Shadow of the Mothaship

by Cory Doctorow

thirty years waiting for an opportunity to grab a megaphoneand organise a disaster-relief.

  The neighbours' is not recognisable as a house anymore. Some people are singingcarols. Then it gets silly and they start singing dirty words, and I join inwhen 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 atall.

  Fuck you, Dad.

  #

  Someone scrounged a big foam minikeg of whiskey, and someone else has come upwith 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 oldparlour, dancing and Merry Xmassing late.

  About half an hour into it, Tony the Tiger comes in the servant's door, his nosered. He's got the hose in one hand, glove frozen stiff from blow-back. I'm nextto 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 Ihobble from pissoir to whiskey, until the whiskey's gone and the pissoir isswimming from other people's misses, and then I settle into a corner of one ofthe 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 seeingher cut so loose, but it suits her. That twinkle is on perma-strobe and she'sdown 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 melike an anvil. My eyelids are like weights. She wriggles up to me, and eventhough 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 anadrenalised 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 -- whenthe bugouts got here and he told everyone that he'd been invited to explain tothem why they should admit humanity into the Galactic Federation, we laughed ourasses off. My sister, she's thirty, she's somewhere out west, we think, maybeWinnipeg, 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 acontact-high from her, because I'm not even a little tired. Eventually, she'slying with her head in my lap, and I can feel my robe slip underneath her, andI'm pretty sure my dick is hanging out underneath her hair, but none of it seemsto matter. No matter how long we sit there, I don't get cramps in my back, nonein 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 wakewith a yelp, catch my breath, yelp again, and Daisy is up and crouching besideme in a flash. Tony arrives a moment later and they take me to bed. I spend NewYear's there, behind a wall of codeine, and Daisy dips her finger into her glassof 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, asfilthy and darky as the grime around the toilet bowl, but I accentuate thepositive.

  By the time I make it downstairs, Tony's in full dervish, helping unload afreshly-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. Ahalf-doz of my housemates, new arrivals whose names I haven't picked up yet, arealready sitting around the kitchen, stuffing their faces.

  I reach into my robe-pocket for my comm and shout "Smile!" and snap a pict, thenstash 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'sPantry, that I use for my office and shut the door. Our e-zine, *Sit/Spin,* wentfrom occasional to daily when I took it over after New Year's, and Icommandeered an office to work in. Apparently, it's *de rigueur* cafe reading inCopenhagen.

  Whatever. The important things are:

  1) I can spend a whole day in my office without once remembering to need to takea pill;

  2) When I come out, Daisy Duke is always the first one there, grabbing my command eating the ish with hungry eyes.

  I start to collect the day's issue, pasting in the pict of Tony and Daisy underthe masthead.

  #

  I'm on a Harbourfront patio with a pitcher of shandy in front of me, darkshades, 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'tinsist on being noble and coming with, lying about my name and camping out inthe ER for a week in the newly recaptured Women's College Hospital before a doccould see me.

  Daisy kissed me on the cheek when I got home and then went upside my head, andTony made everyone come and see my new knee. While I was in, someone had sortedout the affairs of the Process, and a government trustee had left a note for meat general delivery. I got over fifty dollars and bought a plane-ticket for amuch-deserved week in the Honduras. I tried to take Daisy, but she had stuff todo. I beach-fronted it until the melanomas came out, then home again, homeagain, only to find that the house crime-scene taped and Tony the Tiger andDaisy 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 winterof pain and confusion, I work on my tan and sip beer and lemonade until thesirens go and the traffic stops and every receiver is turned to the EmergencyBroadcast System -- *This is not a test*.

  I flip open my comm. There's a hubble of the mothaship, whirlagig andwiddershins around our rock. The audio track is running, but it's just talkingheads, 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 asan 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 someshandy 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 anyconcern 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 tobe vapourised? I surprise myself and reach down and switch off my comm and throwa nickle on the table to cover the pitchers and tip, and walk away before I hearthe answer.

  The honking horns tell me what it is. Louder than the when the Jays won thepennant. 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 theworld suddenly very, very interested in finding the arsonists who were vengefulheroes 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 Icaught sickening audio of him, the harrowing story of how he had valiantlyrescued dozens of Process-heads and escaped to the subway tunnels, hiding outfrom the torch-bearing mobs. He actually said it
, "torch-bearing mobs," in thesame 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 afoam 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 theGalactic 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 toevery dingy, darky corner of the world. Pops, after all, has been given aGovernor General's award, a Nobel Prize, and a UN Medal of Bravery.

  I pinball between bars, looking for somewhere outside of the coffin without