Mother Lode

dge. Her feet dropped to the floor. «As you were,» the newcomer said. «How's it going, Erin?» «Slow,» she said. «That eager to leave us?» She shrugged. «Yes and no,» she said truthfully. «I haven't seen my father in six years.» «As I remember it you're from Terra II.» «New Earth,» she corrected automatically, for Earthers felt that the formal name of their planet was a bit stilted. Lieutenant Commander Jack Burnish knew very well that Erin was a New Earth girl. He knew quite a lot about her, for until she had learned quite by accident that he had a wife and family on Delos III, she had held nothing back from him. «Commander?» she asked formally, breaking the silence. «Is there something I can do for you?» «Erin—» He moved closer. There was a pained look in his eyes. For a moment she remembered, and felt that soft, sliding, melting feeling in the pit of her stomach. She shook her head, tossing her short, ashen hair. «Erin, I—» «If you have no business here, Commander, I am on watch, you know.» Her voice was cold, service standard. «I loved you,» Burnish said. She looked at him evenly for long moments, her face set in serious lines, before she smiled and said softly, «Bullshit.» «I hope you find what you're looking for back on Terra II,» he said. She opened her mouth to correct him, but remained silent. For two years she had thought that she'd found the universe in Jack Burnish's arms. She'd always been a sucker for older men, although she would have fought any head-shrinker who tried to hang a father complex on her. She was by no means a promiscuous girl. There'd been a boy at the Academy, and then Jack, and after she'd found the holo-tape from Jack's wife and children there'd been two others, quite discreetly, aboard Rimfire. The ship had been a long, long way from home, with years stretching ahead before she made the last left turn and headed back into the starred regions of the Milky Way Galaxy and that little grouping of suns and worlds that made up the U.P. Sector. Jack's deception had left her empty and very, very lonely. With the others she was simply trying, unsuccessfully, to fill the void inside her with shared passion. For the last three years of Rimfire's voyage she had kept to her own bed. She had learned that without love the act of coupling was almost comically sweaty, strenuous, undignified, quickly finished, and in the aftermath somewhat damaging to one's self esteem. At the end of her last watch aboard Rimfire she put on a full dress uniform, tucked the last few items of her personal gear into her bag, and went to knock on Julie Roberts' door. The captain was in gown and slippers. «I'll be leaving on the next shuttle, ma'am,» Erin said. Julie rose, gave Erin a solemn salute, then came to put her arms around the younger woman. She squeezed, stepped back. «You are a good officer,» she said. «If you change your mind, your rank and position will be reserved for you for a period of six months.» «I know. Thank you.» The captain smiled. «Thanks, but no thanks?» «I'm afraid so.» «We're getting a unit citation. Leave your home address with personnel and I'll have yours sent along to you.» «I will, thank you.' « «Have a good life.» «And you,» Erin said. The shuttle dropped away from the big ship. Looking back, Erin saw the harsh outlines, the dingy, service gray paint, and felt a moment of sadness. In a way it was like leaving the womb, for the ship had been her home, her haven in a completely hostile environment. The crew had been her family while ship and complement were at awesome distances from the nearest outpost of human exploration. Rimfire looked worn and old and tired and that was odd, for there was nothing in space to erode her original sheen, to dull her paint. Thirty minutes later Erin was on the ground. She had fourteen hours to wait before catching her flight to New Earth, so she was in no hurry to exit the shuttle. She waited for the more eager crew members from Rimfire to get on with their planetside liberty before leaving her seat. A few of them called out one final good-bye. She was the last one off the shuttle. She stepped out of the hatch and had to reach for the railing of the boarding ramp as dizziness swept over her. «You'll be fine in a minute,» said one of the shuttle's crew from behind her. «Ain't it a bitch? You breathe recycled air for long enough and the real thing hits you like a good belt of booze.» She breathed deeply, tried to define the smell of the air. The answer was that there was no smell. No scents, no flavorings, only an exhilarating keenness and a feeling of clean purity. For years she'd lived with the subliminal odors that accumulate when a closed ship recycles air and organic wastes. On Xanthos, where industry was prohibited, there was a purity to the air that really did seem to intoxicate her. The planet was one huge city. From Xanthos the lines of command and administration extended over parsecs of space to the various U.P. planets and beyond into the areas of exploration, to dim and distant planets not well suited for human habitation, to Old Earth, the planet from which space-going man had emerged thousands of years in the past, to her home, New Earth, where the space travelers had struggled against long odds to overcome the loss of all technology and their own history to blast their way back into space on the ravaged resources of a planet. After checking into an X&A B.O.Q., she placed a blink call to New Earth to tell her father that she would soon be on her way home. She was told that there'd be a two-hour delay. She went out onto the streets and walked. Civilization buzzed, hummed, honked, whistled, roared, whispered, sang about her. Humanity swarmed, making her feel just a bit ill at ease. She envied the Old Earth Power Givers, females who could soar above the crowded street, their tiny, jeweled scales reflecting the lights. Now and then she saw a Healer, one of the males who was so highly valued in X&A because of his ability to explore places that were deadly to the Old Ones, meaning ordinary men like those who had left the home planet before the Destruction. Once and only once did she see a third form of the race that had mutated on Old Earth after the Destruction, a Far Seer, his bald, pointed head gleaming, his eyeless face moving from side to side as he made his way unhesitatingly among the throngs. One never saw the fourth Old Earth mutant, the idiot savant Keeper, in public. She took a moving sidewalk to a shopping complex and marveled at the richness of goods on display. After buying a few luxuries for herself and gifts for her father, she ate alone in a beautifully decorated little restaurant that specialized in the cuisine of the Tigian planets, drank two glasses of a beautifully dry Tigian wine. The communications blink routes to New Earth were still jammed. She had a lovely night's sleep in her room on the B.O.Q. with the windows open. She had to bundle up under heavy covers, but the unladen sweetness of the air made it worth it. She had a leisurely breakfast next morning, tried to call New Earth again without success, left the B.O.Q., grabbed a taxi, and was soon aboard a passenger liner enroute to Tigian I, II, and III; Trojan V; Delos; and New Earth. The bed in her stateroom was prepared. She stripped to her singlet, punched a Do-Not-Disturb message into her communicator, and slept. Her stateroom was, when compared to her quarters aboard Rimfire, luxurious. There was no limit to the amount of water she could use, so she filled the bathtub until she could slide down and soak with only her face showing. She lolled in the bath for an hour and emerged feeling wrinkled but good. The food in the ship's dining room was excellent. Her fellow passengers seemed to be a cross section of United Planets society, although most of them were considerably older than she. She was polite enough, but made it clear that she was not interested in socializing. When the ship cleared the three Tigian planets and settled in for the extended trip to Trojan, the captain invited her to the bridge. He was a distinguished man with gray hair and grayer eyes, a veteran of the Service. He asked questions about the circumnavigation. «Incredibly dull,» she said, «after the first few thousand parsecs.» They indulged in did-you-know exchanges. Both of them had known Dean Richards, first captain of the Rimfire. Neither of them had ever met Pete and Jan Jaynes, who had earned a huge bonus by bringing Rimfire back from entrapment in dimensionless space during the big ship's maiden voyage when her blink generator malfunctioned. The conversation was pleasant, but it caused her to wonder if she'd made the proper decision in leaving the Service. She knew and understood people like the polite, sophisticated man who captained the luxury liner. The civilians who laughed, clinked glasses, dropped flatware, talked at the top of their voices in the dining room seemed to be a separate species. But, she told herself, it would be different when she was back among her own kind on her home planet with her father. That thought sustained her as she rested in her stateroom, hydrated her skin in the bath, ate more than she should have eaten in the dining room, explored the spacetown around Trojan V's port. And then she was looking down on home. Terra II. New Earth. No uncomfortable space-suited transfers to shuttles for passenger liner customers. Liners dropped through planetside clouds and weather, generators roaring on flux, using the occasional guidance jet, to land featherlike on hardpads set among manicured lawns and exotic plantings. She had not been able, as yet, to notify her father of her coming. She had decided, when one last attempt to call had been frustrated on Delos, to surprise him. She gathered her bags, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver an address a full thirty miles away, on the outskirts of Old Port. «Sure you can afford this, Lieutenant?» the driver asked. «Has there been inflation in the past six years?» «Does a bear defecate in the woods?» «If it's that bad, maybe you'd better give me an estimate,» Erin said. The driver let his eyes drift up and down her well-shaped body. His gaze lingered on the ship's patch over her left breast. «Say, you're from the Rimfire?» «Yes.» «You with her all the way around?» He had a tattoo on his forearm that told Erin he was a veteran of X&A Service. She talked Service talk to him. «Does a bear shit in the woods?» she asked. The driver laughed heartily. «As it happens, I live in Old Port and I was just thinking about heading home when you got aboard. Tell you what, Lieutenant, this one's on me.» She tossed her bags to the floorboard and took a seat. The hydrocar leaped forward. «I was in the Service a few years back,» the driver said. «Yep,» Erin said. «I noticed.» «Battle cruiser. Went out with the peace force that occupied Taratwo. That was before your time.» «I'm afraid so,» Erin said. The driver was looking into the rearview mirror. He had read her name tag, but it hadn't registered until he spelled it out backward from the mirror. He said, «Kenner. Kenner. Say, you wouldn't be John Kenner's girl?» «I am,» she said, smiling. «Do you know my father?» An odd look took possession of the driver's face. The hydrocar slowed, stopped. He turned to stare at her, his mouth dropping. «You don't know, honey?» Her heart thudded. «Know what?» «Well, damn,» he said. «Please, what is it?» she asked. «Honey, I hate to be the one to have to tell you, damned if I don't.» «Something has happened to my father?» «He died just last week,» the driver said. CHAPTER TWO John Kenner had built his retirement home on high ground overlooking a peripatetic river which, like many natural features on Terra II, had an Old Earth name of lost meaning. The Canadian wound its way among wooded, rolling hills past the line of rocky bluffs from which the Kenner house overlooked the river and, on the far side, the ancient scars of deep mining that had devastated the area in the Age of Exploitation. The centuries had healed the wounds to the planet's crust, but there were people alive who still remembered when the Canadian ran red and oily as buried petroleum and mineral wastes were weathered to the surface. Man, in his frantic rush to get back into space, had once again raped a planet, although he had not, as in the case of the home planet, poisoned it fatally with the byproducts of nuclear, chemical, and biological war. A concerted drive to return New Earth to her original beauty had been initiated two hundred years before Erin Kenner was born to a retired fleet marine sergeant major who had married in middle age. The air was sweet in the midlands of the western continent where John Kenner had built his stone, glass, and polished wood retreat. As a part of the rehabilitation of Terra II, billions of trees had been planted. Tough, hardy grasses had been imported—after careful study—from distant planets to take root in the scorched slag heaps and the scars of the deep surface mines. A climate change that had threatened to give New Earth a permanent overcoat of ice had been reversed. The planet wasn't a garden spot like Delos III, but it offered privacy and a pace of life that was less hectic than that on Xanthos or the bustling Tigian planets. A man of modest means could own, as John Kenner did, a tract of land stretching half a mile in three directions from the house on the sandstone bluff overlooking the river. «You'll always have a place to come back to, Erin,» her father had told her when she went away to the Academy at eighteen. «It's yours.» He winked. «I hope you don't mind if I enjoy it until you're ready to take over.» Erin could just barely remember her mother as a pretty, gentle woman who told her young daughter stories of her life on a pleasant agricultural world lying in-galaxy from the main body of U.P. Erin was named for her mother, who had died when her daughter was seven, leaving Erin to form the closest of bondings with her father. For six years she had looked forward to coming home, and now that she was here John Kenner had been dead five days. As she entered the house in which she had grown up, she had a feeling that her father would emerge from his office or from the kitchen where he had loved cooking dishes from recipes he'd collected on a score of planets. That, of course, did not happen. She was very much alone. Winter had come to the mid-continent. The outside temperature was just above freezing, but it was warm in the house because the climate control unit had been left on. John Kenner had liked the house to be warm. With a smile of fond memory Erin went to the control unit and lowered the temperature four degrees. As usual, the house was immaculately neat. The bed was made up in her father's room, where he had died in his sleep. Perishable foods had been removed from the kitchen storage units, although the pantry was stocked with staples and canned goods. In her father's office—he preferred that to calling it his den, saying, «I'm not, after all, some kind of animal,"—she found the same perfect order. She sat in his chair and stared at the holo-stills on his desk. The images were familiar. There was her mother, big Erin, with baby Erin in her arms. Erin at six, in miniature, looking as if she were alive, with a puppy in her arms and with her front teeth missing. Erin as a teenager in her first formal gown. Tears clouded her vision. She had not yet wept. She let it come in a flood of stomach wrenching sobs, for there was no one in the house to hear and she was more alone than she'd ever been. She put her head down on her father's desk as the sobs lessened and there began in her mind that age-old game of if only. If only Rimfire had finished her job a couple of weeks early. If only she had never left home. If only… But Rimfire had not finished earlier; and she had left home, encouraged by her father to make a life of her own. But if only she had been able to see him just once more. If only she'd been at home to comfort him in his last moments. «When we face the death of someone dear to us, honey,» John Kenner had said beside the grave of Erin's mother, «we weep for ourselves. We may think we're weeping for the dead. We're not, but that's all right. We're weeping for ourselves, and that's permissible because it hurts so damned badly. God knows how badly it hurts, so he gives us tears to wash away the pain that makes us think that it might be best to just give up and join her. The tears help us get through it and go on doing what we have to do.» Remembering, Erin wept harder. She was so lost in her misery, weeping, as her father had said, for herself, that she didn't at first notice a small sound at her feet. It