Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

its own dynamicchannel selection to avoid stepping on other access points."

  Alan turned his head this way and that, making admiring noises. "Youmade this, huh?"

  "For about eighty bucks. It's my fifteenth box. Eventually, I wanna havea couple hundred of these."

  "Ambitious," Alan said, handing the box back. "How do you pay for theparts you have to buy? Do you have a grant?"

  "A grant? Shit, no! I've got a bunch of street kids who come in and takedigital pix of the stuff I have no use for, research them online, andpost them to eBay. I split the take with them. Brings in a couple granda week, and I'm keeping about fifty street kids fed besides. I go divingthree times a week out in Concord and Oakville and Richmond Hill,anywhere I can find an industrial park. If I had room, I'd recruit fiftymore kids -- I'm bringing it in faster than they can sell it."

  "Why don't you just do less diving?"

  "Are you kidding me? It's all I can do not to go out every night! Youwouldn't believe the stuff I find -- all I can think about is all thestuff I'm missing out on. Some days I wish that my kids were lesshonest; if they ripped off some stuff, I'd have room for a lot more."

  Alan laughed. Worry for Edward and Frederick and George nagged at him,impotent anxiety, but this was just so fascinating. Fascinating anddistracting, and, if not normal, at least not nearly so strange as hecould be. He imagined the city gridded up with junk equipment, radiatingInternet access from the lakeshore to the outer suburbs. The grandiositytook his breath away.

  "Look," Kurt said, spreading out a map of Kensington Market on theunmade bed. "I've got access points here, here, here, and here. Anothereight or ten and I'll have the whole Market covered. Then I'm going tohead north, cover the U of T campus, and push east towards YongeStreet. Bay Street and University Avenue are going to be tough -- howcan I convince bankers to let me plug this by their windows?"

  "Kurt," Alan said, "I suspect that the journey to University Avenue isgoing to be a lot slower than you expect it to be."

  Kurt jutted his jaw out. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "There's a lot of real estate between here and there. A lot of trees andhigh-rises, office towers and empty lots. You're going to have to knockon doors every couple hundred meters -- at best -- and convince them tolet you install one of these boxes, made from garbage, and plug it in,to participate in what?"

  "Democratic communication!" Kurt said.

  "Ah, well, my guess is that most of the people who you'll need toconvince won't really care much about that. Won't be able to make thatabstract notion concrete."

  Kurt mumbled into his chest. Alan could see that he was fuming.

  "Just because you don't have the vision to appreciate this --"

  Alan held up his hand. "Stop right there. I never said anything of thesort. I think that this is big and exciting and looks like a lot offun. I think that ringing doorbells and talking people into letting menail an access point to their walls sounds like a *lot* of fun. Really,I'm not kidding.

  "But this is a journey, not a destination. The value you'll get out ofthis will be more in the doing than the having done. The having done'sgoing to take decades, I'd guess. But the doing's going to besomething." Alan's smile was so broad it ached. The idea had seizedhim. He was drunk on it.

  The buzzer sounded and Kurt got up to answer it. Alan craned his neck tosee a pair of bearded neohippies in rasta hats.

  "Are you Kurt?" one asked.

  "Yeah, dude, I'm Kurt."

  "Marcel told us that we could make some money here? We're trying toraise bus fare to Burning Man? We could really use the work?"

  "Not today, but maybe tomorrow," Kurt said. "Come by around lunchtime."

  "You sure you can't use us today?"

  "Not today," Kurt said. "I'm busy today."

  "All right," the other said, and they slouched away.

  "Word of mouth," Kurt said, with a jingling shrug. "Kids just turn up,looking for work with the trash."

  "You think they'll come back tomorrow?" Alan was pretty good atevaluating kids and they hadn't looked very reliable.

  "Those two? Fifty-fifty chance. Tell you what, though: there's alwaysenough kids and enough junk to go around."

  "But you need to make arrangements to get your access points mounted andpowered. You've got to sort it out with people who own stores andhouses."

  "You want to knock on doors?" Kurt said.

  "I think I would," Alan said. "I suspect it's a possibility. We canstart with the shopkeepers, though."

  "I haven't had much luck with merchants," Kurt said, shrugging hisshoulders. His chains jingled and a whiff of armpit wafted across theclaustrophobic hollow. "Capitalist pigs."

  "I can't imagine why," Alan said.

  #

  "Wales Avenue, huh?" Kurt said.

  They were walking down Oxford Street, and Alan was seeing it with fresheyes, casting his gaze upward, looking at the lines of sight from onebuilding to another, mentally painting in radio-frequency shadows castby the transformers on the light poles.

  "Just moved in on July first," Alan said. "Still getting settled in."

  "Which house?"

  "The blue one, with the big porch, on the corner."

  "Sure, I know it. I scored some great plumbing fixtures out of thedumpster there last winter."

  "You're welcome," Alan said.

  They turned at Spadina and picked their way around the tourist crowdsshopping the Chinese importers' sidewalk displays of bamboo parasols andHello Kitty slippers, past the fogged-up windows of the dim-sumrestaurants and the smell of fresh pork buns. Alan bought a condensedmilk and kiwi snow-cone from a sidewalk vendor and offered to treatKurt, but he declined.

  "You never know about those places," Kurt said. "How clean is their ice,anyway? Where do they wash their utensils?"

  "You dig around in dumpsters for a living," Alan said. "Aren't youimmune to germs?"

  Kurt turned at Baldwin, and Alan followed. "I don't eat garbage, I pickit," he said. He sounded angry.

  "Hey, sorry," Alan said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to imply --"

  "I know you didn't," Kurt said, stopping in front of a dry-goods storeand spooning candied ginger into a baggie. He handed it to theage-hunched matron of the shop, who dropped it on her scale and dustedher hands on her black dress. Kurt handed her a two-dollar coin and tookthe bag back. "I'm just touchy, okay? My last girlfriend split becauseshe couldn't get past it. No matter how much I showered, I was neverclean enough for her."

  "Sorry," Alan said again.

  "I heard something weird about that blue house on the corner," Kurtsaid. "One of my kids told me this morning, he saw something last nightwhen he was in the park."

  Alan pulled up short, nearly colliding with a trio of cute universitygirls in wife-beaters pushing bundle-buggies full of newspaper-wrappedfish and bags of soft, steaming bagels. They stepped around him, luggingtheir groceries over the curb and back onto the sidewalk, not breakingfrom their discussion.

  "What was it?"

  Kurt gave him a sideways look. "It's weird, okay? The kid who saw it isnever all that reliable, and he likes to embellish."

  "Okay," Alan said. The crowd was pushing around them now, trying to getpast. The dry-goods lady sucked her teeth in annoyance.

  "So this kid, he was smoking a joint in the park last night, reallylate, after the clubs shut down. He was alone, and he saw what hethought was a dog dragging a garbage bag down the steps of your house."

  "Yes?"

  "So he went over to take a look, and he saw that it was too big to be agarbage bag, and the dog, it looked sick, it moved wrong. He tookanother step closer and he must have triggered a motion sensor becausethe porch light switched on. He says..."

  "What?"

  "He's not very reliable. He says it wasn't a dog, he said it was like adried-out mummy or something, and it had its teeth sunk into the neck ofthis big, fat, naked guy, and it was dragging the fat guy out into thestreet. When the light came on, though, it gave the fat guy's neck aha
rd shake, then let go and turned on this kid, walking toward him onstumpy little feet. He says it made a kind of growling noise and liftedup its hand like it was going to slap the kid, and the kid screamed andran off. When he got to Dundas, he turned around and saw the fat guy getdragged into an alley between two of the stores on Augusta."

  "I see," Alan said.

  "It's stupid, I know," Kurt said.

  Natalie and Link rounded the corner, carrying slices of pizza fromPizzabilities, mounded high with eggplant and cauliflower and othertoppings that were never intended for use in connection with pizza. Theystartled on seeing Alan and Kurt, then started to walk away.

  "Wait," Alan called. "Natalie, Link, wait." He smiled apologetically atKurt. "My neighbors," he said.

  Natalie and Link had stopped and turned around. Alan and Kurt walked tothem.

  "Natalie, Link, this is Kurt," he said. They shook hands all around.

  "I wanted to apologize," Alan said. "I didn't mean to put you betweenKrishna and me. It was very unfair."

  Natalie smiled warily. Link lit a cigarette with a great show ofindifference. "It's all right," Natalie said.

  "No, it's not," Alan said. "I was distraught, but that's noexcuse. We're going to be neighbors for a long time, and there's nosense in our not getting along."

  "Really, it's okay," Natalie said.

  "Yeah, fine," Link said.

  "Three of my brothers have gone missing," Alan said. "That's why I wasso upset. One disappeared a couple of weeks ago, another last night, andone this morning. Krishna..." He thought for a moment. "He taunted meabout it. I really wanted to find out what he saw."

  Kurt shook his head. "Your brother went missing last night?"

  "From my house."

  "So what the kid saw..."

  Alan turned to Natalie. "A friend of Kurt's was in the park lastnight. He says he saw my brother being carried off."

  Kurt shook his head. "Your brother?"

  "What do you mean, 'carried off'?" Natalie said. She folded her slice inhalf to keep the toppings from spilling.

  "Someone is stalking my brothers," Alan said. "Someone very strong andvery cunning. Three are gone that I know about. There are others, but Icould be next."

  "Stalking?" Natalie said.

  "My family is a little strange," Alan said. "I grew up in the northcountry, and things are different there. You've heard of blood feuds?"

  Natalie and Link exchanged a significant look.

  "I know it sounds ridiculous. You don't need to be involved. I justwanted to let you know why I acted so strangely last night."

  "We have to get back," Natalie said. "Nice to meet you, Kurt. I hope youfind your brother, Andy."

  "Brothers," Alan said.

  "Brothers," Natalie said, and walked away briskly.

  #

  Alan was the oldest of the brothers, and that meant that he was the onewho blazed all the new trails in the family.

  He met a girl in the seventh grade. Her name was Marci, and she had justtransferred in from Scotland. Her father was a mining engineer, andshe'd led a gypsy life that put her in stark contrast to thethird-generation homebodies that made up most of the rest of theirclass.

  She had red hair and blue eyes and a way of holding her face in reposethat made her look cunning at all times. No one understood her accent,but there was a wiry ferocity in her movement that warned off any kidwho thought about teasing her about it.

  Alan liked to play in a marshy corner of the woods that bordered theplayground after school, crawling around in the weeds, catching toadsand letting them go again, spying on the crickets and the secret livesof the larvae that grubbed in the milkweed. He was hunkered down on hishaunches one afternoon when Marci came crunching through the tallgrass. He ducked down lower, then peered out from his hiding spot as shecrouched down and he heard the unmistakable patter of urine as she peedin the rushes.

  His jaw dropped. He'd never seen a girl pee before, had no idea what thesquatting business was all about. The wet ground sucked at his sneakerand he tipped back on his ass with a yelp. Marci straightened abruptlyand crashed over to him, kicking him hard in the ribs when she reachedhim, leaving a muddy toeprint on his fall windbreaker.

  She wound up for another kick and he hollered something wordless andscurried back, smearing marsh mud across his jeans and jacket.

  "You pervert!" she said, pronouncing it Yuh peervurrt!

  "I am not!" he said, still scooting back.

  "Watching from the bushes!" she said.

  "I wasn't -- I was already here, and you -- I mean, what were *you*doing? I was just minding my own business and you came by, I just didn'twant to be bothered, this is *my* place!"

  "You don't own it," she said, but she sounded slightly chastened. "Don'ttell anyone I had a piss here, all right?"

  "I won't," he said.

  She sat down beside him, unmindful of the mud on her denimskirt. "Promise," she said. "It's so embarrassing."

  "I promise," he said.

  "Swear," she said, and poked him in the ribs with a bony finger.

  He clutched his hands to his ribs. "Look," he said, "I swear. I'm goodat secrets."

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Oh, aye? And I suppose you've lots ofsecrets, then?"

  He said nothing, and worked at keeping the smile off the corners of hismouth.

  She poked him in the ribs, then got him in the stomach as he moved toprotect his chest. "Secrets, huh?"

  He shook his head and clamped his lips shut. She jabbed a flurry ofpokes and prods at him while he scooted back on his butt, then dug herclawed hands into his tummy and tickled him viciously. He giggled, thenlaughed, then started to hiccup uncontrollably. He shoved her awayroughly and got up on his knees, gagging.

  "Oh, I like you," she said, "just look at that. A wee tickle and you'reready to toss your lunch." She tenderly stroked his hair until thehiccups subsided, then clawed at his belly again, sending him rollingthrough the mud.

  Once he'd struggled to his feet, he looked at her, panting. "Why are youdoing this?"

  "You're not serious! It's the most fun I've had since we moved to thisterrible place."

  "You're a sadist!" He'd learned the word from a book he'd bought fromthe ten-cent pile out front of the used bookstore. It had a clipped-outrecipe for liver cutlets between the pages and lots of squishy grown-upsex things that seemed improbable if not laughable. He'd looked "sadist"up in the class dictionary.

  "Aye," she said. "I'm that." She made claws of her hands and advanced onhim slowly. He giggled uncontrollably as he backed away fromher. "C'mere, you, you've more torture comin' to ye before I'm satisfiedthat you can keep a secret."

  He held his arms before him like a movie zombie and walked towardher. "Yes, mathter," he said in a monotone. Just as he was about toreach her, he dodged to one side, then took off.

  She chased him, laughing, halfway back to the mountain, then criedoff. He stopped a hundred yards up the road from her, she doubled overwith her hands planted on her thighs, face red, chest heaving. "You goon, then," she called. "But it's more torture for you at schooltomorrow, and don't you forget it!"

  "Only if you catch me!" he called back.

  "Oh, I'll catch you, have no fear."

  #

  She caught him at lunch. He was sitting in a corner of the schoolyard,eating from a paper sack of mushrooms and dried rabbit and keeping aneye on Edward-Frederick-George as he played tag with the otherkindergartners. She snuck up behind him and dropped a handful of graveldown the gap of his pants and into his underpants. He sprang to hisfeet, sending gravel rattling out the cuffs of his jeans.

  "Hey!" he said, and she popped something into his mouth. It was wet andwarm from her hand and it squirmed. He spat it out and it landed on theschoolyard with a soft splat.

  It was an earthworm, thick with loamy soil.

  "You!" he said, casting about for a curse of sufficientvehemence. "You!"

  She hopped from foot to foot in front of him, clearly delighted with
this reaction. He reached out for her and she danced back. He took offafter her and they were chasing around the yard, around hopscotches andtag games and sand castles and out to the marshy woods. She skiddedthrough the puddles and he leapt over them. She ducked under a branchand he caught her by the hood of her windbreaker.

  Without hesitating, she flung her arms in the air and slithered out ofthe windbreaker, down to a yellow T-shirt that rode up her back,exposing her pale freckles and the knobs of her spine, the fingers ofher ribs. She took off again and he balled the windbreaker up in hisfist and took off after her.

  She stepped behind a bushy pine, and when he rounded the corner she waswaiting for him, her hands clawed, digging at his tummy, leaving himgiggling. He pitched back into the pine needles and she followed,straddling his waist and tickling him until he coughed and choked andgasped for air.

  "Tell me!"