Cory Doctorow - Craphound
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Craphound
Cory Doctorow
From "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," a short story collection published in
September, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). See
http://craphound.com/place for more.
Originally Published in Science Fiction Age, March 1998
Reprinted in:
* Northern Suns
(Tor, 1999, David Hartwell and Glenn Grant, editors)
* Year's Best Science Fiction XVI
(Morrow, 1999, Gardner Dozois, editor)
* Hayakawa Science Fiction Magazine (Japan)
September 2001
"Like most aliens-mingling-with-human-society stories, Doctorow's story serves
mostly to hold a mirror up to human nature, but the odd corner of human nature
it examines is fascinating, and the story is smoothly and expertly written, with
some good detail and local color and some shrewd insights into human nature and
human culture, and an almost Bradburian vein of rich nostalgia running through
it (although the nostalgia is quirky enough that perhaps it might more usefully
be compared to R.A. Lafferty or Terry Bisson than to Bradbury)."
- Gardner Dozois
Editor, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
--
Blurbs and quotes:
* Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into the
caverns and underground rivers of Pop Culture, here filtered through SF-coloured
glasses. Enjoy.
- Neil Gaiman
Author of American Gods and Sandman
* Few writers boggle my sense of reality as much as Cory Doctorow. His vision
is so far out there, you'll need your GPS to find your way back.
- David Marusek
Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Award, Nebula Award nominee
* Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,
entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of
the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find.
- Gardner Dozois
Editor, Asimov's SF
* He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science
fiction needs Cory Doctorow!
- Bruce Sterling
Author of The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction
* Cory Doctorow strafes the senses with a geekspeedfreak explosion of gomi kings
with heart, weirdass shapeshifters from Pleasure Island and jumping automotive
jazz joints. If this is Canadian science fiction, give me more.
- Nalo Hopkinson
Author of Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring
* Cory Doctorow is the future of science fiction. An nth-generation hybrid of
the best of Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and Groucho Marx, Doctorow
composes stories that are as BPM-stuffed as techno music, as idea-rich as the
latest issue of NEW SCIENTIST, and as funny as humanity's efforts to improve
itself. Utopian, insightful, somehow simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, these
nine tales will upgrade your basal metabolism, overwrite your cortex with new
and efficient subroutines and generally improve your life to the point where
you'll wonder how you ever got along with them. Really, you should need a
prescription to ingest this book. Out of all the glittering crap life and our
society hands us, craphound supreme Doctorow has managed to fashion some
industrial-grade art."
- Paul Di Filippo
Author of The Steampunk Trilogy
* As scary as the future, and twice as funny. In this eclectic and electric
collection Doctorow strikes sparks off today to illuminate tomorrow, which is
what SF is supposed to do. And nobody does it better.
- Terry Bisson
Author of Bears Discover Fire
--
A note about this story
This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published
by Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I've
released this story, along with five others, under the terms of a Creative
Commons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyright
normally reserves for me, the creator.
I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out in
the Magic Kingdom" (http://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigated
success. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book -- good news -- and
thousands of people bought the book -- also good news. It turns out that, as
near as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is a
great way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting the
book into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work.
I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of the
Internet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basic
science: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doing
here. The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me as
an artist is to not read my work -- to let it languish in obscurity and
disappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, and
this is doubly true for the short stories. Losing a couple bucks to people who
would have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic text
is no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevant
and unread. And luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for free
gets me more paying customers than it loses me.
You can find the canonical version of this file at
http://craphound.com/place/download.php
If you'd like to convert this file to some other format and distribute it, you
have my permission, provided that:
* You don't charge money for the distribution
* You keep the entire text intact, including this notice, the license below, and
the metadata at the end of the file
* You don't use a file-format that has "DRM" or "copy-protection" or any other
form of use-restriction turned on
If you'd like, you can advertise the existence of your edition by posting a link
to it at http://craphound.com/place/000012.php
--
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###
Craphound
=========
Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was
too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of
uselessness for me not to like him -- respect him, anyway. But then he found the
cowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly
alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.
So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a
buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience,
wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind
but scorched earth.
Craphound spotted the sign -- his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton,
gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway
in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on
to the CBC's summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old
radio dramas: "The Shadow," "Quiet Please," "Tom Mix," "The Crypt-Keeper" with
Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a
radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck
rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My arm
was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said "Turn
around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!"
When Craphound gets that excited, it's a sign that he's spotted a rich vein. I
checked the side-mirror quickly, pounded the brakes and spun around. The
transmission creaked, the wheels squealed, and then we were creeping along the
way we'd come.
"There," Craphound said, gesturing with his long, skinny arm. I saw it. A wooden
A-frame real-estate sign, a piece of hand-lettered cardboard stuck overtop of
the realtor's name:
EAST MUSKOKA VOLUNTEER FIRE-DEPT
LADIES AUXILIARY RUMMAGE SALE
SAT 25 JUNE
"Hoo-eee!" I hollered, and spun the truck onto the dirt road. I gunned the
engine as we cruised along the tree-lined road, trusting Craphound to spot any
deer, signs, or hikers in time to avert disaster. The sky was a perfect blue and
the smells of summer were all around us. I snapped off the radio and listened to
the wind rushing through the truck. Ontario is _beautiful_ in the summer.
"There!" Craphound shouted. I hit the turn-off and down-shifted and then we were
back on a paved road. Soon, we were rolling into a country fire-station, an ugly
brick barn. The hall was lined with long, folding tables, stacked high. The
mother lode!
Craphound beat me out the door, as usual. His exoskeleton is programmable, so he
can record little scripts for it like: move left arm to door handle, pop it,
swing legs out to running-board, jump to ground, close door, move forward.
Meanwhile, I'm still making sure I've switched off the headlights and that I've
got my wallet.
Two blue-haired grannies had a card-table set up out front of the hall, with a
big tin pitcher of lemonade and three boxes of Tim Horton assorted donuts. That
stopped us both, since we share the superstition that you _always_ buy food from
old ladies and little kids, as a sacrifice to the crap-gods. One of the old
ladies poured out the lemonade while the other smiled and greeted us.
"Welcome, welcome! My, you've come a long way for us!"
"Just up from Toronto, ma'am," I said. It's an old joke, but it's also part of
the ritual, and it's got to be done.
"I meant your friend, sir. This gentleman."
Craphound smiled without baring his gums and sipped his lemonade. "Of course I
came, dear lady. I wouldn't miss it for the worlds!" His accent is pretty good,
but when it comes to stock phrases like this, he's got so much polish you'd
think he was reading the news.
The biddie _blushed_ and _giggled_, and I felt faintly sick. I walked off to the
tables, trying not to hurry. I chose my first spot, about halfway down, where
things wouldn't be quite so picked-over. I grabbed an empty box from underneath
and started putting stuff into it: four matched highball glasses with gold
crossed bowling-pins and a line of black around the rim; an Expo '67
wall-hanging that wasn't even a little faded; a shoebox full of late sixties
O-Pee-Chee hockey cards; a worn, wooden-handled steel cleaver that you could
butcher a steer with.
I picked up my box and moved on: a deck of playing cards copyrighted '57, with
the logo for the Royal Canadian Dairy, Bala Ontario printed on the backs; a
fireman's cap with a brass badge so tarnished I couldn't read it; a three-story
wedding-cake trophy for the 1974 Eastern Region Curling Championships. The
cash-register in my mind was ringing, ringing, ringing. God bless the East
Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary.
I'd mined that table long enough. I moved to the other end of the hall. Time
was, I'd start at the beginning and turn over each item, build one pile of
maybes and another pile of definites, try to strategise. In time, I came to rely
on instinct and on the fates, to whom I make my obeisances at every opportunity.
Let's hear it for the fates: a genuine collapsible top-hat; a white-tipped
evening cane; a hand-carved cherry-wood walking stick; a beautiful black lace
parasol; a wrought-iron lightning rod with a rooster on top; all of it in an
elephant-leg umbrella-stand. I filled the box, folded it over, and started on
another.
I collided with Craphound. He grinned his natural grin, the one that showed row
on row of wet, slimy gums, tipped with writhing, poisonous suckers. "Gold!
Gold!" he said, and moved along. I turned my head after him, just as he bent
over the cowboy trunk.
I sucked air between my teeth. It was magnificent: a leather-bound miniature
steamer trunk, the leather worked with lariats, Stetson hats, war-bonnets and
six-guns. I moved toward him, and he popped the latch. I caught my breath.
On top, there was a kid's cowboy costume: miniature leather chaps, a tiny
Stetson, a pair of scuffed white-leather cowboy boots with long, worn spurs
affixed to the heels. Craphound moved it reverently to the table and continued
to pull more magic from the trunk's depths: a stack of cardboard-bound Hopalong
Cassidy 78s; a pair of tin six-guns with gunbelt and holsters; a silver star
that said Sheriff; a bundle of Roy Rogers comics tied with twine, in mint
condition; and a leather satchel filled with plastic cowboys and Indians, enough
to re-enact the Alamo.
"Oh, my God," I breathed, as he spread the loot out on the table.
"What are these, Jerry?" Craphound asked, holding up the 78s.
"Old records, like LPs, but you need a special record player to listen to them."
I took one out of its sleeve. It gleamed, scratch-free, in the overhead
fluorescents.
"I got a 78 player here," said a member of the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire
Department Ladies' Auxiliary. She was short enough to look Craphound in the eye,
a hair under five feet, and had a skinny, rawboned look to her. "That's my
Billy's things, Billy the Kid we called him. He was dotty for cowboys when he
was a boy. Couldn't get him to take off that fool outfit -- nearly got him
thrown out of school. He's a lawyer now, in Toronto, got a fancy office on Bay
Street. I called him to ask if he minded my putting his cowboy things in the
sale, and you know what? He didn't know what I was talking about! Doesn't that
beat everything? He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy."
It's another of my rituals to smile and nod and be as polite as possible to the
erstwhile owners of crap that I'm trying to buy, so I smiled and nodded and
examined the 78 player she had produced. In lariat script, on the top, it said,
"Official Bob Wills Little Record Player," and had a crude watercolour of Bob
Wills and His Texas Playboys grinning on the front. It was the kind of record
player that folded up like a suitcase when you weren't using it. I'd had one as
a kid, with Yogi Bear silkscreened on the front.
Billy's mom plugged the yellowed cord into a wall jack and took the 78 from me,
touched the stylus to the record. A tinny ukelele played, accompanied by
horse-clops, and then a narrator with a deep, whisky voice said, "Howdy,
Pardners! I was just settin' down by the ole campfire. Why don't you stay an'
have some beans, an' I'll tell y'all the story of how Hopalong Cassidy beat the
Duke Gang when they come to rob the Santa Fe."
In my head, I was already breaking down the cowboy trunk and its contents,
thinking about the minimum bid I'd place on each item at Sotheby's. Sold
individually, I figured I could get over two grand for the contents. Then I
thought about putting ads in some of the Japanese collectors' magazines, just
for a lark, before I sent the lot to the auction house. You never can tell. A
buddy I knew had sold a complete packaged set of Welcome Back, Kotter action
figures for nearly eight grand that way. Maybe I could buy a new truck. . .
