Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 28

But it wasn't fine, and Kurt wouldn't give it up. He kept on beating his head against the blank wall, and every time Alan saw him, he was grimmer than the last.

"Let it *go*," Adam said. "I've done a deal with the vacuum-cleaner repair guy across the street." A weird-but-sweet old Polish Holocaust survivor who'd listened attentively to Andy's pitch before announcing that he'd been watching all the hardware go up around the Market and had simply been waiting to be included in the club. "That'll cover that corner just fine."

"I'm going to throw a party," Kurt said. "Here, in the shop. No, I'll rent out one of the warehouses on Oxford. I'll invite them, the kids, everyone who's let us put up an access point, a big mill-and-swill. Buy a couple kegs. No one can resist free beer."

Alan had started off frustrated and angry with Kurt, but this drew him up and turned him around. "That is a *fine* idea," he said. "We'll invite Lyman."

Lyman had taken to showing up on Alan's stoop in the morning sometimes, on his way to work, for a cup of coffee. He'd taken to showing up at Kurt's shop in the afternoon, sometimes, on his way home from work, to marvel at the kids' industry. His graybeard had written some code that a.n.a.lyzed packet loss and tried to make guesses about the crowd density in different parts of the Market, and Lyman took a proprietary interest in it, standing out by Bikes on Wheels or the Portuguese furniture store and watching the data on his PDA, comparing it with the actual crowds on the street.

He'd only hesitated for a second when Andrew asked him to be the inaugural advisor on ParasiteNet's board, and once he'd said yes, it became clear to everyone that he was endlessly fascinated by their little adhocracy and its experimental telco potential.

"This party sounds like a great idea," he said. He was buying the drinks, because he was the one with five-hundred-dollar gla.s.ses and a full-suspension racing bike. "Lookit that," he said.

From the Greek's front window, they could see Oxford Street and a little of Augusta, and Lyman loved using his PDA and his density a.n.a.lysis software while he sat, looking from his colored map to the crowd scene. "Lookit the truck as it goes down Oxford and turns up Augusta. That signature is so distinctive, I could spot it in my sleep. I need to figure out how to sell this to someone -- maybe the cops or something." He tipped Andy a wink.

Kurt opened and shut his mouth a few times, and Lyman slapped his palm down on the table. "You look like you're going to bust something," he said. "Don't worry. I kid. d.a.m.n, you've got you some big, easy-to-push b.u.t.tons."

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

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

"The SkyDome was built with tax-dollars that should have been spent on affordable housing, then was turned over to rich pals of the premier for a 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 up about the G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 bottles filled with murky homemade beer and a giant bag of skunk-weed. The party had only been on for a couple hours, but it had already balkanized into inward-facing groups: merchants, kids, hackers. Kurt kept turning the music way up ("If they're not going to talk with one another, they might as well dance." "Kurt, those people are old. Old people don't dance to music like this." "Shut up, Lyman." "Make me."), and Andy kept turning it down.

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

"Lyman?" She had two short ponytails and a round face that made her look teenage young, but on closer inspection she was more Lyman's age, mid-thirties. She laughed and crossed the gap to their little republic and 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 my cousin Sara," he said. "These are Albert and Kurt. I'm helping them out."

"Hi, Sara," Kurt said.

"Hey, Kurt," she said looking away. It was clear even to Alan that they knew each other already. The other bookstore people were looking on with suspicion, drinking their beer out of refillable coffee-store thermos cups.

"It's great to meet you!" Alan said taking her hand in both of his and shaking 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 a subtle easeway into this conversation, but Lyman was running with it.

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

"Surprised the h.e.l.l outta me," Lyman said. "Will you hear them out?"

She looked back at her collective. "What the h.e.l.l. Yeah, I'll talk 'em into it."

"It starts with the sinking of the *t.i.tanic*," Kurt said. They'd arranged their mismatched chairs in a circle in the cramped back room of the bookstore and were drinking and eating organic crumbly things with the taste and consistency of mud-brick. Sara told Kurt that they'd have ten minutes, and Alan had told him that he could take it all. Alan'd spent the day reading on the net, remembering the arguments that had swayed the most people, talking it over. He was determined that Kurt would win this fight.

"There's this s.h.i.+p going down, and it's signaling S-O-S, S-O-S, but the message didn't get out, because the s.h.i.+pping lanes were full of other s.h.i.+ps with other radios, radios that clobbered the *t.i.tanic*'s signal. That's because there were no rules for radio back then, so anyone could light up any transmitter and send out any signal at any frequency. Imagine a room where everyone shouted at the top of their lungs, nonstop, while setting off air horns.

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

"But today, we've got a better way: We can make radios that are capable of intelligently cooperating with each other. We can make radios that use databases or just finely tuned listeners to determine what bands aren't in use, at any given moment, in any place. They can talk between the gaps in other signals. They can relay messages for other radios. 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 be receiving off of the Internet and pa.s.s it on, so that the dumb device doesn't even realize that the world has moved on.

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

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

"But Parliament's not going to throw the airwaves open because no elected politician can be responsible for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the voters'

televisions, because that's the surest-fire way to not get reelected. Which means that when you say, 'Hey, our freedom of speech is being clobbered by bad laws,' the other side can say, 'Go study some physics, hippie, or produce a working network, or shut up.'

"The radios we're installing now are about one millionth as smart as they could be, and they use one millionth as much spectrum as they could without stepping on anyone else's signal, but they're legal, and they're letting more people communicate than ever. There are people all over the world doing this, and whenever the policy wonks go to the radio cops to ask for more radio spectrum to do this stuff with, they parade people like us in front of them. We're like the Pinocchio's nose on the face of the radio cops: They say that only their big business buddies can be trusted with the people's airwaves, and we show them up for giant liars."

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 Lyman steadied the ladder. Sara came out and joked with Lyman, and Alan got distracted watching them, trying to understand this notion of "cousins."

They had an easy rapport, despite all their differences, and spoke in a shorthand of family weddings long past and crotchety relatives long dead.

So none of them were watching when Kurt overbalanced and dropped the Makita, making a wild grab for it, foot slipping off the rung, and toppled backward. It was only Kurt's wild bark of panic that got Adam to instinctively move, to hold out his arms and look up, and he caught Kurt under the armpits and gentled him to the ground, taking the weight of Kurt'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 and Sara bent to help them apart. "Nice catch," Lyman said. Kurt was helped to his feet, and he declared that he'd sprained his ankle and nothing worse, and they helped him back to his shop, where a couple of his kids doted over him, getting him an ice pack and a pillow and his laptop and one of the many dumpster-dived discmen from around the shop and some of the CDs of old punk bands that he favored.

There he perched, growly as a wounded bear, master of his kingdom, for the next two weeks, playing online and going twitchy over the missed dumpsters going to the landfill every night without his expert picking over. Alan visited him every day and listened raptly while Kurt gave him the stats for the day's network usage, and Kurt beamed proud the whole while.