Super Man and the Bug Out | Page 5

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 hunks of tangy rice-pancake and scooping up
vegetarian curry with them. Even before he saw Thomas, his
super-hearing had already picked his voice out of the din and located it.
Hershie made a beeline for Thomas's table, not making eye-contact
with the others -- old-guard activists who still saw him as a tool of the
war-machine.
Thomas licked his fingers clean and shook his hand. "Supe! Glad you
could make it! Sit, sit." There was a general shuffling of coats and
chairs as the other people at the table cleared a space for him. Thomas
was already pouring him a beer out of one of the pitchers on the