Lester laughed and slipped one of Perry's arms over his shoulders and

picked up his suitcase and walked them back through the parking lot to

his latest hotrod.

Perry breathed in the hot, wet air as they went, feeling it open his

chest and nasal passages. His eyes were at half mast, but the sight of

the sickly roadside palms, the wandering vendors on the traffic

islands with their net bags full of ipods and vpods -- he was home,

and his body knew it.

Lester cooked him a huge plate of scrambled eggs with corned beef,

pastrami, salami and cheese, with a mountain of sauerkraut on

top. "There you go, fatten you up. You're all skinny and haggard,

buddy." Lester was an expert at throwing together high-calorie meals

on short order.

Perry stuffed away as much as he could, then collapsed on his old bed

with his old sheets and his old pillows, and in seconds he was

sleeping the best sleep he'd had in months.

When he woke the next day, his cold had turned into a horrible, wet,

crusty thing that practically had his face glued to his pillow. Lester

came in, took a good look at him, and came back with a quart of fresh

orange juice, a pot of tea, and a stack of dry toast, along with a

pack of cold pills.

"Take *all* of this and then come down to the ride when you're

ready. I'll hold down the fort for another couple days if that's what

it takes."

Perry spent the day in his bathrobe, shuttling between the living room

and the sun-chairs on the patio, letting the heat bake some of the

snot out of his head. Lester's kindness and his cold made him

nostalgic for his youth, when his father doted on his illnesses.

Perry's father was a little man. Perry -- no giant himself -- was

taller than the old man by the time he turned 13. His father had

always reminded him of some clever furry animal, a raccoon or

badger. He had tiny hands and his movements were small and precise and

careful.

They were mostly cordial and friendly, but distant. His father worked

as a CAD/CAM manager in a machine shop, though he'd started out his

career as a plain old machinist. Of all the machinists he'd started

with at the shop, only he had weathered the transition to the new

computerized devices. The others had all lost their jobs or taken

early retirement or just quit, but his father had taken to CAD/CAM

with total abandon, losing himself in the screens and staggering home

bleary after ten or fifteen hours in front of the screen.

But that all changed when Perry took ill. Perry's father loved to play

nurse. He'd book off from work and stay home, ferrying up gallons of

tea and beef broth, flat ginger-ale and dry toast, cold tablets and

cough syrup. He'd open the windows when it was warm and then run

around the house shutting them at the first sign of a cool breeze.

Best of all was what his father would do when Perry got restless: he

and Perry would go down to the living-room, where the upright piano

stood. It had been Perry's grandfather's, and the old man -- who'd

died before Perry was born -- had been a jazz pianist who'd played

sessions with everyone from Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington.

"You ready, P?" his father would ask.

Perry always nodded, watching his father sit down at the bench and try

a few notes.

Then his father would play, tinkling and then pounding, running up and

down the keyboard in an improvised jazz recital that could go for

hours, sometimes only ending once Perry's mom came home from work at

the framing shop.

Nothing in Perry's life since had the power to capture him the way his

father's music did. His fingers danced, literally *danced* on the

keys, walking up and down them like a pair of high-kicking legs,

making little comedy movements. The little stubby fingers with their

tufts of hair on the knuckles, like goat's legs, nimbly prancing and

turning.

And then there was the *music*. Perry sometimes played with the piano

and he'd figured out that if you hit every other key with three

fingers, you got a chord. But Perry's dad almost never made chords: he

made anti-chords, sounds that involved those mysterious black keys and

clashed in a way that was *precisely* not a chord, that jangled and

jarred.

The anti-chords made up anti-tunes. Somewhere in the music there'd be

one or more melodies, often the stuff that Perry listened to in his

room, but sometimes old jazz and blues standards.

The music would settle into long runs of improvisational noise that

wasn't *quite* noise. That was the best stuff, because Perry could

never tell if there was a melody in there. Sometimes he'd be sure that

he had the know of it, could tell what was coming next, a segue into

"Here Comes the Sun" or "Let the Good Times Roll" or "Merrily We Roll

Along," but then his father would get to that spot and he'd move into

something else, some other latent pattern that was unmistakable in

hindsight.

There was a joke his dad liked, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies

like a banana." This was funny in just that way: you expected one

thing, you got something else, and when your expectations fell apart

like that, it was pure hilarity. You wanted to clutch your sides and

roll on the floor sometimes, it was so funny.

His dad usually closed his eyes while he played, squeezing them shut,

letting his mouth hang open slightly. Sometimes he grunted or scatted

along with his playing but more often he grunted out something that

was kind of the *opposite* of what he was playing, just like sometimes

the melody and rhythms he played on the piano were sometimes the

opposite of the song he was playing, something that was exactly and

perfectly opposite, so you couldn't hear it without hearing the thing

it was the opposite of.

The game would end when his dad began to improvise on parts of the

piano besides the keys, knocking on it, reaching in to pluck its

strings like a harp, rattling Perry's teacup on its saucer just so.

Nothing made him feel better faster. It was a tonic, a fine one,

better than pills and tea and toast, daytime TV and flat ginger-ale.

As Perry got older, he and the old man had their share of fights over

the normal things: girls, partying, school... But every time Perry

took ill, he was transported back to his boyhood and those amazing

piano recitals, his father's stubby fingers doing their comic

high-kicks and pratfalls on the keys, the grunting anti-song in the

back of his throat, those crazy finales with teacups and piano

strings.

Now he stared morosely at the empty swimming pool six stories below

his balcony, filled with blowing garbage, leaves, and a huge wasps'

nest. His father's music was in his ears, distantly now and fading

with his cold. He should call the old man, back home in Westchester

County, retired now. They talked only rarely these days, three or four

times a year on birthdays and anniversaries. No fight had started

their silence, only busy lives grown apart.

He should call the old man, but instead he got dressed and went for a

jog around the block, trying to get the wet sick wheeze out of his

whistling breath, stopping a couple times to blow his nose. The sun

was like a blowtorch on his hair, which had grown out of his normal

duckling fuzz into something much shaggier. His head baked, the cold

baked with it, and by the time he got home and chugged a quart of

orange juice, he was feeling fully human again and ready for a shower,

street clothes and a turn at the old ticket-window at work.

The queue snaked all the way through the market and out to the street,

where the line had a casual, party kind of atmosphere. The market kids

were doing a brisk business in popsicles, homemade colas, and clever

origami stools and sun-beds made from recycled cardboard. Some of the

kids recognized him and waved, then returned to their hustle.

He followed the queue through the stalls. The vendors were happier

than the kids, if that was possible, selling stuff as fast as they

could set it out. The queue had every conceivable kind of person in

it: old and young, hipsters and conservative rawboned southerners,

Latina moms with their babies, stone-faced urban homeboys, crackers,

and Miami Beach queers in pastel shorts. There were old Jewish couples

and smartly turned out European tourists with their funny two-tone

shag cuts and the filter masks that they smoked around. There was a

no-fooling Korean tour group, of the sort he'd seen now and again in

Disney World, led by a smart lady in a sweltering little suit, holding

an umbrella over her head.

"Lester, what the *fuck*?" he said, grinning and laughing as he

clapped Lester on the shoulder, taking a young mall-goth's five bucks

out of a hand whose fingernails were painted with chipped black

polish. "What the hell is going on here?"

Lester laughed. "I was saving this for a surprise, buddy. Record

crowds -- growing every day. There's a line up in the morning no

matter how early I open and no matter what time I close, I turn people

away."

"How'd they all find out about it?"

Lester shrugged. "Word of mouth," he said. "Best advertising you can

have. Shit, Perry, you just got back from ten cities where they want

to clone this thing -- how did *they* find out about it?"

Perry shook his head and marveled at the queue some more. The Korean

tour group was coming up on them, and Perry nudged Lester aside and

got out his ticket-roll, the familiar movements lovely after all that

time on the road.

The tour guide put a stack of twenties down on the counter. "I got

fifty of 'em," she said. "That's two hundred and fifty bucks." She had

an American accent, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. Perry had

been expecting a Korean accent, broken English.

Perry riffled the bills. "I'll take your word for it."

She winked at him. "They got off the plane and they were all like,

'Screw Disney, we have one of those in Seoul, what's *new*, what's

*American*?' So I took them here. You guys totally rock."

He could have kissed her. His heart took wing. "In you go," he

said. "Lester will get you the extra ride vehicles."

"They're all in there already," he said. "I've been running the whole

fleet for two weeks and I've got ten more on order."

Perry whistled. "You shoulda said," he said, then turned back to the

tour guide. "It might be a little bit of a wait."

"Ten, fifteen minutes," Lester said.

"No *problem*," she said. "They'll wait till kingdom come, provided

there's good shopping to be had." Indeed the tour group was at the

center of a pack of vendor-kids, hawking busts and tattoos, contacts

and action-figures, kitchenware and cigarette lighters.

Once she was gone, Lester gave his shoulder another squeeze. "I hired

two more kids to bring the ride cars back around to the entrance."

When Perry had left, that had been a once-daily chore, something you

did before shutting down for the night.

"Holy crap," Perry said, watching the tour group edge toward the

entrance, slip inside in ones and twos.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" Lester said. "And wait till you see the

ride!"

Perry didn't get a chance to ride until much later that day, once the

sun had set and the last market-stall had been shut and the last rider

had been chased home, when he and Lester slugged back bottles of flat

distilled water from their humidity-still and sat on the ticket

counter to get the weight off their tired feet.

"Now we ride," Lester said. "You're going to *love* this."

The first thing he noticed was that the ride had become a lot less

open. When he'd left, there'd been the sense that you were in a giant

room -- all that dead Wal-Mart -- with little exhibits spread around

it, like the trade-floor at a monster-car show. But now the exhibits

had been arranged out of one another's sight-lines, and some of the

taller pieces had been upended to form baffles. It was much more like

a carny haunted house trade-show floor now.

The car circled slowly in the first "room," which had accumulated a

lot of junk that wasn't mad inventions from the heyday of New

Work. There was a chipped doll-cradle, and a small collection of

girls' dolls, a purse spilled on the floor with photos of young girls

clowning at a birthday party. He reached for the joystick with

irritation and slammed it toward minus one -- what the hell was this

crap?

Next was a room full of boys' tanks and cars and trading cards, some

in careful packages and frames, some lovingly scuffed and beaten

up. They were from all eras, and he recognized some of his beloved

toys from his own boyhood among the mix. The items were arranged in

concentric rings -- one of the robots' default patterns for displaying

materials -- around a writhing tower of juddering, shuddering domestic

robots that had piled one atop the other. The vogue for these had been

mercifully brief, but it had been intense, and for Perry, the

juxtaposition of the cars and the cards, the tanks and the robots made

something catch in his throat. There was a statement here about the

drive to automate household chores and the simple pleasure of rolling

an imaginary tank over the imaginary armies of your imaginary

enemies. So, too, something about the collecting urge, the need to get

every card in a set, and then to get each in perfect condition, and

then to arrange them in perfect order, and then to forget them

altogether.

His hand had been jerking the joystick to plus one all this time and

now he became consciously aware of this.

The next room had many of the old inventions he remembered, but they

were arranged not on gleaming silver tables, but were mixed in with

heaps of clothing, mountains of the brightly colored ubiquitous

t-shirts that had gone hand in hand with every New Work invention and

crew. Mixed in among them were some vintage tees from the dotcom era,

and perched on top of the mountain, staring glassily at him, was a

little girl-doll that looked familiar; he was almost certain that he'd

seen her in the first doll room.

The next room was built out of pieces of the old "kitchen" display,

but there was disarray now, dishes in the sink and a plate on the

counter with a cigarette butted out in the middle of it. Another plate

lay in three pieces on the linoleum before it.

The next room was carpeted with flattened soda tins that crunched

under the chair's wheels. In the center of them, a neat workbench with

ranked tools.

The ride went on and on, each room utterly different from how he'd

left it, but somehow familiar too. The ride he'd left had celebrated

the New Work and the people who'd made it happen, and so did this

ride, but this ride was less linear, less about display more --

"It's a story," he said when he got off.

"I think so too," Lester said. "It's been getting more and more

story-like. The way that doll keeps reappearing. I think that someone

had like ten of them and just tossed them out at regular intervals and

then the plus-oneing snuck one into every scene."

"It's got scenes! That's what they are, scenes. It's like a Disney

ride, one of those dark rides in Fantasyland."

"Except those suck and our ride rocks. It's more like Pirates of the

Caribbean."

"Have it your way. Whatever, how freaking weird is that?"

"Not so weird. People see stories like they see faces in clouds. Once

we gave them the ability to subtract the stuff that felt wrong and

reinforce the stuff that felt right, it was only natural that they'd

anthropomorphize the world into a story."

Perry shook his head. "You think?"

"We have this guy, a cultural studies prof, who comes practically

every day. He's been telling me all about it. Stories are how we

understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories.

"Check out the Greeks. All those Greek plays, they end with the *deus

ex machina* -- the playwright gets tired of writing, so he trots a god

out on stage to simply point a finger at the players and make it all

better. You can't do that in a story today, but back then, they didn't

have the tools to help them observe and record the world, so as far as

they could tell, that's how stuff worked!

"Today we understand a little more about the world, so our stories are

about people figuring out what's causing their troubles and changing

stuff so that those causes go away. Causal stories for a causal

universe. Thinking about the world in terms of causes and effects

makes you seek out causes and effects -- even where there are

none. Watch how gamblers play, that weird cargo-cult feeling that the

roulette wheel came up black a third time in a row so the next spin

will make it red. It's not superstition, it's kind of the *opposite*

-- it's causality run amok."

"So this is the story that has emerged from our collective

unconscious?"

Lester laughed. "That's a little pretentious, I think. It's more like

those Japanese crabs."

"Which Japanese crabs?"

"Weren't you there when Tjan was talking about this? Or was that in

Russia? Anyway. There are these crabs in Japan, and if they have

anything that looks like a face on the backs of their shells, the

fishermen throw them back because it's bad luck to eat a crab with a

face on its shell. So the crabs with face-like shells have more

babies. Which means that gradually, the crabs' shells get more

face-like, since all non-face-like shells are eliminated from the

gene-pool. This leads the fishermen to raise the bar on their

selection criteria, so they will eat crabs with shells that are a

little face-like, but not *very* face-like. So all the slightly

face-like crab-shells are eliminated, leaving behind moderately

face-like shells. This gets repeated over several generations, and now

you've got these crabs that have vivid faces on their shells.

"We let our riders eliminate all the non-story-like elements from the

ride, and so what's left behind is more and more story-like."

"But the plus-one/minus-one lever is too crude for this, right? We

should give them a pointer or something so they can specify individual

elements they don't like."

"You want to encourage this?"

"Don't you?"

Lester nodded vigorously. "Of course I do. I just thought that you'd

be a little less enthusiastic about it, you know, because so much of

the New Work stuff is being de-emphasized."

"You kidding? This is what the New Work was all about: group creation!

I couldn't be happier about it. Seriously -- this is so much cooler

than anything that I could have built. And now with the network coming

online soon -- wow. Imagine it. It's going to be so fucking weird,

bro."

"Amen," Lester said. He looked at his watch and yelped. "Shit, late

for a date! Can you get yourself home?"

"Sure," Perry said. "Brought my wheels. See you later -- have a good

one."

"She's amazing," Lester said. "Used to weigh 900 pounds and was shut

in for ten years. Man has she got an imagination on her. She can do

this thing --"

Perry put his hands over his ears. "La la la I'm not listening to

you. TMI, Lester. Seriously. Way way TMI."

Lester shook his head. "You are such a prude, dude."

Perry thought about Hilda for a fleeting moment, and then

grinned. "That's me, a total puritan. Go. Be safe."

"Safe, sound, and slippery," Lester said, and got in his car.

Perry looked around at the shuttered market, rooftops glinting in the

rosy tropical sunset. Man he'd missed those sunsets. He snorted up

damp lungsful of the tropical air and smelled dinners cooking at the

shantytown across the street. It was different and bigger and more

elaborate every time he visited it, which was always less often than

he wished.

There was a good barbecue place there, Dirty Max's, just a hole in the

wall with a pit out back and the friendliest people. There was always

a mob scene around there, locals greasy from the ribs in their hands,

a big bucket overflowing with discarded bones.

Wandering towards it, he was amazed by how much bigger it had grown

since his last visit. Most buildings had had two stories, though a few

had three. Now almost all had four, leaning drunkenly toward each

other across the streets. Power cables, network cables and

clotheslines gave the overhead spaces the look of a carelessly spun

spider's web. The new stories were most remarkable because of what

Francis had explained to him about the way that additional stories got

added: most people rented out or sold the right to build on top of

their buildings, and then the new upstairs neighbors in turn sold

*their* rights on. Sometimes you'd get a third-storey dweller who'd

want to build atop two adjacent buildings to make an extra-wide

apartment for a big family, and that required negotiating with all of

the "owners" of each floor of both buildings.

Just looking at it made his head hurt with all the tangled property

and ownership relationships embodied in the high spaces. He heard the

easy chatter out the open windows and music and crying babies. Kids

ran through the streets, laughing and chasing each other or bouncing

balls or playing some kind of networked RPG with their phones that had

them peeking around corners, seeing another player and shrieking and

running off.

The grill-woman at the barbecue joint greeted him by name and the men

and women around it made space for him. It was friendly and

companionable, and after a moment Francis wandered up with a couple of

his proteges. They carried boxes of beer.

"Hey hey," Francis said. "Home again, huh?"

"Home again," Perry said. He wiped rib-sauce off his fingers and shook

Francis's hand warmly. "God, I've missed this place."

"We missed having you," Francis said. "Big crowds across the way,

too. Seems like you hit on something."

Perry shook his head and smiled and ate his ribs. "What's the story

around here?"

"Lots and lots," Francis said. "There's a whole net-community thing

happening. Lots of traffic on the AARP message-boards from other

people setting these up around the country."

"So you've hit on something, too."

"Naw. When it's railroading time, you get railroads. When it's

squatter time, you get squats. You know they want to open a 7-Eleven

here?"

"No!" Perry laughed and choked on ribs and then guzzled some beer to

wash it all down.

Francis put a wrinkled hand over his heart. He still wore his wedding

band, Perry saw, despite his wife's being gone for decades. "I swear

it. Just there." He pointed to one of the busier corners.

"And?"

"We told them to fuck off," Francis said. "We've got lots of

community-owned businesses around here that do everything a 7-Eleven

could do for us, without taking the wealth out of our community and

sending it to some corporate jack-off. Some soreheads wanted to see

how much money we could get out of them, but I just kept telling them

-- whatever 7-Eleven gives us, it'll only be because they think they

can get more *out of us*.' They saw reason. Besides, I'm in charge --

I always win my arguments."

"You are the most benevolent of dictators," Perry said. He began to

work on another beer. Beer tasted better outside in the heat and the

barbecue smoke.

"I'm glad someone thinks so," Francis said.

"Oh?"

"The 7-Eleven thing left a lot of people pissed at me. There's plenty

around here that don't remember the way it started off. To them, I'm

just some alter kocker who's keeping them down."

"Is it serious?" Perry knew that there was the potential for serious,

major lawlessness from his little settlement. It wasn't a failing

condo complex rented out to Filipina domestics and weird entrepreneurs

like him. It was a place where the cops would love an excuse to come

in with riot batons (his funny eyebrow twitched) and gas, the kind of

place where there almost certainly were a few very bad people living

their lives. Miami had bad people, too, but the bad people in Miami

weren't his problem.

And the bad people and the potential chaos were what he loved about

the place, too. He'd grown up in the kind of place where everything

was predictable and safe and he'd hated every minute of it. The

glorious chaos around him was just as he liked it. The wood-smoke

curled up his nose, fragrant and all-consuming.

"I don't know anymore. I thought I'd retire and settle down and take

up painting. Now I'm basically a mob boss. Not the bad kind, but

still. It's a lot of work."

"Pimpin' ain't easy." Perry saw the shocked look on Francis's face and

added hastily, "Sorry -- not calling you a pimp. It's a song lyric is

all."

"We got pimps here now. Whores, too. You name it, we got it. It's

still a good place to live -- better than Miami, if you ask me -- but

it could go real animal. Bad, bad animal."

Hard to believe, standing there in the wood-smoke, licking his

fingers, drinking his beer. His cold seemed to have been baked out by

the steamy swampy heat.

"Well, Francis, if anyone knows how to keep peace, it's you."

"Social workers come around, say the same thing. But there's people

around here with little kids, they worry that the social workers could

force them out, take away their children."

It wasn't like Francis to complain like this, it wasn't in his nature,

but here it was. The strain of running things was showing on

him. Perry wondered if his own strain was showing that way. Did he

complain more these days? Maybe he did.

An uncomfortable silence descended upon them. Perry drank his beer,

morosely. He thought of how ridiculous it was to be morose about the

possibility that he was being morose, but there you had it.

Finally his phone rang and saved him from further conversation. He

looked at the display and shook his head. It was Kettlewell

again. That first voicemail had made him laugh aloud, but when they

hadn't called back for a couple days, he'd figured that they had just

had a little too much wine and placed the call.

Now they were calling back, and it was still pretty early on the West

Coast. Too early for them to have had too much wine, unless they'd

really changed.

"Perry Perry Perry!" It was Kettlebelly. He sounded like he might be

drunk, or merely punch-drunk with excitement. Perry remembered that he

got that way sometimes.

"Kettlewell, how are you doing?"

"I'm here too, Perry. I cashed in my return ticket."

"Suzanne?"

"Yeah," she said. She too sounded punchy, like they'd been having a

fit of the giggles just before calling. "Kettlewell's family have

taken me in, wayward wanderer that I am."

"You two sound pretty, um, happy."

"We've been having an amazing time," Kettlewell said. His speakerphone

made him sound like he was at the bottom of a well. "Mostly

reminiscing about you guys. What the hell are you up to? We tried to

follow it on the net, but it's all jumbled. What's this about a

*story*?"

"Story?"

"I keep reading about this ride of yours and its story. I couldn't

make any sense of it."

"I haven't read any of this, but Lester and I were talking about some

stuff to do with stories tonight. I didn't know anyone else was

talking about this, though. Where'd you see it?"

"I'll email it to you," Suzanne said. "I was going to blog it tonight

anyway."

"So you two are just hanging around San Francisco giggling and walking

down memory lane?"

"Well, yeah! It's about time, too. We've all been separated for too

long. We want a reunion, Perry."

"A reunion?"

"We want to come down for a visit and see what you're doing and hang

out. You wouldn't believe how much fun we've been having, Perry,

seriously." Kettlewell sounded like he'd been huffing nitrous or

something. "Have *you* been having fun?"

He thought about the question. "Um, kind of?" He told them about his

travels, a quick thumbnail sketch, struggling to remember which city

he'd been to when, leaving out the crazy sex -- which came back to him

in a rush, that night with Hilda in the coffin, like a warm

hallucination. "On balance, yes. It's been fun."

"Right, so we want to come down and have fun with you and Lester. He's

still hanging around, right?"

Lester had told him about the history he had with Suzanne, and there

was something in the way she asked after Lester that suggested to

Perry that there was still something there.

"You kidding? You'd have to pry us apart with a crowbar."

"See, I told you so," Suzanne said. "This guy thought that Lester

might have gotten bored and wandered off."

"Never! Plus anyone who follows his message board traffic and blogs

would know that he was right here, minding the shop." And you're

reading his blog, aren't you, Suzanne? He didn't need to say it. He

could almost hear her blush over the line.

"So how about tomorrow?"

"For what?"

"For us coming to town. I'll bring the wife and kids. We'll rent out a

couple hotel rooms and spend a week there. It'll be a blast."

"Tomorrow?"

"We could get the morning flight and be there for breakfast. You got a

good hotel? Not a coffin hotel, not with the kids."

Perry's heart beat faster. He did miss these two, and they were so

punchy, so gleeful. He'd love to see them. He muted his phone.

"Hey, Francis? That guesthouse down the road, is it still running?"

"Lulu's? Sure. They just built another storey and took over the top

floor of the place next door."

"Perfect." He unmuted. "How'd you like to stay in a squatter

guesthouse in the shantytown?"

"Um," Kettlewell said, but Suzanne laughed.

"Oh hell *yes*," she said. "Get that look off your face, Kettlewell,

this is an *adventure*."

"We'd love it," Kettlewell said.

"Great, I'll make you a reservation. How long are you staying?"

"Until we leave," Suzanne said.

"Right," Perry said and laughed himself. They were different people,

these two, from the people he remembered, but they were also old

friends. And they were coming to see him tomorrow. "OK, lemme go make

your reservations."

Francis walked him over and the landlord fussed over the two of them

like they were visiting dignitaries. Perry looked the place over and

it was completely charming. He spotted what he thought was probably a

hooker and a trick taking a room for the night, but you got that at

the Hilton, too.

By the time he got home he was sure that he'd sleep like a log. He

could barely keep his eyes open on the drive. But after he climbed

into bed and closed his eyes, he found that he couldn't sleep at

all. Something about being back in his own room in his own bed felt

alien and exciting. He got up and paced the apartment and then Lester

came home from his date with the fatkins nympho, full of improbable

stories and covered in little hickeys.

"You won't believe who's coming for a visit," Perry said.

"Steve Jobs. He's come down from the lamasery and renounced

Buddhism. He wants to give a free computer to every visitor."

"Close," Perry said. "Kettlebelly and Suzanne Church. Coming

*tomorrow* for a stay of unspecified duration. It's a reunion. It's a

*reunion* you big sonofabitch! Woot! Woot!" Perry did a little

two-step. "A reunion!"

Lester looked confused for a second, and then for another second he

looked, what, upset? and then he was grinning and jumping up and down

with Perry. "Reunion!"

He felt like he'd barely gotten to sleep when his phone rang. The

clock showed six AM, and it was Kettlebelly and Suzanne, bleary,

jet-lagged and grouchy from their one-hour post-flight security

processing.

"We want breakfast," Suzanne said.

"We've gotta open the ride, Suzanne."

"At six in the morning? Come on, you've got hours yet before you have

to be at work. How about you and Lester meet us at the IHOP?"

"Jesus," he said.

"Come *on*! Kettlebelly's kids are dying for something to eat and his

wife looks like she's ready to eat *him*. It's been years, dude! Get

your ass in the shower and down to the International House of

Pancakes!"

Lester didn't rouse easy, but Perry knew all the tricks for getting

his old pal out of bed, they were practically married after all.

They arrived just in time for the morning rush but Tony greeted them

with a smile and sent them straight to the front of the line. Lester

ordered his usual ("Bring me three pounds of candy with a side of

ground animal parts and potatoes") and they waited nervously for

Suzanne and the clan Kettlewell to turn up.

They arrived in a huge bustle of taxis and luggage and two wide-eyed,

jet-lagged children hanging off of Kettlewell and Mrs Kettlewell, whom

neither of them had ever met. She was a small, youthful woman in her

mid-forties with artfully styled hair and big, abstract chunky silver

jewelry. Suzanne had gone all Eurochic, rail-thin and smoking, with

quiet, understated dark clothes. Kettlewell had a real daddy belly on

him now, a little pot that his daughter thumped rhythmically from her

perch on his hip.

"Sit, sit," Perry said to them, getting up to help them stack their

luggage at either end of the long table down the middle of the

IHOP. Big family groups with tons of luggage were par for the course

in Florida, so they didn't really draw much attention beyond mild

irritation from the patrons they jostled as they got everyone seated.

Perry was mildly amused to see that Lester and Suzanne ended up

sitting next to one another and were already chatting avidly and close

up, in soft voices that they had to lean in very tight to hear.

He was next to Mrs Kettlewell, whose name, it transpired, was Eva --

"As in Extra-Vehicular Activity," she said, geeking out with

him. Kettlewell was in the bathroom with his daughter and son, and Mrs

Kettlewell -- Eva -- seemed relieved at the chance for a little adult

conversation.

"You must be a very patient woman," Perry said, laughing at all the

ticklish noise and motion of their group.

"Oh, that's me all right," Eva said. "Patience is my virtue. And you?"

"Oh, patience is something I value very much in other people." Perry

said. It made Eva laugh, which showed off her pretty laugh-lines and

dimples. He could see how this woman and Kettlewell must complement

each other.

She rocked her head from side to side and took a long swig of the

coffee that their waiter had distributed around the table, topping up

from the carafe he'd left behind. "Thank God for legal stimulants."

"Long flight?"

"Traveling with larvae is always a challenge," she said. "But they dug

it hard. You should have seen them at the windows."

"They'd never been on a plane before?"

"I like to go camping," she said with a shrug. "Landon's always on me

to take the kids to Hawaii or whatever, but I'm always like, 'Man, you

spend half your fucking life in a tin can -- why do you want to start

your holidays in one? Let's go to Yosemite and get muddy.' I haven't

even taken them to Disneyland!"

Perry put the back of his hand to his forehead. "That's heresy around

here," he said. "You going to take them to Disney World while you're

in Florida? It's a lot bigger, you know -- and it's a different

division. Really different feel, or so I'm told."

"You kidding? Perry, we came here for *your* ride. It's famous, you

know."

"Net.famous, maybe. A little." He felt his cheeks burning. "Well,

there will be one in your neck of the woods soon enough." He told her

about the Burning Man collective and the plan to build one down the

101, south of San Francisco International.

Kettlebelly returned then with the kids, and he managed to get them

into their seats while sucking back a coffee and eating a biscuit from

the basket in the center of the table, breaking off bits to shove in

the kids' mouths whenever they protested.

"These are some way tired kids," he said, leaning over to give his

wife a kiss. Perry thought he saw Suzanne flick a look at them then,

but it might have been his imagination. Suzanne and Lester were off in

their own world, after all.

"The plane almost crashed," said the little girl next to Perry. She

had a halo of curly hair like a dandelion clock and big solemn dark

eyes and a big wet mouth set between apple-round cheeks.

"Did it really?" Perry said. She was seven or eight he thought, the

bossy big sister who'd been giving orders to her little brother from

the moment they came through the door.

She nodded solemnly. He looked at Eva, who shrugged.

"Really?" he said.

"Really," she said, nodding vigorously now. "There were terrists on

the plane who wanted to blow it up, but the sky marshas stopped them."

"How could you tell they were 'terrists'?"

She clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. "They were *whispering*,"

she said. "Just like on *Captain President and the Freedom Fighters*."

He knew something of this cartoon, mostly because of all the knock-off

merch for sale in the market stalls in front of the ride.

"I see," he said. "Well, I'm glad the Sky Marshas stopped them. Do you

want pancakes?"

"I want caramel apple chocolate pancakes with blueberry banana sauce,"

she said, rolling one pudgy finger along the description in the glossy

menu, beneath an oozing food-porn photo. "And my brother wants a

chocolate milkshake and a short stack of happy face clown waffles with

strawberry sauce, but not too many because he's still a baby and can't

eat much."

"You'll become as fat as your daddy if you eat like that," Perry

said. Eva snorted beside him.

"No," she said. "I'm gonna be a fatkins."

"I see," he said. Eva shook her head.

"It's the goddamned fatkins agitprop games," Eva said. "They come free

with everything now -- digital cameras, phones, even in cereal

boxes. You have to eat a minimum number of calories per level or you

starve to death. This one is a champeen."

"I'm nationally ranked," the little girl said, not looking up from the

menu.

Perry looked across the table and discovered that Suzanne had covered

Lester's hand with hers and that Lester was laughing along with her at

something funny. Something about that made him a little freaked out,

like Lester was making time with his sister or their mom.

"Suzanne," he said. "What's happening with you these days, anyway?"

"Petersburg is what's happening with me," she said, with a hoarse

little chuckle. "Petersburg is like Detroit crossed with

Paris. Completely decrepit and decadent. There's a serial killer who's

been working the streets for five years there and the biggest obstacle

to catching him is that the first cops on the scene let rubberneckers

bribe them to take home evidence as souvenirs."

"No way!" Lester said.

"Oh, da, big vay," she said, dropping into a comical Boris and Natasha

accent. "Bolshoi vay."

"So why are you there?"

"It's like home for me. It's got enough of Detroit's old brutal,

earthy feel, plus enough of Silicon Valley's manic hustle, it just

feels right."

"You going to settle in there?"

"Well, put that way, no. I couldn't hack it for the long term. But at

this time in my life, it's been just right. But it's good to get back

to the States, too. I'm thinking of hanging out here for a couple

months. Russia's so cheap, I've got a ton saved up. Might as well blow

it before inflation kills it."

"You keep your money in rubles?"

"Hell no -- no one uses rubles except tourists. I'm worried about

another run of *US* inflation. I mean, have you looked around lately?

You're living in a third world country, buddy."

A waiter came between them, handing out heaping, steaming plates of

food. Lester, who'd finished his first breakfast while they waited,

had ordered a second breakfast, which arrived along with the rest of

them. Mountains of food stacked up on the table, side-plates crowding

jugs of apple juice and carafes of coffee.

Incredibly, the food kept coming -- multiple syrup-jugs, plates of

hash-browns, baskets of biscuits and bowls of white sausage

gravy. Perry hadn't paid much attention when orders were being taken,

but from the looks of things, he was eating with a bunch of IHOP

virgins, unaccustomed to the astonishing portions to be had there.

He cocked his funny eyebrow at Suzanne, who laughed. "OK, not quite a

third-world country. But not a real industrial nation anymore,

either. Maybe more like the end-days of Rome or something. Drowning in

wealth and wallowing in poverty." She forked up a mouthful of hash

browns and chased them with coffee. Perry attacked his own plate.

Kettlewell fed the kids, sneaking bites in-between, while Eva looked

on approvingly. "You're a good man, Landon Kettlewell," she said,

slicing up her steak and eggs into small, precise cubes, wielding the

knife like an artist.

"You just enjoy your breakfast, my queen," he said, spooning oatmeal

with raisins, bananas, granola and boysenberry jam into the little

boy's mouth.

"We got you presents," the little girl said, taking a break from

shoveling banana-chocolate caramel apples into her mouth.

"Really?" Perry raised his funny eyebrow and she giggled. He did it

again, making it writhe like a snake. She snarfed choco-banana across

the table, then scooped it up and put it back in her mouth.

She nodded vigorously. "Dad, give them their presents!"

Kettlewell said, "Someone has to feed your brother, you know."

"I'll do it," she said. She forked up some of his oatmeal and

attempted to get it into the little boy's face. "Presents!"

Kettlewell dug through the luggage-cluster under the table and came up

with an overstuffed diaper bag, then pawed through it for a long time,

urged on by his daughter who kept chanting "Presents! Presents!

Presents!" while attempting to feed her little brother. Eva and Lester

and Suzanne took up the chant. They were drawing stares from nearby

tables, but Perry didn't mind. He was laughing so hard his sides hurt.

Finally Kettlewell held a paper bag aloft triumphantly, then clapped a

hand over his daughter's mouth and shushed the rest.

"You guys are really hard to shop for," he said. "What the hell do you

get for two guys who not only have everything, but *make* everything?"

Suzanne nodded. "Damned right. We spent a whole day looking for

something."

"What is it?"

"Well," Kettlewell said. "We figured that it should be something

useful, not decorative. You guys have decorative coming out of your

asses. So that left us with tools. We wanted to find you a tool that

you didn't have, and that you would appreciate."

Suzanne picked up the story. "I thought we should get you an antique

tool, something so well-made that it was still usable. But to be

useful, it had to be something no one had improved on, and that had in

fact been degraded by modern manufacturing techniques.

"At first we looked at old tape-measures, but I remembered that you

guys were mostly using keychain laser range-finders these

days. Screwdrivers, pliers, and hammers were all out -- I couldn't

find a damned thing that looked any better than what you had around

here. The state of the art is genuinely progressing.

"There were a lot of nice old brass spirit-levels and hand-lathed

plumb-bobs but they were more decorative than useful by a damned

sight. Great old steel work-helmets looked cool, but they weighed

about a hundred times what the safety helmets around here weigh.

"We were going to give in and try to bring you guys a big goddamned

tube-amp, or maybe some Inuit glass knives, but I didn't see you

having much of a use for either.

"Which is how we came to give up on tools per se and switched over to

leisure -- sports tools. There was a much richer vein. Wooden bats, oh

yes, and real pigskin footballs that had nice idiosyncratic spin that

you'd have to learn to compensate for. But when we found these, we

knew we'd hit pay-dirt."

She picked up Kettlewell's paper sack with a flourish and unzipped

it. A moment later she presented them with two identical packages

wrapped in coarse linen paper hand-stamped with Victorian woodcuts of

sporting men swinging bats and charging the line with pigskins under

their arms.

"Ta-dah!"

The kids echoed it. "These are the best presents," the little girl

confided in Perry as he picked delicately at the exquisite paper.

The paper gave way in folds and curls, and then he and Lester both

held their treasures aloft.

"Baseball gloves!" Perry said.

"A catcher's mitt and a fielder's glove," Kettlewell said. "You look

at that catcher's mitt. 1910!" It was black and bulbous, the leather

soft and yielding, with a patina of fine cracks like an old

painting. It smelled like oil and leather, an old rich smell like a

gentleman's club or an expensive briefcase. Perry tried it on and it

molded itself to his hand, snug and comfortable. It practically cried

out to have a ball thrown at it.

"And this fielder's glove," Kettlewell went on, pointing at the glove

Lester held. It was the more traditional tan color, comically large

like the glove of a cartoon character. It too had the look of ancient,

well-loved leather, the same mysterious smell of hide and oil. Perry

touched it with a finger and it felt like a woman's cheek, smooth and

soft. "Rawlings XPG6. The Mickey Mantle. Early 1960s -- the ultimate

glove."

"You got the whole sales pitch, huh, darling?" Eva said, not unkindly,

but Kettlewell flushed and glared at her for a moment.

Perry broke in. "Guys, these are -- wow. Incredible."

"They're better than the modern product," Suzanne said. "That's the

point. You can't print these or fab these. They're wonderful because

they're so well made *and so well-used*! The only way to make a glove

this good would be to fab it and then give it to several generations

of baseball players to love and use for fifty to a hundred years."

Perry turned over the catcher's mitt. Over a hundred years old. This

wasn't something to go in a glass case. Suzanne was right: this was a

great glove because people had played with it, all the time. It needed

to be played with or it would get out of practice.

"I guess we're going to have to buy a baseball," Perry said.

The little girl beside him started bouncing up and down.

"Show him," Suzanne said, and the girl dove under the table and came

up with two white, fresh hard balls. Once he fitted one to the pocket

of his glove, it felt so perfectly right -- like a key in a lock. This

pocket had held a lot of balls over the years.

Lester had put a ball in the pocket of his glove, too. He tossed it

lightly in the air and caught it, then repeated the trick. The look of

visceral satisfaction on his face was unmistakable.

"These are *great* presents, guys," Perry said. "Seriously. Well

done."

They all beamed and murmured and then the ball Lester was tossing

crashed to the table and broke a pitcher of blueberry syrup, upset a

carafe of orange juice, and rolled to a stop in the chocolate mess in

front of the little girl, who laughed and laughed and laughed.

"And *that* is why we don't play with balls indoors," Suzanne said,

looking as stern as she could while obviously trying very hard not to

bust out laughing.

The waiters were accustomed to wiping up spills and Lester was

awkwardly helpful. While they were getting everything set to rights

again, Perry looked at Eva and saw her lips tightly pursed as she

considered her husband. He followed Kettlebelly's gaze and saw that he

was watching Suzanne (who was laughingly restraining Lester from doing

any more "cleaning") intently. In a flash, Perry thought he had come

to understanding. Oh dear, he thought.

The kids loved the shantytown. The little girl -- Ada, "like the

programming language," Eva said -- insisted on being set down so she

could tread the cracked cement walkways herself, head whipping back

and forth to take the crazy-leaning buildings in, eyes following the

zipping motor-bikes and bicycles as they wove in and out of the busy

streets. The shantytowners were used to tourists in their midst. A few

yardies gave them the hairy eyeball, but then they saw Perry was along

and they found something else to pay attention to. That made Perry

feel obscurely proud. He'd been absent for months, but even the corner

boys knew who he was and didn't want to screw with him.

The guesthouse's landlady greeted them at the door, alerted to their

coming by the jungle telegraph. She shook Perry's hand warmly, gave

Ada a lollipop, and chucked the little boy (Pascal, "like the

programming language," said Eva, with an eye-roll) under the

chin. Check-in was a lot simpler than at a coffin-hotel or a Hilton:

just a brief discussion of the available rooms and a quick tour. The

Kettlewells opted for the lofty attic, which could fit two

three-quarter width beds and a crib, and overlooked the curving

streets from a high vantage; Suzanne took a more quotidian room just

below, with lovely tile mosaics made from snipped-out sections of

plastic fruit and smashed novelty soda bottles. (The landlady

privately assured Perry that her euphemistic "hourly trade" was in a

different part of the guesthouse altogether, with its own staircase).

A few hours later, Perry was alone again, working his ticket

counter. The Kettlewells were having naps, Lester and Suzanne had gone

off to see some sights, and the crowd for the ride was already large,

snaking through the market, thick with vendors and hustling kids

trying to pry the visitors loose of their bankrolls.

He felt like doing a carny barker spiel, *Step right up, step right

up, this way to the great egress!* But the morning's visitors didn't

seem all that frivolous -- they were serious-faced and sober.

"Everything OK?" he asked a girl who was riding for at least the

second time. She was a midwestern-looking giantess in her early

twenties with big white front teeth and broad shoulders, wearing a

faded Hoosiers ball-cap and a lot of coral jewelry. "I mean, you don't

look like you're having a fun time."

"It's the story," she said. "I read about it online and I didn't

really believe it, but now I totally see it. But you made it, right?

It didn't just... *happen*, did it?"

"No, it just happened," Perry said. This girl was a little

spooky-looking. He put his hand over his heart. "On my honor."

"It can't be," she said. "I mean, the story is like *right

there*. Someone must have made it."

"Maybe they did," Perry said. "Maybe a bunch of people thought it

would be fun to make a story out of the ride and came by to do it."

"That's probably it," the girl said. "The other thing, that's just

ridiculous."

She was gone and on the ride before he could ask her what this meant,

and the three bangbangers behind her just wanted tickets, not

conversation.

An hour later, she was back.

"I mean the message boards," she said. "Don't you follow your

referers? There's a guy in Osceola who says that this is, I don't

know, like the story that's inside our collective unconsciousness."

Perry restrained a smile at the malapropism. "Anyway a lot of people

agree. I don't think so, though. No offense, mister, but I think that

this is just a prank or something."

"Something," Perry said. But she rode twice more that day, and she

wasn't the only one. It was a day of many repeat riders, and the

market-stall people came by to complain that the visitors weren't

buying much besides the occasional ice-cream or pork cracklin.

Perry shrugged and told them to find something that these people

wanted to buy, then. One or two of the miniatures guys got gleams in

their eyes and bought tickets for the ride (Perry charged them half

price) and Perry knew that by the time the day was out, there'd be

souvenir ride-replicas to be had.

Lester and Suzanne came by after lunchtime and Lester relieved him,

leaving him to escort Suzanne back to the shantytown and the

Kettlewells.

"You two seem to be getting on well," Perry said, jerking his head

back at Lester as they walked through the market.

Suzanne looked away. "This is amazing, Perry," she said, waving her

hand at the market stalls, a gesture that took in the spires of the

shantytown and the ride, too. "You have done something...stupendous,

you know it? I mean, if you had a slightly different temperament, I'd

call this a cult. But it seems like you're not in charge of anything

--"

"That's for sure!"

"-- even though you're still definitely *leading* things."

"No way -- I just go where I'm told. Tjan's leading."

"I spoke to Tjan before we came out, and he points the finger at

you. 'I'm just keeping the books and closing the contracts.' That's a

direct quote."

"Well maybe no one's leading. Not everything needs a leader, right?"

Suzanne shook her head at him. "There's a leader, sweetie, and it's

you. Have a look around. Last I checked, there were three more rides

going operational this week, and five more in the next month. Just

looking at your speaking calendar gave me a headache --"

"I have a speaking calendar?"

"You do indeed, and it's a busy one. You knew that though, right?"

Tjan sent him email all the time telling him about this group or that,

where he was supposed to go and give a talk, but he'd never seen a

calendar. But who had time to look at the website anymore?

"I suppose. I knew I was supposed to get on a plane again in a couple

weeks."

"So that's what a leader is -- someone who gets people mobilized and

moving."

"I met a girl in Madison, Wisconsin, you'd probably get along with."

Thinking of Hilda made him smile and feel a little horny, a little

wistful. He hadn't gotten fucked in mind and body like that since his

twenties.

"Maybe I'll meet her. Is she working on a local ride?"

"You're going to go to the other rides?"

"I got to write about something, Perry. Otherwise my pageviews fall

off and I can't pay my rent. This is a story -- a big one, and no one

else has noticed it yet. That kind of story can turn into the kind of

money you buy a house with. I'm speaking from experience here."

"You think?"

She put her hand over her heart. "I'm good at spotting these. Man,

you've got a cult on your hands here."

"What?"

"The story people. I've been reading the message boards and

blogs. It's where I get all my best tips."

Perry shook his head. Everyone else was more on top of this stuff than

him. He was going to have to spend less time hacking the ride and more

time reading the interweb, clearly.

"It was all Lester's idea, anyway," he said.

She looked down with an unreadable expression. He hazarded a guess as

to what that was about.

"Things are getting tight between you two, huh?"

"Christ it doesn't show that much does it?"

"No," he lied. "I just know Lester is all."

"He's something else," she said.

Suzanne needed some sundries, so he directed her to a little bodega in

the back room of one of the houses. He told her he'd meet her at the

guesthouse and took a seat in the lobby. He was still beat from the

cold and the jet-lag, the work and the sheer exhaustion.

On the road he'd had momentum dragging him from one thing to the next,

flights to catch, speeches to make. Back at home, confronted with

routine, it was like his inertia was disappearing.

Eva Kettlewell thundered down the stairs three at a time with a sound

like a barely controlled fall, burst into the lobby and headed for the

door, her back rigid, her arms swinging, her face a picture of rage.

She went out the door like a flash and then stood in the street for a

moment before striking out, seemingly at random.

Uh-oh, Perry thought.

#

Sammy didn't dare go back to the ride for weeks after the debacle in

Boston. He'd been spotted by the Chinese guy and the bummy-looking guy

who said he'd designed the ride, that much was sure. They probably

suspected him of having sabotaged the Boston ride.

But he couldn't stay away. Work was dismal. The other execs at Disney

World were all amazingly petty, and always worse before the quarterly

numbers came out. Management liked to chase any kind of bad numbers

with a few ritual beheadings.

The new Fantasyland had been a feather in Sammy's cap that had kept

him safe from politics for a long time, but not anymore. Now it was

getting run down: cigarette burns, graffiti, and every now and again

someone would find a couple having pervy eyeliner sex in the bushes.

He'd loved to work openings in Fantasyland's heyday. He'd stand just

past the castle-gate and watch the flocking crowds of black-clad,

lightly sweating, white-faced goth kids pour through it, blinking in

the unnatural light of the morning. A lot of them took drugs and

partied all night and then capped it off with an early morning at

Fantasyland -- Disney had done focus groups, and they'd started

selling the chewy things that soothed the clenched jaws brought on by

dance-drugs.

But now he hated the raven-garbed customers who sallied into his park

like they owned the joint. A girl -- maybe 16 -- walked past on vinyl

platform heels with two gigantic men in their thirties behind her, led

on thin black leather leashes. A group of whippet-thin boys in grey

dusters with impossibly high sprays of teased electric blue hair

followed. Then a group of heavily pierced older women, their faces

rattling.

Then it was a river of black, kids in chains and leather, leathery

grownups who dressed like surly kids. They formed neat queues by their

favorite rides -- the haunted houses, the graveyard walk-through, the

coffin coaster, the river of blood -- and puffed cloves through

smokeless hookahs. At least he hoped it was cloves.

The castmembers in Sammy's Fantasyland were no better than the

guests. They were pierced, dyed, teased, and branded to within an inch

of their lives, even gothier than the goths who made the long

pilgrimages to ride his unwholesome rides.

The worst of it was that there weren't *enough* of them anymore. The

goth scene, which had shown every sign of surging and re-surging every

five years, seemed finally to be dying. Numbers were down. A couple of

goth-themed parks in the area had shuttered, as had the marshy one in

New Orleans (admittedly that might have been more to do with the

cholera outbreak).

Last month, he'd shut down the goth toddler-clothing shop and put its

wares on deep online discount. All his little nieces and nephews were

getting bat-wing onesies, skull platform-booties and temporary

hair-dye and tattoos for Christmas. Now he just had to get rid of the

other ten million bucks' worth of merch.

"Morning, Death," he said. The kid's real name was Darren Weinberger,

but he insisted on being called Death Waits, which given his pudgy

round cheeks and generally eager-to-please demeanor, was funny enough

that it had taken Sammy a full year to learn to control his grin when

he said it.

"Sammy! Good morning -- how're you doing?"

"The numbers stink," Sammy said. "You must have noticed."

Death's grin vanished. "I noticed. Time for a new ride, maybe." No one

called them "attractions" anymore -- all that old Orwellian

Disneyspeak had been abolished. "They love the coaster and the

free-fall. Thrill rides are always crowd-pleasers."

Death Waits had worked at Disney for three years now, since the age of

16, and he had grown up coming to the park, one of the rare Orlando

locals. Sammy had come to rely on him for what he thought of as

insight into the "goth street." He never said that aloud, because he

knew how much it sounded like "whatever you crazy kids are into these

days."

But this wasn't helpful. "I *know* that everyone likes thrill rides,

but how the hell can you compete with the gypsy coasters?" They set up

their coasters by the road and ran them until there was an injury

serious enough to draw the law -- a week or two at best. You could

order the DIY coaster kits from a number of suppliers across the US

and Mexico, put them up with cranes and semi-skilled labor and wishful

thinking, start taking tickets, and when the inevitable catastrophe

ensued, you could be packed and on the lam in a couple hours.

"Gypsy coasters? They suck. We've got theming. Our rides are

*art*. That stuff is just *engineering*." Death Waits was a good kid,

but he was a serious imbiber of the kool-aid. "Maybe try dance parties

again?" They'd tried a string of all-night raves, but the fights,

drugs, and sex were just too much for the upper management, no matter

how much money they brought in.

Sammy shook his head morosely. "I've told you that a company this size

can't afford the risks from that sort of thing." A few more goths

straggled in. They headed for the walk-through, which probably meant

they planned to get high or make out, something he'd given up on

trying to prevent. Anything to get the numbers up. He and the security

staff had come to an understanding on this and no one was telling his

boss or his colleagues.

"I should just bulldoze the whole fucking thing and start over. What

comes after goth, anyway? Are ravers back? Hippies? Punks? Chavs?"

Death Waits was staring at him with round eyes. "You wouldn't really

--"

He waved at the kid. This was his whole life. "No, Death, no. We're

not going to bulldoze this place. You've got a job for life here." It

was a lie of such amazing callousness that Sammy felt a twinge of

remorse while saying it. Those twinges didn't come often. But Death

Waits looked a lot happier once the words were out of his mouth --

goths with big candy-apple cheeks were pretty unconvincing

gloom-meisters.

Sammy stalked back to the nearest utilidor entrance, over by what had

been the Pinocchio Village Haus. He'd turned the redesign over to a

designer who'd started out as a lit major and whose admiration for the

dark and twisted elements of the original Pinocchio tale by Carlo

Collodi shone through. Now it featured murals of donkeys being flensed

by fish, hectic Pleasure Island. Hanged Pinocchio on his gibbet

dangled over the condiment bar, twitching and thrashing. The smell of

stale grease rose from it like a miasma, clashing with the patchouli

they pumped out from the underground misters.

Down into the tunnels and then into a golf cart and out to his

office. He had time to paw desultorily at the mountain of merchandise

samples that had come in over the week since he'd last tackled it --

every plaster-skull vendor and silver cross-maker in the world saw him

as a ticket to easy street. None had twigged to the fact that they

were *reducing* their goth-themed merch these days. Still, going

through merch had been his task for three years now and it was a hard

habit to break. He liked the lick-and-stick wounds with dancing

maggots that were activated by body-heat. The skeletal bikers with

flocking algorithms that led them into noisy demolition derbies were a

great idea, too, since you'd have to buy another set after a couple

hours' play.

His desk was throbbing pink, which meant that he was late for

something. He slapped at it, read the message that came up, remembered

that there was a weekly status meeting for theme-leaders that he'd

been specifically instructed to attend. He didn't go to these things

if he could help it. The time-markers who ran Adventureland and

Tomorrowland and so on were all boring curatorial types who thought

that change was what you gave a sucker back from a ten at a

frozen-banana wagon.

The theme-leaders met in a sumptuous board-room that had been themed

in the glory years of the unified Walt Disney Company. It had

renewable tropical hardwood panelling, a beautiful garden and a koi

pond, and an aviary that teemed with chirruping bright birds borrowed

from the Animal Kingdom menagerie. The table was a slab of slate with

a brushed finish over its pits and shelves, the chairs were so

ergonomic that they had zero adjustment controls, because they knew

much better than you ever could how to arrange themselves for your

maximum comfort.

He was the last one through the door, and they all turned to stare at

him. They all dressed for shit, in old fashioned slacks and high-tech

walking shoes, company pocket-tees or baseball jerseys. None of them

had a haircut that was worth a damn, not even the two women execs who

co-ran Main Street. They dressed like the Middle Americans they

catered to, or maybe a little better.

Sammy had always been a sharp dresser. He liked shirts that looked

like good cotton but had a little stretch built into them so they

rested tight at his chest, which was big, and tight at his waist,

which was small. He liked jeans in whatever style jeans were being

worn in Barcelona that year, which meant black jeans cut very square

and wide-legged, ironed stiff without a crease. He had shades that had

been designed to make his face look a little vulpine, a trait that

he'd always known he had. It put people on edge if you looked a little

wolfy.

He stopped outside the door of the board-room and squared up his

shoulders. He was the youngest person on the board, and he'd always

been the biggest, cockiest bastard in the room. He had to remember

that if he was going to survive this next hour.

He came through the door and stopped and looked at the people around

the table and waited for everyone to notice him. They looked so

midwestern and goofy, and he gave them his wolfy smile -- hello,

little piggies, here to blow your house down.

"Hey, kids," he said, and grabbed the coffee carafe and a mug off the

sideboard. He filled his cup, then passed the carafe off, as though

every meeting began with the passing-around of the low-grade

stimulants. He settled into his seat and looked around expectantly.

"Glad you could make it, Sammy." That was Wiener, who generally

chaired the meetings. Theoretically, it was a rotating chairship, but

there's a certain kind of person who naturally ends up running every

meeting, and Ron Wiener was that kind of person. He co-ran

Tomorrowland with three faceless nonentities who had been promoted

above their competence due to his inexplicable loyalty to them, and

between the four of them, they'd managed to keep Tomorrowland the most

embarrassingly badly themed part of the park. "We were just talking

about you."

"I love being the subject of conversation," Sammy said. He slurped

loudly at his coffee.

"What we were talking about was the utilization numbers from

Fantasyland."

Which sucked, Sammy knew. They'd been in free-fall for months now, and

looking around at those cow-like midwestern faces, Sammy understood

that it was time for the knives to come out.

"They suck," Sammy said brightly. "That's why we're about to change

things up."

That preempted them. "Can you explain that some?" Wiener said,

clicking his pen and squaring up his notepad. These jerks and their

paper-fetish.

Sammy did his best thinking on his feet and on the

move. Confident. Wolfy. You're better than these jerks with their pads

and their corn-fed notions. He sucked in a breath and began to pace

and use his hands.

"We're going to take out every under-utilized ride in the land,

effective immediately. Lay off the dead-wood employees. We're going to

get a couple off-the-shelf thrill rides and give them a solid

working-over for theming -- build our own ride vehicles, queue areas

and enclosures, big ones, weenies that will draw your eye from outside

the main gate. But that's just a stopgap.

"Next I'm going to start focus-grouping the fatkins. They're

ready-made for this stuff. All about having fun. Most of those

ex-fatties used to pack this place when they were stuck in electric

wheelchairs, but now they're too busy --" he stopped himself from

saying "fucking" -- "Having more adult fun to come back, but anyone

who can afford fatkins has discretionary income and we should have a

piece of it.

"It's hard to say without research, but I'm willing to bet that these

guys will respond strongly to nostalgia. I'm thinking of reinstating

the old Fantasyland dark-rides, digging parts out of storage, whatever

we haven't auctioned off on the collectibles market, anyway, and

cloning the rest, but remaking them with a little, you know,

darkness. Like the Pinocchio thing, but more so. Captain Hook's grisly

death. Tinker Bell's inherent porniness. What kind of friendship did

Snow White have with the dwarfs? You see where I'm going. Ironic -- we

haven't done ironic in a long time. It's probably due for a comeback."

They stared at him in shocked silence.

"You say you're going to do this when?" Wiener said. He'd want to know

so he could get someone senior to intervene.

"You know, research first. We'll shut down the crap rides next week

and can the dead-wood. Want to commission the research today if I

can. Start work on the filler thrill-rides next week too."

He sat down. They continued to boggle.

"You're serious about this?"

"About what? Getting rid of unprofitable stuff? Researching profitable

directions? Yes and yes."

There were other routine agenda items, which reminded Sammy of why he

didn't come to these meetings. He spent the time surfing readymade

coasters and checking the intranet for engineer availability. He was

just getting into the HR records to see who he'd have to lay off when

they finally wound down and he sauntered out, giving his wolfy grin to

all, with a special flash of it for Wiener.

#

"Death, I'd like a word, please?"

"I'd be delighted." Death talked like someone who'd learned to talk by

being a precocious reader. He over-pronounced his words, spoke in

complete sentences, and paused at the commas. Sammy knew that speech

pattern well, since he'd worked hard to train himself out of it. It

was a geek accent, and it made you sound like a smart-ass instead of a

sharp operator. You got that way if you grew up trying to talk with a

grown-up vocabulary and a child's control of your speech-muscles; you

learned to hold your chin and cheeks still while you spoke to give you

a little precision-boost. That was the geek accent.

"Remember what we talked about this morning?"

"Building a thrill ride?"

"Yes," Sammy said. He'd forgotten that Death Waits had suggested that

in the first place. Good -- that was a good spin. "I've decided to

take your suggestion. Of course, we need to make room for it, so I'm

going to shut down some of the crap -- you know which ones I mean."

Death Waits was green under his white makeup. "You mean --"

"All the walk-throughs. The coffin coaster, of course. The flying

bats. Maybe one or two others. And I'm going to need to make some

layoffs, of course. Gotta make room."

"You're going to lay people off? How many people? We're already barely

staffed." Death was the official arbiter of shift-changing,

schedule-swapping and cross-scheduling. If you wanted to take an

afternoon off to get your mom out of the hospital or your dad out of

jail, he was the one to talk to.

"That's why I'm coming to you. If I shut down six of the rides --"

Death gasped. Fantasyland had 10 rides in total. "Six of the

rides. How many of the senior staffers can I get rid of and still have

the warm bodies to keep everything running?" Senior people cost a

*lot* more than the teenagers who came through. He could hire six

juniors for what Death cost him. Frigging Florida labor laws meant

that you had to give cost-of-living raises every year, and it added

up.

Death looked like he was going to cry.

"I've got my own estimates," Sammy said. "But I wanted to get a

reality check from you, since you're right there, on the ground. I'd

hate to leave too much fat on the bone."

He knew what effect this would have on the kid. Death blinked back his

tears, put his fist under his chin and pulled out his phone and

started scribbling on it. He had a list of every employee in there and

he began to transfer names from it to another place.

"They'll be back, right? To operate the new rides?"

"The ones we don't bring back, we'll get them unemployment

counseling. Enroll them in a networking club for the jobless, one of

the really good ones. We can get a group rate. A job reference from

this place goes a long way, too. They'll be OK."

Death looked at him, a long look. The kid wasn't stupid, Sammy

knew. None of these people were stupid, not Wiener, not the kid, not

the goths who led each other around Fantasyland on leashes. Not the

fatkins who'd soon pack the place. They were none of them stupid. They

were just -- soft. Unwilling to make the hard choices. Sammy was good

at hard choices.

#

Perry got home that night and walked in on Lester and Suzanne. They

were tangled on the living-room carpet, mostly naked, and Lester

blushed right to his ass-cheeks when Perry came through the door.

"Sorry, sorry!" Lester called as he grabbed a sofa cushion and passed

it to Suzanne, then got one for himself. Perry averted his eyes and

tried not to laugh.

"Jesus, guys, what's wrong with the bedroom?"

"We would've gotten there eventually," Lester said as he helped

Suzanne to her feet. Perry pointedly turned to face the wall. "You

were supposed to be at dinner with the gang," Lester said.

"Close-up on the ride was crazy. Everything was changing and the

printers were out of goop. Lots of action on the network -- Boston and

San Francisco are introducing a lot of new items to the ride. By the

time I got to the guest-house, the Kettlewells were already putting

the kids to bed." He decided not to mention Eva's angry storm-out to

Suzanne. No doubt she had already figured out that all was not well in

the House of Kettlewell.

Suzanne ahem'd.

"Sorry, sorry," Lester said. "Let's talk about this later, OK? Sorry."

They scurried off to Lester's room and Perry whipped out a computer,

put on some short humor videos in shuffle-mode, and grabbed a big tub

of spare parts he kept around to fiddle with. It could be soothing to

take apart and reassemble a complex mechanism, and sometimes you got

ideas from it.

Five minutes later, he heard the shower running and then Suzanne came

into the living room.

"I'm going to order some food. What do you feel like?"

"Whatever you get, you'll have to order it from one of the fatkins

places. It's not practical to feed Lester any other way. Get me a

small chicken tikka pizza."

She pored over the stack of menus in the kitchen. "Does Food in Twenty

Minutes really deliver in 20 minutes?"

"Usually 15. They do most of the prep in the vans and use a lot of

predictive math in their routing. There's usually a van within about

ten minutes of here, no matter what the traffic. They deliver to

traffic-jams, too, on scooters."

Suzanne made a face. "I thought *Russia* was weird." She showed the

number on the brochure to her phone and then started to order.

Lester came out a minute later, dressed to the nines as always. He was

barely capable of entering his bedroom without effecting a wardrobe

change.

He gave Perry a slightly pissed off look and Perry shrugged

apologetically, though he didn't feel all that bad. Lester's fault.

Christ on a bike, it was weird to think of the two of them together,

especially going at it on the living room rug like a couple of horny

teens. Suzanne had always been the grownup in their little family. But

that had been back when there was a big company involved. Something

about being a piece of a big company made you want to act like you'd

always figured grownups should act. Once you were a free agent, there

wasn't any reason not to embrace your urges.

When the food came, the two of them attacked it like hungry dogs. It

was clear that they'd forgotten their embarrassment and were planning

another retreat to the bedroom once they'd refueled. Perry left.

#

"Hey, Francis." Francis was sitting on the second-storey balcony of

his mayoral house, surveying the electric glow of the shantytown. As

usual now, he was alone, without any of his old gang of boys hanging

around him. He waved an arm toward Perry and beckoned him inside,

buzzing him in with his phone.

Perry tracked up the narrow stairs, wondering how Francis negotiated

them with his bad knee and his propensity to have one beer too many.

"What's the good word?"

"Oh, not much," Perry said. He helped himself to a beer. They made it

in the shantytown and fortified it with fruits, like a Belgian

beer. The resulting suds were strong and sweet. This one was raspberry

and it tasted a little pink, like red soda.

"Your friends aren't getting along too good, is what I hear."

"Really." Nothing was much of a secret in this place.

"The little woman's taken a room of her own down the road. My wife did

that to me once. Crazy broad. That's their way sometimes. Get so mad

they just need to walk away."

"I get that mad, too," Perry said.

"Oh, hell, me too, all the time. But men usually don't have the guts

to pack a suitcase and light out. Women have the guts. They're nothing

but guts."

Perry cursed. Why hadn't Kettlebelly called him? What was going on?

He called Kettlebelly.

"Hi, Perry!"

"Hi, Landon. What's up?"

"Up?"

"Yeah, how are things?"

"Things?"

"Well, I hear Eva took off. That sort of thing. Anything we can talk

about?"

Kettlewell didn't say anything.

"Should I come over?"

"No," he said. "I'll meet you somewhere. Where?"

Francis wordlessly passed Kettlewell a beer as he stepped out onto the

terrace.

"So?"

"They're in a motel not far from here. The kids love coffins."

Francis opened another beer for himself. "Hard to imagine a kid loved

a coffin more than your kids loved this place this afternoon."

"Eva's pretty steamed at me. It just hasn't been very good since I

retired. I guess I'm pretty hard to live with all the time."

Perry nodded. "I can see that."

"Thanks," Kettlewell said. "Also." He took a pull off his beer. "Also

I had an affair."

Both men sucked air between their teeth.

"With her best friend."

Perry coughed a little.

"While Eva was pregnant."

"You're still breathing? Patient woman," Francis said.

"She's a good woman," Kettlewell said. "The best. Mother of my

children. But it made her a little crazy-jealous."

"So what's the plan, Kettlewell? You're a good man with a plan," Perry

said.

"I have to give her a night off to cool down and then we'll see. Never

any point in doing this while she's hot. Tomorrow morning, it'll come

together."

The next morning, Perry found himself desperately embroiled in

ordering more goop for the three-d printers. *Lots more*. The other

rides had finally come online in the night, after interminable network

screw-ups and malfing robots and printers and scanners that wouldn't

cooperate, but now there were seven rides in the network, seven rides

whose riders were rearranging, adding and subtracting, and there was

reconciling to do. The printers hummed and hummed.

"The natives are restless," Lester said, pointing a thumb over his

shoulder at the growing queue of would-be riders. "We going to be

ready to open soon?"

Perry had fallen into a classic nerd trap of having almost solved a

problem and not realizing that the last three percent of the solution

would take as long as the rest of it put together. Meanwhile, the ride

was in a shambles as robots attempted to print and arrange objects to

mirror those around the nation.

"Soon soon," Perry said. He stood up and looked around at the

shambles. "I lie. This crap won't be ready for hours yet. Sorry. Fuck

it. Open up."

Lester did.

"I know, I know, but that's the deal with the ride. It's got to get in

sync. You know we've been working on this for months now. It's just

growing pains. Here, I'll give you back your money you come back

tomorrow, it'll all be set to rights."

The angry rider was a regular, one of the people who came by every

morning to ride before work. She was gaunt and tall and geeky and

talked like an engineer, with the nerd accent.

"What kind of printer?" Lester broke in. Perry hid his snicker with a

cough. Lester would get her talking about the ins and outs of her

printer, talking shop, and before you knew it she'd be mollified.

Perry sold another ticket, and another.

"Hi again!" It was the creepy guy, the suit who'd shown up in

Boston. Tjan had a crazy theory about why he'd left the Boston launch

in such a hurry, but who knew?

"Hi there," Perry said. "Long time no see. Back from Boston, huh?"

"For months." The guy was grinning and sweating and didn't look

good. He had a fresh bruise on his cheek with a couple of knuckle

prints clearly visible. "Can't wait to get back on the ride. It's been

too long."

#

Sammy had been through a rehab and knew how they went. You laid off a

bunch of people in one fast, hard big bang. Hired some unemployment

coaches for the senior unionized employees, scheduled a couple of

"networking events" where they could mingle with other unemployed

slobs and pass around home-made business cards.

You needed a Judas goat, someone who'd talk up the rehab to the other

employees, whom you could rely on. Death Waits had been his Judas goat

for the Fantasyland goth makeover. He'd tirelessly evangelized the

idea to his co-workers, had found goth tru-fans who'd blog the hell

out of every inch of the rehab, had run every errand no matter how

menial.

But his passion didn't carry over to dismantling the goth rehab. Sammy

should have anticipated that, but he had totally failed to do so. He

was just so used to thinking of Death Waits as someone who was a

never-questioning slave to the park.

"Come on, cheer up! Look at how cool these thrill rides are going to

be. Those were your idea, you know. Check out the coffin-cars and the

little photo-op at the end that photoshops all the riders into

zombies. That's got to be right up your alley, right? Your friends are

going to love this."

Death moped as only a goth could. He performed his duties slowly and

unenthusiastically. When Sammy pinned him down with a direct question,

he let his bangs fall over his eyes, looked down at his feet, and went

silent.

"Come on, what the hell is going on? The fences were supposed to be up

this morning!" The plan had been to get the maintenance crews in

before rope-drop to fence off the doomed rides so that the dismantling

could begin. But when he'd shown up at eight, there was no sign of the

fences, no sign of the maintenance crews and the rides were all fully

staffed.

Death looked at his feet. Sammy bubbled with rage. If you couldn't

trust your own people, you were lost. There were already enough people

around the park looking for a way to wrong-foot him.

"Death, I'm talking to you. For Christ's sake, don't be such a

goddamned baby. You shut down the goddamned rides and send those

glue-sniffers home. I want a wrecking crew here by lunchtime."

Death Waits looked at his feet some more. His floppy black wings of

hair covered his face, but from the snuffling noises, Sammy knew there

was some crying going on underneath all that hair.

"Suck it up," he said. "Or go home."

Sammy turned on his heel and started for the door, and that was when

Death Waits leapt on his back, dragged him to the ground and started

punching him. He wasn't much of a puncher, but he did have a lot of

chunky silver skull-rings that really stung. He pasted a couple good

ones on Sammy before Sammy came to his senses and threw the skinny kid

off of him. Strangely, Sammy's anger was dissipated by the actual,

physical violence. He had never thrown a punch in his life and he was

willing to bet the same was true of Death Waits. There was something

almost funny about an actual punch-up.

Death Waits picked himself up and looked at Sammy. The kid's eyeliner

was in smears down his cheeks and his hair was standing up on

end. Sammy shook his head slowly.

"Don't bother cleaning out your locker. I'll have your things sent to

you. And don't stop on your way out of the park, either."

He could have called security, but that would have meant sitting there

with Death Waits until they arrived. The kid would go and he would

never come back. He was disgraced.

And leave he did. Sammy had Death Wait's employee pass deactivated and

the contents of his locker -- patchouli-reeking black tee-shirts and

blunt eyeliner pencils -- sent by last-class mail to his house. He cut

off Death Waits's benefits. He had the deadwood rides shuttered and

commenced their destruction, handing over any piece recognizable as

coming from a ride to the company's auction department to list

online. Anything to add black to his bottom line.

But his cheek throbbed where Death had laid into him, and he'd lost

his fire for the new project. Were fatkins a decent-sized market

segment? He should have commissioned research on it. But he'd needed

to get a plan in the can in time to mollify the executive

committee. Plus he knew what his eyes told him every day: the park was

full of fatkins, and always had been.

The ghost of Death Waits was everywhere. Sammy had to figure out for

himself whom to fire, and how to do it. He didn't really know any of

the goth kids that worked the rides these days. Death Waits had hired

and led them. There were lots of crying fits and threats, and the kids

he didn't fire acted like they were next, and if it hadn't been for

the need to keep revenue flowing, Sammy would have canned all of them.

Then he caught wind of what they were all doing with their severance

pay: traveling south to Hollywood and riding that goddamned

frankenride in the dead Wal-Mart, trying to turn it into goth

paradise. Judging from the message-boards he surfed, the whole thing

had been Death Waits's idea. Goddamn it.

It was Boston all over again. He'd pulled the plug and the machine

kept on moving. The hoardings went up and the rides came down, but all

his former employees and their weird eyeliner pervert pals all went

somewhere else and partied on just the same. His attendance numbers

were way down, and the photobloggers posting shots of black clouds of

goths at the frankenride made it clear where they'd all gone.

*Fine*, he thought, *fine. Let's go have a look.*

The guy with the funny eyebrow made him immediately, but didn't seem

to be suspicious. Maybe they never figured out what he'd done in

Boston. The goth kids were busy in the market stalls or hanging around

smoking clove and patchouli hookahs and they ignored him as a square

and beneath their notice.

The ride had changed a great deal since his last fated visit. He'd

heard about The Story, of course -- the dark-ride press had reported

on it in an editorial that week. But now The Story -- which, as he

could perceive it, was an orderly progression of what seemed to be

someone's life unfolding from childhood naivete to adolescent

exuberance to adult cynicism to a nostalgic, elderly delight -- was

augmented by familiar accoutrements.

There was a robot zombie-head from one of the rides he'd torn down

yesterday. And here was half the sign from the coffin coaster. A

bat-wing bush from the hedge-maze. The little bastards had stolen the

deconstructed ride-debris and brought it here.

By the time he got off the ride, he was grinning ferociously. By

tomorrow there'd be copies of all that trademarked ride-stuff rolling

off the printers in ten cities around the United States. That was a

major bit of illegal activity, and he knew where he could find some

hungry attack-lawyers who'd love to argue about it. He jumped on the

ride again and got his camera configured for low-light shooting.

#

Eva showed up on Perry's doorstep that night after dinner. Lester and

Suzanne had gone off to the beach and Perry was alone, updating his

inventory of tchotchkes with a camera and an old computer, getting

everything stickered with RFIDs.

She had the kids in tow. Ada spotted the two old, lovely baseball

mitts on the crowded coffee table and made a bee-line for them,

putting one over each hand and walking around smacking them together

to hear the leathery sound, snooping in drawers and peering at the

business-end of an arc-welder that Perry hastily snapped up and put on

a high shelf, which winked once to let him know that it had tracked

the movement and noted the location of the tool.

The little boy, Pascal, rode on his mother's hip. Eva had clearly had

a bit of a cry, but had gotten over it. Now she was determined, with

her jaw thrust out and her chin up-tilted.

"I don't know what to do about him. He's been driving me crazy since

he retired. You know he had an affair?"

"He told me."

She laughed. "He tells *everyone*. He's boasting, you know?

Whatever. I know why he did it. Mid-life crisis. But before that, it

was early-adulthood crisis. And adolescent crisis. That guy doesn't

know what to do with himself. He's a good man, but he's out of his

fucking mind if he's not juggling a hundred balls."

Perry tried out a noncommittal shrug.

"You're his buddy, I know. But you have to see that it's true, right?

I love him, I really do, but he's got a self-destructive streak a mile

wide. It doesn't matter how much he loves me or the kids, if he's not

torturing himself with work, he's got to come up with something else

to screw up his life. I thought that we were going to spend the next

twenty years raising the kids, doing volunteer work, and

traveling. Not much chance of that though. You saw how he was looking

at Suzanne."

"You think he and Suzanne --"

"No, I asked him and he said no. Then I talked to *her* and she told

me that she wouldn't ever let something like that happen. Her I

believe." She sat down and dandled the little boy until he gurgled

contentedly. Perry heard Ada going crazy in the kitchen with a

mechanical sphincter he'd been building. "Rides are a lot of fun,

Perry. Your ride, it's amazing. But I don't want to ride a ride for

the rest of my life, and Landon is a ride that doesn't stop. You can't

get off."

Perry was at a loss. "I've never had a relationship that lasted more

than six months, Eva. I've got no business giving you advice on this

stuff. Kettlewell is pretty amazing, though. It sounds like you've got

him pretty wired, right? You know that if he's busy, he's happy, and

when he's slack, he's miserable. Sounds like if you keep him busy,

he'll be the kind of guy you want him to be, even if you won't have

much time to play with him."

She unholstered a tit and stuck it in the boy's mouth and Perry looked

at the carpet. She laughed. "You are such a geek," she said. "OK,

fine. I hear what you're saying. So how do I get him busy again? Can

you use him around here?"

"Here?" Perry thought about it. "I don't think we need much empire

building around here."

"I thought you'd say that. Perry, what the hell am I going to do?"

There was a tremendous crash from the kitchen, a shriek of surprise,

then a small "oops."

"Ada!" Eva called. "What now?"

"I was playing ball in the house," Ada said in the same small

voice. "Even though you have told me not to. And I broke something. I

should have listened to you."

Eva shook her head. "Plays me like a goddamned cello," she said. "I'm

sorry, Perry. We'll pay for whatever it was."

He patted her arm. "You forget who you're talking to. I love fixing

stuff. Don't sweat it."

"Whatever -- I'll buy you one and you can use it for parts. Ada! What

did you break, anyway?"

"Made of seashells, by the toaster. It's twitching."

"Toast-making seashell robot," Perry said. "No sweat -- it was due for

an overhaul, anyway."

"Christ," she said. "Toast-making *seashell* robot?"

"Kettlewell is why we gave up making that kind of thing," he said.

"Have you seen him?"

"I've seen him."

"How penitent was he?"

He thought back to Kettlewell's long puss on Francis's terrace. "Yeah,

pretty penitent. He's pretty worried, I'd say."

She nodded. "All right then. Maybe he's learned a lesson. Ada! Stop

breaking things and get your shoes back on!"

"We going back to Daddy?"

"Yes," she said.

"Good," Ada said.

They were barely out the door when Suzanne and Lester came in. They

nodded at Perry and disappeared into the bedroom. Ten minutes later,

Suzanne stomped out again. She barely looked at Perry as she

disappeared into the corridor, slamming the door behind her.

Perry waited five minutes to see if Lester would come out on his

own. This happened sometimes with the fatkins girls; love among the

fatkins was stormy and unpredictable and Lester seemed to like

bragging about the melt-downs they experienced, each one an oddity of

sybaritic fatkins culture to boast about.

But Lester didn't come out this time. Perry thought about calling him

or sending him an email. Finally, Perry went and knocked at his door.

"Oh, go back to the living room, I'll come out, I'll come out."

Perry went back and moused desultorily at some ride-fan blogs for a

while, listening for Lester's door opening. Finally, out he came,

long-faced and puffy-eyed.

Perry shook his head. Was everyone miserable tonight?

"Hello, Lester," he said. "Something on your mind?"

He barked a humorless laugh. "With her, I'm still fat."

Perry nodded as though he understood, though he didn't.

"Since fatkins, I've felt like, I don't know, a real person. When I

was big, I was invisible and totally asexual. I didn't think about

having sex with anyone and no one ever thought about having sex with

me. When I felt something for a woman, it was more like a big,

romantic love, like I was a beast and she was a beauty and we could

enjoy some kind of chaste, spiritual love.

"Fatkins made me...whole. A whole person, with a life below my belt as

well as above my neck. I know it looks gross and desperate to you, but

to me it's a celebration. Every time I get together with a fatkins

girl and we're, you know, partying -- for both of us it becomes

something really intimate. A denial of pain. A fuck you to the

universe that made us so gross and untouchable."

"And with her, you're still fat, huh?"

Lester winced. "Yeah, it's my problem. I guess I really resent her for

not wanting me when I was big, though I totally get why she wouldn't

have."

"Maybe you're angry that she wants you now."

"Huh." Lester looked at his hands, which he was dry-washing in his

lap. "OK, maybe. Why should she want me now? I'm the same person,

after all."

"Except that you're whole now."

"Urk." Lester started pacing. "Who broke the toast-robot?"

"Kettlewell's daughter, Ada. Eva was over with the kids. She moved out

on Kettlebelly." He thought about whether he should tell Lester. What

the hell. "She thinks he's in love with Suzanne."

"Jesus," Lester said. "Maybe we should swap. I'll take Eva and he can

take Suzanne."

"You're such a pig," Perry said.

"You know us fatkins -- fuck, food and folly."

"So what's going on with you and Suzanne now?"

"She's gone away until I can get naked around her without either

bursting into tears or making sarcastic remarks."

Jesus. Crying. Perry couldn't remember when he'd ever seen Lester

cry. It was waterworks city these days around here.

"Ah." Perry just wanted this day to be over. He missed Hilda, though

he barely knew her. It would have been nice to have someone here at

home with him, someone he could cuddle up to in bed and talk this all

out with. Maybe he should call Tjan. He hit the button on his computer

that made the TV blink the time in Morse code. It was 1AM. He'd have

to be up in six hours to get the ride up and running. Screw all this,

he was going to bed. He hadn't even gotten a single email from Hilda

since he'd left Madison. Not that he'd sent one to her, of course.

Lester was still snoring when Perry slipped out of the condo, a bulb

of juice and a microwavable venison and quail-egg breakfast burrito

under his arm. He had a little glove-box microwave and by the time he

hit his first red light, the burrito was nuclear-hot and ready to

eat. He gobbled it one-handed while he made his way to the ride.

There were two cop cars at the end of the driveway leading to the

parking lot. Broward County sheriff's deputy black-and-whites, parked

horizontally to blockade the drive.

Perry pulled over and got out of his car slowly, keeping his hands in

plain sight. The doors of the cruisers opened, too. The deputies

already had their mirrorshades on, though the sun was still rising,

and they set down their coffees on the hood of the cars.

"This yours?" A deputy said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at

the flea market and the ride.

Perry knew better than to answer any questions. "Can I help you?"

"We're shutting you down, buddy, sorry." The cop was young, Latina and

female, her partner was older, white and male, with the ruddy

complexion that Perry associated with old time Florida cops.

"What's the charge?"

"There's no charge," the male cop said. He sounded like he was angry

already and anything Perry said would just make him angrier. "We

charge you if we're going to arrest you. We're enforcing an

injunction. Now, if you try to get past us, we'll come up with a

charge and *then* we'll arrest you."

"Can I see the injunction?"

"Sure, you can go to the courthouse and see the injunction."

"Aren't you supposed to have a copy of it to show to me?"

"Am I?" The cop's grin was mean and impatient.

"Can I go and get some stuff from my office?"

"If you want to get arrested you can." He pulled a dyspeptic face and

drank some coffee, then got back into his cruiser.

The other cop had the grace to look faintly embarrassed at her asshole

partner, but then she, too, got back in her car.

Perry thought furiously about this. The cop was clearly itching to

bust his ass. Maybe he hated the ride, or this duty, or maybe he hated

Perry -- maybe he was one of the cops who had raided the shantytown

all those years before. Perry had taken a pretty big settlement off

the county over the shot in his head, and it was a sure bet that a lot

of cops had suffered for it and now harbored some enmity for him.

As bad as this was, it was about to get worse. The goth kids who'd

been hanging around in droves lately -- they didn't seem like the sort

with a lot of good instincts when it came to dealing with authority

figures. Then there were the flea-market stall owners, who'd be coming

over the road to open their shops in an hour or so. This could get

really goddamned ugly.

He needed a lawyer, and someone to front for him with the lawyer. He

could call Tjan -- he would call him, in fact, but not just yet. There

were limits to what Tjan could do from Boston, after all.

He got back in his car and peeled across the road to the shantytown

and the guesthouse.

"Kettlewell!" He thumped the door. "Come on, Landon, it's me,

Perry. It's an emergency."

He heard Eva curse, then heard movement. "Whazzit?"

"Sorry, man, I wouldn't have woken you but it's a real emergency."

"Fire?"

"No. Cops. They've shut down the ride."

Kettlewell opened the door a crack and stared at him with a

red-rimmed, hung-over eye. "Cops shut down the ride?"

"Yeah, they say there's an injunction."

"Gimme a sec, gotta put some pants on." He closed the door. As Perry

listened to the sounds of him getting dressed, he reflected that he'd

done Eva the favor she'd been seeking: he'd found something to keep

Kettlewell busy.

Kettlewell quizzed him intensely as they drove back across the road to

the police-cars. He called Tjan and got voicemail, left a brief

message, then got out of the car and stood still outside it, waving at

the cop-cars.

"What?"

The male cop looked even more dyspeptic.

"Hi there! I wondered if I could get you to explain what's going on

here so we can open up shop again?"

"We've shut you down to enforce an injunction."

"What injunction is that?"

"A court injunction."

"Which court?"

The cop looked really angry for a second, then he got back in his car

and fished around. "Broward County." He sounded aggrieved.

"Is that the injunction there?" Kettlewell said.

"No," the cop said, too quickly. They both knew he was lying, jerking

them around.

"Can I see it? Does it have information about who to talk to to get

the injunction lifted?" Kettlewell's tone was even, pleasant and very

adult. The voice of someone used to being obeyed.

"You'll have to go to the courthouse. They open in a couple hours."

"I'd really like to see it."

"Oh for chrissakes," the female cop said. "Just show it to them,

Tom. God." She spat on the ground. Her partner gave her a look, then

handed the paper over to Kettlewell, who pored over it intently. Perry

shoulder surfed him and gathered that they were being shut down for

infringing Disney Parks Company trademarks. That was weird. You could

hardly go ten feet in Florida without tripping over a bootleg Mickey,

so why should the market-stalls' Mickey designs trigger legal action?

"All right, then," Kettlewell said. "Let's make some phone calls."

They got in the car and drove across the road to the shantytown. There

was a tea-house that opened early and they commandeered its window

table and spread out their things. Perry called Lester and woke him

up. It took two or three tries to get his head around it -- Lester

couldn't figure out why they'd shut down the market-stalls, but once

he got that the ride was down too, he woke up fast and promised to

meet them.

Kettlewell's conversation with Tjan was a lot more heated. Perry tried

to eavesdrop but couldn't make any sense of it.

"All the rides are down," he said once he'd dropped the phone to

bounce a couple times on the tabletop, making the coffees

shiver. "Every one of them was shut down by the cops this morning."

"You're shitting me. But they don't all sell the same stuff."

"They were shut down because of Disney trademarks in the ride itself,

or so it seems. Now, what are we going to do? Tjan's hired a lawyer

for the Boston group and we can hire one for here, but I don't think

we're going to be able to hire fixers everywhere that there's a

ride. That's going to be really expensive. Disney's filed all the

injunctions at the state level -- they have an industry association

they work through that has cooperating attorneys in every city in the

country, so it was easy for them."

"Holy crap."

"Yeah. Who did you piss off, Perry?"

Damned if he knew. He literally couldn't think of a single person

who'd want to do this -- someone had convinced the Disney company to

clobber him like Godzilla going after Tokyo. It just didn't make any

sense.

"So what do we do?"

Kettlewell looked at him. "I have no clue, Perry. You aren't a

company. You aren't a network of companies. You aren't an industry

association. No one can speak for you. You can't lobby or even field a

spokesman. I mean, none of that stuff works for you -- and that's the

only way I know to fight back in court."

"I thought we were immune to this stuff. If there's no one to sue, how

can they sue us?"

"If there's no one to sue, there's no one to show up in court and

object, either."

"Yeah."

"I don't think we can incorporate you in time to make a difference,"

Kettlewell said. "So we need to think of something else."

Suzanne slid into the booth beside them. Her hair was tied back and

her makeup was spare and severe. She had on European-cut trousers,

high like a bolero-dancer's, and a loose, flowing white cotton

over-shirt on top of a luminescent pink tank. Perry couldn't tell

whether it was formal or informal, but it looked good and a little

intimidatingly foreign. She didn't meet Perry's eye.

"Brief me," she said. She held out her phone and put it in record

mode.

Kettlewell ran it down quickly and she nodded, jotting notes.

"So what happens next?"

"Not much we can do," Kettlewell said.

"The riders will be along shortly. Oh, and the merchants." Perry still

couldn't catch her eye.

"I'll go take some pictures," she said.

"Be careful," Perry said.

She mugged for him. "Sweetie, I take pictures of the mafiyeh." Then it

was all right between them again, somehow.

"Right," Kettlewell said. "How's our time looking?"

"Got thirty minutes until the first of the merchants show up. An hour

until the riders start turning up."

"You don't have a lawyer, do you?"

Perry quirked his funny eyebrow.

"Stupid question. OK. Right, I'll make some more calls. Let's get some

people out of bed."

"What can I do?"

Kettlewell looked at him. "Huh. Um. This is really my beat now. I

suppose you could go keep Suzanne company."

"Gee, thanks."

"Something wrong with Suzanne?"

"Nothing's wrong with Suzanne," he said. "OK, off I go."

He set off on foot. The shantytown had woken up now, people getting

ready for the hike to the early busses into places where the few

remaining jobs were.

He took his phone out and tossed it from hand to hand. Then he called

the number that he'd programmed in all those days ago in Madison but

had never bothered to call. He forgot until the ringing started that

it was another time-zone there -- an hour or two earlier. But when

Hilda answered, she sounded wide awake.

"Nice of you to call," she said.

"Nice of you to answer." Her voice sent a thrill up his spine.

"We've got cops outside of the ride here," she said. "We've only been

live for a week, too."

"They're at every ride," he said. "They shut us down too."

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"What am *I* going to do about it?"

"Sure, this is your thing, Perry. We woke up and discovered the cops

this morning and the first thing everyone did was wonder when you'd

call with the plan."

"You're kidding. What do I know about cops?"

"What do any of us know about cops? All we know is we built this thing

after you came and talked to us about it and now it's been shut down,

so we're waiting for you to tell us what to do next."

He groaned and sat down on a curb. "Oh, crap."

Then she sighed heavily at the other end. "OK, Perry, you need to pull

it together. We need you now. We need something that explains what's

going on, what to do next, and how to do it. There's a lot of energy

out here, a lot of people ready to fight. Just point us in the right

direction."

"I have a guy who's trying to figure that out right now."

"Perfect. Now you need to set up a conference call with every ride

operator so we can talk this over. Get online and post a time and an

address. I'll chat it up and make some calls. You make some calls

too. Everyone likes to hear from you. They like to know you're on

their side."

"Right," he said, getting back to his feet, turning around to get his

computer out of his trunk. "Right. That's totally the right thing to

do. I'm on it."

"Good man," she said.

A little pause stretched between them. "So," he said. "How you doing,

apart from all this?"

Her laugh was merry. "I thought you'd never ask. I'm looking forward

to your next visit, is how I'm doing."

"Really?"

"Of course really."

"You sounded a little pissed at me there is all." He sounded like a

lovesick teenager. "I mean --" He broke off.

"Your ass needed kicking, was all." Pause. "I'm not pissed at you,

though. When are you coming for a visit?"

"Got me," he said. "I guess I should, right?" He really sounded like a

teenager.

"You need to visit all the sites, check in on how we're doing."

Pause. "Plus you should come hang out with me some."

He almost pointed out all her warnings about only having a one-night

stand and not missing the people he was away from and so forth, but

stayed his tongue. The fact that she wanted him to come for a visit

was overshadowing everything, even the looming crisis with the cops.

"It's a deal."

"Deal."

"Well, bye."

"Bye."

He almost said, "You hang up first," but that would have been too

much. Instead he just kept the phone at his ear until he heard her

click.

Suzanne was pointing and shooting like mad. Perry sat down on the

cracked pavement beside her and unfolded his computer and started

sending out emails, setting up a conference-channel. He gave Suzanne a

short version of his talk with Hilda, being careful not to give a hint

of his feelings for her.

"She sounds like a sensible girl," Suzanne said. "You should go and

pay her another visit."

He blushed and she socked him in the shoulder.

"Take your call," she said. The cops were giving them the hairy

eyeball, and Perry screwed in his headset.

The conference channel was filling up. Perry checked off names as reps

from all the rides came online. There was a lot of tight, tense

chatter, jokes about the fuzz.

"OK," Perry said. "Let's get it started. There's cops blockading every

ride, right? Use the poll please." He posted a poll to the conference

page and it quickly got to 100 percent green. "So I just found the

cops outside of mine, too, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I've

got some dough for a lawyer, but I can't afford lawyers for

everyone. To make that work, we'd have to fly attorneys to every city

with a ride in it, and that's not practical as I'm sure you can tell."

A half-dozen flags went up in the conference page. "I need someone to

play moderator, 'cause I can't talk and mod at the same time. How

about you, Hilda?"

"OK," she said. "I'm Hilda Hammersen, from the Madison group. Post

one-line summaries of your points and I'll set a speaker order."

The conference page filled up. There was the official back channel at

the bottom where the text was spilling by too fast for Perry to parse,

and he knew that there were lots of unofficial back-channels in use,

too. He covered the mic and sighed. He had nothing to say to these

people. He didn't have any answers.

"Right. So who knows what we should do?" The back-channel went

crazy. Hilda started green-lighting speakers with their flags up.

"Why are you asking us, Perry? You've got to run this." The voice was

petulant and Perry saw that it was one of the Boston crew, which made

him wonder what Tjan was going to do when he discovered that Perry was

doing this.

The page pinkened and then sank into red. The other people on the call

clearly thought this was BS, which was a relief to Perry. Hilda cued

up the next speaker.

"We could set up information pickets at the gates to each ride hitting

people up for donations for our legal defense -- get the press to

cover it and maybe we could bring in enough to fight all the

injunctions."

The pink lightened a little, went back to neutral white, turned a

little green. Perry slowed down the back-channel a little and skimmed

it:

:: No way could we bring in enough, that's like 30 grand each I get a

couple hundred people here in the morning and that would mean a

hundred and fifty bucks each

:: No no it's totally do-able we can raise that easy just set up some

paypals and publicize the shit out of it

The next speaker was talking. "What if we got the maintenance bots to

break open the doors and carry the ride outside where everyone can see

it?"

Bright red. Dumb idea.

Perry broke in. "I'm worried that when people show up it'll provoke

some kind of confrontation with the law. It could get ugly here. How

can we keep that cooled out?"

Green.

"That's totally got to be our top priority," Hilda said.

Next speaker. "OK, so the best way to keep people calm is to tell them

that there's an alternative to going nuts, which maybe could be

raising money for a legal defense."

Green-ish. "What about finding pro-bono lawyers? What about the ACLU

or EFF?"

Greener.

The back-channel filled up with URLs and phone numbers and email

addresses.

"OK, time's running out here," Perry said. "You guys need to organize

a call-around to those orgs and see if they'll help us out. Pass the

hat at your rides, try to find lawyers. Everyone keep reporting in all

day -- especially if you get a win anywhere. I'm going to go take care

of things here."

Hilda IMed him -- "Good luck, Perry. You'll kick ass."

Perry started to IM back, but a shadow fell across his screen. It was

Jason, who ran the contact-lens stall. He was staring at the two

cop-cars quizzically, looking groggy but growing alarmed.

Perry closed his lid and got to his feet. "Morning, Jason." Behind

Jason were five or six other vendors. The sellers who lived in the

shantytown and could therefore walk to work were always first in. Soon

the commuters would start arriving in their beater cars.

"Hey, Perry," Jason said. He was chewing on an unlit cigarette, a

disgusting habit that was only marginally less gross than smoking

them. He'd tried toothpicks, but nothing would satisfy his oral

cravings like a filter-tip. At least he didn't light them. "What's

up?"

Perry told him what he knew, which wasn't much. Jason listened

carefully, as did the other vendors who arrived. "They're fucking with

you, man. The cops, Disney, all of them. Just fucking with you. You go

ahead and hire a lawyer to go to the court for you and see how far it

gets you. They're not playing by any rules, they're not interested in

the law you broke or whatever. They just want to fuck with you."

Suzanne appeared over Perry's shoulder.

"I'm Suzanne Church, Jason. I'm a reporter."

"Sure, I know you. You were there when they burned down the old

place."

"That was me. I think you're right. They're fucking with you guys. I

want to report on that because it might be that exposing it makes it

harder to continue. Can I record what you guys say and do?"

Jason grinned and slid the soggy cig from one corner of his mouth to

the other and back again. "Sure, that's cool with me." He turned to

the other sellers: "You guys don't mind, do you?" They joked and

laughed and said no. Perry let out a breath slowly. These guys didn't

want a confrontation with the cops -- they knew better than him that

they couldn't win that one.

Suzanne started interviewing them. The cops got out of their cars and

stared at them. The woman cop had her mirrorshades on now, and so the

both of them looked hard and eyeless. Perry looked away quickly.

The vendors with cars were pulling them around to the roadside leading

up to the ride, unpacking merchandise and setting it out on their

hoods. Vendors from the shantytown headed home and came back with

folding tables and blankets. These guys were business-people. They

weren't going to let the law stand in the way of putting food on the

table for their families.

The cops got back into their cars. Kettlewell worked his way

cautiously across the freeway, climbing laboriously over the

median. He had changed into a smart blazer and slacks, with a crisp

white shirt that hid his incipient belly. He looked like the

Kettlewell of old, the kind of man used to giving orders and getting

respect.

"Hey, man," Perry said. Kettlewell's easy smile was reassuring.

"Perry," he said, throwing an arm around his shoulders and leading him

away. "Come here and talk with me."

They stood in the lee of one of the sickly palms that stood by the

roadside. The day was coming up hot and Perry's t-shirt stuck to his

chest, though Kettlewell seemed dry and in control.

"What's going on, Perry?"

"Well, we did a phoner this morning with all the ride

operators. They're going to work on raising money for the defense and

getting pro-bono lawyers from the EFF or the ACLU or something."

Kettlewell did a double-take. "Wait, what? They're going to ask the

ACLU? They can't be trusted, Perry. They're *impact litigators* --

they'll take cases to make a point, even when it's not in their

clients' best interests."

"What could be more in our interests than getting lawyers to fight

these bogus injunctions?"

Kettlewell blew out a long breath. "OK, table it. Table it. Here's

what I've been pulling together: we've got a shitkicking corporate

firm that used to handle the Kodacell business that's sending out a

partner to go to the Broward County court this morning to get the

injunction lifted. They're doing this as a freebie, but I told them

that they could handle the business if we put together all the rides

into one entity."

Now it was Perry's turn to boggle. "What kind of entity?"

"We have to incorporate them all, get them all under one umbrella so

that we can defend them all in one go. Otherwise there's no way we're

going to be able to save them. Without a corporate entity, it's like

trying to herd cats. Besides, you need some kind of structure, a

formal constitution or something for this thing. You've got a network

protocol, and that's it. There's money at stake here -- potentially

some big money -- and you can't run something like that on a

handshake. It's too vulnerable. You'll get embezzled or sued into

oblivion before you even have a chance to grow. So I've started the

paperwork to get everything under one banner."

Perry counted to ten, backwards. "Landon, I'm really thankful that

you're helping us out here. You're probably going to save our

asses. But you can't put everything under one banner -- you can't just

declare to these people that their projects are ours --"

"Of course they're yours. They're using your IP, your protocols, your

designs.... If they don't come on board, you can just threaten to sue

them --"

"Landon! Please listen to me. We are not going to effect a hostile

takeover of my friends. They are equal owners of everything we do

here. And no offense, but if you ever mention suing other projects

over our 'IP'" -- he made sarcastic finger quotes -- "then we're

through having any discussions about this. OK?"

Kettlewell snorted air through his nostrils. "My apologies, I didn't

realize that this was such a sensitive area for you." Perry boggled at

this -- lawsuits against ride operators! "But I can get that. Here's

the thing, Perry. Without some kind of fast-moving structure you're

going to be dead. Even if we repel the boarders this morning, they'll

be back tomorrow and the day after. You need something stronger than a

bunch of friends who have loose agreements. You need a legal entity

that can speak for everyone. Maybe that's a co-op or a charity or

something else, but it's got to exist. You may not think you have any

say over these other rides, but does everyone else agree? What if you

get sued for someone's bad deeds in Minneapolis? What if some ride

operator sues *you* to put you out of business?"

Perry's head swam. He hated conversations like this. He didn't have

any good answer for Kettlewell's objections, but it was ridiculous. No

one from a ride was going to sue him. Or maybe they would, if he got

all grabby and went MINE MINE MINE and incorporated everything with

him at the top. Hilda said he was the one they all looked to, but that

was because he would never try to hijack their projects.

"No."

"No what?"

"No to all of it. We have to defend this thing, but we're not going to

do it by trying to tie everyone down to contracts and agreements where

I get to control everything. Maybe a co-op is the right way to go, but

we can't just declare a co-op and force everyone to be members. We

have to get everyone to agree, everyone who's involved, and then they

can elect a council or something and work out some kind of uniform

agreement. I mean, that's how all the good free software projects

work. There's authority, but it's not all unilateral and

imperious. I'm not interested in that. I'd rather shut this down than

declare myself pope-emperor of ride-land."

Kettlewell scrubbed his eyes with his fists. Up close, the lines in

his face were deep-sunk, his eyeballs bloodshot and hung over. "You're

killing me, you know that? What good is principle going to do when

they knock this fucking thing down and slap you with a gigantic

lawsuit?"

Perry shrugged. "I really appreciate what you've done, but I'd rather

lose it than fuck it up."

They stared at each other for a long time. Cars whizzed past. Perry

felt like a big jerk. Kettlewell had done amazing work for him this

morning, just out of the goodness of his own heart, and Perry had

repaid him by being a stiff-necked dickwad. He felt an overwhelming

desire to take it back, just put Kettlewell in charge and let him run

the whole show. Just shrug his shoulders and abdicate.

He looked down at the ground and up into the straggly palms, then

heaved a sigh.

"Landon, I'm sorry, OK, but that's just how it is. I totally dig that

you're saying that we're risking everything by not doing it your way,

but from my seat, doing it your way will kill it anyway. So we need a

better answer."

Kettlewell scrubbed his eyes some more. "You and my wife sound like

you'd get along."

Perry waited for him to go on, but it became clear he had nothing more

to say.

Perry went back to the cop cars just as the first gang of goths showed

up to take a ride.

$$$$