Chap. 107 Naming the beast

Chap. 107 Naming the beast

"Oh, hello, K'ndar, Francie told me you rode Donal," Raylan said, as K'ndar entered Landings Main reception lobby.

K'ndar shook his head in admiration.

"That…THAT is a riding horse. I'm so glad you got him, I couldn't have afforded him, but I dreaded the possibility that he might go to some idiot who'd treat him like a cart horse," he said.

"To be honest with you, K'ndar, we really couldn't afford him, either. But I know my wife, when it comes to horses. The man who sold him to us could see right away that we'd give him a good home. He was …well, K'ndar, I didn't take him to be a trader, not dressed the way he was, he acted like his feet hurt! But he was a shrewd business man. He didn't cheat us, he did bring his price down, and we feel we all got the best part of a deal."

K'ndar, knowing the real story, kept it to himself. 

"I take it you're about to leave?" Raylan asked.

"I am, but something made me come in, not sure what," he said.

"Ah, Jansen must have been sending you mind waves, like when Francie calls her fire lizards or Motanith," he said. "Come on back, she's at her computer right now."

"She showed me the skull of the diver, earlier today," he said, following the technician.

"Aye, and after you left she did some excavating in the data base and found out what the diver is."

"OH! That's great!"

They entered Jansen's work area.

"K'ndar! I'm glad you came back. I've learned something about the divers," she said, grinning.

There was a page on her computer monitor screen, filled with notes from someone's notebook written a long time ago. 

He bent over to look over her shoulder, reading the page.

"I'd almost given up, really. That got to me. I don't give up, not easily, when I have a hunch the information is Right There, I'm just not asking the right questions. So, I went WAY back. There was a man who did a lot of research on the animals when humans first got here," she said. "This is a page from one of his field notebooks."

"I'm guessing you'll be treating the ones I give you the same way?"

"Oh, yes, indeed, and thank you for making them neat and legible!. This man,  Dee
Ar  Plank, kept copious notes but apparently didn't realize that his notebooks would be entered into the database, but then I don't know when it was done. Maybe after he died? But anyway, his writing is hard to read, and he makes notations that sometimes don't make sense. At least to me. BUT it's what we have to work with, and in a way, I’m grateful, it makes me work harder to be a better researcher. Or 'data miner', as some folks call it," she said. 

"Is that the same DR Plank who wrote "The Natural History of Pern"?" K'ndar asked.

"Aye, it is."

"That was the first book I read, and if you ever reprint it, I want a copy. Elene lent me one with the understanding, and my promise-that I'd donate it to my weyr's library, and I did," he said, "but I still want one for my own bookshelf."

Raylan laughed. "Considering the things you've done for us, I can probably get you your own copy. I think we're reprinting that one along with several others. Let me go check."

"I'd appreciate it, Raylan, I would. I'm going to have to have another bookshelf made for my weyr, between my 'messy' field notebooks and the few books I do have, it's getting full."

Jansen drew his attention back.

"Before I go on…when you saw the mosar, did it have wings?"

He laughed, a bit nervously. "No, and I'm glad I didn't get that close-it was too close to begin with! But I saw no wings."

Ah. All this time, something about the mosar had been bothering him. 

"Now that I think of it, you know, no, it had no wings. It had, only, um, FOUR limbs, like us, and the earth creatures, not six, like Pern's. That's been bothering me all this time, and I just now figured it out. At the time, all I could see was about a thousand teeth, all coming too close!"

Jansen grinned.

"Nevertheless, a mosar has 'wings'. Except that its wing bones have transformed into retractable dorsal spines! A mosar has TWO rows of these spines running parallel to its spine. It can raise the spines to enable it to make sharp turns when it's swimming fast, like a rudder on a boat can make it turn," she said.

"I know very little about boats other than they have bow waves that dolphins ride on," he said, remembering his first conversation with Lindea.

Jansen laughed. "I can research that if you like, because I don't much about boats, either, but let's continue."

"Having seen the skeleton of the diver, even partially buried, I can try and sketch what I think the live 'diver' looked like. Please excuse me, but I've never been good at drawing-I can barely draw a straight line and I'm no where near as good an artist as you, but here is what the skeleton tells me the diver looked like."

She drew a rough sketch.

"Oh, shards, I didn't mean to do that," she said, trying to rub out a mistake.

"That's okay, Jansen, I make mistakes all the time," he said.

She turned the sketch around for them to look at.

It looked like nothing he'd ever even considered before.

Paladen benthos or 'diver'. Drawn by Jansen of Landing

"Huh. I thought it would look like a mosar, which, I've learned from you, is evolved from a tunnel snake. But this looks nothing like a mosar, and it has wings!"

"Not wings, K'ndar. Flippers," she said.  She rolled her computer monitor's screen to a page taken from someone's field notebook.

"Now then. This is where Dee Ar Plank's field notebook mentions 'divers'. He'd had never seen one alive, but apparently, between talking with the dolphins who were just as new to Pern as he was, and finding a lower jaw, he called it Paladen benthos, or "benthic shovel tooth". 

"Benthic….meaning sea bottom? Something that lives on the bottom of the sea?"

"Right!"

"The dolphins say it rarely comes to the surface, that it lives on the sea floor."

"They're probably right. Like other Pern creatures, it has six limbs. See these 'flippers'? They're the wings, turned into paddles to allow the paladen to move through the water. The forelegs are adapted to digging in the sand on the sea floor, digging up clams and possibly holding onto rocks in strong currents. I'll know more if we are lucky enough to find the front feet. The hind legs, again, transformed into flippers, and the tail was flattened and broad, similar to a dolphin's tail, but not split, just a broad surface," she said.

"Other than those changes, it's not much different from other Pern animals, with the fenestrated rib cage, and the pelvic girdle unchanged. It started out as a land creature and evolved into a sea one."

"Do…do they walk on land?"

"I doubt it. Not considering the size of them, and the fact that they are like mosars in that they can't breathe out of the water," she said. "But, as in all biology, never say never. Again, we'll know more about it when we get it all dug up and brought here."

"You got all that from a few field notes and a look at the skeleton?" he asked, amazed.

"It's just adaptation and evolution, K'ndar, you know that," she said.

"I've been so busy, I've not been able to really dig down into evolution, but I do understand enough of it," he said, a bit abashed.

"Not to worry, we're printing a book on evolution and adaptation right now," she said.

He looked at the sketch with a new understanding. 

"Paladen benthos," he repeated. "Paladen. Well, I don't think we'll be able to re-educate the dolphins to call it that," K'ndar said.

"There's no need, really," she said, "Ninety percent of Pernese still call horses 'runnerbeasts'," she laughed.

Raylan came in, with a big smile on his face. In his hands were two books.

"You, my friend, have a big fan in Elene," he said.

"She's…well, she's ..well, like my mum. The kindest person," he said.

"She's got a sweet spot for you, because when I told her you wanted a copy of Plank's book, she said, wait, I have another for that young man, tell him these are HIS, to keep-and gave me these," he said, smiling. 

He handed the books to K'ndar. One was "The Natural History of Pern". The other was "Evolution, Natural Selection and Adaptation."

K'ndar took them and pressed them to his chest.

"Thank you. Thank you so much," was all he could say.