Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #8: “Rescue Run” (1991)

Tequila Mockingbird: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.

Lleu: And today we are beginning our journey through Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, which is a collection of short stories. The collection was published in 1993, but several of the short stories were published independently, prior to or in close conjunction with the collection as a whole, and as a result, we’re going to do them as a series of bonus episodes focused on each of the stories in more or less their publication order. What this means is that we are starting today with the last story in the collection, “Rescue Run,” which was published in 1991, around the same time as All the Weyrs of Pern, actually slightly before it.

Tequila Mockingbird: If you have not read this story, it is a pretty dark one, and it does discuss sexual exploitation and coercion, grooming and sexual exploitation of a minor, suicide, the implication of incest, and we are going to be talking about some pretty racist characterization decisions that McCaffrey made.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Yeah… I definitely, when coming back to read this, I procrastinated a little bit, ’cause I was like, “Oh, it’s the creepy one, isn’t it?”

Lleu: It turns out I lied in Nerilka: I had forgotten that I also owned a copy of Chronicles of Pern: First Fall in my own right. I never read it, ’cause it was connected with Dragonsdawn, which I didn’t really like.

Tequila Mockingbird: Wow. See, for me, again, it was exactly the opposite, because it was connected to Dragonsdawn. So Dragonsdawn and Chronicles were the ones I reread over and over again, along with Dragonflight.

Tequila Mockingbird: Uh-huh. Not “Rescue Run” — I read that one once and was like, “Mm, it’s creepy. I don’t want to read that again.” But some of the others.

Lleu: Yeah. “Rescue Run” follows Ross Benden, who is Paul Benden’s nephew, who is a naval officer in the Federation space navy, and the ship that he is on receives the distress call that Ted Tubberman sent out illegally in Dragonsdawn, 50 years later. So, they make a decision that they are going to go and investigate: it’ss close enough to their course and, crucially, their job is to investigate the frontiers of human settlement for incursions by the Nathi, who we know are the alien species that the Federation had just been fighting a series of brutal wars with prior to Dragonsdawn. The wars ended, but apparently Nathi incursions have continued. We’ll talk more about that later. So, against the possibility that this might be a Nathi incursion, they decide to go investigate, and Ross Benden leads an away mission, basically, to the surface with a couple marines, a scientist, and a naïve, bright-eyed young officer —

Lleu: — to assess the situation, make contact with any survivors of the alien attack that was reported in the distress call.

Tequila Mockingbird: So they are also trying to figure out if Thread is in fact the alien organism that Ted Tubberman mentions, and, if so, whether it’s naturally occurring or is some kind of biological weapon, if it’s still on Pern, because they were deeply creeped out by investigating it and the scientist who’s on the mission is specifically intrigued.

Lleu: Yeah. Also, they don’t know what the mechanism for the organism getting from the Oort cloud to Pern is. So they’re seeking specific information about that, if the organism that they find in the Oort cloud is, in fact, the alien attacker. They try to contact the main settlement at Landing — no one’s there, obviously, ’cause they evacuated 50 years ago — and then they go to a second beacon that is active, after scanning the planet, determining, “Oh, there’s no life signs on the Northern Continent —”

Lleu: Yeah, we’ll come back to that. “But we’re getting a signal from a beacon somewhere else on the Southern Continent.” And they go to the location, and who do they find but fucking Stev Kimmer.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fucking Stev Kimmer and also the remnants of Kenjo Fusaiyuki’s family in his home state of Honshu.

Lleu: Yes. So Stev Kimmer has been living at Honshu as the iron-fisted patriarch for the last 50 years, teaching Kenjo’s children and also his own children and grandchildren because he married…

Lleu: And then, basically, Stev Kimmer is like, “No, there’s no other survivors,” and is weirdly insistent on this. His children are like, “We did look, and we didn’t find any other survivors.” And so, finally, Benden and co. are like, “Okay, with some of Kenjo’s stockpiled fuel reserves that his children know about we have just barely enough fuel to get all of you back to the ship if we jettison a bunch of non-essential equipment.” And everyone’s being kind of weird about this, but they’re like, “Yeah, okay, we’re going to evacuate.” Kimmer’s —

Lleu: — wife-slash-adopted daughter has a fire lizard that she quote-unquote “releases,” whatever that means, because pets aren’t allowed in space. They get on the ship and discover that they’re hundreds of kilograms overweight for some reason, and it’s because Kimmer and his family smuggled hundreds of kilograms of precious metals and gemstones aboard.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think they were allowed to bring the gemstones; the platinum was all smuggled, ’cause it was in thin plates and they glued it all over the ship.

Lleu: Yes, true. And while they are attempting to locate all of this and remove it, someone launches Stev Kimmer out the airlock.

Lleu: Yeah, and everyone is like, “Oh, no. Stev Kimmer’s dead. It was probably not murder, though. He probably was trying to frame one of his adopted sons, because he knows they hate him. That’s what happened. He threw himself out the airlock.” And then they get back to the ship, and Ross is like, “Boy, do I have a lot to tell you.” And the captain’s like, “I look forward to reading your report.”

Lleu: Oh, also, I skipped a crucial moment, which is, while they’re taking off, a fisherman from Fort Hold looks up and sees the rocket’s trail going up into the sky, but then is like, “Hm. Whatever. Don’t know what that’s about. Back to work, I guess.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think that’s actually a good jumping off point, because the core problem that we both came away from this story with is, it doesn’t make sense. I’m sorry. It simply doesn’t make sense that they have this technology and they can do all this stuff and they’re really looking and they couldn’t find any trace of life on the Northern Continent.

Tequila Mockingbird: They know people live in caves. Honshu is literally built into a cave. They know that people said they were going north.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, Kimmer misleads them, saying, “Well, they said they were going west,” but I think they also do know that like, “Oh, there were ships; they might have sailed to the islands.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s apparently a fisherman who’s out on a goddamn boat, not under a fucking rock. So nobody, after the Pass has ended, nobody has left the Hold? Nobody has built a fucking smallhold somewhere that sticks out? Nobody has goddamn herd animals out in the open, two years after the Pass has ended? Why?

Lleu: They’re literally like, “Oh, well, the Northern Continent’s in the grip of a horrible winter right now,” but no one appears to have made the connection that that might mean that people are staying inside and producing fewer obvious signals of human habitation, that maybe they would have to look a little closer.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also also, are you telling me that there’s no smoke on the entire Northern Continent?

Tequila Mockingbird: Are you telling me that they’re still using high-tech heat sources?

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. And that electricity isn’t producing any kind of pollution? That’s completely goddamn invisible renewable energy? Where is that electrical power coming from?

Lleu: Yeah. It’s infuriating. And the result is a story that I actually in some ways think is quite good — I think it’s some of her best characterization.

Lleu: It’s deeply creepy. But it relies on this premise of, “Oh, well! Guess there’s no one else on the planet!”

Tequila Mockingbird: To me, it felt like the same problem she had at the end of Moreta, wanting the pathos and pushing it a little too far to the point where it just becomes frustrating instead of genuinely tragic.

Tequila Mockingbird: She wanted that, “Oh, the fisherman sees; oh, it could have been!” The tantalizing “Oh, they almost did it!” And as a result, it gets so close that you’re like, “Well, why didn’t that just happen? That’s stupid.”

Tequila Mockingbird: As opposed to, maybe if she’s put it during a pass and everyone’s button the fuck down — although I guess then there would be dragons fucking flying around, so never mind. I feel like you could have given better reasons for them not being able to find life on the Northern Continent. I’m not coming up with a lot of them off the cuff, but it just doesn’t work.

Lleu: I think it would have been substantially more interesting — not to write the fake good version of Pern, but — if they had found people on the Northern Continent, and they’d talked to the people in charge at Fort Hold and Ruatha Hold and the Weyrleaders, and they’d all said, “We’ve got things handled for now. We don’t need your help.”

Lleu: Although that would get a little diffuse. So probably better to just leave him out of this.

Lleu: That’s a more interesting story. It seems like she went into this feeling like Kimmer had not gotten his, kind of, just desserts and so she needed to give him those.

Tequila Mockingbird: But honestly, letting the rest of that deeply traumatized family know that there’s other human beings out there and having them abandon him to be alone, or kick him out of Honshu and shun him — ‘cause they love to fucking shun people on this goddamn colony — then that would have been revenge. You don’t need to blast him out of an airlock, even though I don’t object the airlock moment. It’s a fun little moment. But you’re so right: that is exactly what should have happened in the story, because they also make it textually clear, if they found a significant population of survivors, they were not really supposed to take people off the planet.

Tequila Mockingbird: They weren’t set up to take people off the planet. They stop and think about that, like, “Wow, if we thought we’d meet a significant population of survivors, we would have brought like a troop ship.” And they’re like, “No, if we meet a significant population of survivors, they’re surviving. Great.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “We were here to investigate, not to evacuate people.” And the only reason that they do it is ’cause they’re like, “This is one family. There’s only 11 of them. The gene pool is clearly stagnant, and this guy is fucking creepy, and there’s no future for them on Pern.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “They’re shipwrecked rather than being a community that could support itself.”

Tequila Mockingbird: You’re right, that is the fake good version of Pern that could have and should have existed. Thank you, as always, for providing that.

Lleu: Yeah. It would have been so much better, ’cause it would have been 100% in keeping with everything we know about the colonists, especially now that it’s two years after the Pass — they’ve proven, “We can survive on this planet. We will survive on this planet,” and now, with two years between them and Threadfall, feels like it would be a lot easier for them to be like, “Yeah. We’re fine. Come back never.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “We don’t want to be in debt. We came here for a reason.” You could have a touching little moment where Paul Beneden has died and his nephew is like, “Ah, yes.” Could be cute!

Lleu: Because here’s the other thing about that — it would open the door to interesting stuff in the future that I would be curious about. I want to see dragons in space more —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes! But again, it does seem like she didn’t want that. She wanted that beat where they leave and they go, “Welp, we’re officially marking Pern and the entire system as interdicted. No one should ever come here. It’s too dangerous. Everyone’s dead.” Rubber stamp.

Lleu: Yeah. That I think actually is probably the real reason that this story exists, is because she needed to explain why Pern had been left alone for 2,500 years, and the answer is because there’s a warning beacon that’s telling people not to come here because they might bring Thread with them.

Lleu: Which also seems like the kind of thing that the Yokohama might be able to detect and inform them about.

Lleu: Apparently not, yeah. This story just creates so many more problems than it solves.

Lleu: ’Cause then, also, it’s like — they can’t poke around more at Landing and find the one building that the beacon is at and dig it out enough that they can go talk to AIVAS and get information?

Tequila Mockingbird: You know that the beacon’s there; you can’t just be like, “Oh, yes, the beacon.” And AIVAS isn’t being like, “Oh, hi!”?

Lleu: Yeah, which is the same problem that is also going to come up in Dragonseye, which is, after 200 years of Interval, people are like, hmm, why didn’t we ever go back to the Southern Continent? It’s like, “Well, we tried after the pass ended, but we couldn’t find AIVAS!” Hello? You cannot make me believe that. Sorry.

Tequila Mockingbird: “We couldn’t find the volcanoes. We just couldn’t find them.” I think I would like to then talk about the world beyond Pern, because I do think there is a fun potential, though, in some future — give it another hundred five hundred years — for dragons to come rocketing out of the Sagittarian sector in a spaceship, and everyone to be like, “Aren’t you from the forbidden system? Are you evil? Are you coming to kill us all in the night?” And future dragon riders who got bored to tears without Thread to fight on Pern being like, “Hi, we are teleporting, telekinetic, psychic dragons and we are here to party!” I would love that for them.

Lleu: They have access to pictures of Earth. They have access to detailed information about Earth. Pick a natural landscape thing that you think is unlikely to have changed significantly in 2,500 years, put some stars overhead —

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know about that. That seems likely to end up in time travel causality mcfuckery.

Lleu: Well, anyway. The most interesting parts of this story are the parts that have to do with space and with Ross Benden and his science officer friend, Saraidh Ni Morgana, who I will talk about later. I hate it.

Tequila Mockingbird: One thing that this does successfully do, I think, is in some ways justify the colonists, because we see that they’re not just anti-government whackjobs —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that there are high likelihoods that, if they were officially rescued by the colonial authorities, they would have been under a severe financial penalty, and it would have been exploitative, which is basically the reason they gave in the first place for not sending the distress beacon in that really upsetting meeting where they’re just like, “Ted Tubberman, your daughter died. Get over it.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s not like I think they’re right-thinking individuals, but it’s good to have it externally validated that that’s not just them being libertarian weirdos.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also to see a little bit more of the Nathi wars and the ugliness and, again, validate a little bit their decision to just nope out of that entire situation.

Lleu: Yeah, I was going to say in terms of the financial penalties, that becomes a plot point, because when they’re trying to convince Kimmer and his family —

Lleu: — be like, “You are not being rescued in an official way. You are not a colony that we are intervening on. You are, legally speaking, shipwrecked, which provides a different legal framework for your rescue that does not involve all of your money being paid to the people who rescue you.”

Lleu: So, in other words, “You’re not going to be destitute when you arrive on whatever planet you arrive to.”

Tequila Mockingbird: — right? I do think there’s an interesting flavor there of Stev Kimmer’s obsession with wealth and the way we saw Bitra, too, this idea of, “Oh, I have to steal all these diamonds and come back from Pern and be rich.” But also this terror of poverty.

Lleu: Right. What if you get rescued, and you have to pay all of your money, and you end up somewhere where you don’t have any of the technological knowledge to do any jobs, you don’t have any skilled labor training, you can’t afford your own land, you don’t have, really, the kinds of agricultural skills that are needed, and you just die.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think there’s some intriguing potential there to think about what it is like to be a refugee in this future world.

Tequila Mockingbird: And in the same way that we’ve seen, the colony authority dumped a bunch of refugees into Pern, in a way that on one hand, these nomadic peoples hypothetically got access to land; on the other hand, we don’t really have a clear sense of whether they wanted to come, since McCaffrey kills them all off pretty much instantly without a lot of page time.

Tequila Mockingbird: We get the sense that the Irish Travellers wanted to come because they were promised horses.

Lleu: Yeah, but also it’s clear that they have not been provided with the same amount of purely logistical information.

Lleu: Sean has to be told that they have access to things from the common store of supplies and then inform his parents of this, which you would think would be something that maybe they should have been told about as part of the legal arrangements of this whole thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; I think there is an implication that like they were told, but they didn’t believe it because they don’t trust authority, but…get a social worker in there.

Lleu: Yeah. Clearly there was no adequate preparation on either side of this arrangement, either from the settled population who were coming to be space pioneers or for the itinerant populations who were being shipped off as refugees because they were inconvenient on Earth.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, more and more one does feel like, “Okay, I don’t love the way that you did it, but I am starting to see the perspective of, ‘What if we just fucked off and found a nice little planet somewhere and everyone left us alone.’”

Lleu: Yeah. There’s also — I was thinking as I read this how much I think Ender’s Game, specifically, influenced, indirectly, Dragonsdawn and, much more directly, this.

Lleu: — who use these incomprehensible weapons and are set out to eradicate all human life, and we just fought a genocidal war against them, and we think they have retreated back to their space, but also maybe they’re back. And now we are off on a, ostensibly a little border patrol mission, but also kind of a search and destroy mission for any remnants of the Nathi that are kind of vaguely near Federation space, ’cause, of course, Pern is not actually part of Federation space.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although I think those are also both, themselves, remnants of Cold War stories, right?

Lleu: Yes. I’m just also thinking specifically about the fact that, in “Rescue Run,” not once are the Nathi ever called the Nathi. They’re only called the “Nasties.”

Lleu: That specifically is Orson Scott Card. Side note, I have one other thing to say about Ross Benden and names.

Lleu: I forgot that his middle name is “Vaclav.” 100% guarantee, on the theme of Pern as Cold War fiction, that he is named for Václav Havel, the first liberal democracy-elected president of Czechoslovakia —

Tequila Mockingbird: You also got this picture of military life, in a way that I think, to me, felt very familiar, because it feels kind of the same as all of the other space opera of the ’80s and ’90s.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t know how much of that is accurate to the real military, because I have never been in the military, or if they’re all just basing it on what each other write, if that makes sense. I do know that some of the authors in question have actually served in the military. Elizabeth Moon was actually in the marines, I believe.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I assume that some of them are pulling from research or some lived experience, but it is a remarkably cohesive picture of what the…sometimes it’s a federation, sometimes it’s a weird space monarchy, military structure looks like.

Tequila Mockingbird: And in a lot of ways, it’s Horatio Hornblower but in space. I mean, David Weber —

Tequila Mockingbird: — is very specifically doing that, and I think that starts in the ’90s, the Honor Harrington books.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s this flavor of old-fashioned military, but there are women now, so it’s in the space future, and they don’t really want to engage with that, and as you noted, they give this conveniently ontologically evil enemy most of the time, so that you can just have your fun adventures and not really interrogate it.

Tequila Mockingbird: As it should be. And, similarly to the note of the old-fashioned nature, you do get the sense that gender politics have not evolved in the space future, that’s for sure.

Lleu: “She was also the only woman on board who kept her hair long, though it was generally dressed in intricate arrangements of braids. The effect was somehow regal and very feminine—an effect at variance with her expertise in the various forms of contact sport that were enjoyed in the Amherst’s gym complex.”

Lleu: It’s like, “Oh, she’s feminine, but also she likes to do contact sports!” Also, the prose of this is so bad.

Lleu: “The effect was [...] an effect at variance with her expertise”; “at variance with her expertise in the various forms of contact sport” — it’s just not good.

Lleu: First of all, of course she’s the science officer and not the weapons officer or anything like that. The Marines who come with them to the surface are all men, as far as we know.

Lleu: Yes, that’s true. The captain is a woman; I forgot about that. For all of the —

Lleu: — one and a half scenes that she’s in, yeah. This is, like, an 80 page story. So it’s fairly substantial. What I thought was interesting is, on the one hand, this — clearly turn of the ’90s gender politics are still very much in effect, but also the fact that when they get down to the surface Stev Kimmer has been instituting iron-fisted patriarchy, and all of the women are terrified of him. They’re the ones, of course, who serve dinner, and they serve the wine, and they are —

Lleu: — they do everything that he says. And when the science officer is introduced, everyone’s like, “What? She’s…what?” — including Kenjo’s children, who are old enough that at least the oldest of them have some memory of their father and of the original colony situation — still are a little bit like, “What? A woman? Science officer?” So we’re supposed to see 1990s gender politics as superior to Stev Kimmer’s gender politics, which suggests that we’re supposed to see 1990s gender politics as the enlightened space future gender politics.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s, again, just such a bummer to try and imagine that as the space future, and I think it’s fair to say that often science fiction is attempting to engage with the contemporary world rather than really attempting to make a genuine prediction about the future. But if this is the future that McCaffrey was earnestly imagining…

Lleu: Which I mean, I guess is maybe a question: is this the future that McCaffrey’s earnestly imagining? Obviously Kimmer is bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; yeah. ’Cause on Pern — diversity win — the women who don’t get to make choices about their life or their agency get to ride a dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Look, to be fair, if I don’t get agency either way, I’ll take lack of agency with a dragon rather than the same lack of agency without a dragon, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the choice we’re being presented with.

Lleu: Yeah. Speaking of things that happen in close proximity to that passage, can we talk about, quote:

Lleu: “If they had followed the usual multiplication so characteristic of colonies, the population should now be close to the 500,000 mark.”

Tequila Mockingbird: All I’m saying is that when we ran the numbers in Dragonsdawn, basically every woman who was capable of reproduction was having a baby every 14 months. So if that’s the pattern that you keep up — I don’t like that as a pattern; I don’t think that that’s good — but…

Lleu: I’m just saying, since 1800, the global population growth rate has been significantly less than 1%, and that’s a massive population explosion. If the starting population 50 years ago was 20,000, that’s a 5.7% growth rate, and that doesn’t account for the fact that most of the population was under the age of eight. And obviously it doesn’t account for the fact that a bunch of them died. But that’s absurd. That has never happened in human history, I don’t think.[1]

Lleu: Yeah; I guess I don’t want to never to absolutely say never, but I don’t believe it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. That to me feels very much like McCaffrey was just throwing numbers around —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and was like, “That sounds like a nice number.”

Lleu: Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about Saraidh Ni Morgana. First let’s talk briefly about her name. So, “Saraidh” is a vaguely Irish spelling of “Sarah.”

Tequila Mockingbird: That -dh ending looked like it was trying to be Irish, to me.

Lleu: I’m not actually 100% sure that’s…used. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the wild, as it were.[2] I object strenuously to her last name for two reasons. One: “Morgana.” Hello? This is just McCaffrey’s American Celticism going on. It’s Morgan Le Fay. That’s not real

Lleu: That’s not a real name, remotely. You can’t make me believe that, especially when it’s paired with one of Kimmer’s grandchildren is named “Alun,” A-L-U-N, which is the Welsh equivalent of “Alan.” Also, the ní plus other name is a patronymic.

Lleu: So, on the one hand, we could interpret this as meaning that Irish-speakers in the future — because apparently there are still Irish-speakers in the future —

Lleu: — even though all culture is gone — now use matronymics instead, or at least sometimes use matronymics, which could be interesting, but it’s also ungrammatical. It would need to be “Ní Mhorgana,” with an Mh- at the beginning. It’s just wrong.

Lleu: And so in answer to the question that I have raised in both of our recap episodes now — to what extent can we see McCaffrey as being influenced by her time in Ireland? — the answer is: only in the most absolutely superficial aesthetic sense, apparently, because she’d been there for 20 years at this point and had not, apparently, learned anything about the Irish language, even the most basic “how personal names work.” That’s my little rant about, Saraidh. As a character, I think she’s…fine.

Lleu: I don’t think she’s the characterization highlight; for me, Ross is the characterization highlight. Saraidh is a little bit more — she’s a, a capable, professional Woman, with a capital W. Woman.

Lleu: Capable, professional Woman. She’s very, like, emotionally sensitive and she’s like, “Ooh, something is up with all of the women and children, but I don’t know what it is, but I know something’s wrong and they just won’t tell me.” It’s very Women’s Intuition, capital W, capital I.

Lleu: I think Ross is much more interesting because he has both a personal and a professional stake in all of this. His uncle is Paul Benden. Paul Benden’s super famous. They learn about his military victories at the academy, and then people teased Ross about it, ’cause they were like, “Oh, that’s your uncle!”

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m not really sure what the teasing component was. “Haha, your uncle is a war hero!”

Lleu: So when they get the message, he’s like, “Okay, it’s weird that it’s not coming from my uncle, but maybe I’ll get to meet him. Or, at the very least, maybe I’ll get to meet his descendants, or I’ll get to meet people who knew him.”

Lleu: And he wants that. He’s curious about his uncle. He wants to meet this person — and at the same time, he’s apprehensive about it, ’cause “He turned his back on everything that I am as a military officer.”

Lleu: “He gave all of that up to go live on some random backwater that no one’s been in contact with for 50 years.” That’s an interesting dynamic, and it means that when he gets there, when they’re first talking to Kimmer, he doesn’t introduce himself for quite a while, because, on one level, he’s like, “I don’t really trust this guy,” but even before that, he’s like, “I don’t want to give myself away. I don’t want it to seem like I’m here just for personal reasons. I have a job to do.”

Lleu: “And if people think that I’m here because I’m a Benden, then that’s going to get in the way of me doing my job.” It’s an interesting dynamic.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it does pay off, in the sense that, whether or not we actually believe this, at least some of Kimmer’s stated reasons for trying to deceive the people who are rescuing him is because he wants to fuck over a Benden.

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s seeing it as some kind of revenge on Paul Benden to deceive Ross, which is kind of fun and adds another layer of like the creepy denouement, the psychological collapse and all of the drama at the end.

Lleu: Yeah. Well, which brings us to a related question in all of this, back to just sort of strictly the plot: how much is Kimmer lying about what happened?

Tequila Mockingbird: This question haunted me in this story. Truly, I kept going back to Dragonsdawn and trying to compare, ’cause we really don’t get a lot about — we get the evacuation from Landing, but I don’t even know if we know Ito’s name in Dragonsdawn. We know that Kenjo’s married, and we know that she’s Japanese, but I think she’s just called “Kenjo’s wife”? Yeah. We literally just get that Chio-Chio Yoritomo, who is Kenjo’s wife’s cabinmate on the Buenos Aires goes, and then —

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘She told us [...] that she would prefer to stay on at Honshu to work the stake herself for her four children. She has very[3] few needs and would not trouble us.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘She is very traditional,’ Chio-Chio told the admiral breathlessly. ‘She would not show grief, for that belittles the dead.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘She was like that. Kenjo married her because she would not question what he did. He asked me first, but I had more sense, even if he was a war ace.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then starts crying. So we literally don’t get her name, just that she’s a very traditional Japanese woman.

Lleu: The other thing is, it’s been 50 years at this point, and I don’t know how solid Kimmer is on what he’s saying, how much of it is true versus how much of it is what he told the children versus how much of it is what he’s told himself so many times to justify himself for the last 50 years. As a side note, Kenjo’s oldest child is like, “Yes, I think my father — he had been talking to other people of our racial phenotype, basically —”

Lleu: “— about coming to live with us. They were going to come join us,” and is like, “I think he was going to start a dynasty.” So, like, is that why Kenjo was stockpiling fuel, so he could be the Shōwa Emperor of Pern?

Tequila Mockingbird: I feel like Dragonsdawn is pretty clear that he just loves flying.

Tequila Mockingbird: That he’s just obsessed with flying and wants to fly for his whole life and wants to have enough fuel for his biplane.

Lleu: Eventually when we get the reveal that he’s built a plane, here, then it’s more like, “Okay, yeah, I guess he just wanted the fuel to fly a plane.” But the framing of it as a “dynasty” specifically, I was like, “We got red flags all over the place here from — our racism alarms are going off.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And also, again, just this incredibly incoherent, “Culture is gone, but all of the ethnically Japanese people, who no longer share a culture, are going to move to the same place”? Why, pray, if culture is over, Anne?

Lleu: Culture is over, but we still have a robust concept of race, apparently.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I, eugh, it’s just very messy. And, similarly, I think the characterization of Kenjo and of Ito is pretty racist.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think…she chose to write this story and only show us the horror of this family from the outside and at the end, so we don’t get to meet Ito, either.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. So we don’t get a sense of whether this is, again, whether this is what really happened or whether this is what the kids remember about their mom dying. There’s a very interesting passage where Chio, Kimmer’s daughter-wife, is sad when he dies, and she’s like, “Oh, it was so great!” And her older brother is like, “You were pregnant when you were 12, and you were crying, and I remember that and you don’t.” And it’s like, oh, shit.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we’re not really getting the horror story. We’re kind of walking in a circle around the horror story.

Lleu: I think if this had been written as a separate, unrelated to Pern horror story —

Lleu: — about finding a failed colony where there are only 11 people left and they’re in this like horrific pseudo-incestuous —

Tequila Mockingbird: The youngest kids might be Chio and Kimmer’s, or they might be Faith, Hope, and Charity and Kimmer’s, who are his three daughters with Chio.

Lleu: Yeah. And at the very least, there’s an implication that, if they’re not his children with his own daughters, there’s a thin line preventing them from being his children with his own daughters. That that could have been a really effective horror story.

Lleu: Yeah. Or it could have been a really interesting story about people from space making contact with Pern just after the end of the First Pass. And instead it tries to be both, and, as a result, it doesn’t entirely succeed in being either.

Tequila Mockingbird: So into the specifics of whether or not he lied, here’s what we’ve got. What Kimmerer says happens is: everything is collapsing; the situation is bad. He goes to Honshu after Kenjo’s dead; Ito is thrilled and delighted to have a nice, strong man around. Then she gets really sick, and he goes to try and find anybody else left on Pern, because he needs medical help to save her and is unable to do so. The last communiqué that he had over the radio was very garbled. It said that they were evacuating Landing and going maybe west, maybe east, he’s not sure. But the last official report was, “We don’t have enough energy left to fight Thread, so we’re just locking our doors and letting it fall, and there’s nothing we can do anymore. We’re trapped inside again forever.” And he’s like, “Well, when I went out, there wasn’t anybody left. So I guess they all died.” Now, we do know that they evacuated, obviously, that the evacuation was somewhat chaotic. And it is true that that communication was sent out, because in the immediate post-evacuation they don’t have enough electricity-energy to fight Thread after the sled crashes and injures Emily Boll. So Benden does put out a report saying, like, “We’re not going to fight this Threadfall. Everybody come inside Fort Hold, seal it up, let it go.” And that’s when the dragonriders show up and fight Thread for the first time.

Tequila Mockingbird: And Benden’s like, “Oh my gosh, no, never mind. Get out there! We have to record this! It’s finally happening!” So they make that first big between jump from the Southern Continent to the Northern Continent, they arrive just in time, they dramatically fight threat over the harbor, everyone’s hearts soar, and that’s the end of Dragonsdawn. So it is possible that Kimmer got that communication and then got none of the subsequent communication, because we don’t know if they were broadcasting that after that. It might have been, “Well, everyone’s here. We can see the god damn dragons. We don’t need to talk about it.” But I don’t know that I believe that, because it does seem — Benden’s, “Record this, Joel. We have to share this with everyone. Everyone has to know about it.” So I kind of suspect that they then got on the radio and were like, “Yay, dragons! It’s all working!” And that Kimmer’s just lying.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause the other thing we do know is that Ito didn’t just get sick —

Tequila Mockingbird: — what Shensu says is that his mom died not just of a quote-unquote “sickness” but of, after multiple different stillbirths she had a bad miscarriage, because Kimmer kept trying to get her pregnant.

Tequila Mockingbird: And when he was unsuccessful and she died, that’s when he turned his gaze to his adopted daughter, who then he groomed into his wife.

Lleu: Yeah. Another question mark I have is, the specific piece of evidence that they produce, and the evidence that has convinced his children, or his adopted children, that they are alone on the planet is that they went to quote unquote “Bitkim Island,” i.e., Ista, because Kimmer knew that there were black diamonds there. And they went there in the sled that he has, with the last bit of fuel that he had.

Lleu: And when they got there, they found a ship that he recognized, or claimed to recognize, as Jim Tillek’s ship. They went twice, and the second time there was no change: it was clear that no one had been on it for years. And his kids are like, “Yep, we can corroborate that.” The second time we went, there was no change.

Lleu: He’d been to a couple of the stakes, and there was nothing. This is something that, I assume, already in 1991 she probably had some idea that she was gonna go back and deal with this, and, in fact, for all we know, may have already written “The Dolphins’ Bell” and just hadn’t found a market for it yet.

Tequila Mockingbird: There is an explanation for why they deliberately put the ship in mothballs, but we’ll get there when we get to “Dolphins’ Bell.”

Lleu: Yeah. I guess something that we can sort of briefly talk about now then is the position of this in The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall. So, this was the first story in Chronicles to be published, in 1991, in Analog, I believe.

Lleu: But it is the last story in the collection. So, the first story is “The P.E.R.N. Survey,” and then…

Tequila Mockingbird: Three stories during the First Pass, and they’re just in chronological order.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause it starts with the survey; then “Dolphins’ Bell,” which is the Crossing; “Ford of Red Hanrahan,” which is the founding of Ruatha Hold; “Second Weyr,” which is the founding of Benden Weyr; and then “Rescue Run,” which is 50 years later, after the end of the Pass.

Lleu: Yes. But the effect of this, I think, is that if you’re getting to “Rescue Run” having already read “The Dolphins’ Bell” and knowing why the ship is there, it’s one more layer of completely unnecessary fake dramatic irony —

Lleu: — where it’s like, “Oh, no, they were so close! They could have found them!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Shocker: the military is not actually good at getting things done.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I don’t object. There are many ways in which the tragedy of the ending, as you say, doesn’t land. The thing that does land for me is the tragedy of Chio —

Tequila Mockingbird: — both in the sense of, you can see that she’s clearly been sexually abused and emotionally manipulated and pretty badly befuckened.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also the fact that she had a bronze fire lizard, and I think clearly the almost catatonic depression she is in as soon as they leave the planet is probably not unconnected to that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because it’s basically, as soon as they make the decision to leave, like she’s weeping ceaselessly; she’s not responding. They’re like, “Wow, she’s really sad about leaving Pern. That’s kind of odd.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “It’ll be so great.” And then Kimmer dies, and that’s obviously disruptive, but I think a lot more of that is about the fact that she’s now farther from her fire lizard than she has ever been.

Lleu: I hadn’t considered that at all, but I think you’re probably absolutely right. That said, was McCaffrey thinking of it that way? I don’t know. But it makes sense, ’cause they do, I believe, specifically say that she had to “release,” quote-unquote, her “pet” fire lizard and was distraught afterwards.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the rest of them are upset and they’re crying, but she’s the one who needs medical intervention.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Chio wept silently, ignoring the food Faith tried to get her to eat. She seemed wrapped in so deep a depression that Saraidh reported her condition to Benden.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘She won’t last the journey in this condition, Ross,’ Saraidh said. ‘She’s deeply disturbed and I don’t think it’s losing Kimmer.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Isn’t it just that she was so dependent on him? You heard when Shensu said.’

Lleu: Oh, yeah, okay, you’re right — I think probably that is exactly what McCaffrey had in mind there, that it is, one way or another, her separation from her fire lizard.

Tequila Mockingbird: There is also, that’s when they get into the fact that, oh, they thought they would be refugees and impoverished, so I think there is some of it that’s, her future seems very bleak. But it’s also —

Lleu: And we know that distance makes the connection harder, because when Ruth goes up to the Yokohama Jaxom’s like, “I can still hear him, barely.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s rough! Because also, fire lizards — they’re immortal. Has anyone ever lost a fire lizard before?

Lleu: So, I’m thinking about a couple of things now. One: fire lizards have a difficult time grasping getting to space, and I wonder if her fire lizard tried to get to her and didn’t make it.

Lleu: That’s one thought. My other thought is, when, in the Ninth Pass, people are exploring around Landing and at the cove, the fire lizards that they meet, especially at the Ship Meadow, are like, “Are you our men? Are our men back?” Which, I wondered if they are fire lizards of people who died during the evacuation or otherwise and have been lingering for the past 2,500 years.

Lleu: Dragons do, but how much of that is the result of being significantly bigger and being Kitti Ping Yung’s intervention — I don’t think it is clear that fire lizards do.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, no, here’s my final — did Kimmer commit suicide?

Lleu: I’m going to be honest, I don’t really think it matters that much.

Lleu: He’s dead; that’s the emotional payoff that the story wants us to have is, thank fucking god, Kimmer is dead.

Lleu: And I don’t think it makes a huge difference whether he committed suicide or whether someone in his family murdered him.

Tequila Mockingbird: Ooh, that’s kind of fun. I like that. I don’t know that I think this is true, but I do think it was really fun if it was one of his daughters.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think that that for me is the most satisfying little narrative fillip.

Lleu: I would agree. But, fundamentally, I don’t think it makes that much of a difference, especially because they all collectively decide it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Lleu: ’Cause Ross doesn’t think that he committed suicide, fundamentally.

Lleu: But everyone else is feeding this explanation, and he’s like, “Fine. I don’t care enough about this man to try and fight this explanation.”

Lleu: And as a result, I, as the reader don’t care enough about this man to try and fight the explanation.

Lleu: This story is a mess. The writing is okay. Some of the characterization is good. It fundamentally does not succeed at what it set out to do, because its plot is so clearly contrived and relies so clearly on its characters being fundamentally incompetent at the same time that we’re being told they’re competent. It’s not a good story, as a result.

Lleu: Instead, my recommendation is recommendation is Sascha Stronach’s story “Tomorrow, Dawn,” which came out about a week before we’re recording this episode, which is about a lone woman on a farm in the middle of an extremely destructive war who is using the blood of murdered fascists to fertilize her farm.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendation, drifting rather significantly from the actual content, but I think a much more emotionally effective horror/fantasy/Western short that does engage with women’s agency and how it feels to be betrayed by members of your community who you felt were mentor figures or parental fatherly figures toward you is Garth Nix’s “Hope Chest,” which was first published in 2003, but which I read as part of a larger anthology, called Across the Wall, of his short fiction, that I generally think is pretty good. And goodbye and good riddance, Stev Kimmer.

Tequila Mockingbird: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It! If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast.tumblr.com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes, along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast.neocities.org — N E O cities.

[1] We don’t have firm data before the 20th century, but looking around Wikipedia, it looks like recently the highest “natural increase rate” — which is to say, basically, births minus deaths — has been just under 4%, and averages lately have been mainly in the 1%-2% range; Michael S. Teitelbaum writing for Encyclopedia Britannica reports that “the highest known rate for a national population—arising from the conjunction of a very high birthrate and a quite low death rate—is that experienced in Kenya during the 1980s, in which the natural increase of the population approximated 4.1 percent per annum.” Lleu can’t currently remember which population growth calculator he used, so 5.7% isn’t an exact figure (some of the calculators he’s looked at while editing this suggest it’s an underestimate for a starting population of 20,000). In any case, this estimate for colonial population growth is wildly high.

[2] Poking around online suggest’s Lleu’s intuition here is correct. While there do appear to be a handful of people named (naming themselves) “Saraidh,” it is not a “normal” name in either Irish or English.