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

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.