At that time I was still sorting out in my head the difference between sun and stars and planets and worldlets, so I did not really follow his discussion of the Maze. But one word of his spoke to me loud and clear.
“Treasure,” I said. “You mean—gold?”
He hardly gave me a glance, before he was turning to mother and laughing that creaking, wheezy laugh. “Gold!” he said. “Now, Molly Hara, you’ve been filling the boy’s head with the old fairy tales. Next it will be leprechauns, and the Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow.”
He turned back to me. “Rarer than gold, Jay, and a damn sight more precious. There’s gold aplenty to be had right here on Erin, but out in the Maze there’s every light element in creation, including the ones that we never find here. I know men who’ve struck lucky on lithium and magnesium and aluminum. And that’s only the start of it. There’s the treasure of old times, too—some say it’s out in the Maze we’ll find the Godspeed Drive, the—”
“Godspeed Drive!” Mother broke in. “Now, Jimmy, and you accuse me of filling his head with fairy tales. Enough of that.” She stood up, supporting herself by one hand on Grogan’s shoulder and stroking his cheek with the other. “All right, Jay, it’s getting late, and you ought to be in bed. Off upstairs with you. Mr. Grogan and I have things to talk about.”
I did not argue. The table was a dreadful jumble of dishes and glasses and bottles, and it was a rare day when I was not made to clear and wash and put away. I would ask about the Godspeed Drive in the morning, when mother was unlikely to be around. After we’d had visitors, she always stayed late abed.
But as it turned out I couldn’t ask Jimmy Grogan anything, for the next morning he was away very early, back around the lake to the spaceport on the other side.
Soon after midday, Duncan West stuck his broad, smiling face in through the front door. I had learned long ago that it was pointless to ask Unkadunka for information, about Godspeed Drives or anything else to do with the distant past. My questions had to wait.
Chapter 2
“So far as I know, Jimmy Grogan never came back to our house. He had stayed only that one night, but from my point of view he was an important visitor. He awoke my sense of curiosity. It was after his arrival that I noticed how Uncle Duncan always disappeared when other men came to see Mother, and how he popped up again at the house as soon as they left.
“And of course, it was from Grogan that I first heard the word that started this whole thing: Godspeed.
Mother’s spacer visitors kept on coming, never more than one man at a time, sometimes a guest every couple of weeks, sometimes no one for half a year. They stayed as little as a night, and as long as a week. As I grew older I became more and more keen to talk to them and ask them about things “out there.” But I was thwarted. For when I reached my tenth birthday, Mother, as though deliberately preventing me from asking questions of her guests, sent me off to old Uncle Toby’s house in Toltoona whenever a visitor arrived. I was not allowed to return home until the man had gone. “You’re growing up, Jay,” was all the explanation that mother or Uncle Toby would ever give me.
Well, over the years I picked up information about space and the Forty Worlds anyway, but it was in such little bits and pieces that I’m often not sure just what I learned when. That doesn’t matter, because Doctor Eileen told me I could set things down any way that I wanted to. I’m going to take her at her word, and tell what I knew—or thought I knew—by the time that I was sixteen years old, and Paddy Enderton rolled onto the scene.
Mother and the house and Lake Sheelin, and the town of Toltoona farther along the shore, had been my childhood world. Then I learned that it was one tiny piece of a great universe. We lived on the western shore of Lake Sheelin, which is long and narrow and extends much farther to the north of us than to the south. A person on foot could start from our home, walk around the southern end of the lake, and in three days reach the spaceport. The same journey by the northern route would take twelve days or more. And a journey around the whole great globe of Erin, if a man or woman could find a way of crossing great seas that would swallow up Lake Sheelin and not even notice it, might take a thousand days.
It was a shock to me to learn that there were aircraft able to make that round-the-world trip, moving so fast that the sun was always overhead, in a single day.
And Erin was just the beginning. Our world was one of many that circled our sun, Maveen. Moving outward, we were the sixth of twelve worlds before a great planet, Antrim, swept the space around it clear, to form the Gap. Well beyond Antrim lay the narrow band known as the Maze, where floated worldlets so numerous and chaotic in orbit that they had never been tagged and named. Then came another gas giant, Tyrone, and finally the twenty-four frozen and lifeless bodies of the Outer System completed the Forty Worlds.
For the spacers out beyond Tyrone seeking the particular light elements that were so rare on Erin, that was all. But once, ten generations ago, there had been the Godspeed Drive. Travel to the far-off stars, and commerce between them, had been an everyday event. Until one day, quite suddenly, no more ships from the stars had arrived in the Maveen system.
It may sound odd, but having learned so much, my interest was less in the Godspeed Drive than it was in the space travelers who risked their lives on and around the Forty Worlds. The Drive, if it had ever existed, was long-dead history—Mother, when I asked her, denied that there had ever been any such thing; Uncle Duncan and many other people said the same. But the spacers were here, real, undeniable. They were today, they were excitement. I could not have Godspeed. But I could have space.
When I reached my fifteenth birthday, I was at last allowed to use our little sailboat that sat on the jetty downhill from the house. The rules were simple: I must stay close to shore, I must never venture out in anything but light breezes, and I must never sail after dark.
If I am going to be as honest as I know how in telling everything that happened, here is a good place to begin. I broke those rules, all three of them. But I did not do it when I was at the house, with Mother there to keep an eye on me.
When she had a visitor on the way, and I was ready to be packed off to stay with Uncle Toby, I always asked if I could go to Toltoona by water, sailing along close to the shore of Lake Sheelin. Provided that the weather was good, Mother would agree. Then I would be out of her sight for anything from a day to a week, and old Uncle Toby, blurred of vision, hard of hearing, and unsteady on his legs, was happy enough to see me away early in the morning, and back as late as I pleased.
I gradually learned by trial and error what I could and could not do on the lake. The ideal situation was a strong and steady breeze from the north. That would allow me to sail right across Lake Sheelin without tacking, and come back the same way. I thought that I could be at the eastern shore in two hours and home again, when I chose to come home, in two more. That would give me most of the day to be where I wanted to be: at the Muldoon Spaceport.