Shadow of the Mothaship by Cory Doctorow (best short novels .txt) 📖

watching me, and so I wipe my nose on the sleeve.

#

When the ballast is done, phase three begins. I go to work outside of the house,
spritzing a line of solvent at the point where the foam meets the ground, until
it's all disconnected.

And then I got to kick myself for an asshole. A strand of armoured fibre-optic,
a steel water pipe, and the ceramic gas line hold it all down, totally
impervious to solvent.

Somewhere, in a toolbox that I ditched out the second floor window, is a big old
steel meat-cleaver, and now I hunt for it, prying apart the piles of crap with a
broomstick, feeling every inch the post-apocalyptic scrounger.

I finally locate it, hanging out of arm's reach from my neighbour Linus's rose
trellis. I shake the trellis until it falls, missing my foot, which I jerk away
and swear at.

#

The fibre cleaves with a single stroke. The gas line takes twenty or more, each
stroke clanging off the ceramic and sending the blade back alarmingly at my
face. Finally it gives, and the sides splinter and a great jet of gas whooshes
out, then stops.

I could kick myself for an asshole. Praise the bugouts for civil engineers who
made self-sealing pipes. I eye the water line warily and flip open my comm, dial
into the city, and touch-tone my way through a near-sexy woman reading menus
until I find out that the water, too, self-seals.

Whang, whang, whang, and I'm soaked and blinded by the water that bursts free,
and *I could kick myself for an asshole!*

The house, now truly untethered, catches a gust of wind and lifts itself a few
metres off the ground, body-checking me on my ass. I do a basketball jump and
catch the solvent-melted corner, drag it down to earth, long-arm for the fix
bath and slop it where the corner meets the driveway, bonding it there until
phase four is ready.

#

I bond one end of monofilament to the front right corner of the house, then let
it unwind, covered in eraser-pink safety goop, until I'm standing in my deserted
Chestnut Ave. I spray a dent 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