Mother Lode

not only are you going to die but everyone you know, everyone you love, and everyone you don't know, and everyone you hate is going to die with you. Family, friends, lovers, children, the young, the old—» He sighed. «Pets? And every material thing is going to perish with you. Total destruction.» «You're being very negative,» she said, trying to sound as if she were teasing but not succeeding totally. «Yep.» He squeezed her. «Time to get up and about, lazybones.» «You get up. I just put in eight hours on the miner.» «Huh?» «Couldn't sleep.» «So you were bothered.» «I'm not totally insensitive.» «No. Sorry.» He slapped her playfully on the rump. Mop bounced up on the bed to get in on the fun. «Toes, Mop,» Denton said, removing the coverlet from Erin's feet. «Get those toes.» Mop attacked Erin's bare toes, gnawing carefully. He was a gentle little dog. Erin squealed. Denton held her legs down. «Toes,» he kept saying as Mop, stubby tail going in ecstatic circles, was urged on to greater efforts by Erin's laughing protest. Mop supervised from his usual perch on the console as Erin lifted the ship and started the search for one more deposit of the yellow metal. Several times the sensors gave heavy metal readings. «Since this is the last one,» she said, «let's make it good.» She set the detectors to the density of sedimentary rock of the type that had yielded pure gold in placer deposits. In such rock fossilized bones were found. Hours went by. They eased past hundreds of oddly shaped asteroids of the most common types. Most of the smooth-skinned rocks registered iron, and their contours seemed to indicate that they had solidified in cold space. Core material. The living heart of a planet, molten, fiery, bursting into the black emptiness through the fragile, solid crust, scattering the debris that had been a world. More than once the computer sang out that the sensors had found stone of the desired consistency with gold deposits near the surface, but for some reason that Erin did not try to explain, even to herself, she was not satisfied. Perhaps, since the next people to see the belt would be the crew of an X&A ship, she just wanted to explore as much of the belt as possible. Deep inside the tumbling, crowded belt the sensors located the largest slab of sedimentary rock they had seen. There were solid indications of gold. Erin ran an additional check, setting the sensors to detect the minerals present in fossil bone. Denton raised his eyebrows when the indicators registered a strong presence. «Are we mining or bone hunting?» he asked. «Little bit of both?» «Might as well,» he said. There was a perfect landing place directly atop the strongest readings for heavy metals. Erin locked Mother to the rock and stabilized the tumble. There was one final task to be performed before beginning mining operations. She put a slow spin on the entire asteroid so that once every hour Mother's detectors could scan all of the spaces separating her from the neighbors. Twice now danger had crept up on the ship's blind side. It would not happen again. Heavy gold nuggets had collected in a pocket. They had a rich, pure color. To the relief of both of them the work went on with riches being accumulated in the cargo space without the distraction of encountering fossilized humanoid remains. «That's it,» Dent said. The nugget pocket had been very productive. He swung the loader back into its pod after dumping one last load of gold-flecked sand into the cargo space. «Unless you want to pile some ore under your bunk.» «I'm not quite that greedy,» she said. He checked the clock. «We can be back on the established blink routes in half an hour.» She nodded. She was toying with the sensor controls, zeroing in on an area that gave the readings of fossilized organic material. «Dent?» «I don't think I want to hear this.» «Just look.» He checked the sensor gauges. «Ummm. Big.» «Bigger than anything we've seen.» He shrugged. «All right.» She used the remote panel to lift ship just far enough off the rock to move a few feet to the right. She used the biter carefully to nibble away the rock, postponing the time when they would have to climb into suits and go extravehicular. When the sensors showed only a thin layer of stone over fossil, she employed the laser and exposed a dome of grayish material. «Looks like another skull,» Denton said. «I'm afraid so.» «It was your crazy idea,» he said. «You don't have to go with me,» she said. «No, I don't have to.» He leaned to kiss her on the cheek. «But I will because you have such splendidly proportioned mammary glands.» «Hands off,» she said, as he fondled her breasts. «I can play with your bosom if I want to,» he said. «It's my bosom.» «If that's the way you're going to be, then you'll have to marry me,» he said. «In fact, as captain of this ship you can marry us and then what's mine is yours and vice-versa.» «Not my body,» she said. «Just half of it,» he said, putting both hands on her left breast, which was slightly larger than the right. «I'll take this half.» «I don't think you quite understand the legal concept of community property,» she said, pressing his hand against her breast. «And besides, it's not play time.» «Anything I hate it's a bossy female captain,» he said, moving off toward the suit closet. «You never get used to it,» she said, as they stood outside on barren rock. Dent led the way into the rather cramped space under the ship. He started using his hand-held laser at one end of the trench. She worked around the skull, freeing it from its encasing stone to look down into rock-clogged eye sockets. «Erin, come have a look at this,» Denton said. There was something in his voice that caused her to look over her shoulder. The horizon was quite near. The rock burned with light, and beyond the rim there was the star-swarmed fabric of emptiness. She bent to let the glare of her helmet light merge with Demon's. He had carefully cut the matrix away from the upper surface of small bones. She did not at first understand the reason for his awe. «They're still articulated,» he said. The small bones, several of them, made up what was, obviously, a foot. The short joints of toes were in perfect position. She squatted, something that took some doing in the suit, and ran her fingers over the fossil bones. «Cartilage would have decayed long before it could be fossilized,» he said. «But look closely here, where I've cleared away the rock from the joints of the toes.» A grayish connection existed between the separate bones. She shook her head and stood. Denton used his laser and began to expose a long femur, working upward toward the hip joint. Erin watched in fascination as the joint was exposed, articulated to the hipbone by ball and socket. And then the pelvic saddle was bared. «Female,» she said. «Big lady,» he said. She went back to work, cutting away matrix along the shoulders, down one arm. All joints were intact. She had planned to simply free the bones from the rock that had held them for countless millennia, but the surprisingly intact condition of the fossil skeleton altered her plans. They used the mining laser to cut a deep trench around the entire deposit, then, after careful measurements and searchings, undercut the oblong, coffin shaped area of rock atop of which the skeleton was exposed like some ancient carving in bas relief. Weight, of course, was no problem in space. Inertia was another thing. It wouldn't do to let a few tons of rock bang Mother even at a very low rate of speed. Erin went aboard, greeted a wildly enthusiastic Mop—once again his humans had come back, had not, after all, deserted him, joy, joy— and moved the ship from atop the trench. Back outside with Dent, she said, «Slow, easy,» as they impelled the slab containing the fossil bones into motion. Erin used the jets of her suit to stop the upward movement, then, together, they eased the slab over a flat area, horsed it to a stop, lowered it to the surface. It was necessary to go aboard ship to renew the air in the suits. Air recycling equipment had not yet been successfully miniaturized to fit inside a unit as small as a flexsuit, but Mother's recycler took care of the stale, oxygen depleted air in the tanks and soon Erin and Dent were back at work, carefully cutting away matrix to reduce the bulk and weight of the slab but leaving enough of the encasing stone to hold the bones in their perfect alignment with each other. After some tricky adjustments the slab was suspended above the surface and Erin was working underneath, blowing away stone from the back of the skeleton. «She must have been lying atop something,» Erin said. Denton came to stand beside her. He rolled the slab to let the skeleton lie on its side. «Easier to work this way.» «Smart ass,» she said, wondering why she hadn't thought of that. Lying along the skeleton's back, there were long, delicate bones unlike any they had seen. Smaller bones, somewhat like ribs, radiated away from the long ones; and the longer bones were one atop the other next to the figure's back. «What the hell?» Denton asked. «Did she fall on an animal or something?» «I think we'd better leave this mess here at the back alone,» she said. «You're planning to take this thing with us?» Denton asked. «I think we'd better.» «She's been here a long, long time. I think she'd wait for an X&A ship.» Erin was reluctant to try to explain that it was absolutely vital to put the fossil skeleton aboard Mother. She couldn't have told him why, she just knew that it had to be done. «Let's melt away a few more pounds of rock,» she said. «But be careful.» Only the surface of the long, curving, graceful bones that reached down to the skeleton's knees had been exposed. The slab had been reduced to mummiform shape. To trim its bulk further, Erin worked around the neck and shoulders. The arm bones lay at the figure's side. There was a curious, rather massive protrusion from the back side of each shoulder blade. She used the laser carefully, hoping to detach the humanoid skeleton from the bones of the life-form that had lain under it. But the protrusions from the shoulder blades were fossil bone that formed a ball and socket joint much like the hip joint, and from that joint the long, delicate bones swept outward in a graceful ellipse. «Dent,» she whispered. He heard, for he had been standing directly behind her, watching as she cut away the matrix to expose two features of the humanoid skeleton that were definitely nonhuman. First, and most obvious, the long, delicate bones connected to the skeleton's shoulders by ball and socket joints could have had only one purpose. Second, a broad, solid bone extending across the skeleton's back was perforated with small holes where tendons had once been connected. The solid plane of the back formed a foundation for connecting muscles to power the leaflike formations extending downward from the shoulders. «Wings,» Erin whispered. «Yep,» Dent said. «The arts and crafts colonies of Delos make them,» Erin said. «They're patterned after the old illustrations in The Book.» Denton nodded inside his helmet. There was, of course, only one «The Book.» The Bible. The only book of Old Earth