The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was typing, Lester holding something out of sight.
How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan’s amusement, Kettlewell’s enrichment? The postures were identical—though their bodies had changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with wizening makeup and hair-dye.
She must have made a noise, because Lester looked up—or maybe it was just the uncanny, semi-psychic bond between an old married couple. He grinned at her like he was ten years old and she grinned back and went around to the door.
“Hello, boys,” she said. They straightened up, both of them unconsciously cradling their low backs, and she suppressed a grin. My little boys, all grown up.
“Darling!” Lester said. “Come here, have a look!”
He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her to the bench, leaning on her a little.
It was in pieces, but she could see where it was going: a pair of familiar boxy shapes, two of Lester’s mechanical computers, their cola-can registers spilling away in a long daisy-chain of worm-gears and rotating shafts. One figure was big and round-shouldered like a vintage refrigerator. The other was cockeyed, half its gears set higher than the other half. Each had a single, stark mechanical arm extended before it, and at the end of each arm was a familiar cracked and fragrant baseball glove.
Lester put a ball into one of the gloves and Perry hammered away at the keyboard. Very, very slowly, the slope-shouldered robot drew its mechanical arm back—“We used one of the open-source prosthestic plans,” Lester whispered in the tense moment. Then it lobbed a soft underhand toss to the lopsided one.
The ball arced through the air and the other bot repositioned its arm in a series of clattering jerks. It seemed to Suzanne that the ball would miss the glove and bounce off of the robot’s carapace, and she winced. Then, at the very last second, the robot repositioned its arm with one more fast jerk, and the ball fell into the pocket.
A moment later, the lopsided bot—Perry, it was Perry, that was easy to see—tossed the ball to the round-shouldered one, who was clearly her Lester, as she’d first known him. Lester-bot caught the ball with a similar series of jerks and returned the volley.
It was magic to watch the robots play their game of catch. Suzanne was mesmerized, mouth open. Lester squeezed her shoulder with uncontained excitement.
The Lester-bot lobbed one to Perry-bot, but Perry-bot flubbed the toss. The ball made a resounding gong sound as it bounced off of Perry-bot’s carapace, and Perry-bot wobbled.
Suzanne winced, but Lester and Perry both dissolved in gales of laughter. She watched the Perry-bot try to get itself re-oriented, aligning its torso to face Lester-bot and she saw that it was funny, very funny, like a particularly great cartoon.
“They do that on purpose?”
“Not exactly—but there’s no way they’re going to be perfect, so we built in a bunch of stuff that would make it funnier when it happened. It is now officially a feature, not a bug.” Perry glowed with pride.
“Isn’t it bad for them to get beaned with a baseball?” she asked as Lester carefully handed the ball to Perry-bot, who lobbed it to Lester-bot again.
“Well, yeah. But it’s kind of an artistic statement,” Perry said, looking away from them both. “About the way that friendships always wear you down, like upper and lower molars grinding away at each other.”
Lester squeezed her again. “Over time, they’ll knock each other apart.”
Tears pricked at Suzanne’s eyes. She blinked them away. “Guys, this is great.” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t care. Lester squeezed her tighter.
“Come to bed soon, hon,” she said to Lester. “I’m going away again tomorrow afternoon—New York, a restaurant opening.”
“I’ll be right up,” Lester said, and kissed the top of her head. She’d forgotten that he was that tall. He didn’t stand all the way up.
She went to bed, but she couldn’t sleep. She crossed to the window and drew back the curtain and looked out at the backyard—the scummy swimming pool she kept forgetting to do something about, the heavy grapefruit and lemon trees, the shed. Perry stood on the shed’s stoop, looking up at the night sky. She pulled the curtains around herself an instant before he looked up at her.
Their eyes met and he nodded slowly.
“Thank you,” she mouthed silently.
He blew her a kiss, stuck out a foot, and then bowed slightly over his outstretched leg.
She let the curtain fall back into place and went back to bed. Lester climbed into bed with her a few minutes later and spooned up against her back, his face buried in her neck.
She fell asleep almost instantly.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Andrew Leonard and Salon for publishing this when it was Themepunks.
Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Irene Gallo, Pablo Defendini, Justin Golenbock, Liz Gorinksy, Tom Doherty and the many wonderful people at Tor for their good work putting this book into the world.
Likewise thanks to Sarah Hodgson, Alice Moss and Victoria Barnsley at HarperCollins for making this book happen in the UK.
Thanks to my agents, Russell Galen, Danny Baror and Justin Manask.
Thanks to my mother, Dr Roslyn Doctorow, who remains the sharpest proofer in the business.
Thanks to my business partners at Boing Boing, the staff of MAKE: Magazine, and to all the makers who let me hold their skateboards while they welded the killer robots.
And thanks, of course, to Alice and Poesy, who are the reason for all of it.
About this download
There’s a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What’s more, they’re powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.
I’m speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.
These people don’t believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made—by elected officials, acting for the public good—they always safeguard this right.
But ebook publishers don’t respect copyright law, and they don’t believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you “buy” an ebook, you’re really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, “Buy this book” and they talk about “Ebook sales” at conferences—no one says, “License this book for your Kindle” or “Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001 % of all publishing to 0.0001 % of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!”)
I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law’s guarantee of ownership in your books.
So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from Creative Commons and it gives you even more rights than you get to a regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy.
What do I want from you in return? Read the book. Tell your friends. Review it on Amazon or at your local bookseller. Bring it to your bookclub. Assign it to your students (older students, please—that sex scene is a scorcher) (now I’ve got your attention, don’t I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years,
and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Oh yeah. Also: if you like it, buy it or donate a copy to a worthy, cash-strapped institution.
Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when I became an adult. Because I can’t stop you from sharing it (zeroes and ones aren’t ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to the cause.
I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don’t get oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch. The idea that I’d get dyspeptic over people—readers celebrating what I write is goddamned bizarre
So, download this book.
Some rules of the road:
It’s kind of a tradition around here that my readers convert my ebooks to their favorite formats and send them to me here, and it’s one that I love! If you’ve converted these files to another format, send them to me ([email protected], subject Makers Conversion) and I’ll host them, but before you do, make sure you read the following:
· Only one conversion per format, first come, first serve. That means that if someone’s already converted the file to a Femellhebber 3000 document, that’s the one you’re going to find here. I just don’t know enough about esoteric readers to adjudicate disputes about what the ideal format is for your favorite device.
· Make sure include a link to the reader as well. When you send me an ebook file, make sure that you include a link to the website for the reader technology as well so that I can include it below.
· No cover art. The text of this book is freely copyable, the cover, not so much. The rights to it are controlled by my publisher, so don’t include it with your file.
· No DRM. The Creative Commons license prohibits sharing the file with “DRM” (sometimes called “copy-protection”) on it, and that’s fine by me. Don’t send me the book with DRM on it. If you’re converting to a format that has a DRM option, make sure it’s switched off.
A word to professors, librarians, and people who want to donate money to me
Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I’m not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audience I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I’ve found it.
Here’s the deal: there are lots of professors and librarians who’d love to get hard-copies of this book into their students’ and patrons’ hands, but don’t have the budget for it.
There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.
I’m proposing that we put them together.
If you’re a prof or librarian and you want a free copy of Makers, email [email protected] with your name and the name and address of your school. It’ll be posted below by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.
If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Makers and you want to donate something to say thanks, check below to find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to [email protected] so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don’t want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we’ll keep you anonymous, otherwise we’ll thank you on the donate page.
Check http://craphound.com/makers/donate for profs, librarians and similar people seeking donations.
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
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Tor Books: 978-0765312792
HarperCollins UK/Voyager: 978-0007325221
Last modified 12 Dec 2009
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Makers Page 56