Home Again, Home Again.

by Cory Doctorow.

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://c.r.a.phound.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://c.r.a.phound.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:

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Home Again, Home Again

The kids in my local bat-house breathe heavy metals, and their gelatinous bodies quiver nauseously during our counseling sessions, and for all that, they reacted just like I had when I told them I was going away for a while -- with hurt and betrayal, and they aroused palpable guilt in me.

It goes in circles. When I was sixteen, and The Amazing Robotron told me he needed to go away for a while, but he'd be back, I did everything I could to make him guilty. Now it's me, on a world far from home, and a pack of snot-nosed jellyfish kids have so twisted my psyche that they're all I can think of when I debark the shuttle at Aristide Interplanetary, just outside my dirty ole Toronto.

The customs officer isn't even human, so it feels like just another R&R, another halting conversation carried on in ugly trade-speak, another bewilderment of queues and luggage carousels. Outside: another s.p.a.ceport, surrounded by the variegated hostels for the variegated tourists, and bipeds are in bare majority.

I can think of it like that.

I can think of it as another s.p.a.ceport.

I can think of it like another trip.

The thing he can't think of it is, is a homecoming. That's too hard for this weak vessel.

He's very weak.

Look at him. He's eleven, and it's the tencennial of the Ascension of his homeworld -- dirty blue ball, so unworthy, yet -- inducted into the Galactic fraternity and the infinite compa.s.sion of the bugouts.

The foam, which had been confined to just the newer, Process-enclaves before the Ascension, has spread, as has the cult of the Process For Lasting Happiness.

Process is, after all, why the dirty blue ball was judged and found barely adequate for membership. Toronto, which had seen half its inhabitants emigrate on open-ended tours of the wondrous worlds of the bugout domain, is full again.

Bursting. The whole d.a.m.n planet is accreting a layer of off-world tourists.

It's a time of plenty. Plenty of cheap food and plenty of cheap foam structures, built as needed, then dissolved and washed away when the need disappears. Plenty of healthcare and education. Plenty of toys and distractions and beautiful, haunting bugout art. Plenty, in fact, of everything, except s.p.a.ce.

He lived in a building that is so tall, its top floors are perpetually damp with clouds. There's a nice name for this building, inscribed on a much-abused foam sculpture in the central courtyard. No one uses the nice name. They call it by the name that the tabloids use, that the inhabitants use, that everyone but the off-world counselors use. They call it the bat-house.

Bats in the belfry. Batty. Bats.h.i.t.

I hated it when they moved us into the bat-house. My parents gamely tried to explain why we were going, but they never understood, no more than any human could. The bugouts had a test, a scifi helmet you wore, and it told you whether you were normal, or batty. Some of our neighbors were clearly bats.h.i.t: the woman who screamed all the time, about the bugs and the little n.i.g.g.e.rs crawling over her flesh; the couple who ate dogt.u.r.ds off the foam sidewalk with lip-smacking relish; the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla.

I don't want to talk about him right now.

His parents' flaw -- whatever it was -- was too subtle to detect without the scifi helmet. They never knew for sure what it was. Many of the bats were in the same belfry: part of the bugouts' arrogant compa.s.sion held that a couple never knew which one of them was defective, so his family never knew if it was his nervous, shy mother, or his loud, opinionated father who had doomed them to the quarantine.

His father told him, in an impromptu ceremony before he slid his keycard into the lock on their new apt in the belfry: "Chet, whatever they say, there's nothing wrong with us. They have no right to put us here." He knelt to look the skinny ten-year-old right in the eye. "Don't worry, kiddo. It's not for long -- we'll get this thing sorted out yet." Then, in a rare moment of tenderness, one that stood out in Chet's memory as the last of such, his father gathered him in his arms, lifted him off his feet in a fierce hug. After a moment, his mother joined the hug, and Chet's face was buried in the spot where both of their shoulders met, smelling their smells. They still smelled like his parents then, like his old house on the Beaches, and for a moment, he knew his father was right, that this couldn't possibly last.

A tear rolled down his mother's cheek and dripped in his ear. He shook his s.h.a.ggy hair like a dog and his parents laughed, and his father wiped away his mother's tear and they went into the apt, grinning and holding hands.

Of course, they never left the belfry after that.

I can't remember what the last thing my mother said to me was. Do I remember her tucking me in and saying, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite,"

or was that something I saw on a vid? Was it a nervous command to wipe my shoes on the way in the door? Was her voice soft and sad, as it sometimes is in my memories, or was it brittle and angry, the way she often seemed after she stopped talking, as she banged around the tiny, two-room apt?

I can't remember.

My mother fell away from speech like a half-converted parishioner falling away from the faith: she stopped visiting the temple of verbiage in dribs and drabs, first missing the regular sermons -- the daily niceties of Good morning and Good night and Be careful, Chet -- then neglecting the major holidays, the Watch out!s and the Ouch!s and the answers to direct questions.

My father and I never spoke of it, and I didn't mention it to the other wild kids in the vertical city with whom I spent my days getting in what pa.s.sed for trouble around the bat-house.

I did mention it to my counselor, The Amazing Robotron, so-called for the metal exoskeleton he wore to support his fragile body in Earth's hard gravity. But he didn't count, then.

The reason that Chet can't pinpoint the moment his mother sealed her lips is because he was a self-absorbed little rodent in those days.

Not a cute freckled h.e.l.lion. A miserable little s.h.i.t who played hide-and-seek with the other miserable little s.h.i.ts in the bat-house, but played it violently, hide-and-seek-and-break-and-enter, hide-and-seek-and-smash-and-grab. The lot of them are amorphous, indistinguishable from each other in his memory, all that remains of all those clever little brats is the lingering impression of loud, boasting voices and sharp little teeth.

The Amazing Robotron was a fool in little Chet's eyes, an easy-to-bulls.h.i.t, ineffectual lump whose company Chet had to endure for a mandatory hour every other day.

"Chet, you seem distr-acted to-day," The Amazing Robotron said in his artificial voice.

"Yah. You know. Worried about, uh, the future." Distracted by Debbie Carr's purse, filched while she sat in the sixty-eighth floor courtyard, talking with her stupid girlie friends. Debbie was the first girl from the gang to get t.i.ts, and now she didn't want to hang out with them anymore, and her purse was stashed underneath the base of a hollow planter outside The Amazing Robotron's apt, and maybe he could sneak it out under his shirt and find a place to dump it and sort through its contents after the session.

"What is it about the fu-ture that wo-rries you?" The Amazing Robotron was as unreadable as a pinball machine, something he resembled. Underneath, he was a collection of whip-like tentacles with a knot of sensory organs in the middle.

"You know, like, the whole fricken thing. Like if I leave here when I'm eighteen, will my folks be okay without me, and like that."