Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

shop there, right?"

"Yeah."

"And it inspired you to go into fashion design. It also provided
employment for a couple dozen people over the years. I sometimes got to
help out little alternative girls from North Toronto buy vintage prom
dresses at the end of the year, and I helped Motown revival bands put
together matching outfits of red blazers and wide trousers. Four or five
little shops opened up nearby selling the same kind of thing, imitating
me -- that whole little strip down there started with Tropicál."

Natalie nodded. "Okay, I knew that, I guess. But it's not the same as
*really* making a difference, is it?"

Link flicked his butt to the curb. "You're changing people's lives for
the better either way, right?"

"Exactly," Alan said.

Then Link grinned. "But there's something pretty, oh, I dunno, *ballsy*,
about this wireless thing, yeah? It's not the same."

"Not the same," Alan said grinning. "Better."

"How can we help?"

#

Kurt had an assembly line cranking out his access points now. Half a
dozen street kids worked in the front of his place, in a cleared-out
space with a makeshift workbench made from bowed plywood and scratched
IKEA table-legs. It made Alan feel better to watch them making sense of
it all, made him feel a little like he felt when he was working on The
Inventory. The kids worked from noon, when Kurt got back from breakfast,
until 9 or 10, when he went out to dive.

The kids were smart, but screwed up: half by teenaged hormones and half
by bad parents or bad drugs or just bad brain chemistry. Alan understood
their type, trying to carve some atom of individual identity away from
family and background, putting pins through their bodies and affecting
unconvincing tough mannerisms. They were often bright -- the used
bookstore had been full of their type, buying good, beat-up books off
the sale rack for 50 cents, trading them back for 20 cents' credit the
next day, and buying more.

Natalie and Link were in that morning, along with some newcomers,
Montreal street punks trying their hand at something other than squeegee
bumming. The punks and his neighbors gave each other uneasy looks, but
Alan had deliberately put the sugar for the coffee at the punks' end of
the table and the cream in front of Natalie and the stirs by the
bathroom door with the baklava and the napkins, so a rudimentary social
intercourse was begun.

First, one of the punks (who had a rusty "NO FUTURE" pin that Alan
thought would probably go for real coin on the collectors' market) asked
Natalie to pass her the cream. Then Link and another punk (foppy silly
black hair and a cut-down private school blazer with the short sleeves
pinned on with rows of safety pins) met over the baklava, and the punk
offered Link a napkin. Another punk spilled her coffee on her lap,
screeching horrendous Quebecois blasphemies as curses, and that cracked
everyone up, and Arnold, watching from near the blanket that fenced off
Kurt's monkish sleeping area, figured that they would get along.

"Kurt," he said pulling aside the blanket, handing a double-double
coffee over to Kurt as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was wearing a
white T-shirt that was the grimy grey of everything in his domain, and
baggy jockeys. He gathered his blankets around him and sipped
reverently.

Kurt cocked his head and listened to the soft discussions going on on
the other side of the blanket. "Christ, they're at it already?"

"I think your volunteers showed up a couple hours ago -- or maybe they
were up all night."

Kurt groaned theatrically. "I'm running a halfway house for geeky street
kids."

"All for the cause," Alan said. "So, what's on the plate for today?"

"You know the church kittycorner from your place?"

"Yeah?" Alan said cautiously.

"Its spire is just about the highest point in the Market. An
omnidirectional up there..."

"The church?"

"Yeah."

"What about the new condos at the top of Baldwin? They're tall."

"They are. But they're up on the northern edge. From the bell-tower of
that church, I bet you could shoot half the houses on the west side of
Oxford Street, along with the backs of all the shops on Augusta."

"How are we going to get the church to go along with it. Christ, what
are they, Ukrainian Orthodox?"

"Greek Orthodox," Kurt said. "Yeah, they're pretty conservative."

"So?"

"So, I need a smooth-talking, upstanding cit to go and put the case to
the pastor. Priest. Bishop. Whatever."

"Groan," Alex said.

"Oh, come on, you're good at it."

"If I get time," he said. He looked into his coffee for a moment. "I'm
going to go home," he said.

"Home?"

"To the mountain," he said. "Home," he said. "To my father," he said.

"Whoa," Kurt said. "Alone?"

Alan sat on the floor and leaned back against a milk crate full of
low-capacity hard drives. "I have to," he said. "I can't stop thinking
of..." He was horrified to discover that he was on the verge of
tears. It had been three weeks since Davey had vanished into the night,
and he'd dreamt of Eugene-Fabio-Greg every night since, terrible dreams,
in which he'd dug like a dog to uncover their hands, their arms, their
legs, but never their heads. He swallowed hard.

He and Kurt hadn't spoken of that night since.

"I sometimes wonder if it really happened," Kurt said.

Alan nodded. "It's hard to believe. Even for me."

"I believe it," Kurt said. "I won't ever not believe it. I think that's
probably important to you."

Alan felt a sob well up in his chest and swallowed it down
again. "Thanks," he managed to say.

"When are you leaving?"

"Tomorrow morning. I'm going to rent a car and drive up," he said.

"How long?"

"I dunno," he said. He was feeling morose now. "A couple days. A week,
maybe. No longer."

"Well, don't sweat the Bishop. He can wait. Come and get a beer with me
tonight before I go out?"

"Yeah," he said. "That sounds good. On a patio on Kensington. We can
people-watch."

#

How Alan and his brothers killed Davey: very deliberately.

Alan spent the rest of the winter in the cave, and Davey spent the
spring in the golem's cave, and through that spring, neither of them
went down to the school, so that the younger brothers had to escort
themselves to class. When the thaws came and icy meltoff carved
temporary streams in the mountainside, they stopped going to school, too
-- instead, they played on the mountainside, making dams and canals and
locks with rocks and imagination.

Their father was livid. The mountain rumbled as it warmed unevenly, as
the sheets of ice slid off its slopes and skittered down toward the
highway. The sons of the mountain reveled in their dark ignorance, their
separation from the school and from the nonsensical and nonmagical
society of the town. They snared small animals and ate them raw, and
didn't wash their clothes, and grew fierce and guttural through the slow
spring.

Alan kept silent through those months, becoming almost nocturnal,
refusing to talk to any brother who dared to talk to him. When
Ed-Fred-George brought home a note from the vice principal asking when
he thought he'd be coming back to school, Alan shoved it into his mouth
and chewed and chewed and chewed, until the paper was reduced to gruel,
then he spat it by the matted pile of his bedding.

The mountain grumbled and he didn't care. The golems came to parley, and
he turned his back to them. The stalactites crashed to the cave's floor
until it was carpeted in ankle-deep chips of stone, and he waded through
them.

He waited and bided. He waited for Davey to try to come home.

#

"What have we here?" Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt's shop, which
had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against
the wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestle
tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage
video-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street
people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane
tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter
emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.

He was roundly ignored -- and before he could speak again, one of the
PCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music that
made him think of Elvis cassettes that had been submerged in salt
water. Half of the assembled mass started bobbing their heads and
singing along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.

Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning down
the volume a little. "Howdy!" he said, spreading his arms and taking in
the whole of his dominion.

"Howdy yourself," Alan said. "What do we have here?"

"We have a glut of volunteers," Kurt said, watching as an old rummy
carefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus its
housing. "I can't figure out if those laptop screens are worth
anything," he said, cocking his head. "But they've been taking up space
for far too long. Time we moved them."

Alan looked around and realized that the workers he'd taken to be at
work building access points were, in the main, shooting digital pictures
of junk from Kurt's diving runs and researching them for eBay
listings. It made him feel good -- great, even. It was like watching an
Inventory being assembled from out of chaos.

"Where'd they all come from?"

Kurt shrugged. "I dunno. I guess we hit critical mass. You recruit a few
people, they recruit a few people. It's a good way to make a couple
bucks, you get to play with boss crap, you get paid in cash, and you
have colorful co-workers." He shrugged again. "I guess they came from
wherever the trash came from. The city provides."

The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. "If either
of you says something like, *Ah, these people were discarded by society,
but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen the
worth of these poor folks and rescued them from the scrapheap of
society,* I'm gonna puke."

"The thought never crossed my mind," Alan said solemnly.

"Keep it up, Wes," Kurt said, patting the man on the shoulder. "See you
at the Greek's tonight?"

"Every night, so long as he keeps selling the cheapest beer in the
Market," Wes said, winking at Alan.

"It's cash in the door," Kurt said. "Buying components is a lot more
efficient than trying to find just the right parts." He gave Alan a
mildly reproachful look. Ever since they'd gone to strictly controlled
designs, Kurt had been heartbroken by the amount of really nice crap
that never made its way into an access point.

"This is pretty amazing," Alan said. "You're splitting the money with
them?"

"The profit -- anything leftover after buying packaging and paying
postage." He walked down the line, greeting people by name, shaking
hands, marveling at the gewgaws and gimcracks that he, after all, had
found in some nighttime dumpster and brought back to be recycled. "God,
I love this. It's like Napster for dumpsters."

"How's that?" Alan asked, pouring himself a coffee and adding some UHT
cream from a giant, slightly dented