“We didn’t, really,” Lester said. “This was a real standing on the shoulders of giants project. We made use of a bunch of stuff that was on the shelf already, put it together, and then other people helped us refine it and get it working well. We’re just part of the group, like I keep saying.” He had a thought. “Besides, if we were in charge, Brazil wouldn’t have been able to zero us out.
“You guys are being really weird and suit-y about this, you know? I’ve fixed the problem: no one can take us down like this again. It just won’t happen. I’ve put the fix on the version-server for the codebase, so everyone else can deploy it if they want to. The problem’s solved. We’ll be shut for an hour or two, but who cares? You’re missing the big picture: Brazil opened fifty rides yesterday! I mean, it sucks that we didn’t notice until it screwed us up, but Brazil’s got it all online. Who’s next? China? India?”
“Russia?” Kettlewell said, looking at the door that Suzanne had left by. He was clearly trying to needle Lester.
Lester ignored him. “I’d love to go to Brazil and check out how they’ve done it. I speak a little Portuguese even—enough to say, ’Are you 18 yet?’ anyway.”
“You’re weird,” Lyenitchka said. Ada giggled and said, “Weird!”
Eva shook her head. “The kids have got a point,” she said. “You people are all a little weird. Why are you fighting? Tjan, Landon, you came here to manage the business side of things, and that’s what you’re doing. Lester, you’re in charge of the creative and technical stuff and that’s what you’re doing. Without Lester, you two wouldn’t have any business to run. Without these guys, you’d be in jail or something by now. Make peace, because you’re on the same side. I’ve got enough children to look after here.”
Kettlewell snapped a nod at her. “Right as ever, darling. OK, I apologize, all right?”
“Me too,” Lester said. “I was kidding about going to Brazil—at least while Perry’s still away.”
“He’s coming home,” Tjan said. “He called me this morning. He’s bringing the girl, too.”
“Yoko!” Lester said, and grinned. “OK, someone should get online and find out how all the other rides are coping with this. I’m sure they’re going nutso out there.”
“You do that,” Kettlewell said. “We’ve got another call with the lawyers in ten minutes.”
“How’s all that going?”
“Let me put it this way,” Kettlewell said, and for a second he was back in his glory days, slick and formidable, a shark. “I liquidated my shares in Disney this morning. They’re down fifty points since the NYSE opened. You wait until Tokyo wakes up, they’re going to bail and bail and bail.”
Lester smiled back. “OK, well that’s good, then.”
He hunkered down with a laptop and got his homebrew wireless rig up and running—a card would have been cheaper, but his rig gave him lots of robustness against malicious interference, multi-path and plain old attenuation—and got his headline reader running.
He set to reading the posts and dispelling the popups that tried to call his attention to this or that. His filters had lots to tell him about, and the areas of his screen designated for different interests were starting to pinken as they accumulated greater urgency.
He waved them away and concentrated on getting through to all the ride-maintainers who had questions about his patches. But there was one pink area that wouldn’t go. It was his serendipity zone, where things that didn’t match his filters but had lots of interestingness—comments and reposts from people he paid attention to—and some confluence with his keywords turned up.
Impatiently, he waved it up, and a page made of bits of LiveJournals and news reports and photo-streams assembled itself.
His eye fell first on the photos. But for the shock of black and neon green hair, he wouldn’t have recognized the kid in the pictures as Death Waits. His face was a ruin. His nose was a bloody rose, his eyes were both swollen shut. One ear was ruined—apparently he’d been dragged some distance with that side of his head on the ground. His cheeks were pulpy and bruised. Then he clicked through to the photos from where they’d found Death, before they’d cleaned him up in the ambulance, and he had to turn his head away and breathe deeply. Both legs and both arms were clearly broken, with at least one compound fracture. His crotch—Jesus. Lester looked away again, then quickly closed the window.
He switched to text accounts from Death’s friends who’d been to see him in the hospital. He would live, but he might not walk again. He was lucid, and he was telling stories about the man who’d beaten him—
You should just shut the fuck up about Disney on the fucking Internet, you know that, kid?
Lester got up and went to find Kettlewell and Tjan and Suzanne—oh, especially Suzanne—again. He didn’t think for one second that Death would have invented that. In fact, it was just the sort of brave thing that the gutsy little kid might have had the balls to report on.
Every step he took, he saw that ruin of a face, the compound fracture, the luminous blood around his groin. He made it halfway to the guesthouse before he found himself leaning against a shanty, throwing up. Tears and bile streaming down his face, chest heaving, Lester decided that this wasn’t about fun anymore. Lester came to understand what it meant to be responsible for people’s lives. When he stood up and wiped his face on the tail of his tight, glittering shirt, he was a different person.
Sweating in the suffocating afternoon heat, his re-casted arm on fire, Hilda had shown him the article about Death Waits while they were being screened for their connection at O’Hare. The TSA guy was swabbing his cast with a black-powder residue detector, and as Perry read it, he let out an involuntary yelp and a jump that sent him back for a full round of tertiary screening. No date with Dr. Jellyfinger, though it was a close thing.
Hilda was deep in her own phone, probing ferociously at it, occasionally picking it up and talking into it, then poking at it some more. Neither of them looked out the windows much, though in his mind, Perry had rehearsed this homecoming as a kind of tour of his territory, picking out which absurd landmarks he’d point out, which funny stories he’d tell, pausing to nuzzle Hilda’s throat.
But by the time he’d absorbed the mailing-list traffic and done a couple phoners with the people back in Madison—particularly Ernie, who was freaking about Death Waits and calling for tight physical security for all their people—they were pulling in at the ride. The cabbie, a Turk, wasn’t very cool about the neighborhood, and he kept slowing down on the side of the road and offering to let them out there, and Perry kept insisting that he take them all the way.
“No, you can’t just drop me here, man. For the tenth time, I’ve got a fucking cast on my broken arm. I’m not carrying my suitcase a mile from here. I live there. It’s safe. God, it’s not like I’m asking you to take me to a war-zone.”
He didn’t want to tip the guy, but he did. The cabbie was just trying to play it safe. Lots of people tried to play it safe. It didn’t make them assholes, even if it did make them ineffectual and useless.
While Perry tipped him, Hilda pulled the suitcase out of the cab’s trunk and she’d barely had time to shut the lid when the driver roared off like he was trying to outrun a sniper.
Perry grimaced. This was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. He was supposed to be showing off his toys, all he’d wrought, to this girl. The town was all around them and they were about to charge in without even pausing to consider its Dr Seuss wonderment.
“Wait a sec,” Perry said. He took her hand. “See that? That was the first shanty they built. Five stories now.” The building was made of prefab concrete for the first couple stories, then successively lighter materials, with the roof-shack made of bamboo. “The designs are experimental, from the Army Corps of Engineers mostly, but they say they’ll stand a force-five hurricane.” He grimaced again. “Probably not the bamboo one, of course.”
“Of course,” Hilda said. “What’s that one?” She’d picked up on his mood, she knew he wanted to show her around before they ended up embroiled in ride-politics and work again.”
“You’ve got a good eye, my dear. That’s the finest BBQ on the continent. See how the walls are a little sooty looking? That’s carbonized ambrosia, a mix of fat and spice and hickory that you could scrape off and bottle as perfume.”
“Eww.”
“You haven’t tried Lemarr’s ribs yet,” he said, and goosed her. She squeaked and punched him in the shoulder. He showed her the tuck-shops, the kids playing, the tutor’s place, the day-care center, the workshops, taking her on a grand-circle tour of this place he’d help conjure into existence.
“Now there’s someone I haven’t seen in far too long,” Francis said. He’d aged something fierce in the last year, booze making his face subside into a mess of wrinkles and pouches and broken blood-vessels. He gave Perry a hard hug that smelled of booze, and it wasn’t even lunchtime.
“Francis, meet Hilda Hammersen; Hilda, meet Francis Clammer: aerospace engineer and gentleman of leisure.”
He took her hand and feinted a kiss at it, and Hilda good-naturedly rolled her eyes at this.
“What do you think of our lovely little settlement, then, Ms Hammersen?”
“It’s like something out of a fairy-tale,” she said. “You hear stories about Christiania and how good and peaceful it all was, but whenever you see squatters on TV, it’s always crack houses and drive-bys. You’ve really got something here.”
Francis nodded. “We get a bad rap, but we’re no different really from any other place where people take pride in what they own. I built my place, with my two hands. If Jimmy Carter had been there with Habitat for Humanity, we would have gotten no end of good press. Because we did it without a dead ex-president on the scene, we’re crooks. Perry tell you about what the law does around here?’
Perry nodded. “Yeah. She knows.”
Francis patted his cast. “Nice hardware, buddy. So when some Bible-thumping do-gooder gives you a leg up, you’re a folk-hero. Help yourself, you’re a CHUD. It’s the same with you people and your ride. If you had the backing of a giant corporation with claws sunk deep into kids’ brains, you’d be every package-tour operator’s wet dream. Build it yourself in the guts of a dead shopping center, and you’re some kind of slimy underclass.”
“Maybe that’s true,” said Hilda. “But it’s not necessarily true. Back in Madison, the locals love us, they think we do great stuff. After the law came after us, they came by with food and money and helped us rebuild. Scrappy activists get a lot of love in this country, too. Not everyone wants a big corporation to spoon-feed them.”
“Off in hippie college-towns you’ll always find people with enough brains to realize that their neighbors aren’t the boogieman. But there ain’t so many hippie college towns these days. I wish you two luck, but I think you’d be nuts to walk out the door in the morning expecting anything better than a kick in the teeth.”
That made Perry think of Death Waits, and the sense of urgency came back to him. “OK, we have to go now,” he said. “Thanks, Francis.”
“Nice to meet you, young woman,” he said, and when he smiled, it was a painful thing, all pouches and wrinkles and sags, and he gimped away with his limp more pronounced than ever.
They tracked down the crew at the tea-house’s big table. Everyone roared greetings at them when they came through the door, a proper homecoming, but when Perry counted heads, he realized that there was no one watching the ride.
“Guys, who’s running the ride?”
They told him about Brazil then, and Hilda listened with her head cocked, her face animated with surprise, dismay, then delight. “You say there are fifty rides open?”
“All at once,” Lester said. “All in one go.”
“Holy mother of poo,” Hilda breathed. Perry couldn’t even bring himself to say anything. He couldn’t even imagine Brazil in his head—jungles? beaches? He knew nothing about the country. They’d built fifty rides, without even making contact with him. He and Lester had designed the protocol to be open because they thought it would make it easier for others to copy what they’d done, but he’d never thought—
It was like vertigo, that feeling.
“So you’re Yoko, huh?” Lester said finally. It made everyone smile, but the tension was still there. Something big had just happened, bigger than any of them, bigger than the beating that had been laid on Death Waits, bigger than anything Perry had ever done. From his mind to a nation on another continent—
“You’re the sidekick, huh?” Hilda said.
Lester laughed. “Touche. It’s very nice to meet you and thank you for bringing him back home. We were starting to miss him, though God alone knows why.”
“I plan on keeping him,” she said, giving his bicep a squeeze. It brought Perry back to them. The little girls were staring at Hilda with saucer eyes. It made him realize that except for Suzanne and Eva, their whole little band was boys, all boys.
“Well, I’m home now,” he said. He knelt down and showed the girls his cast. “I got a new one,” he said. “They had to throw the old one out. So I need your help decorating this. Do you think you could do the job?”
Lyenitchka looked critically at the surface. “I think we could do the gig,” she said. “What do you think, partner?”
Tjan snorted out his nose, but she was so solemn that the rest kept quiet. Ada matched Lyenitchka’s critical posture and then nodded authoritatively. “Sure thing, partner.”
“It’s a date,” Perry said. “We’re gonna head home and put down our suitcases and come back and open the ride if it’s ready. It’s time Lester got some time off. I’m sure Suzanne will appreciate having him back again.”
Another silence fell over the group, tense as a piano wire. Perry looked from Lester to Suzanne and saw in a second what was up. He had time to notice that his first emotional response was to be intrigued, not sorry or scared. Only after a moment did he have the reaction he thought he should have—a mixture of sadness for his friend and irritation that they had yet another thing to deal with in the middle of a hundred other crises.
Hilda broke the tension—“It was great to meet you all. Dinner tonight, right?”
“Absolutely,” Kettlewell said, seizing on this. “Leave it to us—we’ll book someplace just great and have a great dinner to welcome you guys back.”