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She nodded.
“And have fun with the computer when it’s slow,” he said.
“What?”
“A store like that, it’s got the home phone number of about seventy percent of the people in Toronto you’d want to ever hang out with. Most of your school friends, even the ones you’ve lost track of. All the things they’ve rented. All their old addresses—you can figure out who’s living together, who gave their apartment to whom, all of that stuff. That kind of database is way more fun than you realize. You can get lost in it for months.”
She was nodding slowly. “I can see that,” she said. She upended her coffee and set it down. “Listen, Arbus—” she began, then bit her lip again. She looked at Link, who tugged at his fading pink shock of hair.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “We get emotionally overwrought about friends and family. I have as much to apologize for as… Well, I owe you an apology.” They stared at the park across the street, at the damaged wading pool where Edward had vanished.
“So, sorries all ’round and kisses and hugs, and now we’re all friends again, huh?” Link said. Natalie made a rude noise and ruffled his hair, then wiped her hand off on his shirt.
Alan, though, solemnly shook each of their hands in turn, and thanked them. When he was done, he felt as though a weight had been lifted from him. Next door, Mimi’s window slammed shut.
“What is it you’re doing around here, Akin?” Link said. “I keep seeing you running around with ladders and tool belts. I thought you were a writer. Are you soundproofing the whole Market?”
“I never told you?” Alan said. He’d been explaining wireless networking to anyone who could sit still and had been beginning to believe that he’d run it down for every denizen of Kensington, but he’d forgotten to clue in his own neighbors!
“Right,” he said. “Are you seated comfortably? Then I shall begin. When we connect computers together, we call it a network. There’s a big network of millions of computers, called the Internet.”
“Even I know this,” Natalie said.
“Shush,” Alan said. “I’ll start at the beginning, where I started a year ago, and work my way forward. It’s weird, it’s big and it’s cool.” And he told them the story, the things he’d learned from Kurt, the arguments he’d honed on the shopkeepers, the things Lyman had told him.
“So that’s the holy mission,” he said at last. “You give everyone a voice and a chance to speak on a level playing field with the rich and powerful, and you make democracy, which is good.”
He looked at Link and Natalie, who were looking to one another rather intensely, communicating in some silent idiom of sibling body-language.
“Plate-o-shrimp,” Natalie said.
“Funny coincidence,” Link said.
“We were just talking about this yesterday.”
“Spectrum?” Alan quirked his eyebrows.
“No, not exactly,” Natalie said. “About making a difference. About holy missions. Wondering if there were any left.”
“I mean,” Link said, “riding a bike or renting out videos are honest ways to make a living and all, and they keep us in beer and rent money, but they’re not—”
“—important.” Natalie said.
“Ah,” Alan said.
“Ah?”
“Well, that’s the thing we all want, right? Making a difference.”
“Yeah.”
“Which is why you went into fashion,” Link said giving her skinny shoulder a playful shove.
She shoved him back. “And why you went into electrical engineering!”
“Okay,” Alan said. “It’s not necessarily about what career you pick. It’s about how you do what you do. Natalie, you told me you used to shop at Tropicál.”
She nodded.
“You liked it, you used to shop there, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And it inspired you to go into fashion design. It also provided employment for a couple dozen people over the years. I sometimes got to help out little alternative girls from North Toronto buy vintage prom dresses at the end of the year, and I helped Motown revival bands put together matching outfits of red blazers and wide trousers. Four or five little shops opened up nearby selling the same kind of thing, imitating me—that whole little strip down there started with Tropicál.”
Natalie nodded. “Okay, I knew that, I guess. But it’s not the same as really making a difference, is it?”
Link flicked his butt to the curb. “You’re changing people’s lives for the better either way, right?”
“Exactly,” Alan said.
Then Link grinned. “But there’s something pretty, oh, I dunno, ballsy, about this wireless thing, yeah? It’s not the same.”
“Not the same,” Alan said grinning. “Better.”
“How can we help?”
Kurt had an assembly line cranking out his access points now. Half a dozen street kids worked in the front of his place, in a cleared-out space with a makeshift workbench made from bowed plywood and scratched IKEA table-legs. It made Alan feel better to watch them making sense of it all, made him feel a little like he felt when he was working on The Inventory. The kids worked from noon, when Kurt got back from breakfast, until 9 or 10, when he went out to dive.
The kids were smart, but screwed up: half by teenaged hormones and half by bad parents or bad drugs or just bad brain chemistry. Alan understood their type, trying to carve some atom of individual identity away from family and background, putting pins through their bodies and affecting unconvincing tough mannerisms. They were often bright—the used bookstore had been full of their type, buying good, beat-up books off the sale rack for 50 cents, trading them back for 20 cents’ credit the next day, and buying more.
Natalie and Link were in that morning, along with some newcomers, Montreal street punks trying their hand at something other than squeegee bumming. The punks and his neighbors gave each other uneasy looks, but Alan had deliberately put the sugar for the coffee at the punks’ end of the table and the cream in front of Natalie and the stirs by the bathroom door with the baklava and the napkins, so a rudimentary social intercourse was begun.
First, one of the punks (who had a rusty “NO FUTURE” pin that Alan thought would probably go for real coin on the collectors’ market) asked Natalie to pass her the cream. Then Link and another punk (foppy silly black hair and a cut-down private school blazer with the short sleeves pinned on with rows of safety pins) met over the baklava, and the punk offered Link a napkin. Another punk spilled her coffee on her lap, screeching horrendous Quebecois blasphemies as curses, and that cracked everyone up, and Arnold, watching from near the blanket that fenced off Kurt’s monkish sleeping area, figured that they would get along.
“Kurt,” he said pulling aside the blanket, handing a double-double coffee over to Kurt as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was wearing a white T-shirt that was the grimy grey of everything in his domain, and baggy jockeys. He gathered his blankets around him and sipped reverently.
Kurt cocked his head and listened to the soft discussions going on on the other side of the blanket. “Christ, they’re at it already?”
“I think your volunteers showed up a couple hours ago—or maybe they were up all night.”
Kurt groaned theatrically. “I’m running a halfway house for geeky street kids.”
“All for the cause,” Alan said. “So, what’s on the plate for today?”
“You know the church kittycorner from your place?”
“Yeah?” Alan said cautiously.
“Its spire is just about the highest point in the Market. An omnidirectional up there… ”
“The church?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the new condos at the top of Baldwin? They’re tall.”
“They are. But they’re up on the northern edge. From the bell-tower of that church, I bet you could shoot half the houses on the west side of Oxford Street, along with the backs of all the shops on Augusta.”
“How are we going to get the church to go along with it. Christ, what are they, Ukrainian Orthodox?”
“Greek Orthodox,” Kurt said. “Yeah, they’re pretty conservative.”
“So?”
“So, I need a smooth-talking, upstanding cit to go and put the case to the pastor. Priest. Bishop. Whatever.”
“Groan,” Alex said.
“Oh, come on, you’re good at it.”
“If I get time,” he said. He looked into his coffee for a moment. “I’m going to go home,” he said.
“Home?”
“To the mountain,” he said. “Home,” he said. “To my father,” he said.
“Whoa,” Kurt said. “Alone?”
Alan sat on the floor and leaned back against a milk crate full of low-capacity hard drives. “I have to,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking of… ” He was horrified to discover that he was on the verge of tears. It had been three weeks since Davey had vanished into the night, and he’d dreamt of Eugene-Fabio-Greg every night since, terrible dreams, in which he’d dug like a dog to uncover their hands, their arms, their legs, but never their heads. He swallowed hard.
He and Kurt hadn’t spoken of that night since.
“I sometimes wonder if it really happened,” Kurt said.
Alan nodded. “It’s hard to believe. Even for me.”
“I believe it,” Kurt said. “I won’t ever not believe it. I think that’s probably important to you.”
Alan felt a sob well up in his chest and swallowed it down again. “Thanks,” he managed to say.
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’m going to rent a car and drive up,” he said.
“How long?”
“I dunno,” he said. He was feeling morose now. “A couple days. A week, maybe. No longer.”
“Well, don’t sweat the Bishop. He can wait. Come and get a beer with me tonight before I go out?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That sounds good. On a patio on Kensington. We can people-watch.”
How Alan and his brothers killed Davey: very deliberately.
Alan spent the rest of the winter in the cave, and Davey spent the spring in the golem’s cave, and through that spring, neither of them went down to the school, so that the younger brothers had to escort themselves to class. When the thaws came and icy meltoff carved temporary streams in the mountainside, they stopped going to school, too—instead, they played on the mountainside, making dams and canals and locks with rocks and imagination.
Their father was livid. The mountain rumbled as it warmed unevenly, as the sheets of ice slid off its slopes and skittered down toward the highway. The sons of the mountain reveled in their dark ignorance, their separation from the school and from the nonsensical and nonmagical society of the town. They snared small animals and ate them raw, and didn’t wash their clothes, and grew fierce and guttural through the slow spring.
Alan kept silent through those months, becoming almost nocturnal, refusing to talk to any brother who dared to talk to him. When Ed-Fred-George brought home a note from the vice principal asking when he thought he’d be coming back to school, Alan shoved it into his mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed, until the paper was reduced to gruel, then he spat it by the matted pile of his bedding.
The mountain grumbled and he didn’t care. The golems came to parley, and he turned his back to them. The stalactites crashed to the cave’s floor until it was carpeted in ankle-deep chips of stone, and he waded through them.
He waited and bided. He waited for Davey to try to come home.
“What have we here?” Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt’s shop, which had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against the wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestle tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage video-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.
He was roundly ignored—and before he could speak again, one of the PCs on the floor started booming out
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