The Super Man and the Bugout by Cory Doctorow (best e ink reader for manga .txt) 📕

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###


The Super Man and the Bugout
============================

"Mama, I'm _not_ a super-villain," Hershie said for the millionth time. He
chased the last of the gravy on his plate with a hunk of dark rye, skirting the
shriveled derma left behind from his kishka. Ever since the bugouts had inducted
Earth into their Galactic Federation, promising to end war, crime, and
corruption, he'd found himself at loose ends. His adoptive Earth-mother, who'd
named him Hershie Abromowicz, had talked him into meeting her at her favorite
restaurant in the heart of Toronto's Gaza Strip.

"Not a super-villain, he says. Listen to him: mister big-stuff. Well,
smartypants, if you're not a super-villain, what was that mess on the television
last night then?"

A busboy refilled their water, and Hershie took a long sip, staring off into the
middle distance. Lately, he'd taken to avoiding looking at his mother: her
infra-red signature was like a landing-strip for a coronary, and she wouldn't
let him take her to one of the bugout clinics for nanosurgery.

Mrs. Abromowicz leaned across the table and whacked him upside the head with one
hand, her big rings clicking against the temple of his half-rim specs. Had it
been anyone else, he would have caught her hand mid-slap, or at least dodged in
a superfast blur, quicker than any human eye. But his Mama had let him know what
she thought of _that_ sass before his third birthday. Raising super-infants
requires strict, _loving_ discipline. "Hey, wake up! Hey! I'm talking to you!
What was that mess on television last night?"

"It was a demonstration, Mama. We were protesting. We want to dismantle the
machines of war -- it's in the Torah, Mama. Isaiah: they shall beat their swords
into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Tot would have approved."

Mrs. Abromowicz sucked air between her teeth. "Your father never would have
approved of _that_."

_That_ was the Action last night. It had been his idea, and he'd tossed it
around with the Movement people who'd planned the demo: they'd gone to an
army-surplus store and purchased hundreds of decommissioned rifles, their bores
filled with lead, their firing pins defanged. He'd flown above and ahead of the
demonstration, in his traditional tights and cape, dragging a cargo net full of
rifles from his belt. He pulled them out one at a time, and bent them into
balloon-animals -- fanciful giraffes, wiener-dogs, bumble-bees, poodles -- and
passed them out the crowds lining Yonge Street. It had been a boffo smash hit.
And it made great TV.

Hershie Abromowicz, Man from the Stars, took his mother's hands between his own
and looked into her eyes. "Mama, I'm a grown man. I have a job to do. It's like
. . . like a calling. The world's still a big place, bugouts or no bugouts, and
there's lots of people here who are crazy, wicked, with their fingers on the
triggers. I care about this planet, and I can't sit by when it's in danger."

"But why all of a sudden do you have to be off with these _meshuggenahs_? How
come you didn't _need_ to be with the crazy people until now?"

"Because there's a _chance_ now. The world is ready to rethink itself. Because
--" The waiter saved him by appearing with the cheque. His mother started to
open her purse, but he had his debitcard on the table faster than the eye could
follow. "It's on me, Ma."

"Don't be silly. I'll pay."

"I _want_ to. Let me. A son should take his mother out to lunch once in a
while."

She smiled, for the first time that whole afternoon, and patted his cheek with
one manicured hand. "You're a good boy, Hershie, I know that. I only want that
you should be happy, and have what's best for you."

#

Hershie, in tights and cape, was chilling in his fortress of solitude when his
comm rang. He checked the callerid and winced: Thomas was calling, from Toronto.
Hershie's long-distance bills were killing him, ever since the Department of
Defense had cut off his freebie account.

Not to mention that talking to Thomas inevitably led to more trouble with his
mother.

He got up off of his crystalline recliner and flipped the comm open, floating up
a couple of metres. "Thomas, what's up?"

"Supe, didja see the reviews? The critics _love_ us!"

Hersh held the comm away from his head and sighed the ancient, put-upon Hebraic
sigh of his departed stepfather. Thomas Aquino Rusk liked to play at being a
sleazy Broadway producer, his "plays" the eye-catching demonstrations he and his
band of merry shit-disturbers hijacked.

"Yeah, it made pretty good vid, all right." He didn't ask why Thomas was
calling. There was only one reason he _ever_ called: he'd had another idea.

"You'll never guess why I called."

"You've had an idea."

"I've had an idea!"

"Really."

"You'll love it."

Hershie reached out and stroked the diamond-faceted coffins that his birth
parents lay in, hoping for guidance. His warm fingers slicked with melted
hoarfrost, and as they skated over the crypt, it sang a pure, high crystal note
like a crippled flying saucer plummeting to the earth. "I'm sure I will,
Thomas."

As usual, Thomas chose not to hear the sarcasm in his voice. "Check this out --
DefenseFest 33 is being held in Toronto in March. And the new keynote speaker is
the Patron Ik'Spir Pat! The fricken head fricken bugout! His address is
'Galactic History and Military Tactics: a Strategic Overview.'"

"And this is a good thing?"

"Ohfuckno. It's terrible, terrible, of course. The bugouts are selling us out.
Going over to the Other Side. Just awful. But think of the possibilities!"

"But think of the possibilities? Oy." Despite himself, Hershie was smiling.
Thomas always made him smile.

"You're smiling, aren't you?"

"Shut up, Thomas."

"Can you make a meeting at the Belquees for 18h?"

Hershie checked his comm. It was 1702h. "I can make it."

"See you there, buddy." Thomas rang off.

Hershie folded his comm, wedged it in his belt, and stroked his parents' crypt,
once more, for luck.

#

Hershie loved the commute home. Starting at the Arctic Circle, he flew up and up
and up above the highest clouds, then flattened out his body and rode the
currents home, eeling around the wet frozen cloudmasses, slaloming through
thunderheads, his critical faculties switched off, flying at speed on blind
instinct alone.

He usually made visual contact with the surface around Barrie, just outside of
Toronto, and he wasn't such a goodiegoodie that he didn't feel a thrill of
superiority as he flew over the cottage-country commuters stuck in the
end-of-weekend traffic, skis and snowmobiles strapped to their roofs.

#

The Belquees had the best Ethiopian food and the worst Ethiopian decor in town.
Successive generations of managers had added their own touches -- tiki-lanterns,
textured wallpaper, framed photos of Haile Selassie, tribal spears and grass
dolls -- and they'd accreted in layers, until the net effect was of an African
rummage sale. But man, the food was good.

Downstairs was a banquet room whose decor consisted of material too ugly to be
shown upstairs, with a stage and a disco ball. It had been a regular meeting
place for Toronto's radicals for more than fifty years, the chairs worn smooth
by generations of left-wing buttocks.

Tonight, it was packed. At least fifty people were crammed around the tables,
tearing off