Mother Lode

h titty, then,» Erin said. She didn't ordinarily use spacer vulgarities, but there were times when she found a bit of shock to be useful, or, at worst, satisfying. «He's the one who seems to be eager.» She found herself on the approach to the aircar pads of the port, cleared herself for landing, said to the Mop dog, «Now why the hell are we here, partner?» Mop didn't say. He ran ahead of her to greet Denton Gale at the door to Gale's office. Dent had seen John Kenner's old aircar come in and was waiting. He opened the door, lifted Mop, rubbed his chest, winked at Erin. «The weather is a bit nicer than it was when you were here before.» She pushed past him into the office. He put Mop on his desk where the little dog curled himself into a ball and took a little practice nap. «Dent, did you talk with that old shipmate of my father's who came to him with this tale about a gold mine?» «Once or twice. He came by here with John a couple of times when they were shopping for the Lode, asking me about computers and electronics. He was an older fellow. At the time I thought he was a bit fragile to be planning to go back into space.» «Obviously you were right,» she said. He sat on the edge of the desk, motioned her to take his chair. She sat, crossed her legs. She'd dug into a trunk at the house to find cold weather slacks and had been quite pleased to find that other than a bit of rather becoming tightness in the seat, she fit well into clothing she had not worn since she was eighteen. «Any particular reason why you ask?» «Ummm,» she said. His face was haloed by backlighting from the windows. He was smiling. He was one handsome son-of-a-bitch. She felt that sliding, melting feeling and answered his smile. «Not thinking of going out there to take a look, are you?» He looked upward, making the standard physical reference to space. «What do you think?» That often used phrase caused Mop to lift his good ear. «I think, Erin, that you are the most beautiful girl I've ever seen.» «Now where did that come from?» she asked disgustedly. «Here,» he said, touching his chest. Her reaction was out of proportion to his infraction. She used a couple of choice spacer expressions on the way out of the office and was in the aircar jerking it aloft and toward the house before she realized why she was so angry. It had not been Dent's compliment that had sent her fleeing from his office but her reaction to it. Once before when she'd been lonely she'd turned to casual male arms for comfort and she had never forgotten the stomach-sinking feeling of self-loathing when the brief spasms without love were over. Now she was lonely again, and she'd seriously entertained the idea, at least for a moment, of seeking solace in Denton Gale's arms. Her decision was made by the time she found the attorney's com-number. A secretary answered. «Yes, Miss Kenner. As a matter of fact, Mr. Atherton has been trying to reach you.» «Glad you called, Erin,» the lawyer said. «I relayed your message to my client and I was rather surprised to find that he is willing to go an extra five thousand for occupancy within thirty days.» «So? I should have asked for ten, huh?» Atherton cleared his throat. «He is quite eager to take occupancy.» «Throw in another five for the furnishings and a used aircar and he can have it right now.» «I'll get back to you within the hour,» Atherton said. The sale was closed before the end of business next day. She left the only home she remembered, taking with her nothing more than books, pictures, holo-tapes, a few music capsules that brought back youthful memories, and the Mop's bed. Her savings and the equity from the property had been converted into universal credits to be drawn on at any bank in the U.P. She spent a day checking and double-checking Mother's store of goodies. Her father had stocked the ship well. Her only purchase was several cases of Tigian wine and a few cases of liver flavored nibbles for the Mop. Once she saw Denton Gale come out of his office and look over toward the Mother, but he did not put in an appearance. She lifted ship without saying good-bye to the only person on New Earth other than a lawyer whom she knew by name. Once out of the planet's gravity well she set multiple blinks into the Mule's big and powerful generator and within a half hour Mother had traversed the most traveled routes within U.P. territory, putting parsecs behind her. Each time the ship blinked, making for that funny little feeling in the stomach, Mop looked up, lifted one ear, and yawned. During recharging, when there was nothing to do but wait while old Mr. Blink's miracle accumulated energy from the stars, she slept, read, sampled the holo-pictures, and wondered if, after all, her mother had had any children that lived. «You,» she said accusingly to the Mop dog. «It's all your fault. You're always so damned eager to go. « Mop's good ear lifted. His tongue came out and he panted excitedly as if to say, «Where, where, go where?» CHAPTER THREE Dressed in athletic shorts and shirt, breasts bound to prevent soreness from bouncing, Erin ran down a New Earth country lane between rows of flowering trees. The sun was warm on her back. The sky overhead was pellucid blue. She'd done half a mile, had a mile and a half to go. Beside the moving track a long-haired little dog sat watching with puzzled interest. He rose, yawned, and stretched, went to lift one leg against a roadside tree. «No, no,» Erin said. The dog was confused. The holo images looked real, but when he tried to go into the woods to find bigger and better trees to irrigate, he bumped into the wall. He came back to cock his head and look up at Erin as she ran lightly on the moving belt. He apparently decided that it looked like fun and jumped onto the belt, lost his footing, and went rolling back past Erin's feet. «You just have to get the hang of it,» Erin said. She slowed the belt, picked Mop up, put him directly in front of her. The belt carried him backward, but he began running, fell back between Erin's legs and almost tripped her. He finally got the hang of it and, as she increased the speed of the exercise track, ran ahead of her, looking back over his shoulder once with his tongue lolling out. After a few more humiliations such as running into the far wall of the gym when he decided to dash ahead, and being tossed tail over head off the moving belt, he got the swing of it. Within a week he was leaping on and off the belt as he saw fit, could pace himself to the speed of it, and, looking quite proud, Erin thought, could even double back, running with the belt, to make a mock attack on her pumping legs. «This is one thing I hate, hate, hate about space,» she told Mop, as she toweled off after a shower. «Exercise for the sake of exercise is—» She paused. «Your young ears should not hear what I was thinking.» She let the shower stall finish drying her with a gentle zephyr of soft, desert air. «And so,» she said, «here I am, halfway to hell-and-gone, half bonkers, talking to a hairy little pooch.» Mop cocked his head charmingly and said, «Wurf.» «And now, sir, it is inspection time. Shall we go?» The magic word. Mop leapt up, did a horizontal 360, a complete turn in the air, and scampered toward the door. The human body's bio-clock adjusted itself to the axial rotation of two planets so much alike that their days differed by mere seconds. On board the Mother Lode ship's clocks measured New Earth hours. Each day at a specific hour Erin made a complete round of Mother, checking all systems and all structural features. Mother was a sound ship, but, space being the most unforgiving environment faced by man, one could not be too careful. In the big empty a particularly swift and unpleasant death lay just beyond a few inches of hull. A pinpoint penetration of that hull by some speeding particle of debris, if not repaired immediately, could bleed the air away. Not even the technology aboard the most advanced of ships, such as Rimfire, could create oxygen out of nothing. Mother had only the air she'd carried with her from New Earth. So once every twenty-four hours the ship's captain and first mate, Erin and Moppy the Dog, strolled the corridors, poked heads into cargo and engineering spaces, scanned the sealed food and water storage chambers, gazed meaningfully at the bolt heads that held the multilayered hull together, pored over the autologs that recorded the ever-mysterious workings of the generator, punched test buttons on various electronic circuits, and in general went over the Mother from her square stern to her square bow. The inspections were made during the periods when Mother floated motionless in the blackness, less than a mote among the ever more dense fields of stars. After a charge things were a bit more interesting as Erin programmed blinks into the computer and punched them in one by one until the huge generator's charge was depleted. The little ship hurled itself down the star lanes toward the fiery heart of the galaxy. There came a time when the blinks were shorter, when the course became a zigzag made necessary by the density of the stellar population. Actual travel was instantaneous, but preparation for that travel began to take more and more time so that weeks became months. She had leisure during the charging periods for exploring the contents of the library, and for getting to know her companion. «You are, sir,» she said, as Moppy offered his right paw for shaking, «a rather remarkable fellow. You don't snore. You don't take up much of the bed. You know that your duty is to keep my feet warm at night and that all you're expected to do during the day is guard against boogers and to get a smile on your face and keep your big mouth shut. Men could learn a lot from you.» Moppy rolled over and said, «Uhhhhh,» which was his way of saying, «That's nice, Erin. Rub my stomach.» She was quite rapidly running out of charts. Winds of radiation swept past Mother as she floated in the hard, hard light of the crowded star fields. After each jump she was reminded of the difference between the Century Series of computers and the state-of-the art Unicloud aboard Rimfire. With millions of points of reference the old Century chuckled to itself for minutes before confirming position. There were times when Erin was tempted to cut the process short. She was, after all, still on established blink routes. However, from her first year at the Academy she had been taught to check and double-check. There was only one recorded case of it happening, but if some natural force, say the gravitational pull of an errant comet, had moved a blink beacon a substantial distance from its surveyed location, a ship using the coordinates of the beacon on which to base a blink might end up inside the atomic furnace of a star or become blended atom to atom with some small, dark body. As she moved ever deeper toward the star-packed core she began to develop a claustrophobic feeling of being hemmed in by stars: orange stars, red stars, blue-white stars; M stars and K stars; visual binaries and eclipsing binaries; variable stars—Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars, SS Cygni stars and R Corona Borealis stars; large stars and medium stars and blue giants and old, tired, dark, shrunken stars dead by nova in a time so remote that it was meaningless to a mere woman of New Earth who had the life expectancy promised to the men of Old Earth in the one surviving piece of Old Earth literature, the Bible. «The life span of man shall be a hundred and twenty years.» Genesis 6:3. She was just over one-quarter through her allotted time, if, indeed, she proved to be average; but as she jumped Mother carefully toward a dense cluster of New York type stars it seemed that time had slowed, that she would use up too much of her ration of years before Mother reached her destination. The New York cluster blocked a straight-line blink route into an area of space, less crowded among the harshness. The blink routes took her around the cluster and, the generator depleted, Mother was motionless in space within optic range of a small grouping of stars that were huddled together as if for company in a sort of cul-de-sac in space surrounded by glittering oceans of old, huge, central core monsters. The sac stars had families. One member of the planetary grouping of the star nearest her came onto her view screen when she punched orders into the computer. The world was one of several that had given mankind the shivers for centuries. Planets were not common enough to be ignored. Planets among the dense star fields near the core, some 10,000 light-years from the U.P. sector, were even more rare. Any ship coming into the sac would take a close look at the world known as D.W. One, and would see one principal reason why man had constructed huge fleets of ships and had armed them with the most deadly weapons that technology could supply. D.W. One, the first of the Dead Worlds to be encountered by a ship coming in from the periphery, had been killed with a totality that belied the difficulty of the feat. Man could denude a planet of forests, eliminate thousands of animal species, poison the atmosphere and the oceans with his wastes, but it was pretty damned difficult to kill a planet and leave it intact. A planet buster could fragment a world and leave nothing more than a belt of asteroids, but what had been done to the Dead Worlds was even more impressive, for D.W. One and several of her sister planets in the sac were dead from the inside out. Although she was old, she should have had a molten core. That she did not was one of the mysteries that had kept astrophysicists guessing and caused all U.P. exploration ships to go armed. If the planet killers ever came sweeping in from the vastness of space, man, so fragile in his frame of bones, tendons, cartilage, and flesh, would need protection. Thus, on Rimfire and on all other major ships of the X&A fleet there were weapons that could fragment a world if necessary. Once the planets in the sac had lived. Although there were no clues to the identity of the race or races that had peopled the Dead Worlds, unidentifiable rubble on the ravaged surface of D.W. One proved that there had been a technological civilization there. Now even the top soil was gone. The ground up nonbiodegradable debris of a technological civilization was scattered over a surface that was nothing more than inert rock. And into a flat, continent-sized area of the rock the killers, the race that had destroyed twenty living planets, had carved a warning. The message was not in words, but in symbols. An eye. A world, a stylized building and other, more obscure images. There was disagreement as to the exact words intended, but all of the experts agreed that the message carved into the bones of a continent was a warning: «Look at this world and tremble. Build not, for we will return.» Erin turned off the optics, shivered. Then, perversely, as if to prove to the vast emptiness around her that she wasn't really spooked by the mystery of twenty dead worlds, she checked the library index and watched a docu-history that told of the initial discovery of the worlds in the sac, and ended with the account of the last licensed scientific expedition to the sac by six graduate students aboard the Paulus, under Laconius of Tigian. The Paulus had disappeared, had vanished as completely as the race that had lived on the Dead Worlds. Every holo-drama fan could name the six students who had disappeared with Paulus. Of course, ships did evaporate into the nothingness of space from time to time, but the fact that the Paulus had disappeared while on a trip to the Dead Worlds had inspired writers, good and bad, to go into spasms of speculative creativity. Aside from the Dead Worlds docu-history, the Mother's library contained no less than three holo-dramas based on the loss of the Paulus. Erin watched two of them while waiting for the generator to charge and then, before the big power source was fully ready, she blinked onward and past the sac into the star fields and to the end of the line, as far as established blink beacons were concerned. From there on she had only the star chart in Mother's computer, a chart compiled by her father's old shipmate who, she felt, may or may not have known a black hole from his own dusky posterior orifice. She wanted a fully charged generator. She watched the third holo-drama about the Dead Worlds in which a rather sick minded writer presented the theory that giant lava beetles had hatched deep down in the fiery magma of the interior of the planets and had eaten the life from within before, in desperate hunger, they had emerged to crumble into tiny, unidentifiable bits everything they didn't eat. To get t