Chap. 271 Grafton’s Advice

Chap. 271 Grafton’s Advice

“Hello the weyr? Grafton, sir? K’ndar here, requesting permission to confer with you? I need some advice.”

He’d thought about the Engineers’ meeting, and D’nis dismissing Geoff for heckling.

This was the fourth of fifth time he’d seen…or been the target of, mouthy, rude and arrogant people at Landing. Was everyone at Landing nothing but self centered arseholes?

I don’t understand these people. It’s as if they’re from another world! I have to talk to someone about it. I could go back to Kahrain Weyr and talk to Oscoral, but…he’s off shift right now, and it’s…well, he wouldn’t understand. Would he? Landing was such a strange, unusual place for a man who’d grown up in the mines, and was now a baker in a traditional weyr in a cavern riddled volcanic ridge.

I don’t even know why it’s bothering me. I was hazed in weyrlingschool, and certainly my father never let a chance to berate me go by. Why, is this bothering me now?

He thought of Grafton, Landing’s headman. The man was held in almost mystical regard. Despite being blind, he seemed to know everyone and everything. He was held in deep regard, even deeper, he felt, than the Council. Everyone said his name in hushed tones, as if he were a brooding queen dragon, ready to bite someone’s head off should you disturb her.

But having met Grafton, he believed the man was open to talking to a confused young scientist.

He waited at the man’s door. Grafton’s living quarters were an older, windowless, wooden building. How odd, he thought. With as many vacant buildings on Landing, why this one? But, he reflected, there were people who had chosen to live in the caverns of Mt. Garben. Like D’nis.

“Hello, the weyr? K’ndar here,” he repeated. Living in caves for most of his life, he’d learned to call for permission to pass through a doorway that, at times, was delineated solely by a hanging hide, or a screen of woven withes. This door was made of lightwood. It swung inwards.

Fafhrd, Grafton’s bronze fire lizard, hovered in the middle of the opening. The lizard met his eyes. Siskin chipped, very softly, intimidated by the very dominant Fafhrd. The bronze fire lizard waited until K’ndar had entered, then pushed on the door til it closed behind him. Then Fafhrd retreated into the darkened room.

“Come in, K’ndar! Will you have some klah?” said a voice.

“Um, no sir, thank you.”

“If you need a light, there’s a shelf at elbow height just to your right. There’s a jar on the shelf, with a glow in it. Help yourself.”

Unseeing in the gloom, his fingers found the jar and opened it. The glow responded with its typical, gentle light.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom. Soon he could see Fafhrd, perched on a shelf on the wall opposite him, and Grafton at a desk, a datalink in front of him. No light emitted from it, but K’ndar could see Grafton’s hands resting gently on the key pad. How did he type, being blind?

“Give me a moment, K’ndar, to finish this report up.”

“Of course, sir.”

The man’s hands waved over the keyboard. He heard no keystrokes. An electronic voice said, “so, in conclusion, Honorable Council, I believe the proposal deserves more inspection, to include the logistical components, before it is implemented. Respectfully, Grafton, Headman, Landing.”

That, K’ndar thought, was clever. A talking datalink! Well, datalinks DID talk, he reflected, but only when someone was on the sending end. But this one!

Grafton turned to face K’ndar. The glow’s soft light failed to pick out the details, but K’ndar remembered seeing the puckered, dreadful scars across the man’s face, the signature of threadfall’s savagery that had blinded the man as a child.

Thread. Thank the stars it was gone.

“What brings you to my hovel, K’ndar?”

“Hovel, sir? What’s a hovel?”

“Hovel, noun. One. A low, open shed, for sheltering animals, storing supplies or equipment. Two. Any small, miserable dwelling, a hut.” said the datalink in its odd, electronic voice.

“Oh, do shut up,” Grafton snapped, “he wasn’t asking YOU.” He touched a key on the board. K’ndar swore that the datalink whimpered as it shut down.

“That was the database? She talks to you?”

“I talk to her and she transcribes what I say into text. She can be bothersome, at times. I have to be careful, she is always listening, unless I tell her not to. Like now.”

“Is this..hovel ‘miserable’? From what I can see,..oh, sir, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to insult, uh, I know you are….” he said, mortified that he’d mentioned a sense that Grafton didn’t have.

“That I’m blind? Not to worry, lad, using the word ‘see’ is a verb used in more ways than just referring to one’s optical sense. And I can ‘see’, through Fafhrd. What a help he is,” Grafton said.

The bronze fire lizard whickered in agreement.

“Thank you sir. I’d hate to insult you.”

“You’ll have to work harder than that, then.”

If you don’t mind my asking, sir, why are you here, rather than in a newer building?”

Grafton laughed, again. “Funny, everyone asks me that when they see my living quarters. I could easily have the sort of building you live in…2001 Belior, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yes sir.” The man’s memory was phenomenal.

“I grew up in a hovel like this one, but smaller. We were Holdless. I grew up in a hut smaller than this one, when we couldn’t find a cave whose occupants were willing to accommodate a widowed woman with three kids, one of them blind. We built a hut out of lightwood, roofed with bark from a redtree. It was under an overhang of stone to shelter us from Thread fall. I remember, during Thread fall when the others would run their livestock under the overhang, and one time a calf actually joined us in the hut!

The buildings here at Landing are almost all that building material called plasticrete. My office, for instance, is in with Administration. It’s difficult for me to work in it. I’m not like sighted folks. Obviously! When a person loses a sense, for instance, sight, the other senses improve in compensation. It is true with me. My sense of hearing is so good that I can navigate by hearing.

Every move we make creates a sound. In this, my wooden home, the sounds are attenuated, softened by the organic, irregular surface of the wood. It makes it easier for me to tell where I am in space based on how quickly a sound is reflected off of the wood. Whereas, in one of the plasticrete buildings, the sounds are reflected off a very hard surface, and while they come back crisper and clearer, they’re loud, sometimes painfully so, and at higher speeds. Then you have the things that use electricity to operate. They all make a low noise, for instance, the lights make a humming that no one else seems to notice. Add one or two people in the mix, and it devolves into chaotic noise, and I get confused, even lost. Then I depend on Fafhrd to be my eyes.

When I was offered the position of Headman, it came with quarters in one of the newly restored buildings. I asked for this ‘hovel’ instead. It’s warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and most important, it’s quiet. Other than this datalink, there is nothing electronic here. Even better, I’m a ways from the main cantonment. The only sounds made are those by me and Fafhrd. Oh, and the little creatures that would like to live with us. Unfortunately for them, Fafhrd eats them.”

The bronze fire lizard chortled.

K’ndar was fascinated. “You can navigate just by sound?”

“Not ‘just’ by sound. Much of it is memory. So many steps to here, so many turns to there. It’s not like I were a dolphin, who navigates by sonar. Mine is not so precise. It took me years to learn how, and to this day, I can still get confused. “

There was a comfortable silence for several moments.

“So, K’ndar. You’ve been on my mind, of late.”

“ME, sir? Me? How?”

“Let me guess why you are here. You were raised in a cothold. Your parents taught you to be respectful to others, those older than you, and to follow Pern etiquette. You were given responsibilities that increased in complexity as you grew older and more competent. You learned early on that there were consequences if you shirked those responsibilities. Then you were impressed, and have a dragon in your head. You learned to work with others as a team, to obey your weyrleader, to listen and learn from those more experienced than you.

When you came here, you rationally assumed that the people here would act as they do in the rest of Pern. But no, even before you were assigned here, you’ve had run ins with at least four people, people who were rude, vengeful, or manipulative. One tried to kill you, another tried to bribe you into his corrupt schemes, a kid stole from you, and now a yob has heckled you in a symposium. You wonder, why in the world are these people like this, in what is Landing? You were expecting people here to act like professionals, like adults. Instead, it seems as if you have a target on your back, one that invites every arsehole to fill it with arrows.”

K’ndar’s jaw dropped.

“Are you…can you hear my thoughts? Is my dragon in your head?” he said, stumbling over his words in amazement.

Grafton laughed. Somehow, it seemed incongruous, that Grafton would laugh. He was like a bronze dragon in K’ndar’s mind, something all business, without a sense of humor.

“I knew you’d ask that. No. I am not in your head. I know how people think, I know why the do the things they do. Being blind forced me into different ways of understanding humans, discerning their actions and behaviour. You’re wondering if you just don’t fit here.”

“By the egg, sir, you ARE reading my mind, to the very word. But…yes. Yes, sir. That’s exactly why I’m here. I’m wondering, am I just a misfit? Maybe I don’t belong here? I sometimes wonder if I should just resign, and find something else to do, go back to the weyr? Or nomad it?”

Grafton slapped the desk. “Do NOT resign, K’ndar. Do NOT. You are well liked here, you are appreciated by the Council, and by your boss, Raylan. You’ve done a lot of good work in the short time you’ve been here. You were born a biologist, and we need you. You’re not a misfit, in fact, you’re a better citizen of Landing than the Shawns, and Marshes, the Flemings and Geoffs. Landing badly needs people like you, with your standards of culture and civility. Not everyone here is an arse. Do you think that of Risal? Or Raylan, or Elene? Who, by the way, was so very, very appreciative that you took her to see the rain forest.”

“Thank you, sir, she’s been so kind to me, right from the first. Of course, I don’t, think that everyone is an arse. I guess I’m being ‘sissy’ as my father used to say. He was always warning me, ‘you better toughen up, boy, people will take advantage of you when they see you’re too soft.’ And I’ll be switched if I’m not beginning to believe he was right. It seemed that from the very day I started working here, the arseholes scented me and came hunting. They have this need to cut me down. It’s not as if I came in boasting like a bull. They seem to feel that I’m some yokel from the steppe and they have to demonstrate that no matter what I do, I’ll never be as good as them, I’ll always be some dung booted fool.”

Grafton laughed again. “”Sissy? I don’t think of a man who flies against Thread a ‘sissy’. You’re ‘sensitive’, K’ndar, and while it sounds soft or weak, it isn’t anything of the sort. Sensitivity is just another word for empathy. Many scientists here, I won’t mention Miklos, for example, haven’t an ounce of empathy in their entire being. It makes for excellent scientists, but sad failures as humans.

When Landing was ‘re-discovered’, when Aivas awoke, it came up with a plan to finally rid Pern of Thread. It needed people, young people, to learn how to build things like computers, printing presses to make paper, create electronic components, create fabrics for space suits! to protect dragonriders from the vacuum of space so that they could drop warp drives onto the Red Star and divert Thread forever. It was a grand plan and took many, many people.

There was much winnowing for those technological positions. Only the person with the right characteristics-a drive to learn, a facility for something like wiring a computer, a penchant for fiddling around with tools, and most of all, a fierce attention to detail, were chosen. It helped that they were ready to leave home, too.

Aivas preferred youths, people in their late teens and early twenties. People that age were old enough to feed and dress themselves, but young enough to not have much in the way of responsibilities. They were farmers but weren’t running the farm. They were herders who was just the kid who mucked out stalls…like you. They were Holder’s sons who dreamed of being Lord Holder and a father who was more than willing to let him go to keep him from trying. They were girls, especially the girls! who wanted more out of life than having lots of babies and dying young from overwork.

Being young, they were willing to try new things. Most adults, by the time they make rank, so to speak, by the time they are parents, or Holders, or Master Craftsmen, or even Weyrleaders, have lost that elasticity of mind that allows them to accept new things. We get set in our ways, having learned that This Way Works and That Way Doesn’t. We don’t have the time or inclination to try something completely new or unusual. I’m sure you can tell me that it’s easier to train a two year old colt than a twelve year old stallion.

Not everyone was young. For instance, my mother made her way here when she heard Landing was hiring for lesser jobs like cooking or seamstress. That’s how I came to be here, with my siblings.

The youngsters learned new and necessary skills, but those skills came at an unforeseen price.

Landing is, I’m certain you’ve noticed, a very odd wherry. It’s not a Hold, or a Hall, or a Weyr, yet it has aspects of all three. Because it was so different, and Aivas had a tight time schedule, these skilled young folk were literally thrown into Landing’s ‘pond’ and told to swim. They were accepted on the fact of what they could do, not what type of citizen they could be. Civility is a nebulous concept and one that is unnecessary for creating computer codes.

The new technicians delighted in their freedom to be someone other than so and so’s son. But there was no one to hold them to the civic norms that were, and still are the bedrock of Pern’s culture. It’s not to say they had no mentor, no guidance. They did. They had Aivas. It was..he was? I can’t help but refer to him as ‘him’.

I don’t know, precisely, what Aivas WAS. It wasn’t an animal, but it was alive. It wasn’t a person, but it had a personality. It had no body but was very self aware. In those early days, when the newly minted ‘technicians’ were working at his direction, he was at every elbow, training, teaching, guiding. He was their mentor and their best friend. He had unending patience, never, ever punished, instead using failure as a way to learn success; encouraged them when they felt hopeless, explained things in simple terms when they were stuck or puzzled. But at the end of the day, he was still ‘nothing’ but an unincorporated voice, with a giant brain.

He didn’t demand or expect courtesy or respect from his students. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ meant nothing to him. Thus, the technicians learned it was unnecessary.

They lived here under heretofore unimaginably luxurious conditions. Someone cooked for them. They lived in a building rather than a cave, one with automated doors and running water. They had no need to work a harvest or grow food. They wanted for nothing. They weren’t expected or allowed to interact with nobles or Masters, or even Harpers. They weren’t held accountable for being rude, or insolent, or a bully.

In a way, K’ndar, I feel sorry for them because they were used, like any draft animal. Fed, watered, and tasked with doing things like build a computer.

They quickly learned what was expected of them. As long as they produced, for a specific and timely goal, everything else, like learning how to interact with other humans, was allowed to slide. In a word, K’ndar, they weren’t socialized.

Many of those technicians were devastated when Aivas ‘died’. He left us with a wealth of information and technology, and a profoundly changed culture. We could finally begin to progress without the fear or Thread.

His death, though, orphaned his cadre of specialized technicians. There was no longer a need for people who could, for instance, make space helmets. Landing had no more need for them. Those technicians were given the option of staying on here at Landing doing work or a trade that was useful. We needed cooks, mechanics, gardeners, plumbers, herdsmen.

Many resisted or flat out refused to do what they considered ‘drudge’ work. Such work was degrading, it was beneath them. They’d come to think of themselves as ‘elites’. But there was no place for them here. They were far too young to retire here. If they’d not learned a trade before coming to Landing, things went very hard on them once they returned to their former Holds or Halls. It’s not commonly known, but many committed suicide.

Those who WERE willing to learn a new trade, or did some job that earlier was ‘below them’, stayed. They were still ‘unsocialized’, mind you, although a great number did learn to be civil, they have to practice to this day. The problem being that they went from being unsocialized kids to unsocialized adults-who had babies.

Having never learned social skills, etiquette, or the necessity of civility, they failed to teach their children. I had one woman complain to me that having her children say “please” and “thank you” was demeaning!

They found it almost impossible to deal with the everyday person, the man who milks the cow, the woman who cooks their meals, the child who collects the eggs. They cannot grasp the fact that everyone, no matter their station in life, is due respect and civility. Nor can they comprehend why, when they’re just acting like they always have, the person on the receiving end reacts with antagonism.

We had one ‘technician’ here who so infuriated a Minecrafter with his complete lack of courtesy that the Master Miner refused to supply Landing with any more copper. The technician was completely mystified as to why he was being dismissed. When he was asked, where did he think copper came from? He said, “why, from the warehouse on Procyon Street”!

When they are dismissed from Landing,..and it happens more often than you may think..they’re set adrift in a society in which they’ve never learned to function. At least once or twice a year, we’ll find someone has sneaked back to Landing, trying their best to avoid being caught eating in the dining hall, or sleeping in a yet unrestored building. They are, essentially, Holdless, but worse than Holdless. Even Holdless people know how to say ‘please’.

These are the types that are targeting you, K’ndar. In many cases they grew up unable to say the simplest ‘please’. You become a threat to them. You’re antiquated, backwards, unintelligent. If nothing else, they’re competitive and you strike them as unable to compete. You possess a skill that they’re not ready or able to learn. You easily function in both worlds. They only know the one they grew up with, and that one is gone. So they attack out of resentment..or fear.

Several years ago I saw this problem and tried to start a ‘civics’ class, a voluntary one, for these grown up babies, as well as children.

Very few adults showed up. They didn’t believe it was necessary. We recently dismissed a young man, born here, for, among other things, a refusal to be civil. He said,‘civility is a sign of weakness.’ I wonder where he is, now. No, let me retract that. I really don’t care where he is now. I imagine he’s not very happy.

Now, after my recommendation was approved, civics is mandatory for children in Landing’s school.

Every adult we hire, for instance, yourself, is now screened for not only their skills, but also for socialization. It’s taking a while, it’s taking longer than any of us thought, but gradually we are seeing the rude, the insolent ones off, and a return to common, every day courtesy.

Before you ask, K’ndar, yes, you passed with flying colors. You ticked that mark off the moment you said ‘thank you’ to the grubby handed mechanics who repaired your dragon’s bay door. You treated them with as much respect as you treat me. You had an advantage, also, in that one, it was obvious your parents taught you, but also, the Weyrs do a tremendous job teaching civil behaviour. You dragonriders are all prepared to address Lords, and Council members…I almost said CouncilMEN, but now we have a female Council member and Pern is the better for it!

So, to sum up this very long winded session, K’ndar, please, do not allow a couple of yobs run you off. Be water, my friend. Be like a dolphin, let it run off your back.”

Grafton leaned back and crossed his hands over his chest. He smiled.

“Have I eased your worries, K’ndar?”

He’d almost forgotten why he’d come there.

“Most definitely, sir, thank you so much,” he said, relieved.

“You’re welcome. Do you have any more questions? Because I must get back to work.”

He got up. “No sir, you HAVE eased my mind, and I can’t for the moment think of one. Oh, yes, I do. If I need to, may I come back?”

“Of course! I do have a question for YOU, though.”

“Sir?”

“You’ve not spent a coin of your pay. Not so much as a tenth of a mark. Are you saving for something big?”

“Pay? I’m getting paid?” he said, gobsmacked.

Grafton roared.

“Yes, you wherry, you get paid every month! It goes into your account. Were you not told this?”

“Um, um, if I was, I don’t recall. I was just, well, so happy to be hired, I’m happy to be able to do what I love..biology.”

“K’ndar, K’ndar. You certainly are the son of a thrifty cotholder. You’re frugal and probably take care of your things, but there’s no need to be a skinflint. K’ndar, not everything here is free. Housing, and meals, yes. Otherwise, Landing isn’t a Weyr that is supported by tithes. Things like boots or harness for your dragon? It comes out of your pocket, it’s why you’re paid in the first place. What in the world have you been living on?”

“Um..” he said, embarrassed. “I…well, I have money, but, well, I am used to bartering, and..well, I..just make do with what I have.” Other than buying books, he’d hardly touched the money he’d won at the horse race. That was a lifetime ago. Two lifetimes!

“K’ndar. You probably need new boots, if nothing else. Go see Drave in accounting. He’s not happy in that he shares an office with Fleming, but Fleming will ignore you, now. No loss, what? If you’re not sure about how to manage money, Drave will teach you. He’s a bit odd, he has nothing but numbers in his head. But he’s honest and a very good man. Polite.”