Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (phonics books TXT) 📕

box of little creamers.

"Most of the music ever recorded isn't for sale at any price. Like 80
percent of it. And the labels, they've made copyright so strong, no one
can figure out who all that music belongs to -- not even them! Costs a
fortune to clear a song. Pal of mine once did a CD of Christmas music
remixes, and he tried to figure out who owned the rights to all the
songs he wanted to use. He just gave up after a year -- and he had only
cleared one song!

"So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting all
that music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of people
an incentive to rip their old CDs -- hell, their old vinyl and tapes,
too! -- and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that,
but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: a
library raising!"

Alan nodded. "So what's your point -- that companies' dumpsters are
being napstered by people like you?" A napsterized Inventory. Alan felt
the *rightness* of it.

Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it
on the side of the table. "Exactly!" he said. "This is garbage -- it's
like the deleted music that you can't buy today, except at the bottom of
bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated in
landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and
rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into
digital files and upload it to the net -- but if you give people an
incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work
to help you..." He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and
popped its latches and swung it open.

"Look at that -- I didn't get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone
else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money
that I exchanged for parts that someone else found in *her* dumpster --"

"Her?"

"Trying not to be sexist," Kurt said.

"Are there female dumpster divers?"

"Got me," Kurt said. "In ten years of this, I've only run into other
divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop
later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the
landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where
it needs to be. So it's not cost effective for some big corporation to
figure out how to use or sell these -- so what? It's not cost-effective
for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of
my favorite bands in print, either. We'll figure it out. We're spookily
good at it."

"Spookily?"

"Trying to be more poetic." He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends
of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. "Got a new girlfriend, she
says there's not enough poetry in my views on garbage."

#

They found one of Davey's old nests in March, on a day when you could
almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go
and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour
greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point
had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in
the Market's second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could
trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in
Alan's attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus
boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he'd found in Bell
Canada's Willowdale switching station dumpster.

Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the
antenna mounting atop the synagogue's roof. It had taken three meetings
with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple's
youth caucus and getting *them* to explain it to the old cleric. The
synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a
brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.

They'd worried about the fight they'd have over drilling through the
roof to punch down a wire, but they needn't have: The wood up there was
soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power
cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and
slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.

Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt's heart was aburst
with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he
caught sight of Kurt's face, ashen, wide-eyed.

"I saw something," he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His
hands were shaking.

"What?"

"Footprints," he said. "There's a lot of leaves that have rotted down to
mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the
mud. Like a toddler's footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes
missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where
I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no
pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs -- so dried up that I
couldn't figure out what they were at first.

"But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints
behind like unbent paperclips."

Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.

"Be careful, it's all rotten up there," Kurt called. Alan nodded.

"Sure, thank you," he said, hearing himself say it as though from very
far away.

The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of
meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and
there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the
antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged
before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth
marks on the birds. They hadn't been eaten, they'd been torn apart, like
a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured
Davey sitting here on the synagogue's roof, listening to the evening
prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching
the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand,
writhing.

He wondered if he was catching Bradley's precognition, and if that meant
that Bradley was dead now.

#

Bradley was born with the future in his eyes. He emerged from the belly
of their mother with bright brown eyes that did not roll aimlessly in
the manner of babies, but rather sought out the corners of the cave
where interesting things were happening, where movement was about to
occur, where life was being lived. Before he developed the muscle
strength and coordination necessary to crawl, he mimed crawling, seeing
how it was that he would someday move.

He was the easiest of all the babies to care for, easier even than
Carlo, who had no needs other than water and soil and cooing
reassurance. Toilet training: As soon as he understood what was expected
of him -- they used the downstream-most bend of one of the underground
rivers -- Benny could be relied upon to begin tottering toward the spot
in sufficient time to drop trou and do his business in just the right
spot.

(Alan learned to pay attention when Bruce was reluctant to leave home
for a walk during those days -- the same premonition that made him
perfectly toilet-trained at home would have him in fretting sweats at
the foreknowledge that he has destined to soil himself during the
recreation.)

His nightmares ran twice: once just before bed, in clairvoyant preview,
and again in the depths of REM sleep. Alan learned to talk him down from
these crises, to soothe the worry, and in the end it worked to
everyone's advantage, defusing the nightmares themselves when they came.

He never forgot anything -- never forgot to have Alan forge a signature
on a permission form, never forgot to bring in the fossil he'd found for
show-and-tell, never forgot his mittens in the cloakroom and came home
with red, chapped hands. Once he started school, he started seeing to it
that Alan never forgot anything, either.

He did very well on quizzes and tests, and he never let the pitcher fake
him out when he was at bat.

After four years alone with the golems, Alan couldn't have been more
glad to have a brother to keep him company.

Billy got big enough to walk, then big enough to pick mushrooms, then
big enough to chase squirrels. He was big enough to play
hide-and-go-seek with, big enough to play twenty questions with, big
enough to horse around in the middle of the lake at the center of the
mountain with.

Alan left him alone during the days, in the company of their parents and
the golems, went down the mountain to school, and when he got back, he'd
take his kid brother out on the mountain face and teach him what he'd
learned, even though he was only a little kid. They'd write letters
together in the mud with a stick, and in the winter, they'd try to spell
out their names with steaming pee in the snow, laughing.

"That's a fraction," Brad said, chalking "3/4" on a piece of slate by
the side of one of the snowmelt streams that coursed down the springtime
mountain.

"That's right, three-over-four," Alan said. He'd learned it that day in
school, and had been about to show it to Billy, which meant that Brad
had remembered him doing it and now knew it. He took the chalk and drew
his own 3/4 -- you had to do that, or Billy wouldn't be able to remember
it in advance.

Billy got down on his haunches. He was a dark kid, dark hair and eyes
the color of chocolate, which he insatiably craved and begged for every
morning when Alan left for school, "Bring me, bring me, bring me!"

He'd found something. Alan leaned in and saw that it was a milkweed
pod. "It's an egg," Bobby said.

"No, it's a weed," Alan said. Bobby wasn't usually given to flights of
fancy, but the shape of the pod was reminiscent of an egg.

Billy clucked his tongue. "I *know* that. It's also an egg for a
bug. Living inside there. I can see it hatching. Next week." He closed
his eyes. "It's orange! Pretty. We should come back and find it once it
hatches."

Alan hunkered down next to him. "There's a bug in here?"

"Yeah. It's like a white worm, but in a week it will turn into an orange
bug and chew its way out."

He was about three then, which made Alan seven. "What if I chopped down
the plant?" he said. "Would the bug still hatch next week?"

"You won't," Billy said.

"I could, though."

"Nope," Brad said.

Alan reached for the plant. Took it in his hand. The warm skin of the
plant and the woody bole of the pod would be so easy to uproot.

He didn't do it.

That night, as he lay himself down to sleep, he couldn't remember why he
hadn't. He couldn't sleep. He got up and looked out the front of the
cave, at the countryside unrolling in the moonlight and the far lights
of the town.

He