then home again, home
again, only to find that the house crime-scene taped and Tony the Tiger and
Daisy Duke were nowhere to be found in a month of hysterical searching.

So now, on the first beautiful day of spring after a fricken evil, grey winter
of pain and confusion, I work on my tan and sip beer and lemonade until the
sirens go and the traffic stops and every receiver is turned to the Emergency
Broadcast System -- *This is not a test*.

I flip open my comm. There's a hubble of the mothaship, whirlagig and
widdershins around our rock. The audio track is running, but it's just talking
heads, not a transmission from the mothaship, so I tune it out.

The world holds its breath again.

#

The first transmission comes a whole pitcher later. They speak flawless English
-- and Spanish and Cantonese and Esperanto and Navajo, just pick a channel --
and they use a beautiful bugout contralto like a newscaster who started out as
an opera singer. Like a Roman tyrant orating to his subjects.

My stomach does a flip-flop and I put the comm down before I drop it, swill some
shandy and look out at Lake Ontario, which is a preternatural blue.
Rats-with-wings seagulls circle overhead.

"People of Earth," says the opera-singer-cum-newscaster. "It is good to be back.

"We had to undertake a task whose nature is. . . complex. We are sorry for any
concern this may have caused.

"We have reached a judgment."

Lady or the tiger, I almost say. Are we joining the bugout UN or are we going to
be vapourised? I surprise myself and reach down and switch off my comm and throw
a nickle on the table to cover the pitchers and tip, and walk away before I hear
the answer.

The honking horns tell me what it is. Louder than the when the Jays won the
pennant. Bicycle bells, air-horns, car-horns, whistles. Everybody's smiling.

My comm chimes. I scan it. Dad and Mum are home.

#

They rebuild the Process centres like a bad apology, the governments of the
world suddenly very, very interested in finding the arsonists who were vengeful
heroes at Xmastime. I smashed my comm after the sixth page from Dad and Mum.

Sometimes, I see Linus grinning from the newsscreens on Spadina, and once I
caught sickening audio of him, the harrowing story of how he had valiantly
rescued dozens of Process-heads and escaped to the subway tunnels, hiding out
from the torch-bearing mobs. He actually said it, "torch-bearing mobs," in the
same goofy lisp.

Whenever