Thaniel is a runnerbeast farmer (runnerbeasts are horses genetically engineered to be viable on Pern). One day he is met by Moreta, Weyrwoman of Fort Weyr. She is delivering a vaccine against the plague that is threatening thousands of lives on Pern. Thaniel thinks it is odd that she is riding Holth, the queen dragon of the retired Weyrwoman, Leri, but thinks nothing more of it… until he is visited by a search party who are looking for Moreta who hasn’t yet returned. Meanwhile, Moreta and Holth find themselves between (the freezing nothingness that is the space between teleporting jumps that the dragons are able to take) and are beginning to panic when they meet with a small brown dragon and his rider, who introduces himself as Marco Galliano…
“Beyond Between” was first published in the anthology Legends II, edited by Robert Silverberg in 2003. It was a collection of stories by bestselling authors of fantasy who were invited to write stories set in their beloved worlds. Anne McCaffrey was one of the authors who had submitted a story for the first volume (“Runner Of Pern”), but she was almost the only one who submitted a story set in the same world as the first one. This story went further back in time her previous story did, though, and proposed to tell us what had happened to Moreta after the end of Moreta: Dragonlady Of Pern.
First up, I have to say that this is the only story in the entire canon of that I dislike. I’ll get to my reasons in a bit but let’s look at some more background first.
After her death in 2011, McCaffrey’s children invited some authors who knew her, as well as some friends of hers to contribute an essay to a collection entitled Dragonwriter. One of the contributors was Anne’s long-time friend Richard J. Woods, OP.
He wrote that, while McCaffrey was not overtly religious, she still held ties to the Catholicism of her youth, largely in the form of a spiritual belief that there was Someone upstairs.
However, the absence of organised religion on Pern was a conscious choice by McCaffrey:
Anne was well aware of the role “organized” religion played in bloody strife, not least in Northern Ireland, as well as other global hotspots. She – along with her Pern colonists – deliberately precluded that from marring what was planned to be a permanently peaceful new world, at least in that respect.
But there were hints of some kind of acknowledgement of the spiritual. In Dragonsdawn, Emily Boll, one of the leaders of the colony, says
“The old Judean Bible used by some of the old religious sects on Earth contained a great many commonsense suggestions for an agricultural society, and some moral and ethical traditions which are worthy of retention… but without any hint of fanatic adherence! We left that back on Earth along with war!”
And, of course, the other tell is when AIVAS quoted Ecclesiastes in All The Weyrs Of Pern:
‘From the greatest book ever written by Mankind, Master Robinton…’
So, while all the indicators are that Pern has no religion, there is – according to McCaffrey – a potential god-shaped hole in their spiritual lives. Like a lot of readers, I was happy to accept that the fealty to the dragonriders was an acceptable substitute for religion, so when “Beyond Between” was published, I was a little disappointed to discover that McCaffrey had developed an idea of “Heaven On Pern.”
But for a slightly different reason than other people, who just hated it and called it an insult to the fanbase. Honestly, the reaction to this story was actively hostile and upsetting to McCaffrey, when it never needed to be. But, while I love Pern and all the stories set on it, I also have other stories that I can hang around in when the need takes me: if one setting disappoints me, I have other places to go, despite Pern being really special to me. And I’m not going to give up an entire series just because the author has written a story that I don’t like: if McCaffrey had been evil, then I would happily give it away, but all she was doing was writing a story with a different flavour to what we were used to.
McCaffrey, claims Woods, was simply writing a ghost story. It has all the trappings of a ghost story – an afterlife; the suggestion that the spirit of the deceased can be sensed but not seen; a wonderful ghostly apparition at the climax – but because we’ve had no inclinations that any such thing had existed on Pern prior to this story, it was jarring to read about it.
As a ghost story, it’s fine. It’s enjoyable, and fun and a little spooky.
And the idea that our heroes actually get to go to some kind of an afterlife is sort of reassuring. And the concept that Marco, the first dragonrider to have died, is also a St Peter figure here, is interesting.
But this version of Pernese heaven only caters to dragonriders.
What happens to “regular” people who die? Where do they go? I mean, I love that Moreta still exists somewhere, but what about Robinton? What’s happened to him? What about dragons who have died and their riders have lived on? What happens to them? Are they still wandering around this “ghost-Pern” forever?
Honestly, my headcanon is that this is a story told by Thaniel to explain why his runnerbeast Rusty was being spooked in the nights after Moreta visited him on her errand of mercy.
It’s more fun that way. And it doesn’t do my head in as much.
But it’s not something that you should ignore just because McCaffrey went places you might not have wanted her to. It was her world, after all.
Coming Up Next: Summing Up.
