For Love of Mother-Not (11 page)

The older man nodded. “I thought you might say something like that, Flinx-boy. Well, I can at least wish you luck. It’s all I have to give you. Do you have credit?”

“A little, on my card.”

“If you need more, I can transfer.” Arrapkha started to pull out his own card.

“No, not now, anyway. I may need such help later.” He broke into a broad smile. “You’re a good friend, Arrapkha. Your friendship is as solid as your woodwork.” He turned. “Did you see which direction these figures took?”

“That’s little to start on.” He pointed to the north. “That way, up the alley. They could have turned off any time. And in the weather”—he indicated the clouds hanging limply overhead—”they’ll have left no trail for you to follow.”

“Perhaps not,” Flinx admitted. “We’ll see.”

“I expect you will, Flinx-boy, since you feel so strongly about this. All I can do, then, is wish luck to you.” He turned and strode back up the street toward his shop, keeping the slickertic tight around his head and neck.

Flinx waited until the rain had swallowed up the older man before going back inside and closing the door behind him. He wandered morosely around the living area, salvaging this or that from the mess and returning things to their proper places. Before long, he found himself in Mother Mastiff’s room. He sat down on the bed and stared at the ajar slip-me-out that led to the alley.

“What do you think, Pip? Where did she go, and who took her, and why? And how am I going to find her? I don’t even know how to start.”

He shut his eyes, strained, tried to sense the kinds of emotions he knew she must be generating, wherever she had been taken. There was nothing. Nothing from Mother Mastiff, nothing from anyone else. His Talent mocked him. He started fixing up the bedroom, hoping that contact with familiar objects might trigger some kind of reaction in his mind. Something, anything, that would give him a start on tracking her down. Pip slipped off his shoulder and slithered across the bed, playing with covers and pillows.

There were gaps—missing clothing—in the single closet, Flinx noted. Whoever had abducted her evidently intended to keep her for a while. The sight cheered him because they would not have troubled to take along clothing for someone they intended to kill immediately.

Pip had worked its way across the bed to the night table and was winding its sinuous way among the bottles and containers there. “Back off that, Pip, before you break something. There’s been enough damage done here today.” The irritation in his voice arose more out of personal upset than any real concern. The minidrag had yet to knock over anything.

Pip reacted, though not to his master’s admonition. The snake spread luminous wings and fluttered from the tabletop to the slip-me-out. It hovered there, watching him. While Flinx gaped at his pet, it flew back to the night table, hummed over a bottle, then darted back to the opening.

Flinx’s momentary paralysis left him, and he rushed to the end table. The thin plasticine bottle that had attracted Pip was uncapped. It normally held a tenth liter of a particularly powerful cheap perfume of which Mother Mastiff was inordinately fond. Now he saw that the bottle was empty.

If Mother Mastiff had retained enough presence of mind to remember that the Drallarian gendarmery occasionally employed the services of tracking animals—for the first time hope crowded despair from Flinx’s thoughts. Those animals could track odors even through Moth’s perpetual dampness.

If an Alaspinian minidrag possessed the same ability … 
Was he completely misinterpreting the flying snake’s actions? “Pip?”

The flying snake seemed to accept the mention of its name as significant, for it promptly spun in midair and darted through the slip-me-out. Flinx dropped to his hands and knees and crawled after. In seconds, he was in the alley again. As he climbed to his feet, he searched for his pet. It was moving eastward, almost out of sight.

“Pip, wait!” The snake obediently halted, hovering in place until its master had caught up. Then it took off up the alley again.

Flinx settled into a steady run. He was an excellent runner and in superb condition, on which he had always prided himself. He resolved to follow the flying snake until one or the other of them dropped.

Any moment he expected the snake to pause outside one of the innumerable faceless structures that peppered the commercial sections of Drallar. But while the minidrag twisted and whirled down alleys and up streets, not once did it hesitate in its steady flight. Soon Flinx found his wind beginning to fail him. Each time he stopped, the snake would wait impatiently until its master caught up again.

Drallar was the largest city on Moth, but it was a village compared to the great cities of Terra or the underground complexes of Hivehom and Evoria, so Flinx was not surprised that when Pip finally began to slow, they had reached the northwestern outskirts of the metropolis. Here the buildings no longer had to be built close to one another. Small storage structures were scattered about, and individual homes of blocked wood and plastic began to blend into the first phalanx of evergreen forest. Pip hesitated before the trees, zooming in anxious circles, soaring to scan the treetops. It ignored Flinx’s entreaties and calls until finally satisfied, whereupon the snake turned and dropped down to settle once again on the familiar perch of his master’s shoulder.

Turning a slow circle, Flinx fought to pick up even a fragment of lingering emotion. Once again, his efforts met with failure. It seemed clear that whoever had carried off Mother
Mastiff had taken her into the forest and that the olfactory trail that had led Pip so far had finally dissipated in the steady onslaught of mist and rain. On a drier world or in one of Moth’s few deserts, things might have been different, but here Pip had come to a dead end.

After a moment’s thought, Flinx started away from the trees. In addition to the storage buildings and homes, several small industrial complexes were visible nearby, including two of the ubiquitous sawmills that ringed the city and processed Moth’s most prolific crop. Flinx wandered among them until he located a public com station on a service street. He stepped inside and slid the spanda-wood door shut behind him. Even after curing, spanda retained a significant coefficient of expansion. When he closed the door, it sealed itself against the elements, and only the ventilation membranes would keep him from suffocating. He took out his battered credcard and slid it into the receptacle on the unit, then punched the keyboard. A pleasant-looking middle-aged woman appeared on the small viewscreen. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“Is there a Missing Persons Bureau in the Drallar Municipal Strata?”

“Just a moment, please.” There was a pause while she glanced at something out of range of the pickup. “Human or alien?”

“Human, please.”

“Native or visitor?”

“Native.”

“You wish connection?”

“Thank you, yes.” The woman continued to stare at him for a moment, and Flinx decided she was fascinated by the coiled shape riding his shoulder. The screen finally flashed once and then cleared.

This time, the individual staring back at him was male, bald, and bored. His age was indeterminate, his attitude barely civil. Flinx had never liked bureaucrats. “Yes, what is it?”

“Last night,” he declared, “or early this morning”—in his rush through the city streets he’d completely lost track of the
time—”I—my mother disappeared. A neighbor saw some people running away down an alley, and our house was all torn apart. I don’t know how to start looking for her. I think she’s been taken out of the city via the northwest quadrant, but I can’t be sure.”

The man perked up slightly, though his voice sounded doubtful. “I see. This sounds more like a matter for the police than for Missing Persons.”

“Not necessarily,” Flinx said, “if you follow my meaning.”

“Oh.” The man smiled understandingly. “Just a moment. I’ll check for you.” He worked a keyboard out of Flinx’s view. “Yes, there were a number of arrests made last night, several of them including women. How old is your mother?”

“Close to a hundred,” Flinx said, “but quite lively.”

“Not lively enough to be in with the group I was thinking of,” the clerk responded. “Name?”

Flinx hesitated. “I always just called her Mother Mastiff.”

The man frowned, then studied his unseen readout. “Is Mastiff a first name or last name? I’m assuming the ‘Mother’ is an honorific.”

Flinx found himself staring dumbly at the clerk. Suddenly, he was aware of the enormous gaps that made up much of his life. “I—I don’t know, for sure.”

The bureaucrat’s attitude turned stony. “Is this some kind of joke, young man?”

“No, sir,” Flinx hastened to assure him, “it’s no joke. I’m telling you the truth when I say that I don’t know. See, she’s not my natural mother.”

“Ah,” the clerk murmured discreetly. “Well, then, what’s your last name?”

“I—” To his great amazement, Flinx discovered that he was starting to cry. It was a unique phenomenon that he had avoided for some time; now, when he least needed it, it afflicted him.

The tears did have an effect on the clerk, though. “Look, young man, I didn’t mean to upset you. All I can tell you is that no woman of that advanced an age is on last night’s arrest recording. For that matter, no one that old has been reported
in custody by any other official source. Does that help you at all?”

Flinx nodded slowly. It helped, but not in the way he’d hoped. “Th-thank you very much, sir.”

“Wait, young man! If you’ll give me your name, maybe I can have a gendarme sent out with—” The image died as Flinx flicked the disconnect button. His credcard popped from its slot. Slowly, wiping at his eyes, he put it back inside his shirt. Would the clerk bother to trace the call? Flinx decided not. For an instant, the bureaucrat had thought the call was from some kid pulling a joke on him. After a moment’s reflection, he would probably think so again.

No one of Mother Mastiff’s age arrested or reported in. Not at Missing Persons, which was bad, but also not at the morgue, which was good because that reinforced his first thoughts: Mother Mastiff had been carried off by unknown persons whose motives remained as mysterious as did their identity. He gazed out the little booth’s window at the looming, alien forest into which it seemed she and her captors had vanished, and exhaustion washed over him. It was toasty warm in the com booth.

The booth’s chair was purposely uncomfortable, but the floor was heated and no harder. For a change, he relished his modest size as he worked himself into a halfway comfortable position on the floor. There was little room for Pip in the cramped space, so the flying snake reluctantly found itself a perch on the com unit. Anyone entering the booth to make a call would be in for a nasty shock.

It was well into morning when Flinx finally awoke, stiff and cramped but mentally rested. Rising and stretching, he pushed aside the door and left the com booth. To the north lay the first ranks of the seemingly endless forest, which ran from Moth’s lower temperate zone to its arctic. To the south lay the city, friendly, familiar. It would be hard to turn his back on it.

Pip fluttered above him, did a slow circle in the air, then rose and started northwestward. In minutes, the minidrag was back. In its wordless way, it was reaffirming its feelings
of the night before: Mother Mastiff had passed that way. Flinx thought a moment. Perhaps her captors, in order to confuse even the most unlikely pursuit, had carried her out into the forest, only to circle back into the city again.

How was he to know for certain? The government couldn’t help him further. All right, then. He had always been good at prying information from strangers. They seemed to trust him instinctively, seeing in him a physically unimposing, seemingly not-too-bright youngster. He could probe as facilely here as in the marketplace.

Leaving the booth and the sawmill block, he began his investigation by questioning the occupants of the smaller businesses and homes. He found most houses deserted, their inhabitants having long since gone off to work, but the industrial sites and businesses were coming alive as the city’s commercial bloodstream began to circulate. Flinx confronted the workers as they entered through doors and gates, as they parked their occasional individual transports, and as they stepped off public vehicles.

Outside the entrance to a small firm that manufactured wooden fittings for kitchen units, he encountered someone not going to work but leaving. “Excuse me, sir,” he said for what seemed like the hundred thousandth time, “did you by any chance see a group of people pass through this part of town last night? They would have had an upset old lady with them, perhaps restrained somehow.”

“Now that’s funny of you to mention,” the man said unexpectedly. “See, I’m the night guard at Koyunlu over there.” He gestured at the small building that was filling up with workers. “I didn’t see no old woman, but there was something of a commotion late last night over that way.” He pointed at the road which came to a dead end against the nearby trees.

“There was a lot of shouting and yelling and cursing. I took a look with my nightsight—that’s my job, you know—and I saw a bunch of people getting out of a rented city transport. They were switching over to a mudder.”

The watchman appeared sympathetic. “They weren’t potential
thieves or young vandals, so I didn’t watch them for long. I don’t know if they were the people you’re looking for.”

Flinx thought a moment, then asked, “You say that you heard cursing. Could you tell if any of it was from a woman?”

The man grinned. “I see what you’re thinking, son. No, they were too far away. But I tell you this: someone in that bunch could swear like any dozen sewer riders.”

Flinx could barely contain his excitement. “That’s them; that’s her! That’s
got
to be her!”

“In fact,” the watchman continued, “that’s really what made it stick in my mind. Not that you don’t see people switching transports at night—you do, even way out here. It’s just a bad time to go mudding into the woods, and when it is done, it’s usually done quietly. No need that I can see for all that yelling and shouting.”