Mother Lode

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.