Cory Doctorow

“ Davey crouched among the bones at the very back of the cave, his back to them, shoulders hunched.
The golems stood stock still as Marci and he crept up on Davey. So intent was he on his work that he didn’t notice them, even as they loomed over his shoulder, staring down on the thing he held in his hands.
It was Alan’s thumb, and growing out of it—Allen. Tiny, the size of a pipe-cleaner man, and just as skinny, but perfectly formed, squirming and insensate, face contorted in a tiny expression of horror. ”

“ Alan worked through the long Toronto winter at his sanding. The house had been gutted by the previous owners, who’d had big plans for the building but had been tempted away by a job in Boston. They’d had to sell fast, and no amount of realtor magic—flowers on the dining-room table, soup simmering on the stove—could charm away the essential dagginess of the gutted house, the exposed timbers with sagging wires and conduit, the runnels gouged in the floor by careless draggers of furniture. Alan got it for a song, and was delighted by his fortune. ”

“ They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt’s Buick.
“Hang on,” Alan said. “Let’s have a walk, okay?” The city smelled like morning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of the distant Cadbury’s factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and the streetcar tracks. Around them, millions were stirring in their beds, clattering in their kitchens, passing water, and taking on vitamins. ”

“ Marci stood and dusted herself off. Alan stared at his knees.
“She’s horrible, isn’t she?” said the voice, and a great, thick hand appeared in his field of vision. He shook it tentatively, noting the heavy class ring and the thin, plain wedding band. He looked up slowly.
Marci’s father was short but powerfully built, like the wrestlers on the other kids’ lunchboxes at school. He had a shock of curly black hair that was flecked with dandruff, and a thick bristling mustache that made him look very fierce, though his eyes were gentle and bookish behind thick glasses. ”

“ Davey came to him that night and pinned him in the light of the flashlight. He woke staring up into the bright bulb, shielding his eyes. He groped out for the light, but Darryl danced back out of reach, keeping the beam in his eyes. The air crackled with the angry grinding of its hand-dynamo.
He climbed out of bed naked and felt around on the floor. He had a geode there, he’d broken it and polished it by hand, and it was the size of a softball, the top smooth as glass, the underside rough as a coconut’s hide. ”

“ God, it’s such a relief to not be the only one anymore.
But now, standing there with Marci, in the distant catcalls of the playground and the smell of the new snow and the soughing of the wind in the trees, he couldn’t bring himself to say it. She either knew these things or she didn’t, and if she didn’t, he didn’t know what he could do to help it.
“What?” she said at last.
“Do you—” he began, then fell silent. He couldn’t say the words.
She looked irritated, and the sounds and the smells swept over him as the moment stretched. But then she softened. “I don’t understand it, Alan,” she said. ”

“ The foot traffic was reduced to sparse, fast-moving umbrellas, people rushing for shelter before the deluge. Ozone crackled in the air and thunder roiled seemingly up from the ground, deep and sickening.
They started with a circuit of the house, looking for footprints, body parts. He found a shred of torn gray thrift-store shirt, caught on a rose bramble near the front of his walk. It smelled of the homey warmth of Edward’s innards, and had a few of Frederick’s short, curly hairs stuck to it. Alan showed it to Edward, then folded it into the change pocket of his wallet. ”

“ Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover’s arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.
“Alan?” she murmured into his chest.
“Yes?”
“What are we?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have wings?” ”

“ His thumb was bleeding anew, dripping fat drops the color of a red crayon into the sun, blood so hot it seemed to sizzle and sink into the snow.
“You need to tell an adult, Alan,” she said, wrapping his new little thumb in gauze she’d taken from her pocket.
“My father knows. My mother knows.” He sat with his head between his knees, not daring to look at her, in his nook in the winter cave.
She just looked at him, squinting.
“They count,” he said. “They understand it.”
She shook her head.
“They understand it better than any adult you know would. This will get better on its own, Marci. Look.” ”

“ Alan’s father, the mountain, had many golems that called him home. They lived round the other side of his father and left Alan and his brothers alone, because even a golem has the sense not to piss off a mountain, especially one it lives in.
Then Alan tackled the timbers, reaching over his head with palm-sanders and sandpaper of ever finer grains until the timbers were as smooth as Adirondack chairs, his chest and arms and shoulders athrob with the agony of two weeks’ work. ”

“ Green blobs chased themselves across his vision, and he could only see Darren rolling on the ground by turning his head to one side and looking out of the corner of his eye.
He groped toward Davey and smelled the blood. Kneeling down, he found Davey’s hand and followed it up to his shoulder, his neck. Slick with blood. Higher, to Davey’s face, his forehead, the dent there sanded ragged by the rough side of the geode. The blood flowed freely and beneath his other hand Danny’s chest heaved as he breathed, shallowly, rapidly, almost panting. ”

“ At two a.m., the motel lights were out and the road was dark and silent but for the soughing of wind and the distant sounds of night animals.
“Are you okay to drive?” she said, as she piled their clothes indiscriminately into the suitcases.
“What?” he said. The cool air on his face was waking him up a little, but he was still in a dream-universe. The air was spicy and outdoors and it reminded him powerfully of home and simpler times.
He looked at Mimi without really seeing her. ”

“ Brad was so thin he looked like a corpse. He was still tall, though, and his hair and beard were grown out into long, bad-smelling straggles of knot and grime. In the half-light of the garage, he had the instantly identifiable silhouette of a street person.
He gathered Adam up in a hug that reeked of piss and booze, a hug like a bundle of twigs in his arms. ”

“ Larry poured himself a coffee. “I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don’t talk to nobody, it’s like having a place full of statues or zombies.”
“Well, sure,” Alan said. “If you’re all alone with a computer, you’re just going to fall down the rabbit hole. You’re in your own world and cut off from the rest of the world. But once you put those computers on the network, they become a way to talk to anyone else in the world. ”

“ Kurt ground his fists into his eyes and groaned. “I’m such a fuck-up,” he said.
Alan tugged Kurt’s hand away from his face. “Stop that. You’re an extraordinary person. I’ve never met anyone who has the gifts you possess, and I’ve met some gifted people. You should be very proud of the work you’re doing, and you should be with someone who’s equally proud of you.” ”

“ You’re a very bright lad, and your brothers are growing up well, but it’s no sin to accept a little help.”
Alan suddenly felt like laughing. “We’re not underprivileged,” he said, thinking of the mountain, of the feeling of being encompassed by love of his father, of the flakes of soft, lustrous gold the golems produced by the handful. “We’re very well off,” he said, thinking of home, now free of Davey and his hateful, spiteful anger. “Thank you, though,” he said, thinking of his life unfolding before him, free from the terror of Davey’s bites and spying and rocks thrown from afar. ”

“ He went back to his porch then, and watched the Market wake up. The traffic was mostly bicycling bankers stopping for a fresh bagel on their way down to the business district. The Market was quite restful. It shuffled like an old man in carpet slippers, setting up streetside produce tables, twiddling the dials of its many radios looking for something with a beat. He watched them roll past, the Salvadoran pupusa ladies, Jamaican Patty Kings, Italian butchers, Vietnamese pho-tenders, and any number of thrift-store hotties, crusty-punks, strung-out artistes, trustafarians and pretty-boy skaters. ”

“ Alan said, but Davey wasn’t welcome. Just last week, Alan had seen a nice-looking bedroom set that he suspected he could afford—the golems had left him a goodly supply of gold flake, though with the golems gone he supposed that the sacks were the end of the family’s no-longer-bottomless fortune. But with the bedroom set would come a kitchen table, and then a bookcase, and a cooker and a fridge, and when they were ready, he could send each brother on his way with the skills and socialization necessary to survive in the wide world, to find women and love and raise families of their own. ”

“ He was already shucking his hat and mittens and boots and snow pants and coat. His skin flushed with the warm vapors coming off of the sulfur spring.
“You live here?” she said. The light from the flashlight was dimming and he reached over and gave it a couple of squeezes, then handed it back to her.
“I live here. It’s complicated.”
Davey’s eyes were open and he was staring at them with squinted eyes and a frown.
“Where are your parents?” she said.
“It’s complicated,” he said again, as though that explained everything. “This is my secret. No one else knows it.” ”

“ Alan said, taking him by the wrist, squeezing harder than was necessary. “Not yet. You said, ‘Lost another one.’ What other one, Krishna? What else did you see?”
Krishna gnawed on his neatly trimmed soul patch. “Let go of me, Andrew,” he said, almost too softly to be heard over the rain.
“Tell me what you saw,” Alan said. “Tell me, and I’ll let you go.” His other hand balled into a fist. “Goddammit, tell me!” Alan yelled, and twisted Krishna’s arm behind his back.
“I called the cops,” Krishna said. “I called them again and they’re on their way. Let me go, freak show.” ”

“ Alan said. “I was just thinking of that. What could be more democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points and their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?”
“Yeah,” Kurt said.
“Sure, you won’t get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet by bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play around with hardware. And convincing the people who already know why WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers who’ve never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their walls.” ”

“ The clerks who’d tended Alan’s many stores—the used clothing store in the Beaches, the used book-store in the Annex, the collectible tin-toy store in Yorkville, the antique shop on Queen Street—had both benefited from and had their patience tried by Alan’s discursive nature. Alan had pretended never to notice the surreptitious rolling of eyes and twirling fingers aimed templewise among his employees when he got himself warmed up to a good oration, but in truth very little ever escaped his attention. ”