The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page B

the first scene. Dad—not my dad, the dad on stage—was wearing a cravat and fanning himself with a newspaper. The dog lay at his feet, doing comedy barks. Dad told us all about the miracle of his ice-box (“holds fifty pounds of ice!”) and his gas lamps. Then the lights came up on the scrim scenes on the wings of the stage and we got to meet Mom, who was ironing. Mom complained that even though it only takes five hours to do the laundry with her new “wash-day marvel,” her spare time is taken up with canning and cleaning the oven. This is supposed to be funny.
    Then the other side lit up and we got to meet Jimmy. Not me—the son. His name is also Jimmy. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. After all, I’d been around for years before Dad got the Carousel. And Mom probably wouldn’t have let him name me after an old robot. Probably.
    Jimmy was looking through a stereoscope at pornography—well, pictures of hoochie-coochie girls—and Dad gave him a good-natured ribbing. I’d seen this scene hundreds of times, but this time, sitting next to Lacey, remembering our necking sessions, it made me a little uncomfortable.
    The remaining scenes introduced Sister (in a corset, worrying that she is “indecent”) and Grandma and Grandpa, listening to a “talking machine” with their pet parrot.
    Then it was over and the singing started, “There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow/Shining at the end of every day!” and the stage rotated. We came around to the next scene—the 1920s and electricity—and I heard a sound from Lacey, beside me. She was snoring. Her head was down on her chest and she was sleeping soundly. Her lips were parted a little and her face looked worried in sleep. I realized that she’d looked worried since I’d met her.
    I got up and stopped the ride, resetting all the shows and powering them down. From the six slices of the Carousel, I heard the robots ceasing their spiels and going to sleep. The pack—who didn’t much care for the show—came out of hiding and began to race around the aisles, nipping at each others’ heels.
    Lacey was going to have to sleep somewhere. I hadn’t really thought about that. I went and checked out my narrow bed. I’d filled the space between two stages with a pile of pillows. It was comfortable enough. Did it smell bad? Maybe it did. The shower was outside, in a little prefab building I’d bought off a traveler, and I didn’t always remember to use it.
    Lacey probably had some kind of bed, anyway. I got up and grabbed her pack. It felt like it was full of rocks. Man, she had to be strong. Another perk of adulthood—of mortality.
    I gave her shoulder a little shake, and her head lolled and she snored. I gave her another shake, a little harder this time. Her eyes opened a crack, then she straightened up slowly and opened and closed her mouth a few times.
    “It’s been a long day,” she said. “Sorry, Jimmy.”
    I showed her my bed and she laughed. “It’s like the den of some burrowing animal.”
    I felt obscurely ashamed. Twenty years here and I had practically nothing to show for it. The pack’s new bodies. The maintenance I’d done on the Carousel. My pathetic pile of pillows.
    She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “It’s great,” she said. “It’s just the kind of thing I would have loved, twenty years ago.” That made me feel even worse. I slumped.
    “Poor Jimmy,” she said. “You’re very generous to offer me a place to sleep, you know.”
    “Do you have a bed in your pack?”
    She nodded. “I do, indeed. But screw it. It’s a pain to set up. I don’t need it here. Besides, I’m so tired I could drop where I stand. Where’s the bathroom?”
    I told her, warning her to keep a low profile—I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain her to the cultists, who’d want her to get a wire in her head if she wasn’t just passing through—and started to dig through my clothes, looking for enough stuff to make