Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was wearing awhite T-shirt that was the grimy grey of everything in his domain, andbaggy jockeys. He gathered his blankets around him and sippedreverently.

  Kurt cocked his head and listened to the soft discussions going on onthe other side of the blanket. "Christ, they're at it already?"

  "I think your volunteers showed up a couple hours ago -- or maybe theywere up all night."

  Kurt groaned theatrically. "I'm running a halfway house for geeky streetkids."

  "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. Anomnidirectional 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 ofthat church, I bet you could shoot half the houses on the west side ofOxford 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, whatare 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 tothe 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'mgoing 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 oflow-capacity hard drives. "I have to," he said. "I can't stop thinkingof..." He was horrified to discover that he was on the verge oftears. 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, theirlegs, 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'sprobably important to you."

  Alan felt a sob well up in his chest and swallowed it downagain. "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 metonight before I go out?"

  "Yeah," he said. "That sounds good. On a patio on Kensington. We canpeople-watch."

  #

  How Alan and his brothers killed Davey: very deliberately.

  Alan spent the rest of the winter in the cave, and Davey spent thespring in the golem's cave, and through that spring, neither of themwent down to the school, so that the younger brothers had to escortthemselves to class. When the thaws came and icy meltoff carvedtemporary streams in the mountainside, they stopped going to school, too-- instead, they played on the mountainside, making dams and canals andlocks with rocks and imagination.

  Their father was livid. The mountain rumbled as it warmed unevenly, asthe sheets of ice slid off its slopes and skittered down toward thehighway. The sons of the mountain reveled in their dark ignorance, theirseparation from the school and from the nonsensical and nonmagicalsociety of the town. They snared small animals and ate them raw, anddidn't wash their clothes, and grew fierce and guttural through the slowspring.

  Alan kept silent through those months, becoming almost nocturnal,refusing to talk to any brother who dared to talk to him. WhenEd-Fred-George brought home a note from the vice principal asking whenhe thought he'd be coming back to school, Alan shoved it into his mouthand 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, andhe turned his back to them. The stalactites crashed to the cave's flooruntil it was carpeted in ankle-deep chips of stone, and he waded throughthem.

  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, whichhad devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up againstthe wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestletables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintagevideo-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by streetpeople crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcanetasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latteremanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.

  He was roundly ignored -- and before he could speak again, one of thePCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music thatmade him think of Elvis cassettes that had been submerged in saltwater. Half of the assembled mass started bobbing their heads andsinging along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.

  Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning downthe volume a little. "Howdy!" he said, spreading his arms and taking inthe whole of his dominion.

  "Howdy yourself," Alan said. "What do we have here?"

  "We have a glut of volunteers," Kurt said, watching as an old rummycarefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus itshousing. "I can't figure out if those laptop screens are worthanything," he said, cocking his head. "But they've been taking up spacefor far too long. Time we moved them."

  Alan looked around and realized that the workers he'd taken to be atwork building access points were, in the main, shooting digital picturesof junk from Kurt's diving runs and researching them for eBaylistings. It made him feel good -- great, even. It was like watching anInventory being assembled from out of chaos.

  "Where'd they all come from?"

  Kurt shrugged. "I dunno. I guess we hit critical mass. You recruit a fewpeople, they recruit a few people. It's a good way to make a couplebucks, you get to play with boss crap, you get paid in cash, and youhave colorful co-workers." He shrugged again. "I guess they came fromwherever the trash came from. The city provides."

  The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. "If eitherof you says something like, *Ah, these people were discarded by society,but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen theworth of these poor folks and rescued them from the scrapheap ofsociety,* I'm gonna puke."

  "The thought never crossed my mind," Alan said solemnly.

  "Keep it up, Wes," Kurt said, patting the man on the shoulder. "See youat the Greek's tonight?"

  "Every night, so long as he keeps selling the cheapest beer in theMarket," Wes said, winking at Alan.

  "It's cash in the door," Kurt said. "Buying components is a lot moreefficient than trying to find just the right parts." He gave Alan amildly reproachful look. Ever since they'd gone to strictly controlleddesigns, Kurt had been heartbroken by the amount of really nice crapthat never made its way into an access point.

  "This is pretty amazing," Alan said. "You're splitting the money withthem?"

  "The profit -- anything leftover after buying packaging and payingpostage." He walked down the line, greeting people by name, shakinghands, marveling at the gewgaws and gimcracks that he, after all, hadfound in some nighttime dumpster and brought back to be recycled. "God,I love this. It's like Napster for dumpsters."

  "How's that?" Alan asked, pouring himself a coffee and adding some UHTcream from a giant, slightly dented box of little creamers.

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

  "So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting allthat music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of peoplean