saw them in between, then you must have seen where they went!" Moreta felt a rush of hope.
He shook his head slowly. "I don't know where they went. I haven't been there yet." A curious expression touched his face as he talked. Duluth warbled gently to his rider.

Marco figures that this place they're both in is some sort of alternate dimension, and that his longevity is due to being there for so long. He's surprised to hear from Moreta that dragons can time-hop as well, before returning to the question of where the other riders he's seen are going to.

"Sometimes, though... I see dragons, usually with their riders, just heading away - sometimes heading up..." he waved his hand in some inexplicit overhead direction. "They aren't heading for between, because they are already between. They are aiming for some destination... beyond between."
"Beyond between?" A shiver ran down her spine. "But there's nothing beyond between."
A heavy silence fell over them age it was quite some time before either one spoke.
"Are you sure?" Marco asked quietly.
"You should know. You arrived here in a spaceship, so you should have seen all there was to see of Pern."
"You better believe it." His tone was nostalgic.

Nice title drop there.

Also, why do I get the feeling that I'm listening to some form of evangelism? Pern is supposed to be a-theistic, inasmuch as the gods of the religion are the dragonriders, and so they wouldn't necessarily have their own gods. And yet, this story started with someone in great anxiety about their own mortality seeing a ghost, who is herself being told if another place beyond where she is currently trapped. Marco hasn't even told her she's dead yet, although, as I read forward, he does so soon after this passage, for maximum shock value.

"If I can get back to Waterhole maybe I can get back to Fort Weyr."
He tilted his head sideways, a wry look on his face. "Now that may be the problem. You see, you're dead."
She stared at him with a combination of horror and disbelief. "By the shards of my dragon's egg! Then why am I here with you?"
[...a staredown ensues...]
"You're not with the right dragon. You should have gone between with Orlith, not Holth!"

Okay, so Marco is Virgil and Moreta is Dante, then? This is so very much unlike any other dragonrider story we've had. And as an attempt at fixfic, it's falling down pretty flat. Plus, it introduces a big problem - what the hell are you still doing there, Marco? You're with the right dragon, so why haven't you gone beyond between? Are we supposed to see you as a bodhisattva, instead, one who could go on to final enlightenment but has chosen to stay behind to guide others on the path? A Force ghost? Something else? Because by the rules that are set down so far, Marco and Duluth don't have a reason to still be here.

Furthermore, Marco suggests that the dragons have been engineered to be functionally immortal - by themselves, their lifespan will likely outlast many, many humans, but because they're so tightly bonded to humans, they follow the human into death. Which, again, seems life a really callous waste of resources. There should be a way of uncoupling and recoupling dragons to riders. That way, new weyrlings get the benefit of a dragon that has the experience of several riders before them to help make sure they stay alive. It would like of be like the Dax symbiote for the Trill.

[As we go along, we'll find that watch-whers are, in fact, engineered for this ability to transfer or shift their bond from one to another, in the giant Todd retcon that makes watch-whers into something other than accidents of the Ancestors trying to create dragons. But this is something that happens independently of the dragon program, and so the accomplishments of the later author, by virtue of being a later author, are not incorporated into the earlier author's work. Because each Pern author, and sometimes each Pern book, feels no loyalty to any other book for things like canon or continuity.

Furthermore, as is pointed out in the original comments to this post, this limbo state apears to only be available to those who went to their final rests on a dragon that was not theirs. Those who have done it on their bonded dragons go immediately to whatever the beyond is. That makes for an interesting situation, because in a functionally timeless space with a semi-consciousness, that might appeal to some people, especially if they can have a limited way of observing and influencing later behavior. It runs the risk, though, of being the last person in hyperspace when they turn out the lights on Pern. And that would be really lonely. But maybe in the meantime, they will have figured out how to bring people back from limbo. Or Universal AC will finally find the answer to the Last Question and the universe will be remade again so those who are lost in limbo can be alive again.]

Anyway, Marco talks about how his experience in limbo has made him pretty certain of the existence of a soul, and that the souls of a rider and their dragon are basically intertwined forever. Moreta has had enough of metaphysics and is determined to get a message to Leri so that this dragon cross gets taken care of. So she hops back to Waterhole, scaring Rusty and the runners, and starts trying to get Thaniel clued in to what's going on. So we see from her perspective what we had seen from his at the beginning, for the first few haunting attempts. Marco encourages her along the way, as well as offering sympathy for the fact that she can't just directly go back to the place where she wants to be.

The narrative shifts over to Leri, the survivor of the tragedy, who is talking to Kamiana, one of the other queen riders, and experiencing both survivor's guilt and the pain of being old.

"I do so completely desire all this to be over," Leri said wearily. "I'm tired of this old body. Orlith says if I stay until her clutch is ready to hatch, then she'll take me with her between.
Kamiana bowed her head; she had no words of reply. She sat silently, a gentle hand resting on Leri's arm.
[...Sh'gall, Tirone, and others come to visit, and everyone has memories of Holth and Moreta to share...]
"Will I forever be lost to Holth, and Orlith to Moreta?" The beseeching look the old queen rider cast about her was too much for the assembled group to bear. The men shuffled their feet and the women hastily dabbed at their eyes; Kamiana was not the only person getting hard not to weep.
"It is something I have thought often about," Sh'gall said quietly. "When our lives as dragonriders are over, do we go on with our dragons to something else, or is this all we are?"
"I like to think that there is more for us, somewhere else," Leri said wistfully, through her unchecked tears. "Another part to this life. But I am just a foolish old woman, hoping I'll find my beloved between."
"As to that," Master Tirone cleared his throat, rocking back on his heels as he assumed an academic stance, "we only know that it is an area of nothingness separating here from there. But there is -" He paused dramatically. "-more to it than we will ever know. Another dimension, perhaps, through which only the dragons may travel."
"Another dimension?" Lidora looked startled.
"As height and width and depth are dimensions. Between may be another such."
"But we don't know, do we?" Levalla, the Benden Weyrwoman, said in a puzzled tone.
"No, we don't and I'm not sure how that applies to this...situation," said Sh'gall.

Sh'gall, as we saw him in Moreta, doesn't seem to have the brain capacity for musing like that on the afterlife. Tirone, no problem at all, but I don't really believe that Sh'gall has been this otherwise brilliant and philosophical man, and only around Moreta does he seem to be a dunce.

This sequence does beg the question of how many dragonriders choose to commit their own deaths, either by going to hyperspace without a destination, or by "accidentally" letting themselves get killed by Thread, because fifty years of fighting and training has to take a toll on one's mental health, especially without any mental health professional to help get them through the siege. The next few lines are Leri asserting that she has the right to choose the time and method of her own death against all the people in the room who want her to stay, despite both her and Orlith having lost the entity most dear to them.

I'm really thinking this story is much more the author telling us about their experiences with getting older, musing on death, and laying out their hope that there is something beyond the veil for those who have the ability to make it there. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and Pern is familiar ground at this point, but it's really rather too religious for the setting that Pern is. Tirone has the right way of going about it to make it work with the setting - if the dragons can traverse space and time, it makes sense they should be able to traverse other dimensions as well.

Anyway, Moreta goes back to haunt Waterhole again, without the desired result, and one more time, this time the one where Thaniel actually sees Moreta in the moonlight and gets the message she has been trying to scratch into the ground - "Get Leri. Moreta."

So they do. The Stationmaster for the messengers (Runners) comes to deliver the message personally to Leri, who slips him a full "Harper Hall credit" and sends him back with a reply message to wait until Orlith's eggs hatch. (We'll talk more about the existence of a messenger guild when we get to the correct story in the sequence that brings them fully formed into existence, instead of having them exist from the beginning. Possibly with Cocowhats.) When the fateful day comes, Thaniel sends Rusty away, greets Leri with bread and klah, then retreats back inside to continue making and baking bread until sundown.

It was about an hour later when the second dragon appeared. Thaniel let out a deep sigh when he heard the glad cries from the women, and the loud trumpeting of the dragons.
The reunions brought tears to Thaniel's eyes as he looked on from the doorway. Moreta leapt from the back of Holth and ran to Orlith. She caressed her queen's head, touching the pale gold neck with great tenderness as she gazed adoringly into faceted eyes that whirled bright blue with happiness. Leri dropped her cup and walked as quickly as she was able to meet Holth; she hugged her dragon's neck fervently, as a newly Impressed weyrling would. Thaniel later said that he thought his heart would break at the old Weyrwoman's joy.
"I never thought I'd see your again, dear heart," Leri said amid tears of joy, while her fingers remembered the texture of Holth's wattling hide.
[...thanks to Thaniel are given from Moreta...]
"Now, we are matched correctly," she [Moreta] said with an air of intense satisfaction.
[...news of the Hatching and Oklina's Impression, and then the two queens launch into the air and disappear into hyperspace...]
Thaniel wished them well, as his tears at last brimmed over. He bent to pick up the handle that was all that remained of the mug. He suddenly felt reassured for the first time in many years. Perhaps there was some other place he would go eventually; some place he did not yet know. Some place where he might see his beloved wife again. He slipped the broken handle into his apron pocket and patted it - a keepsake by which to remember Moreta.

And that's the end. No description of the space beyond, no Marco giving them a wistful wave and a chuckle, before moving on to the next resident of his corner of limbo, not even a pair of shooting stars streaking across the sky.

I'm glad, in some ways, that Thaniel feels hope at the end point. Admittedly, though, blest more are those that have not seen and yet believe, and all that. Thaniel gets the benefit of having seen Moreta and Holth's ghosts to know there's something beyond. Which is still way different than anything we've seen in Pern to this point, or in the past of Pern, and suggests that maybe spirituality survived just fine on the planet, even though it never gets mentioned. All in all, this has been a very strange trip, and perhaps one that's been more insightful into the author than the characters. We don't even know if this was a successful trip for them to heaven. Just that they both went away.

[This is one of the weirder parts of the Pern canon, so much so that it basically doesn't cohere with anything else, before or after, and I wouldn't be surprised of most of the fandom has not seen this work at all, as it appeared in exactly one collection of short stories by multiple authors and hasn't been reprinted since. At the time I wrote this, I had to wait on inter-library loan for a paper copy of the work, so when it appeared, I basically dropped the order I was in and took care of it immediately, then slotted it in where it made sense in the original set, because by that time I'd finished the origin stories and we were heading back to the Ninth Pass for more.

Truthfully, not only is this a finish story for Moreta, possibly requested by the fans, but it really feels like an extended meditation about growing older, about the possibility of dying, and of wondering if there's anything more than the current life. Which, y'know, given that the only times we have people who come back from being dead for a while is in our mythologies, it's really an issue that only looms larger with time. It's one of those things that I don't think about too much, because thinking about it is terrifying. Instead, even in a pandemic, we're trying to focus on the things that we feel we can control and we hope that we don't run into something that we can't.

In terms of Pern, though, although the rights would be impossible to wrangle, as a way of proving that Pernese hyperspace works like an alternate dimension, it would be neat if, at the end of this particular story, there was an odd sound, and something that could be plausibly described as a blue police box (but not as that, because Pern wouldn't have a conception of that at all) materialized on the horizon somewhere, and a strange-looking person stepped out of their conveyance, wondering where they are. Pick whichever Doctor makes the most sense for that time. If we were using the actual Doctor at that time, it would either be the Eighth or the Ninth.]

Let's move on. [Time to go back further in time, to the origins of Pern, the colonists who arrived there, what they were aiming for, and what they built for themselves instead. And a lot decisions being made that won't make a whole lot of sense at all, but that, frankly, is old hat at this point.]