Cory Doctorow - Shadow of the Mothaship
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Cory Doctorow >> Shadow of the Mothaship
#
It's nearly four and my beautiful kite is a dancing bird in the sky before the
good little kiddies of my Chestnut Ave start to trickle home from their days of
denial, playing at normalcy in the face of Judgment.
Linus is the first one home, and he nearly decapitates himself on the taut line
as he cruises past on his bicycle. He slews to a stop and stares unbelieving at
me, at the airborne house, at the gap where he had a neighbour.
"Maxes Fuentes Shumacher! What is this?"
"Flying a kite, Linus. Just flyin' a kite. Nice day for it, yeah?"
"This," he says, then sputters. Linus is a big devotee of Dad's Process for
Lasting Happiness, and I can actually watch him try to come up with some
scripture to cover the situation while he gulps back mouthsful of bile. "This is
an Irresponsible Wrong, Maxes. You are being a Feckless Filthy. This is an abuse
of property, a Lashing Out at a Figure in Absentia. You are endangering others,
endangering aircraft and people and property below that. I insist that you
Right-Make this now, this instant."
"Yeah, uh-huh, yeah." And I squint up at my kite, the sun coming down behind it
now, and it's just a dot in the big orange fire. The wind's more biting than
friendly. I pull the foam sweater a little closer, and do up one of the buttons
in the middle.
"Maxes!" Linus shouts, his happiness dissipating. "You have thirty seconds to
get that down here, or I will Right-Make it myself."
I didn't live with my dad for twenty years without picking up some
Process-speak. "You seem to be Ego-Squeezing here, Lin. This Blame-Saying is a
Barrier to Joy, bud, and the mark of a Weekend Happyman. Why don't you go watch
some TV or something?"
He ignores me and makes a big show of flipping open his comm and starting a
timer running on it.
Man, my kite is a work of art. Megafun.
"Time's up, Feckless Filthy," Linus says, and snakes out and punches the suck
button on my monofilament reel. It whizzes and line starts disappearing into its
guts.
"You can't bring down a kite *that* way, frickface. It'll crash." Which it does,
losing all its airworthiness in one hot second and plummeting like a house.
It tears up some trees down Chestnut, and I hear a Rice Crispies bowl of
snap-crackle-pops from further away. I use a shear to clip the line and it zaps
away, like a hyperactive snake.
"Moron," I say to Linus. The good kiddies of Chestnut Ave are now trickling home
in twos and threes and looking at the gap in the smile with looks of such bovine
stupidity that I stalk away in disgust, leaving the reel bonded to the middle of
the road forever.
I build a little fort out of a couch and some cushions, slop fix bath over the
joints so they're permanent, and hide in it, shivering.
#
Tricky-treaters didn't come knocking on my pillow-fort last night. That's fine
by me. I slept well.
I rise with the sun and the dew and the aches of a cold night on a mattress of
clothes and towels.
I flip open my comm, and there's a half-doz clippings my agent's found in the
night. Five are about the bugouts; I ignore those. One is about the kite.
It crashed around Highway 7 and the 400 in Vaughan, bouncing and skidding.
Traffic was light, and though there were a few fender-benders, nothing serious
went down. The city dispatched a couple-three guys to go out with solvent and
melt the thing, but by the time they arrived, an errant breeze had lofted it
again, and it flew another seventy kay, until it crossed the antidebris field at
Jean Paul Aristide International in Barrie.
I'm hungry. I'm cold. My teeth are beshitted with scum. Linus comes tripping
Noel Coward out of his front door and I feel like kicking his ass. He sees me
staring at him.
"Did you have a good night, Maxes?"
"Spiff, strictly nift. Eat shit and die."
He tsks and shakes his head and gets on his bicycle. He works down at Yonge and
Bloor, in the big Process HQ. His dad was my dad's lieutenant, and since they
both went to the confab on the mothaship (along with all the other grownups on
my Chestnut Ave), he's sort of in charge. Shit-eating prick. He lisps a little
when he talks, and he's soft and pudgy, not like Dad, who could orate like a
Roman tyrant and had a washboard for a gut.
I hope he gets hit by a semi.
#
I pass the morning with my comm, till I come to the pict of Mum and Dad and
their Process buds on the jetway to the shuttle at Aristide, ascending to the
heavens as humanity's reps. They're both naked and arm-in-arm and as chaste as
John and Yoko, and my eyes fill up with tears. I crawl back into my fort and
sleep and dream about buzzing Chestnut Ave in a shuttle with a payload of
solvent, melting down all the houses into trickles that disappear into the
sewers.
#
I wake for the second time that day to the sound of a gas engine, a rarity on
Chestnut Ave and the surrounding North Toronto environs. It's a truck, from the
city, the kind they used to use to take away the trash before the pneuma was
finished -- Dad pointed out how it was a Point of Excellence, the plans for the
subterranean pneuma, and his acolytes quietly saw to it. Three men in coveralls
and reflective vests ride on the back. It pulls up into my drive, and my comm
chimes.
It's a text-only message, signed and key-crypted from Linus, on Process
letterhead. The first thing it does is flash a big message about how by reading
it, I have logged my understanding of its contents and it is now officially
served to me, as per blah blah blah. Legal doc.
I scroll down, just skimming. "-- non compis mentis -- anti-social destruction
of property -- reckless endangerment of innocent life -- violation of terms --
sad duty of the Trustees --" and by the time I'm finished the message, I'm
disinherited. Cut off from the Process trust fund. Property stripped. Subpoenaed
to a competency hearing.
The driver of the truck has been waiting for me to finish the note. He makes eye
contact with me, I make eye contact with him. The other two hop out and start
throwing my piles of ballast into the back of the truck.
I take my bicycle from the shed out back, kick my way through the piles of crap,
and ride off into the sunset.
#
For Christmas I hang some tinsel from my handlebars and put a silver star on the
big hex-nut that holds the headset to the front forks.
Tony the Tiger thinks that's pretty funny. He stopped into my sickroom this
morning as I lay flat on my back on my grimy, sweaty futon, one arm outflung,
hand resting on the twisted wreckage of my front wheel. He stood in the doorway,
grinning from striped shirt to flaming red moustache, and barked "Hah!" at me.
Which is his prerogative, since this is his place I'm staying at, here in a
decaying Rosedale mansion gone to spectacular Addams Family ruin, this is where
he took me in when I returned on my bike from the ghosttown of Niagara Falls,
where I'd built a nest of crap from the wax-museums and snow-globe stores until
the kitsch of it all squeezed my head too hard and I rode home, to a Toronto
utterly unlike the one I'd left behind. I'd been so stunned by it all that I
totally missed the crater at Queen and Brock, barreling along at forty kay, and
I'd gone down like a preacher's daughter, smashing my poor knee and my poor bike
to equally dismal fragments.
"Hah!" I bark back at Tony the Tiger. "Merry happy, dude."
"You, too."
Which it is, more or less, for us ragtags who live on Tony the Tiger's paternal
instincts and jumbo survivalist-sized boxes of Corn Flakes.
And now it's the crack of noon, and my navel is thoroughly contemplated, and my
adoring public awaits, so it's time to struggle down bravely and feed my face.
I've got a robe, it used to be white, and plush, with a hood. The hood's still
there, but the robe itself is the sweat-mat grey of everything in Tony the
Tiger's dominion. I pull it on and grope for my cane. I look down at the bruisey
soccerball where my knee used to be and gingerly snap on the brace that Tony
fabbed up for me out of foam and velcro. Then it's time to stand up.
"Fricken-mother-shit-jesus-fuck!" I shout and drown out my knee's howls of
protest.
"Y'okay?" floats Tony's voice up the stairs.
"Peachy keen!" I holler back and start my twenty-two-year-old old-fogey shuffle
down the stairs: step, drag.
On the ground-floor landing, someone's used aerosol glitter to silver the
sandbags that we use to soak up bullets randomly fired into our door. It's a
wonderful life.
I check myself out in the mirror. I'm skinny and haunted and stubbly and gamey.
Num.
There's a pair of size-nine Kodiaks in a puddle of melting slush and someone's
dainty wet sock-prints headed for the kitchen. Daisy Duke's home for the
holidays. Off to the kitchen for me.
And there she is, a vision of brave perseverance in the face of uncooperative
climate. She's five-six average; not-thin, not-fat average; eyes an average
hazel; tits, two; arms, two; legs, two; and skin the colour of Toronto's winter,
sun-deprived-white with a polluted grey tinge. My angel of mercy.
She leaps out of her chair and is under my arm supporting me before I know it.
"Maxes, hi," she says, drawing out the "hi" like an innuendo.
"Daisy Duke, as I live and breathe," I say, and she's got the same mix of sweat
and fun-smell coming off her hair as when she sat with me while I shouted and
raved about my knee for a week after coming to Tony the Tiger's.
She puts me down in her chair as gently as an air-traffic controller. She gives
my knee a look of professional displeasure, as though it were swollen and ugly
because it wanted to piss her off. "Lookin' down and out there, Maxes. Been to a
doctor yet?"
Tony the Tiger, sitting on the stove, head ducked under the exhaust hood, stuffs
his face with a caramel corn and snorts. "The boy won't go. I tell him to go,
but he won't go. What to do?"
I feel like I should be pissed at him for nagging me, but I can't work it up.
Dad's gone, taken away with all the other Process-heads on the mothaship, which
vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The riots started immediately. Process
HQ at Yonge and Bloor was magnificently torched, followed by the worldwide
franchises. Presumably, we'd been Judged, and found wanting. Only a matter of
time, now.
So I can't get pissed at Tony for playing fatherly. I kind of even like it.
And besides, now that hospitals are turf, I'm as likely to get kakked as cured,
especially when they find out that dear ole Dad was the bull-goose Process-head.
Thanks, Pop.
"That right? Won't go take your medicine, Maxes?" She can do this eye-twinkle
thing, turn it off and on at will, and when she does, it's like there's nothing
average about her at all.
"I'm too pretty to make it in there."
Daisy turns to Tony and they do this leaders-of-the-commune meaningful-glance
thing that makes me apeshit. "Maybe we could get a doc to come here?" Daisy
says, at last.
"And perform surgery in the kitchen?" I say back. All the while, my knee is
throbbing and poking out from under my robe.
Daisy and Tony hang head and I feel bad. These two, if they can't help, they
feel useless. "So, how you been?" I ask Daisy, who has been AWOL for three
weeks, looking for her folks in Kitchen-Waterloo, filled up with the holiday
spirit.
"Baby, it's cold outside. Took highway 2 most of the way -- the 407 was drive-by
city. The heater on the Beetle quit about ten minutes out of town, so I was
driving with a toque and mittens and all my sweaters. But it was nice to see the
folks, you know? Not fun, but nice."
Nice. I hope they stuck a pole up Dad's ass and put him on top of the Xmas tree.
"It's good to be home. Not enough fun in Kitchener. I am positively fun-hungry."
She doesn't look it, she looks wiped up and wrung out, but hell, I'm pretty fun
hungry, too.
"So what's on the Yuletide agenda, Tony?" I ask.
"Thought we'd burn down the neighbours', have a cheery fire." Which is fine by
me -- the neighbours split two weeks before. Morons from Scarborough, thought
that down in Florida people would be warm and friendly. Hey, if they can't be
bothered to watch the tacticals fighting in the tunnels under Disney World, it's
none of my shit.
"Sounds like a plan," I say.
We wait until after three, when everyone in the happy household has struggled
home or out of bed. We're almost twenty when assembled, ranging from little Tiny
Tim to bulldog Pawn-Shop Maggie, all of us unrecalcitrants snagged in the tangle
of Tony's hypertrophied organisational skills.
The kitchen at Tony's is big enough to prepare dinner for forty guests. We
barely fit as we struggle into our parkas and boots. I end up in a pair of
insulated overalls with one leg slit to make room for my knee/soccerball. If
this was Dad and Mum, it'd be like we were gathered for a meeting, waiting for
the Chairman to give us the word. But that's not Tony's style; he waits until
we're approaching ready, then starts moving toward the door, getting out the
harness. Daisy Duke shoulders a kegger of foam and another full of kerosene, and
Grandville gets the fix-bath. Tiny Tim gets the sack of marshmallows and we
trickle into the yard.
It was a week and a half after Hallowe'en when the vast cool intelligences from
beyond the stars zapped away. The whole year since they'd arrived, the world had
held its breath and tippytoed around on best behave. When they split, it
exhaled. The gust of that exhalation carried the stink of profound
pissed-offedness with the Processors who'd acted the proper Nazi hall-monitors
until the bugouts went away. I'd thrown a molotov into the Process centre at the
Falls myself, and shouted into the fire until I couldn't hear myself.
So now I'm a refugee on Xmas Eve, waiting for fearless leader to do something
primordial and cathartic. Which he does, even if he starts off by taking the
decidedly non-primordial step of foaming the side of our squat that faces the
neighbours', then fixing it, Daisy Duke whanging away on the harness's seal with
a rock to clear the ice. Once our place is fireproofed, Daisy Duke switches to
kero, and we cheer and clap as it laps over the neighbours', a two-storey
coach-house. The kero leaves shiny patches on the rime of frost that covers the
place. My knee throbs, so I sit/kneel against the telephone pole out front.
The kids are getting overexcited, pitching rocks at the glass to make holes for
the jet of kero. Tony shuts down the stream, and I think for a minute that he's
pissed, he's gonna take a piece out of someone, but instead he's calm and
collected, asks people to sort out getting hoses, buckets and chairs from the
kitchen. Safety first, and I have to smile.
The group hops to it, extruding volunteers through a nonobvious Brownian motion,
and before long all of Tony's gear is spread out on the lawn. Tony then crouches
down and carves a shallow bowl out of the snow. He tips the foam-keg in, then
uses his gloves to sculpt out a depression. He slops fix-bath on top, then fills
his foam-and-snow bowl with the last of the kero.
"You all ready?" he says, like he thinks he's a showman.
Most of us are cold and wish he'd just get it going, but Tony's the kind of guy
you want to give a ragged cheer to.
He digs the snow out from around the bowl and holds it like a discus. "Maestro,
if you would?" he says to Daisy Duke, who uses long fireplace match to touch it
off. The thing burns like a brazier, and Tony the Tiger frisbees it square into
the middle of the porch. There's a tiny *chuff* and then all the kero seems to
catch at once and the whole place is cheerful orange and warm as the summer.
We pass around the marshmallows and Tony's a fricken genius.
#
The flames lick and spit, and the house kneels in slow, majestic stages. The
back half collapses first, a cheapie addition that's fifty years younger than
the rest of the place. The front porch follows in the aftershock, and it sends a
constellation of embers skittering towards the marshmallow-roasters, who beat at
each other's coats until they're all extinguished.
As the resident crip, I've weaseled my way into one of the kitchen chairs, and
I've got it angled to face the heat. I sit close enough that my face feels like
it's burning, and I turn it to the side and feel the delicious cool breeze.
The flames are on the roof, now, and I'm inside my own world, watching them.
They dance spacewards, and I feel a delicious thrill as I realise that the
bugouts are not there, that the bugouts are not watching, that they took my
parents and my problems and vanished.
I'm broken from the reverie by Daisy Duke, who's got a skimask on, the mouth
rimmed in gummy marshmallow. She's got two more marshmallows in one
three-fingered cyclist's glove.
"Mmm. Marshmallowey," I say. It's got that hard carboniferous skin and the gooey
inside that's hot enough to scald my tongue. "I *like* it."
"Almost New Year's," she says.
"Yuh-huh."
"Gonna make any resolutions?" she asks.
"You?"
"Sure," she says, and I honestly can't imagine what this perfectly balanced
person could possibly have to resolve. "You first," she says.
"Gonna get my knee fixed up."
"That's *it*?"
"Yuh-huh. The rest, I'll play by ear. Maybe I'll find some Process-heads to hit.
Howbout you?"
"Get the plumbing upstairs working again. Foam the whole place. Cook one meal a
week. Start teaching self-defense. Make sure your knee gets fixed up." And
suddenly, she seems like she's real *old*, even though she's only twenty-five,
only three years older than me.
"Oh, yeah. That's real good."
"Got any *other* plans for the next year, Maxes?"
"No, nothing special." I feel a twinge of freeloader's anxiety. "Maybe try and
get some money, help out around here. I don't know."
"You don't have to worry about that. Tony may run this place, but I'm the one
who found it, and I say you can stay. I just don't want to see you," she
swallows, "you know, waste your life."
"No sweatski." I'm not even thinking as I slip into *this* line. "I'll be just
fine. Something'll come up, I'll figure out what I want to do. Don't worry about
me."
Unexpectedly and out of the clear orange smoke, she hugs me and hisses in my
ear, fiercely, "I *do* worry about you, Maxes. I *do*." Then Bunny nails her in
the ear with a slushball and she dives into a flawless snap-roll, scooping snow
on the way for a counterstrike.
#
Tony the Tiger's been standing beside me for a while, but I just noticed it now.
He barks a trademarked Hah! at me. "How's the knee?"
"Big, ugly and swollen."
"Yum. How's the brain?"
"Ditto."
"Double-yum."
"Got any New Year's resolutions, Tony?"
"Trim my moustache. Put in a garden, here where the neighbours' place was. Start
benching in the morning, work on my upper-body. Foam the house. Open the rooms
in the basement, take in some more folks. Get a cam and start recording house
meetings. Start an e-zine for connecting up squats. Some more things. You?"
"Don't ask," I say, not wanting to humiliate myself again.
He misunderstands me. "Well, don't sweat it: if you make too many resolutions,
you're trying, and that's what counts."
"Yuh-huh." It feels good to be overestimated for a change.
Tony used to work in the customer-service dept at Eatons-Walmart, the big one at
Dundas and Yonge where the Eaton Centre used to be. They kept offering him
promotions and he kept turning them down. He wanted to stay there, acting as a
guide through the maze of bureaucracy you had to navigate to get a refund when
you bought the dangerous, overpriced shit they sold. It shows.
It's like he spent thirty years waiting for an opportunity to grab a megaphone
and organise a disaster-relief.
The neighbours' is not recognisable as a house anymore. Some people are singing
carols. Then it gets silly and they start singing dirty words, and I join in
when they launch into Jingle Bells, translated into Process-speak.
I turn back into the fire and lose myself in the flickers, and I don't scream at
all.
Fuck you, Dad.
#
Someone scrounged a big foam minikeg of whiskey, and someone else has come up
with some chewable vitamin C soaked in something *up*, and the house gets going.
Those with working comms -- who pays for their subscriptions, I wonder --
micropay for some tuneage, and we split between the kitchen and the big old
parlour, dancing and Merry Xmassing late.
About half an hour into it, Tony the Tiger comes in the servant's door, his nose
red. He's got the hose in one hand, glove frozen stiff from blow-back. I'm next
to the door, shivering, and he grins. "Putting out the embers."
I take his gloves and toque from him and add them to the drippy pile beside me.
I've got a foam tumbler of whiskey and I pass it to him.
The night passes in the warmth of twenty sweaty, boozy, speedy bodies, and I
hobble from pissoir to whiskey, until the whiskey's gone and the pissoir is
swimming from other people's misses, and then I settle into a corner of one of
the ratty sofas in the parlour, dozing a little and smiling.
Someone wakes me with a hard, whiskey-fumed kiss on the cheek. "How can you
*sleep* on *speed*, Maxes?" Daisy shrieks into my ear. I'm not used to seeing
her cut so loose, but it suits her. That twinkle is on perma-strobe and she's
down to a sportsbra and cycling shorts. She bounces onto the next cushion.
I pull my robe tighter. "Just lucky that way." Speed hits me hard, then drops me
like an anvil. My eyelids are like weights. She wriggles up to me, and even
though she's totally whacked, she manages to be careful of my knee. Cautiously,
I put my arm around her shoulders. She's clammy with sweat.
"Your Dad, he musta been some pain in the ass, huh?" She's babbling in an
adrenalised tone, and the muscles under my hand are twitching.
"Yeah, he sure was."
"I can't imagine it. I mean, we used to watch him on the tube and groan -- when
the bugouts got here and he told everyone that he'd been invited to explain to
them why they should admit humanity into the Galactic Federation, we laughed our
asses off. My sister, she's thirty, she's somewhere out west, we think, maybe
Winnipeg, she had a boyfriend in highschool who ended up there. . . ."
It takes her four more hours to wind down, and I think I must be picking up a
contact-high from her, because I'm not even a little tired. Eventually, she's
lying with her head in my lap, and I can feel my robe slip underneath her, and
I'm pretty sure my dick is hanging out underneath her hair, but none of it seems
to matter. No matter how long we sit there, I don't get cramps in my back, none
in my knee, and by the time we both doze away, I think I maybe am in love.
#
I should have spent the night in my bed. I wake up nearly twenty hours later,
and my knee feels like it's broken into a million pieces, which it is. I wake
with a yelp, catch my breath, yelp again, and Daisy is up and crouching beside
me in a flash. Tony arrives a moment later and they take me to bed. I spend New
Year's there, behind a wall of codeine, and Daisy dips her finger into her glass
of fizzy nauga-champagne and touches it to my lips at midnight.
#
I eat four codeine tabs before getting up, my usual dose. Feb is on us, as
filthy and darky as the grime around the toilet bowl, but I accentuate the
positive.
By the time I make it downstairs, Tony's in full dervish, helping unload a
freshly-scrounged palette of brown bread, lifted from the back of some bakery.
He grins his trademark at me when I come into the kitchen and I grin back.
"Foo-oo-ood!" he says, tearing the heel of a loaf and tossing it my way. A
half-doz of my housemates, new arrivals whose names I haven't picked up yet, are
already sitting around the kitchen, stuffing their faces.
I reach into my robe-pocket for my comm and shout "Smile!" and snap a pict, then
stash it in the dir I'm using for working files for the e-zine.
"What's the caption?" said Tony.
"*Man oh manna*," I say.
I eat my heel of bread, then stump into the room that Daisy calls the Butler's
Pantry, that I use for my office and shut the door. Our e-zine, *Sit/Spin,* went
from occasional to daily when I took it over after New Year's, and I
commandeered an office to work in. Apparently, it's *de rigueur* cafe reading in
Copenhagen.
Whatever. The important things are:
1) I can spend a whole day in my office without once remembering to need to take
a pill;
2) When I come out, Daisy Duke is always the first one there, grabbing my comm
and eating the ish with hungry eyes.
I start to collect the day's issue, pasting in the pict of Tony and Daisy under
the masthead.
#
I'm on a Harbourfront patio with a pitcher of shandy in front of me, dark
shades, and a fabbed pin in my knee when the mothaship comes back.
I took the cure in February, slipped out and left a note so Daisy wouldn't
insist on being noble and coming with, lying about my name and camping out in
the ER for a week in the newly recaptured Women's College Hospital before a doc
could see me.
Daisy kissed me on the cheek when I got home and then went upside my head, and
Tony made everyone come and see my new knee. While I was in, someone had sorted
out the affairs of the Process, and a government trustee had left a note for me
at general delivery. I got over fifty dollars and bought a plane-ticket for a
much-deserved week in the Honduras. I tried to take Daisy, but she had stuff to
do. I beach-fronted it until the melanomas came out, then home again, home
again, only to find that the house crime-scene taped and Tony the Tiger and
Daisy Duke were nowhere to be found in a month of hysterical searching.