The Super Man and the Bugout (3 of 13)

---

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE
The Super Man and the Bugout by Cory Doctorow. Copyright 1998 by Cory Doctorow.
Share with a a friend! Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 1.0

---

Previous | Next

THE SUPER MAN AND THE BUGOUT (CONT'D)

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 table.

"Geez, how many people did you invite?"

Tina, a tiny Chinese woman who could rhyme "Hey hey, ho ho" and "One, two, three, four" with amazing facility said, "Everyone's here. The Quakers, the commies, a couple of councilors, the vets, anyone we could think of. This is gonna be huge."

The food hot, and the different curries and salads were a symphony of flavours and textures. "This is terrific," he said.

"Best Ethiopian outside of Addis Ababa," said Thomas.

Better than Addis Ababa, Hershie thought, but didn't say it. He'd been in Addis Ababa as the secret weapon behind Canada's third and most ill-fated peacekeeping mission there. There hadn't been a lot of restaurants open then, just block after block of bombed-out buildings, and tribal warlords driving around in tacticals, firing randomly at anything that moved. The ground CO sent him off to scatter bands of marauders while the bullets spanged off his chest. He'd never understood the tactical significance of those actions -- still didn't -- but at the time, he'd been willing to trust those in authority.

"Good food," he said.

#An hour later, the pretty waitress had cleared away the platters and brought fresh pitchers, and Hershie's tights felt a little tighter. One of the Quakers, an ancient, skinny man with thin grey hair and sharp, clever features stood up and tapped his beer-mug. Gradually, conversation subsided.

"Thank you," he said. "My name is Stewart Pocock, and I'm here from the Circle of Friends. I'd like us all to take a moment to say a silent thanks for the wonderful food we've all enjoyed."

There was a nervous shuffling, and then a general bowing of heads and mostly silence, broken by low whispers.

"Thomas, I thought you called this meeting," Hershie whispered.

"I did. These guys always do this. Control freaks. Don't worry about it," he whispered back.

"Thank you all. We took the liberty of drawing up an agenda for this meeting."

"They always do this," Thomas said.

The Quakers led them in a round of introductions, which came around to Hershie. "I'm, uh, The Super Man. I guess most of you know that, right?" Silence. "I'm really looking forward to working on this with you all." A moment of silence followed, before the next table started in on its own introductions.

#

Previous | Next