Tenna is a courier, running messages and letters across Pern. One evening while she is travelling between stations she is knocked over by a wagon. This is a blatant disregard for the long-established rules that the runner trails are only for runners. When she stops at Fort Hold station to get treatment, she learns that the culprit is one of Lord Groghe’s sons. But she is still determined to seek redress for her injuries…
“Runner Of Pern” first appeared in the 1998 anthology Legends, edited by Robert Silberberg. This was an enormous anthology featuring stories set in established fantasy settings (yes, yes, I know that the Dragonriders of Pern is Science Fiction). It was hugely successful and spawned a sequel a few years later called, imaginatively enough, Legends II. Anne McCaffrey was one of several authors who contributed a second story to this; she was, however, the only one to contribute one in the same setting as she did in the first one (it was also the last story set on Pern to have only her name on it). I don’t have it in this form, but it was featured in the Anne-thology A Gift Of Dragons, which is making its second appearance in this blog series (it has one more showing to make).
“Runner Of Pern” is a rather charming story about a young woman who is just setting out on a career to carry messages across Pern by foot. Tenna is very serious about her running, coming as she does from a line of runners who have all served Pern in the past. Being proud of her profession and heritage within it, she naturally takes great offence at Halogan, the driver of the wagon who knocked her over, and his antics. She is encouraged to make a claim against him by other runners who have also suffered a similar fate.
Suffice to say that Tenna does have a reckoning with Halogan and they begin a romance, which is developed further in The Skies Of Pern, the final novel in the series, taking place nearly thirty years later.
The setting of this novel is late Eighth Interval – just before the Ninth Pass, in which the majority of the books and stories are set. Thread is yet to fall so what we have is an almost fantastical setting, with teleporting dragons making it feel quite magical, similar to The Masterharper Of Pern.
But that novel was at least built in to the history of the series – the idea of runners is pretty much set out in whole cloth here.
And yet it makes perfect sense that there would be a form of postal service on Pern: dragons have been mentioned as being carriers of messages and passengers before, but that is almost exclusively for Holders and Craftmasters on Pern; regular folks haven’t really had much of a look in until the more recent stories. There’s also the traders, carting their goods from one Hold to another, but they would travel too slowly for regular mail. And we’ve also seen the drums, but they operate like a telegraph or semaphore, carrying important information that needs to be transmitted and answered as fast as possible.
The idea of the runners is laid out very simply and effectively: they have their own road system, adjacent to established tracks and roadways, set aside exclusively for their use. For the regular people of Pern it feels like a perfectly adequate system for a reasonably speedy delivery of the mail.
Interestingly, the running network doesn’t really feature terribly heavily in the future of the series, unlike several other ideas that were set up in other books and stories and exploited in later tales.
The Dawn Sisters, for example, the three satellites that turned out to be the original colony ships that brought humanity to Pern parked in a geostationary orbit, were mentioned first in Dragonsong but brought up as a plot point in The White Dragon. But it wasn’t until Dragonsdawn that we properly discovered what they were.
The dolphins released into the oceans of Pern in Dragonsdawn, were a surprising addition to the canon but they became an interesting storyline of their own.
The runners and their subculture, mixing elite athletes with an essential public service, also provide an interesting sideways glimpse into what happens on Pern when the high and the mighty aren’t trying to change everything.
Everything is connected and has a place in Pernese society, it seems.
Coming Up Next: The Skies Of Pern
