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dragons had to use coal for their flames,” he explained, wilting under Tarik’s look. Feebly, he finished, “I was sure they’d only use the best.”
    “Your lad’s a fair one for thinking, Tarik,” Moran said with an affable laugh. “You can’t really fault his logic.”
    “It’s his job to listen to his elders and learn from them,” Tarik replied. “He doesn’t need to do any thinking.”
    Moran gave the miner a troubled look. “Thinking comes in handy for harpers.”
    “He’s not going to
be
a harper,” Tarik replied. “Cristov’s going to be a miner. Like his father and my father before me.” He gave Moran a grim smile and held up a hand over Cristov’s head. “We’re built the right size for the mines.”
    “I imagine that thinking will be important for miners, Tarik,” Moran said, shaking his head in disagreement. “Times are changing. The old mines have played out; the new seams are all deep underground. Mining down there will require news ways of thinking.”
    “Not for me,” Tarik disagreed. “I know all I need to know about mining. I’ve been a miner for twenty Turns now—learned from my father and he’d been a miner for thirty Turns. It was
his
father that first opened our seam, seventy Turns back.”
    A ripple of overwhelming sound and a burst of cold air announced the arrival of a huge wing of dragons, flying low over the crowd.
    “Telgar!” The crowd shouted as the dragons entered a steep dive, twisted into a sharp rolling climb, and came to a halt, their formation intermeshed with the weyrlings so perfectly that it looked like the two wings of dragons had been flying as one, even though the fighting wing was head to head and a meter underneath the weyrlings.
    Cristov gasped as a rain of sacks fell from the weyrlings only to be caught by the riders of the great fighting dragons. Looking at the jacket worn by the bronze rider leading the fighting wing, he saw the stylized field of wheat set in a white diamond—it was the Weyrleader himself!
    As one, the fighting wing of dragons turned and dove again, flawlessly returning to hover in the same place where it had come from
between.
As the dragons hovered, their great necks twisted and their heads turned back to face their riders, who opened the sacks they had caught to feed the firestone to their dragons.
    “Nasty stuff, firestone,” Cristov heard the harper mutter behind him. “Nasty stuff.”

    The planet Pern was a beautiful world settled hundreds of Turns ago by colonists seeking to forget the horror of interstellar war—indeed, of all war.
    But the original survey of Pern failed to notice that one of its sister planets was a wildly erratic rogue. It was not until eight Turns after Landing that the settlers learned of their peril—when the planet they called “The Red Star” came close enough to loose its deadly cargo of Thread across the void of space and onto fertile Pern.
    Thread, an alien life-form that streamed into the atmosphere in the form of long silvery strands, devoured any organic material; neither flesh nor vegetation was safe from it. A single Thread burrow could suck the life out of a whole valley in half a day.
    The resourceful colonists fought back with the last of their space-going technology while devising a series of long-term, biological defenses, chief among them, fire-breathing dragons that chewed phosphine-bearing rocks—firestone—to create their flames. At birth, in a ritual called “Impression,” the dragons bonded telepathically with human riders who, with their great mounts, risked their lives fighting Thread. And so Pern survived.
    The Red Star receded and Thread stopped falling. For two hundred Turns the colonists spread out across the Northern Continent of Pern. When the Red Star returned, the dragonriders were prepared and flamed the Thread out of the skies.
    Even a pastoral world needed steel for plows, horseshoes, and shovels. Pern required more, including steel buckles and