Shadow of the Mothaship by Cory Doctorow (leveled readers .TXT) 📖

in the middle of the road with my solvent, plunk the reel into it, bond it, then rush back to the house and unbond that last one corner.

I hit the suck button on the reel and the house slowly drags its way to the street, leaving a gap like a broken tooth in the carefully groomed smile of my Chestnut Ave.

The wind fluffs at the house, making it settle/unsettle like a nervous hen and so I give it line by teasing the spit button on the reel until it's a hundred metres away. Then I reel it in and out, timing it with the gusts until, in a sudden magnificent second, it catches and sails up-and-up-and-up and I'm a fricken genius.

#

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