Free The Dolphins of Pern by Anne McCaffrey Page A

make you shake your head, Alemi?” Kitrin asked him with a sigh of exasperation.
    “Wonder,” Alemi answered, leaning back in his chair. “Wonder that we missed every single clue the dolphins gave us that they wanted to be friends. Shards, they tried to
tell
us and we humans didn’t
listen!”
Kitrin made such a grimace that he laughed. He often knew her thoughts before she spoke them aloud. “Yes, indeed, I can just picture my good father, Yanus, listening to a shipfish!” He snorted.
    “Exactly,” Kitrin said with some heat, for a moment abandoning the little wrapper she was hemming for their expected child. “I mean no disrespect—well, maybe I do,” she added with a rueful expression, “but he is sometimes …”
    “Always,”
Alemi amended firmly with a smile.
    “So set in his ways. You know, neither he nor your mother have
ever
mentioned Menolly. Though yourmother often remarks on ingratitude in my presence.” She sighed. “It’s as if Menolly never existed.”
    “I think she prefers it that way,” Alemi said with a wry and slightly bitter grin, knowing all too well the treatment given his talented sister during her adolescence at Half Circle Sea Hold. “Both of them—mother and daughter.”
    “Menolly’s never been back? Ever?”
    “Not to the Sea Hold. Why should she?”
    Kitrin shrugged. “It seems so … so awful … that they cannot accept her accomplishments.” Then she added shyly, “Sebell always remembers to send us copies of her latest songs. Alemi,
when
are we going to have a harper?”
    He grinned, for he knew that had been the main reason for this trend of their conversation.
    “Hmmm. I’ve asked Jayge and Aramina. Readis is growing old enough to learn his ballads and so are enough other youngsters, including our own, for the hold to have its own harper. Enough for a journeyman surely, and we can offer many benefits here: decent weather and property to develop.”
    “Ask if
they’ve
asked,” Kitrin said with unusual force. “I’m not going to have the girls, or our
son”
—and she said this defensively, one hand on her gravid belly—“grow up ignorant of what they owe Hold, Hall, and Weyr.”
    Alemi laughed. “Stoutly said.”
    He did bring up the matter of a harper for the Hold the very next afternoon when he delivered the Holder’s best of the day’s catch: three grand big redfins.
    “I could almost
wish,”
Jayge said with some acrimony,“that Aivas hadn’t been discovered! Everything depends on what he needs first!”
    “But surely harpers …”
    “Every harper who’s done his journeyman’s walk wants to have some part in transcribing Aivas’s information, which seems to be inexhaustible on every subject imaginable and
all
of it seemingly has to be done
now!”
The Holder rubbed an agitated hand across the stubble of his close-cropped black hair. He scowled. “I’ve
asked
and asked.”
    “Master Robinton?” Alemi suggested hopefully.
    Jayge dismissed that hope. “He’s worse than anyone else, stuck up there at the Admin.” Then he gave a snort of amusement. “Still has his finger in most pies! But I no more want Readis ignoring his duties—even if those, too, are apt to change with all these new gadgets and information—than you want your girls growing up untrained. Push comes to shove, the farmcrafters have an elderly harper who might be persuaded to travel up to us now and again, but …”
    “If you don’t mind me doing so, I’ll drop a word to my sister,” Alemi offered.
    A look of intense relief passed over Jayge’s tanned features. “I didn’t want to impose …”
    “Why not?” Alemi grinned. “I haven’t fished for many favors from my well-placed Master of a sister. She’s got a child, too, you know. And another one on the way.”
    Jayge gave him a stare and then winked. “Seems she does more than craft all the songs anyone sings these days.”
    “It’s one way of being
able
to do just that, accordingto her, what with