Home Again, Home Again | Page 4

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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
spaceport, 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 spaceport.
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 compassion 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 damn

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 space.
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. Batshit.
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 batshit: the woman who screamed all the time,
about the bugs and the little niggers crawling over her flesh; the couple
who ate dogturds 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: