"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

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 officeтАФhe preferred
that to calling it his den, saying, "I'm not, after all, some kind of
animal,"тАФshe 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
onlyтАж 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