Cory Doctorow - Shadow of the Mothaship

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Shadow of the Mothaship

Cory Doctorow

From "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," a short story collection published in

September, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). See

http://craphound.com/place for more.

Originally Published in Amazing Stories, Winter 2000

--

Blurbs and quotes:

* Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into the

caverns and underground rivers of Pop Culture, here filtered through SF-coloured

glasses. Enjoy.

- Neil Gaiman

Author of American Gods and Sandman

* Few writers boggle my sense of reality as much as Cory Doctorow. His vision

is so far out there, you'll need your GPS to find your way back.

- David Marusek

Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Award, Nebula Award nominee

* Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,

entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of

the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find.

- Gardner Dozois

Editor, Asimov's SF

* He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science

fiction needs Cory Doctorow!

- Bruce Sterling

Author of The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction

* Cory Doctorow strafes the senses with a geekspeedfreak explosion of gomi kings

with heart, weirdass shapeshifters from Pleasure Island and jumping automotive

jazz joints. If this is Canadian science fiction, give me more.

- Nalo Hopkinson

Author of Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring

* Cory Doctorow is the future of science fiction. An nth-generation hybrid of

the best of Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and Groucho Marx, Doctorow

composes stories that are as BPM-stuffed as techno music, as idea-rich as the

latest issue of NEW SCIENTIST, and as funny as humanity's efforts to improve

itself. Utopian, insightful, somehow simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, these

nine tales will upgrade your basal metabolism, overwrite your cortex with new

and efficient subroutines and generally improve your life to the point where

you'll wonder how you ever got along with them. Really, you should need a

prescription to ingest this book. Out of all the glittering crap life and our

society hands us, craphound supreme Doctorow has managed to fashion some

industrial-grade art."

- Paul Di Filippo

Author of The Steampunk Trilogy

* As scary as the future, and twice as funny. In this eclectic and electric

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collection Doctorow strikes sparks off today to illuminate tomorrow, which is

what SF is supposed to do. And nobody does it better.

- Terry Bisson

Author of Bears Discover Fire

--

A note about this story

This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published

by Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I've

released this story, along with five others, under the terms of a Creative

Commons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyright

normally reserves for me, the creator.

I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out in

the Magic Kingdom" (http://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigated

success. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book -- good news -- and

thousands of people bought the book -- also good news. It turns out that, as

near as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is a

great way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting the

book into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work.

I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of the

Internet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basic

science: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doing

here. The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me as

an artist is to not read my work -- to let it languish in obscurity and

disappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, and

this is doubly true for the short stories. Losing a couple bucks to people who

would have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic text

is no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevant

and unread. And luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for free

gets me more paying customers than it loses me.

You can find the canonical version of this file at

http://craphound.com/place/download.php

If you'd like to convert this file to some other format and distribute it, you

have my permission, provided that:

* You don't charge money for the distribution

* You keep the entire text intact, including this notice, the license below, and

the metadata at the end of the file

* You don't use a file-format that has "DRM" or "copy-protection" or any other

form of use-restriction turned on

If you'd like, you can advertise the existence of your edition by posting a link

to it at http://craphound.com/place/000015.php

--

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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

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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."

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Cory Doctorow - Shadow of the Mothaship

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