"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 box of little creamers.
"Most of the music ever recorded isn't for sale at any price. Like 80
percent of it. And the labels, they've made copyright so strong, no one
can figure out who all that music belongs to -- not even them! Costs a
fortune to clear a song. Pal of mine once did a CD of Christmas music
remixes, and he tried to figure out who owned the rights to all the
songs he wanted to use. He just gave up after a year -- and he had only
cleared one song!
"So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting all
that music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of people
an incentive to rip their old CDs -- hell, their old vinyl and tapes,
too! -- and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that,
but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: a
library raising!"
Alan nodded. "So what's your point -- that companies' dumpsters are
being napstered by people like you?" A napsterized Inventory. Alan felt
the *rightness* of it.
Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it
on the side of the table. "Exactly!" he said. "This is garbage -- it's
like the deleted music that you can't buy today, except at the bottom of
bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated in
landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and
rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into
digital files and upload it to the net -- but if you give people an
incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work
to help you..." He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and
popped its latches and swung it open.
"Look at that -- I didn't get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone
else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money
that I exchanged for parts that someone else found in *her* dumpster --"
"Her?"
"Trying not to be sexist," Kurt said.
"Are there female dumpster divers?"
"Got me," Kurt said. "In ten years of this, I've only run into other
divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop
later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the
landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where
it needs to be. So it's not cost effective for some big corporation to
figure out how to use or sell these -- so what? It's not cost-effective
for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of
my favorite bands in print, either. We'll figure it out. We're spookily
good at it."
"Spookily?"
"Trying to be more poetic." He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends
of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. "Got a new girlfriend, she
says there's not enough poetry in my views on garbage."
#
They found one of Davey's old nests in March, on a day when you could
almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go
and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour
greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point
had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in
the Market's second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could
trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in
Alan's attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus
boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he'd found in Bell
Canada's Willowdale switching station dumpster.
Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the
antenna mounting atop the synagogue's roof. It had taken three meetings
with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple's
youth caucus and getting *them* to explain it to the old cleric. The
synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a
brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.
They'd worried about the fight they'd have over drilling through the
roof to punch down a wire, but they needn't have: The wood up there was
soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power
cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and
slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.
Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt's heart was aburst
with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he
caught sight of Kurt's face, ashen, wide-eyed.
"I saw something," he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His
hands were shaking.
"What?"
"Footprints," he said. "There's a lot of leaves that have rotted down to
mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the
mud. Like a toddler's footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes
missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where
I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no
pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs -- so dried up that I
couldn't figure out what they were at first.
"But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints
behind like unbent paperclips."
Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.
"Be careful, it's all rotten up there," Kurt called. Alan nodded.
"Sure, thank you," he said, hearing himself say it as though from very
far away.
The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of
meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and
there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the
antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged
before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth
marks on the birds. They hadn't been eaten, they'd been torn apart, like
a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured
Davey sitting here on the synagogue's roof, listening to the evening
prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching
the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand,
writhing.
He wondered if he was catching Bradley's precognition, and if that meant
that Bradley was dead now.
#
Bradley was born with the future in his eyes. He emerged from the belly
of their mother with bright brown eyes that did not roll aimlessly in
the manner of babies, but rather sought out the corners of the cave
where interesting things were happening, where movement was about to
occur, where life was being lived. Before he developed the muscle
strength and coordination necessary to crawl, he mimed crawling, seeing
how it was that he would someday move.
He was the easiest of all the babies to care for, easier even than
Carlo, who had no needs other than water and soil and cooing
reassurance. Toilet training: As soon as he understood what was expected
of him -- they used the downstream-most bend of one of the underground
rivers -- Benny could be relied upon to begin tottering toward the spot
in sufficient time to drop trou and do his business in just the right
spot.
(Alan learned to pay attention when Bruce was reluctant to leave home
for a walk during those days -- the same premonition that made him
perfectly toilet-trained at home would have him in fretting sweats at
the foreknowledge that he has destined to soil himself during the
recreation.)
His nightmares ran twice: once just before bed, in clairvoyant preview,
and again in the depths of REM sleep. Alan learned to talk him down from
these crises, to soothe the worry, and in the end it worked to
everyone's advantage, defusing the nightmares themselves when they came.
He never forgot anything -- never forgot to have Alan forge a signature
on a permission form, never forgot to bring in the fossil he'd found for
show-and-tell, never forgot his mittens in the cloakroom and came home
with red, chapped hands. Once he started school, he started seeing to it
that Alan never forgot anything, either.
He did very well on quizzes and tests, and he never let the pitcher fake
him out when he was at bat.
After four years alone with the golems, Alan couldn't have been more
glad to have a brother to keep him company.
Billy got big enough to walk, then big enough to pick mushrooms, then
big enough to chase squirrels. He was big enough to play
hide-and-go-seek with, big enough to play twenty questions with, big
enough to horse around in the middle of the lake at the center of the
mountain with.
Alan left him alone during the days, in the company of their parents and
the golems, went down the mountain to school, and when he got back, he'd
take his kid brother out on the mountain face and teach him what he'd
learned, even though he was only a little kid. They'd write letters
together in the mud with a stick, and in the winter, they'd try to spell
out their names with steaming pee in the snow, laughing.
"That's a fraction," Brad said, chalking "3/4" on a piece of slate by
the side of one of the snowmelt streams that coursed down the springtime
mountain.
"That's right, three-over-four," Alan said. He'd learned it that day in
school, and had been about to show it to Billy, which meant that Brad
had remembered him doing it and now knew it. He took the chalk and drew
his own 3/4 -- you had to do that, or Billy wouldn't be able to remember
it in advance.
Billy got down on his haunches. He was a dark kid, dark hair and eyes
the color of chocolate, which he insatiably craved and begged for every
morning when Alan left for school, "Bring me, bring me, bring me!"
He'd found something. Alan leaned in and saw that it was a milkweed
pod. "It's an egg," Bobby said.
"No, it's a weed," Alan said. Bobby wasn't usually given to flights of
fancy, but the shape of the pod was reminiscent of an egg.
Billy clucked his tongue. "I *know* that. It's also an egg for a
bug. Living inside there. I can see it hatching. Next week." He closed
his eyes. "It's orange! Pretty. We should come back and find it once it
hatches."