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

#

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.

So now, on the first beautiful day of spring after a fricken evil, grey winter of pain and confusion, I work on my tan and sip beer and lemonade until the sirens go and the traffic stops and every receiver is turned to the Emergency Broadcast System — *This is not a test*.

I flip open my comm. There's a hubble of the mothaship, whirlagig and widdershins around our rock. The audio track is running, but it's just talking heads, not a transmission from the mothaship, so I tune it out.

The world holds its breath again.

#

The first transmission comes a whole pitcher later. They speak flawless English — and Spanish and Cantonese and Esperanto and Navajo, just pick a channel — and they use a beautiful bugout contralto like a newscaster who started out as an opera singer. Like a Roman tyrant orating to his subjects.

My stomach does a flip-flop and I put the comm down before I drop it, swill some shandy and look out at Lake Ontario, which is a preternatural blue. Rats-with-wings seagulls circle overhead.

"People of Earth," says the opera-singer-cum-newscaster. "It is good to be back.

"We had to undertake a task whose nature is. . . complex. We are sorry for any concern this may have caused.

"We have reached a judgment."

Lady or the tiger, I almost say. Are we joining the bugout UN or are we going to be vapourised? I surprise myself and reach down and switch off my comm and throw a nickle on the table to cover the pitchers and tip, and walk away before I hear the answer.

The honking horns tell me what it is. Louder than the when the Jays won the pennant. Bicycle bells, air-horns, car-horns, whistles. Everybody's smiling.

My comm chimes. I scan it. Dad and Mum are home.

#

They rebuild the Process centres like a bad apology, the governments of the world suddenly very, very interested in finding the arsonists who were vengeful heroes at Xmastime. I smashed my comm after the sixth page from Dad and Mum.

Sometimes, I see Linus grinning from the newsscreens on Spadina, and once I caught sickening audio of him, the harrowing story of how he had valiantly rescued dozens of Process-heads and escaped to the subway tunnels, hiding out from the torch-bearing mobs. He actually said it, "torch-bearing mobs," in the same goofy lisp.

Whenever Dad and Mum appear on a screen, I disappear.

I've got over fifteen dollars left. My room costs me a penny a night, and for a foam coffin, it's okay.

#

Someone stuck a paper flyer under my coffin's door this morning. That's unusual — who thinks that the people in the coffins are a sexy demographic?

My very own father is giving a free lecture on Lasting Happiness and the
Galactic Federation, at Raptor Stadium, tomorrow night.

I make a mental note to be elsewhere.

Of course, it's not important where I am, the fricken thing is simulcast to every dingy, darky corner of the world. Pops, after all, has been given a Governor General's award, a Nobel Prize, and a UN Medal of Bravery.

I pinball between bars, looking for somewhere outside of the coffin without the
Tyrant's oration.

Someone's converted what was left of Roy Thompson hall into a big booming dance club, the kind of place with strobe lights and nekkid dancers.

It's been so long since I was at a bar. Last summer. When they first ascended to the mothaship. I feel like an intruder, though I notice about a million half-familiar faces among the dancers, people who I met or shook hands with or drank with or fought with, some time in another life.

And then I see Daisy Duke. Six months have been enough for her to grow her hair out a little and do something to it that makes it look *expensive*. She's wearing a catsuit and a bolero jacket, and looks sexy and kind of scary.

She's at one of the ridiculously small tables, drinking and sparkling at a man in a silver vest and some kind of skirt that looks like the kind of thing I laugh at until I catch myself trying one on

We make eye-contact. I smile and start to stand. I even point at my knee and grin. Her date says something, and I see, behind the twinkle, a total lack of recognition. She turns to him and I see myself in the mirror behind her.

My hair's longer. I'm not wearing a bathrobe. I've got some meat on my bones. I'm not walking with a cane. Still, I'm *me*. I want to walk over to her and give her a hug, roll up my pants and show her the gob of scar tissue around my knee, find out where Tony the Tiger's got to.

But I don't. I don't know why, but I don't. If I had a comm, I might try calling her, so she'd see my name and then I wouldn't have to say it to her. But I don't have a comm.

I feel, suddenly, like a ghost.

I test this out, walk to the bar, circling Daisy's table once on the way and again on the way back. She sees me but doesn't recognise me, both times. I overhear snatches of her conversation, "— competing next weekend in a black-belt competition — oh, man, I can't *believe* what a pain in the ass my boss was today — want another drink —" and it's her voice, her tones, but somehow, it doesn't seem like *her*.

It feels melancholy and strange, being a ghost. I find myself leaving the bar, and walking off towards Yonge Street, to the Eatons-Walmart store where Tony the Tiger worked.

And fuck me if I don't pass him on the street out front, looking burned and buzzed and broke, panning for pennies. He's looking down, directly addressing people's knees as they pass him, "spare-change-spare-change-spare-change."

I stand in front of him until he looks up. He's got an ugly scar running over his eyebrow, and he looks right through me. *Where you been, Tony?* I want to ask it, can't. I'm a ghost. I give him a quarter. He doesn't notice.

#

I run into Stude the Dude and hatch my plan at Tilly the horse's funeral. I read the obit in the Globe, with a pict of the two of them. They buried her at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, with McKenzie King and Timothy Eaton and Lester Pearson. Stude can afford it. The squib said that he was going aboard the mothaship the day after the ceremony.

Lots of people are doing that. Now that we're members of the Confederation, we've got passports that'll take us to *wild* places. The streets get emptier every day. It's hard to avoid Dad's face.

Stude scares the shit out of me with his eulogy. *It's all in Process-speak*. It is positively, fricken eerie.

"My Life-Companion goes into the ground today."

There's a long pause while he stares into the big hole and the out-sized coffin.

"My Daily Road has taken me far from the Points of Excellence, and I feel like my life has been a Barrier to Joy for myself and for many others. But Tilly was a Special Someone, a Lightning Rod for Happiness, and her presence graced me with the Vision of Joy."

And so on.

I wait near the back until Stude finishes, then follow at a discreet distance as he makes his way back to his place. It's not something I ever would have considered doing last Hallowe'en — the Stude I knew would've spotted a tail in hot second. But now the world has gone to jargon-slinging harmony and I'm brazen as I ride along behind on my bike, down Yonge to Front, and up to a new building made of foam.

I feel like a ghost as I watch him look straight through me, and I mark the address.

#

I spend a day kicking at everything foam.

The foam is hard, and light, and durable, and I imagine the houses of my parent's suburb, the little Process enclave, surviving long past any of us, surviving as museum pieces for arsenic-breathing bugouts, who crawl over the mummified furniture and chests of clothes, snapping picts and chattering in their thrilling contraltos. I want to scream

Here and there, pieces of the old, pre-Process, pre-foam Toronto stick out, and
I rub them as I pass them by, touchstones for luck.

#

Spring lasted about ten days. Now we're into a muggy, 32 degrees Toronto summer, and my collar itches and sweat trickles down my neck.

I'd be wearing something lighter and cooler, except that today I'm meeting my Dad, at Aristide. They've got a little wire-flown twin-prop number fuelled up and waiting for me at the miniature airstrip on Toronto Island. Dad was *so* glad when I got in touch with him. A real Milestone on his Personal Road to Lasting Happiness. There's even one of the Process-heads from Yonge and Bloor waiting for me. He doesn't even comment on all my fricken luggage.

#

I hit Stude's place about ten minutes after he left for his trip to