Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

something." He tipped Andy a wink.

  Kurt opened and shut his mouth a few times, and Lyman slapped his palmdown on the table. "You look like you're going to bust something," hesaid. "Don't worry. I kid. Damn, you've got you some big, easy-to-pushbuttons."

  Kurt made a face. "You wanted to sell our stuff to luxury hotels. Youtried to get us to present at the *SkyDome*. You're capable ofanything."

  "The SkyDome would be a great venue for this stuff," Lyman said settlinginto one of his favorite variations of bait-the-anarchist.

  "The SkyDome was built with tax-dollars that should have been spent onaffordable housing, then was turned over to rich pals of the premier fora song, who then ran it into the ground, got bailed out by the province,and then it got turned over to different rich pals. You can just shut upabout the goddamned SkyDome. You'd have to break both of my legs and*carry me* to get me to set foot in there."

  "About the party," Adam said. "About the party."

  "Yes, certainly," Lyman said. "Kurt, behave."

  Kurt belched loudly, provoking a scowl from the Greek.

  #

  The Waldos all showed up in a bunch, with plastic brown liter bottlesfilled with murky homemade beer and a giant bag of skunk-weed. The partyhad only been on for a couple hours, but it had already balkanized intoinward-facing groups: merchants, kids, hackers. Kurt kept turning themusic way up ("If they're not going to talk with one another, they mightas well dance." "Kurt, those people are old. Old people don't dance tomusic like this." "Shut up, Lyman." "Make me."), and Andy kept turningit down.

  The bookstore people drifted in, then stopped and moved vaguely towardthe middle of the floor, there to found their own breakawayconversational republic. Lyman startled. "Sara?" he said and one of theanarchists looked up sharply.

  "Lyman?" She had two short ponytails and a round face that made her lookteenage young, but on closer inspection she was more Lyman's age,mid-thirties. She laughed and crossed the gap to their little republicand threw her arms around Lyman's neck. "Crispy Christ, what are *you*doing here?"

  "I work with these guys!" He turned to Arnold and Kurt. "This is mycousin Sara," he said. "These are Albert and Kurt. I'm helping themout."

  "Hi, Sara," Kurt said.

  "Hey, Kurt," she said looking away. It was clear even to Alan that theyknew each other already. The other bookstore people were looking on withsuspicion, drinking their beer out of refillable coffee-store thermoscups.

  "It's great to meet you!" Alan said taking her hand in both of his andshaking it hard. "I'm really glad you folks came down."

  She looked askance at him, but Lyman interposed himself. "Now, Sara,these guys really, really wanted to talk something over with you all,but they've been having a hard time getting a hearing."

  Kurt and Alan traded uneasy glances. They'd carefully planned out asubtle easeway into this conversation, but Lyman was running with it.

  "You didn't know that I was involved, huh?"

  "Surprised the hell outta me," Lyman said. "Will you hear them out?"

  She looked back at her collective. "What the hell. Yeah, I'll talk 'eminto it."

  #

  "It starts with the sinking of the *Titanic*," Kurt said. They'darranged their mismatched chairs in a circle in the cramped back room ofthe bookstore and were drinking and eating organic crumbly things withthe taste and consistency of mud-brick. Sara told Kurt that they'd haveten minutes, and Alan had told him that he could take it all. Alan'dspent the day reading on the net, remembering the arguments that hadswayed the most people, talking it over. He was determined that Kurtwould win this fight.

  "There's this ship going down, and it's signaling S-O-S, S-O-S, but themessage didn't get out, because the shipping lanes were full of otherships with other radios, radios that clobbered the *Titanic*'ssignal. That's because there were no rules for radio back then, soanyone could light up any transmitter and send out any signal at anyfrequency. Imagine a room where everyone shouted at the top of theirlungs, nonstop, while setting off air horns.

  "After that, they decided that fed regulators would divide up the radiospectrum into bands, and give those bands to exclusive licensees who'dknow that their radio waves would reach their destination without beingclobbered, because any clobberers would get shut down by the cops.

  "But today, we've got a better way: We can make radios that are capableof intelligently cooperating with each other. We can make radios thatuse databases or just finely tuned listeners to determine what bandsaren't in use, at any given moment, in any place. They can talk betweenthe gaps in other signals. They can relay messages for otherradios. They can even try to detect the presence of dumb radio devices,like TVs and FM tuners, and grab the signal they're meant to bereceiving off of the Internet and pass it on, so that the dumb devicedoesn't even realize that the world has moved on.

  "Now, the original radio rules were supposed to protect free expressionbecause if everyone was allowed to speak at once, no one would beheard. That may have been true, but it was a pretty poor system as itwent: Mostly, the people who got radio licenses were cops, spooks, andmedia barons. There aren't a lot of average people using the airwaves tocommunicate for free with one another. Not a lot of free speech.

  "But now we have all this new technology where computers direct theoperation of flexible radios, radios whose characteristics aredetermined by software, and it's looking like the scarcity of theelectromagnetic spectrum has been pretty grossly overstated. It's hardto prove, because now we've got a world where lighting up a bunch ofsmart, agile radios is a crime against the 'legit' license-holders.

  "But Parliament's not going to throw the airwaves open because noelected politician can be responsible for screwing up the voters'televisions, because that's the surest-fire way to not getreelected. Which means that when you say, 'Hey, our freedom of speech isbeing clobbered by bad laws,' the other side can say, 'Go study somephysics, hippie, or produce a working network, or shut up.'

  "The radios we're installing now are about one millionth as smart asthey could be, and they use one millionth as much spectrum as they couldwithout stepping on anyone else's signal, but they're legal, and they'reletting more people communicate than ever. There are people all over theworld doing this, and whenever the policy wonks go to the radio cops toask for more radio spectrum to do this stuff with, they parade peoplelike us in front of them. We're like the Pinocchio's nose on the face ofthe radio cops: They say that only their big business buddies can betrusted with the people's airwaves, and we show them up for giantliars."

  He fell silent and looked at them. Adam held his breath.

  Sara nodded and broke the silence. "You know, that sounds pretty cool,actually."

  #

  Kurt insisted on putting up that access point, while Alan and Lymansteadied the ladder. Sara came out and joked with Lyman, and Alan gotdistracted watching them, trying to understand this notion of "cousins."They had an easy rapport, despite all their differences, and spoke in ashorthand of family weddings long past and crotchety relatives longdead.

  So none of them were watching when Kurt overbalanced and dropped theMakita, making a wild grab for it, foot slipping off the rung, andtoppled backward. It was only Kurt's wild bark of panic that got Adam toinstinctively move, to hold out his arms and look up, and he caught Kurtunder the armpits and gentled him to the ground, taking the weight ofKurt's fall in a bone-jarring crush to his rib cage.

  "You okay?" Alan said once he'd gotten his breath back.

  "Oof," Kurt said. "Yeah."

  They were cuddled together on the sidewalk, Kurt atop him, and Lyman andSara bent to help them apart. "Nice catch," Lyman said. Kurt was helpedto his feet, and he declared that he'd sprained his ankle and nothingworse, and they helped him back to his shop, where a couple of his kidsdoted over him, getting him an ice pack and a pillow and his laptop andone of the many dumpster-dived discmen from around the shop and some ofthe CDs of old punk bands that he favored.

  There he perched, growly as a wounded bear, m
aster of his kingdom, forthe next two weeks, playing online and going twitchy over the misseddumpsters going to the landfill every night without his expert pickingover. Alan visited him every day and listened raptly while Kurt gave himthe stats for the day's network usage, and Kurt beamed proud the wholewhile.

  #

  One morning, Alan threw a clatter of toonies down on the Greek's counterand walked around the Market, smelling the last night's staggeringpissers and the morning's blossoms.

  Here were his