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

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.