Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 58

The kid rolled his eyes. "Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other -- even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.

"And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there's always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don't give us *real* democracy. It's so much bulls.h.i.+t."

He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt's mouth hung open.

"I'm not old," he said finally.

"You're older than me," the kid said. His tone softened. "Look, I'm not trying to be cruel here, but you're generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it's not the last great thing we'll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You're a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy."

Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt's shop for a while, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves of milk crates stuffed with T-s.h.i.+rts and cruft, he had a thought.

"Okay," he said. "Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field, there's a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the end of the day" -- he thought of Lyman -- "this is the *phone company*

we're talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thras.h.i.+ng in the tar pit. The spazz dinosaur that's so embarra.s.sed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue it.

"Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network than a phone-company network -- even if the Internet network lives on top of the phone-company network.

"If you invent a new way of using the phone network -- say, a cheaper way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can't roll that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You have to go to him and say, 'Hey, I've invented a way to kill your most profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?'

"But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all over the world had the Web.

"So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run voice-calling as an application, but it's not tied to the phone network. It doesn't care whose wires or wireless it lives on top of. It's got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That's why we care about this."

The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body language that even Alan could read that he'd heard this already.

"Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I'm talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for *free*. I can talk to *everyone* with it. I can say *anything* I want. I can use it *anywhere*. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can't invent the Web for my phone or make free long distance calls I'm being censored?"

"Of course not," Kurt said. Alan put a steadying hand on his shoulder. "Fine, it's not an either-or thing. You can have your phones, I can have my Internet, and we'll both do our thing. It's not like the absence of the Web for phones or high long-distance charges are *good*

for free expression, Christ. We're trying to unbreak the net so that no one can own it or control it. We're trying to put it on every corner of the city, for free, anonymously, for anyone to use. We're doing it with recycled garbage, and we're paying homeless teenagers enough money to get off the street as part of the program. What's not to f.u.c.king like?"

The kid scribbled hard on his pad. "*Now* you're giving me some quotes I can use. You guys need to work on your pitch. 'What's not to f.u.c.king like?' That's good."

He and Link saw each other later that day, and Link still had his two little girls with him, sitting on the patio at the Greek's, drinking beers, and laughing at his jokes.

"Hey, you're the guy with the books," one of them said when he pa.s.sed by.

He stopped and nodded. "That's me, all right," he said.

Link picked at the label of his beer bottle and added to the dandruff of shredded paper in the ashtray before him. "Hey, Abe," he said.

"Hey, Link," he said. He looked down at the little girls' bags. "You've made some finds," he said. "Congratulations."

They were wearing different clothes now -- double-knit neon pop-art dresses and horn-rim shades and white legs flas.h.i.+ng beneath the tabletop. They kicked their toes and smiled and drank their beers, which seemed comically large in their hands.

Casually, he looked to see who was minding the counter at the Greek's and saw that it was the idiot son, who wasn't smart enough to know that serving liquor to minors was asking for bad trouble.

"Where's Krishna?" he asked.

One girl compressed her heart-shaped lips into a thin line.

And so she resolved to help her brother, because when it's your fault that something has turned to s.h.i.+t, you have to wash s.h.i.+t. And so she resolved to help her brother, which meant that, step one, she had to get him to stop s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up.

"He took off," the girl said. Her pancake makeup had sweated away during the day and her acne wasn't so bad that she'd needed it. "He took off running, like he'd forgotten something important. Looked scared."

"Why don't you go get more beers," Link said angrily, cutting her off, and Alan had an intuition that Link had become Krishna's Renfield, a recursion of Renfields, each nesting inside the last like Russian dolls in reverse: Big Link inside medium Krishna inside the stump that remained of Darrel.

And that meant that she had to take him out of the company of his bad companions, which she would accomplish through the simple expedient of scaring the everlasting f.u.c.k out of them.

She sulked off and the remaining girl looked down at her swinging toes.

"Where'd he go, Link?" Alan said. If Krishna was in a hurry to go somewhere or see something, he had an idea of what it was about.

Link's expression closed up like a door slamming shut. "I don't know,"

he said. "How should I know?"

The other girl scuffed her toes and took a sip of her beer.

Their gazes all flicked down to the bottle.

"The Greek would bar you for life if he knew you were bringing underaged drinkers into here," Alan said.

"Plenty of other bars in the Market," Link said, shrugging his newly broad shoulders elaborately.

Trey was the kid who'd known her brother since third grade and whose p.u.b.erty-induced brain damage had turned him into an utter t.u.r.d. She once caught him going through the bathroom hamper, fetis.h.i.+zing her panties, and she'd shouted at him and he'd just ducked and grinned a little-boy grin that she had been incapable of wiping off his face, no matter how she raged. She would enjoy this.

"And they all know the Greek," Alan said. "Three, two, one." He turned on his heel and began to walk away.

"Wait!" Link called. The girl swallowed a giggle. He sounded desperate and not cool at all anymore.

Alan stopped and turned his body halfway, looking impatiently over his shoulder.

Link mumbled something.

"What?"

"Behind Kurt's place," Link said. "He said he was going to go look around behind Kurt's place."

"Thank you, Link," he said. He turned all the way around and got down to eye level with the other girl. "Nice to meet you," he said. He wanted to tell her, *Be careful* or *Stay alert* or *Get out while the getting's good*, but none of that seemed likely to make much of an impression on her.

She smiled and her friend came back with three beers. "You've got a great house," she said.

Her friend said, "Yeah, it's amazing."

"Well, thank you," he said.

"Bye," they said.