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

Start
benching in the morning, work on my upper-body. Foam the house. Open the rooms
in the basement, take in some more folks. Get a cam and start recording house
meetings. Start an e-zine for connecting up squats. Some more things. You?"

"Don't ask," I say, not wanting to humiliate myself again.

He misunderstands me. "Well, don't sweat it: if you make too many resolutions,
you're trying, and that's what counts."

"Yuh-huh." It feels good to be overestimated for a change.

Tony used to work in the customer-service dept at Eatons-Walmart, the big one at
Dundas and Yonge where the Eaton Centre used to be. They kept offering him
promotions and he kept turning them down. He wanted to stay there, acting as a
guide through the maze of bureaucracy you had to navigate to get a refund when
you bought the dangerous, overpriced shit they sold. It shows.

It's like he spent thirty years waiting for an opportunity to grab a megaphone
and organise a disaster-relief.

The neighbours' is not recognisable as a house anymore. Some people are singing
carols. Then it gets silly and they start singing dirty words, and I join in
when they launch into Jingle Bells, translated into Process-speak.

I turn back into the fire and lose myself in the flickers, and I don't scream at
all.

Fuck you, Dad.

#

Someone scrounged a big foam minikeg of whiskey, and someone else has come up
with some chewable vitamin C soaked in something *up*, and the house gets going.
Those with working comms -- who pays for their subscriptions, I wonder --
micropay for some tuneage, and we split between the kitchen and the big old
parlour, dancing and Merry Xmassing late.

About half an hour into it, Tony the Tiger comes in the servant's door, his nose
red. He's got the hose in one hand, glove frozen stiff from blow-back. I'm next
to the door, shivering, and he grins. "Putting out the embers."

I take his gloves and toque from him and add them to the drippy pile beside me.
I've got a foam tumbler of whiskey and I pass it to him.

The night passes in the warmth of twenty sweaty, boozy, speedy bodies, and I
hobble from pissoir to whiskey, until the whiskey's gone and the pissoir is
swimming from other people's misses, and then I settle into a corner of one of
the ratty sofas in the parlour, dozing a little and smiling.

Someone wakes me with a hard, whiskey-fumed kiss on the cheek. "How can you
*sleep* on *speed*, Maxes?" Daisy shrieks into my ear. I'm not used to seeing
her cut so loose, but it suits her. That twinkle is on perma-strobe and she's
down to a sportsbra and cycling shorts. She bounces onto the next cushion.

I pull my robe tighter. "Just lucky that way." Speed hits me hard, then drops me
like an anvil. My eyelids are like weights. She wriggles up to me, and even
though she's totally whacked, she manages to be careful of my knee. Cautiously,
I put my arm around her shoulders. She's clammy with sweat.

"Your Dad, he musta been some pain in the ass, huh?" She's babbling in an
adrenalised tone, and the muscles under my hand are twitching.

"Yeah, he sure was."

"I can't imagine it. I mean, we used to watch him on the tube and groan -- when
the bugouts got here and he told everyone that he'd been invited to explain to
them why they should admit humanity into the Galactic Federation, we laughed our
asses off. My sister, she's thirty, she's somewhere out west, we think, maybe
Winnipeg, she had a boyfriend in highschool who ended up there. . . ."

It takes her four more hours to wind down, and I think I must be picking up a
contact-high from her, because I'm not even a little tired. Eventually, she's
lying with her head in my lap, and I can feel my robe slip underneath her, and
I'm pretty sure my dick is hanging out underneath her hair, but none of it seems
to matter. No matter how long we sit there, I don't get cramps in my back, none
in my knee, and by the time we both doze away, I think I maybe am in love.

#

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*.