Shadow of the Mothaship by Cory Doctorow (100 books to read in a lifetime .txt) 📕

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Shadow of the Mothaship =======================

It's the untethering of my parents' house that's on my plate today. The flying of a kite on a windy Toronto Hallowe'en day and the suspension of worry for a shiny moment.

And sail surface isn't even a problemette when it comes to my parents' home — the thing is a three-storey bat whose narrow wings contain the trolleycar-shaped bedrooms and storages. Mum and Dad built it themselves while I tottered in the driveway, sucking a filthy shred of blanket, and as I contemplate it today with hands on hips from the front yard, I am there on that day:

Dad is nailgunning strips of plywood into a frame, Mum stands where I am now, hands on her hips (and I take my hands from my hips hastily, shove them deep in pockets). She squints and shouts directions. Then they both grab rolls of scrim and stapleguns and stretch it loosely across the frames, and fast-bond pipes and prefab fixtures into place. Mum harnesses up the big tanks of foam and aims the blower at the scrim, giving it five fat coats, then she drops the blower and she and Dad grab spatulas and tease zillions of curlicues and baroque stuccoes from the surface, painting it with catsup, chutney, good whiskey and bad wine, a massive canvas covered by centimetres until they declare it ready and Mum switches tanks, loads up with fix-bath and mists it with the salty spray. Ten minutes later, and the house is hard and they get to work unloading the U-Haul in the drive.

And now I'm twenty-two again, and I will untether that house and fly it in the stiff breeze that ruffles my hair affectionately.

#

Firstly and most foremost, I need to wait for the man. I hate to wait. But today it's waiting and harsh and dull, dull, dull.

So I wait for the man, Stude the Dude and the gentle clip-clop of Tilly's hooves on the traction-nubbed foam of my Chestnut Ave.

My nose is pressed against the window in the bat's crotch, fingers dug into the hump of fatty foam that runs around its perimeter, fog patches covering the rime of ground-in filth that I've allowed to accumulate on my parents' spotless windows.

Where the frick is Stude?

#

The man has cometh. Clop-clip, clip-clop, Stude the Dude, as long as a dangling booger, and his clapped-out nag Tilly, and the big foam cart with its stacks of crates and barrels and boxes, ready to do the deal.

"Maxes!" he says, and I *know* I'm getting taken today — he looks genuinely glad to see me.

"Stude, nice day, how's it?" I say, as cas and cool as I can, which isn't, very.

"Fine day! Straight up fine day to be alive and awaiting judgment!" He power-chugs from the perpetual coffee thermos at his side.

"Fine day," I echo.

"Fine, fine day." Like he's not in any hurry to get down to the deal, and I know it's a contest, and the first one to wheel gets taken.

I snort and go "Yuh-huh." It's almost cheating, since I should've had something else nice to say, but Stude gives me a conversational Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free.

"Good night to tricky treat."

I concede defeat. "I need some stuff, Stude."

Give it to him, he doesn't gloat. Just hauls again from Mr Coffee and pooches his lips and nods.

"Need, uh, spool of monofilament, three klicks, safety insulated. Four litres of fix bath. Litre, litre and a half of solvent."

"Yeah, okay. Got a permit for the solvent?"

"If I had a permit, Stude, I'd go and buy it at the fricken store. Don't pull my dick."

"Just askin'. Whyfor the solvent? Anything illegal?"

"Just a project, Stude. Nothing to worry."

"What kinda project?"

"Art project. Fun-fricken-tastic. You'll love it."

"'Cause you know, they tag the shit with buckyballs now, one molecule in a million with a serial number and a checksum. You do something stupid, I get chopped."

I hadn't known. Didn't matter, my parents' house was legally mine, while they were up confabbing with their alien buds on the mothaship. "No worries."

"That'll be, uh, sixty-eight cents."

"Thirty."

"Sixty, firm."

"Fifty-four."

"Fifty-eight."

"Take it in trade?"

"Fricken Maxes! Tradesies? You're wastin' my time, lookin' for bootleg solvent, looking for trade and no cash? Get fucked, Maxes."

He starts to haw-up Tilly and I go, "Wait-wait-wait, I got some good stuff.
Everything must go, moving sale, you know?"

He looks really pissed and I know it hard now, I'm gonna get *taken*. I hand him up my bag, and he does a fast-paw through the junk. "What's this?" he asks.

"Old video game. Atari. Shoot up the space aliens. Really, really antisocial.
Needs a display, but I don't got it anymore." I'd sold it the month before on a
bored day, and used the eight cents to buy good seats behind home plate at the
Skydome and thus killed an entire afternoon before Judgment Day.

There are some of the artyfarty "freestyle" kitchen utensils Mum used to sell for real cash until Dad founded his Process for Lasting Happiness and she found herself able to pursue "real art." There are paper books and pictures and assorted other crap.

Stude clucks and shakes his head. "If I just gave you the monofil and the fix-bath for this shit, it'd be a favour. Look, I can *get* real money for solvent. I *pay* real money for solvent. This just don't cut it."

"I'll get more, just hang a sec."

He haws-up Tilly but reigns her in slow, and I dash back to my place and fill a duffel with anything I lay hands to, and run out, dragging it behind me, catching the cart before it turns the corner. "Here, here, take this too."

Stude dumps it out in front of him and kicks at the pile. "This is just crap,
Maxes. There's lots of it, sure, but it's still crap."

"I need it, Stude, I really need some solvent. You already *got* all my good stuff."

He shakes his head, sad, and says, "Go ask Tilly."

"Ask?"

"Tilly. Ask her."

Stude likes to humiliate you a little before he does you a favour. The word is *capricious*, he told me once.

So I go to his smelly old horse and whisper in her hairy ear and hold my breath as I put my ear next to the rotten jumbo-chiclets she uses for teeth. "She says you should do it," I say. "And she says you're an asshole for making me ask her. She says horses can't talk."

"Yeah, okay," and he tosses me the goods.

#

With stage one blessedly behind me, I'm ready for stage two. I take the nozzle of the solvent aerosol and run a drizzle along the fatty roll of the windowsills and then pop them out as the fix bath runs away and the windows fly free and shatter on the street below.

Then it's time to lighten the ballast. With kicks and grunts and a mantra of "Out, out, out," I toss everything in the house out, savouring each crash, taking care to leave a clear path between the house and the street.

On the third floor, I find Dad's cardigan, the one Mum gave him one anniversary, and put it on. She carved it herself from foam and fixed it with some flexible, dirt-shedding bath, so by the time I'm done with the third floor, my arms and chest are black with dust, and the sweater is still glowing with eerie cleanliness.

I know Dad wouldn't want me to wear his sweater now. They say that on the mothaship, the bugouts have ways to watch each and every one of us, and maybe Mum and Dad are there, 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