Home Again, Home Again by Cory Doctorow (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud .txt) 📖

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###


Home Again, Home Again
======================

The kids in my local bat-house breathe heavy metals, and their gelatinous bodies
quiver nauseously during our counseling sessions, and for all that, they reacted
just like I had when I told them I was going away for a while -- with hurt and
betrayal, and they aroused palpable guilt in me.

It goes in circles. When I was sixteen, and The Amazing Robotron told me he
needed to go away for a while, but he'd be back, I did everything I could to
make him guilty. Now it's me, on a world far from home, and a pack of snot-nosed
jellyfish kids have so twisted my psyche that they're all I can think of when I
debark the shuttle at Aristide Interplanetary, just outside my dirty ole
Toronto.

The customs officer isn't even human, so it feels like just another R&R, another
halting conversation carried on in ugly trade-speak, another bewilderment of
queues and luggage carousels. Outside: another spaceport, surrounded by the
variegated hostels for the variegated tourists, and bipeds are in bare majority.

I can think of it like that.

I can think of it as another spaceport.

I can think of it like another trip.

The thing he can't think of it is, is a homecoming. That's too hard for this
weak vessel.

He's very weak.

#

Look at him. He's eleven, and it's the tencennial of the Ascension of his
homeworld -- dirty blue ball, so unworthy, yet -- inducted into the Galactic
fraternity and the infinite compassion of the bugouts.

The foam, which had been confined to just the newer, Process-enclaves before the
Ascension, has spread, as has the cult of the Process For Lasting Happiness.
Process is, after all, why the dirty blue ball was judged and found barely
adequate for membership. Toronto, which had seen half its inhabitants emigrate
on open-ended tours of the wondrous worlds of the bugout domain, is full again.
Bursting. The whole damn planet is accreting a layer of off-world tourists.

It's a time of plenty. Plenty of cheap food and plenty of cheap foam structures,
built as needed, then dissolved and washed away when the need disappears. Plenty
of healthcare and education. Plenty of toys and distractions and beautiful,
haunting bugout art. Plenty, in fact, of everything, except space.

He lived in a building that is so tall, its top floors are perpetually damp with
clouds. There's a nice name for this building, inscribed on a much-abused foam
sculpture in the central courtyard. No one uses the nice name. They call it by
the name that the tabloids use, that the inhabitants use, that everyone but the
off-world counselors use. They call it the bat-house.

Bats in the belfry. Batty. Batshit.

I hated it when they moved us into the bat-house. My parents gamely tried to
explain why we were going, but they never understood, no more than any human
could. The bugouts had a test, a scifi helmet you wore, and it told you whether
you were normal, or batty. Some of our neighbors were clearly batshit: the woman
who screamed all the time, about the bugs and the little niggers crawling over
her flesh; the couple who ate dogturds off the foam sidewalk with lip-smacking
relish; the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla.

I don't want to talk about him right now.

His parents' flaw -- whatever it was -- was too subtle to detect without the
scifi helmet. They never knew for sure what it was. Many of the bats were in the
same belfry: part of the bugouts' arrogant compassion held that a couple never
knew which one of them was defective, so his family never knew if it was his
nervous, shy mother, or his loud, opinionated father who had doomed them to the
quarantine.

His father told him, in an impromptu ceremony before he slid his keycard into
the lock on their new apt in the belfry: "Chet, whatever they say, there's
nothing wrong with us. They have no right to put us here." He knelt to look the
skinny ten-year-old right in the eye. "Don't worry, kiddo. It's not for long --
we'll get this thing sorted out yet." Then, in a rare moment of tenderness, one
that stood out in Chet's memory as the last of such, his father gathered him in
his arms, lifted him off his feet in a fierce hug. After a moment, his mother
joined the hug, and Chet's face was buried in the spot where both of their
shoulders met, smelling their smells. They still smelled like his parents then,
like his old house on the Beaches, and for a moment, he knew his father was
right, that this couldn't possibly last.

A tear rolled down his mother's cheek and dripped in his ear. He shook his
shaggy hair like a dog and his parents laughed, and his father wiped away his
mother's tear and they went into the apt, grinning and holding hands.

Of course, they never left the belfry after that.

#

I can't remember what the last thing my mother said to me was. Do I remember her
tucking me in and saying, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite,"
or was that something I saw on a vid? Was it a nervous command to wipe my shoes
on the way in the door? Was her voice soft and sad, as it sometimes is in my
memories, or was it brittle and angry, the way she often seemed after she
stopped talking, as she banged around the tiny, two-room apt?

I can't remember.

My mother fell away from speech like a half-converted parishioner falling away
from the faith: she stopped visiting the temple of verbiage in dribs and drabs,
first missing the regular sermons -- the daily niceties of Good morning and Good
night and Be careful, Chet -- then neglecting the major holidays, the Watch
out!s and the Ouch!s and the answers to direct questions.

My father and I never spoke of it, and I didn't mention it to the other wild
kids in the vertical city with whom I spent my days getting in what passed for
trouble around the bat-house.

I did mention it to my counselor, The Amazing Robotron, so-called for the metal
exoskeleton he wore to support his fragile body in Earth's hard gravity. But he
didn't count, then.

#

The reason that Chet can't pinpoint the moment his mother sealed her lips is
because he was a self-absorbed little rodent in those days.

Not a cute freckled hellion. A miserable little shit who played hide-and-seek
with the other miserable little shits in the bat-house, but played it violently,
hide-and-seek-and-break-and-enter, hide-and-seek-and-smash-and-grab. The lot of
them are amorphous, indistinguishable from each other in his memory, all that
remains of all those clever little brats is the lingering impression of loud,
boasting voices and sharp little teeth.

The Amazing Robotron was a fool in little Chet's eyes, an easy-to-bullshit,
ineffectual lump whose company Chet had to endure for a mandatory hour every
other day.

"Chet, you seem distr-acted to-day," The Amazing Robotron said in his artificial
voice.

"Yah. You know. Worried about, uh, the future." Distracted by Debbie Carr's
purse, filched while she sat in the sixty-eighth floor courtyard, talking with
her stupid girlie friends. Debbie was the first girl from the gang to get tits,
and now she didn't want to hang out with them anymore, and her purse was stashed
underneath the base of a hollow planter outside The Amazing Robotron's apt, and
maybe he could sneak it out under his shirt and find a place to dump it and sort
through its contents after the session.