Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  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 th
ing, 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.”