For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [1]
And yet there was something more to him, something that set him apart from the listless procession of orphans who paraded across that rain-swept platform, season after season. Mother Mastiff sensed something lurking behind those wide, mournful eyes—a maturity well beyond his years, a greater intensity to his stare than was to be expected from a child in his position. That stare continued to rove over the crowd, probing, searching. There was more of the hunter about the boy than the hunted.
The rain continued to fall. What activity there was among the watchers was concentrated on the back right corner of the platform, where a modestly attractive girl of about sixteen was next in line for consignment. Mother Mastiff let out a derisive snort. Government assurances or not, you couldn’t tell her that those pushing, shoving snots in the front row didn’t have something on their minds beyond an innocently altruistic concern for the girl’s future. Oh, no!
The ever-shifting cluster of potential benefactors formed an island around which eddied the greater population of the marketplace. The marketplace itself was concentrated into a ring of stalls and shops and restaurants and dives that encircled the city center. The result was just modern enough to function and sufficiently unsophisticated to attract those intrigued by the mysterious.
It held no mysteries for Mother Mastiff. The marketplace of Drallar was her home. Ninety years she had spent battling that endless river of humanity and aliens, sometimes being sucked down, sometimes rising above the flow, but never in danger of drowning.
Now she had a shop—small, but her own. She bargained for objets d’art, traded knicknacks, electronics, and handicrafts, and managed to make just enough to keep herself clear of such places as the platform on which the boy was standing. She put herself in his place and shuddered. A ninety-year-old woman would not bring much of a price.
There was an awkwardly patched rip at the neck of her slickertic, and rain was beginning to find its way through the widening gap. The pouch of salables she clutched to her thin waist wasn’t growing any lighter. Mother Mastiff had other business to transact, and she wanted to be back home before dark. As the sun of Moth set, the murky daylight of Drallar would fade to a slimy darkness, and things less than courteous would emerge from the slums that impinged on the marketplace. Only the careless and the cocky wandered abroad at such times, and Mother Mastiff was neither.
As the boy’s eyes roved over the audience, they eventually reached her own—and stopped. Suddenly, Mother Mastiff felt queasy, unsteady. Her hand went to her stomach. Too much grease in the morning’s breakfast, she thought. The eyes had already moved on. Since she had turned eighty-five, she had had to watch her diet. But, as she had told a friend, “I’d rather die of indigestion and on a full stomach than waste away eating pills and concentrates.”
“One side there,” she abruptly found herself saying, not sure what she was doing or why. “One side.” She broke a path through the crowd, poking one observer in the ribs with her cane, disturbing an ornithorpe’s ornate arrangement of tail feathers, and generating a chirp of indignation from an overweight matron. She worked her way down to the open area directly in front of the platform. The boy took no notice of her; his eyes continued to scan the uncaring crowd.
“Please, ladies and gentlebeings,” the official on the platform pleaded, “won’t one of you give this healthy, honest boy a home? Your government requests it of you; civilization demands it of you. You have a chance today to do two good turns at once; one for your king and the other for this unfortunate youth.”
“I’d like to give the king a good