incentive to rip their old CDs -- hell, their old vinyl and tapes,too! -- and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that,but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: alibrary raising!"
Alan nodded. "So what's your point -- that companies' dumpsters arebeing napstered by people like you?" A napsterized Inventory. Alan feltthe *rightness* of it.
Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed iton the side of the table. "Exactly!" he said. "This is garbage -- it'slike the deleted music that you can't buy today, except at the bottom ofbins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated inlandfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around andrescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it intodigital files and upload it to the net -- but if you give people anincentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my workto help you..." He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP andpopped its latches and swung it open.
"Look at that -- I didn't get its guts out of a dumpster, but someoneelse did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for moneythat I exchanged for parts that someone else found in *her* dumpster --"
"Her?"
"Trying not to be sexist," Kurt said.
"Are there female dumpster divers?"
"Got me," Kurt said. "In ten years of this, I've only run into otherdivers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the coplater. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from thelandfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to whereit needs to be. So it's not cost effective for some big corporation tofigure out how to use or sell these -- so what? It's not cost-effectivefor some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any ofmy favorite bands in print, either. We'll figure it out. We're spookilygood at it."
"Spookily?"
"Trying to be more poetic." He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split endsof his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. "Got a new girlfriend, shesays there's not enough poetry in my views on garbage."
#
They found one of Davey's old nests in March, on a day when you couldalmost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would goand the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sourgreyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access pointhad gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look inthe Market's second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you couldtrace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen inAlan's attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplusboxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he'd found in BellCanada's Willowdale switching station dumpster.
Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on theantenna mounting atop the synagogue's roof. It had taken three meetingswith the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple'syouth caucus and getting *them* to explain it to the old cleric. Thesynagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, abrick-and-stone beauty from 1930.
They'd worried about the fight they'd have over drilling through theroof to punch down a wire, but they needn't have: The wood up there wassoft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the powercable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers andslipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.
Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt's heart was aburstwith the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then hecaught sight of Kurt's face, ashen, wide-eyed.
"I saw something," he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. Hishands were shaking.
"What?"
"Footprints," he said. "There's a lot of leaves that have rotted down tomud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in themud. Like a toddler's footprints, maybe. Except there were two toesmissing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot whereI could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were nopigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs -- so dried up that Icouldn't figure out what they were at first.
"But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left printsbehind like unbent paperclips."
Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.
"Be careful, it's all rotten up there," Kurt called. Alan nodded.
"Sure, thank you," he said, hearing himself say it as though from veryfar away.
The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles ofmeltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, andthere, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted theantenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-leggedbefore the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no toothmarks on the birds. They hadn't been eaten, they'd been torn apart, likea label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He picturedDavey sitting here on the synagogue's roof, listening to the eveningprayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watchingthe grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand,writhing.
He wondered if he was catching Bradley's precognition, and if that meantthat Bradley was dead now.
#
Bradley was born with the future in his eyes. He emerged from the bellyof their mother with bright brown eyes that did not roll aimlessly inthe manner of babies, but rather sought out the corners of the cavewhere interesting things were happening, where movement was about tooccur, where life was being lived. Before he developed the musclestrength and coordination necessary to crawl, he mimed crawling, seeinghow it was that he would someday move.
He was the easiest of all the babies to care for, easier even thanCarlo, who had no needs other than water and soil and cooingreassurance. Toilet training: As soon as he understood what was expectedof him -- they used the downstream-most bend of one of the undergroundrivers -- Benny could be relied upon to begin tottering toward the spotin sufficient time to drop trou and do his business in just the rightspot.
(Alan learned to pay attention when Bruce was reluctant to leave homefor a walk during those days -- the same premonition that made himperfectly toilet-trained at home would have him in fretting sweats atthe foreknowledge that he has destined to soil himself during therecreation.)
His nightmares ran twice: once just before bed, in clairvoyant preview,and again in the depths of REM sleep. Alan learned to talk him down fromthese crises, to soothe the worry, and in the end it worked toeveryone's advantage, defusing the nightmares themselves when they came.
He never forgot anything -- never forgot to have Alan forge a signatureon a permission form, never forgot to bring in the fossil he'd found forshow-and-tell, never forgot his mittens in the cloakroom and came homewith red, chapped hands. Once he started school, he started seeing to itthat Alan never forgot anything, either.
He did very well on quizzes and tests, and he never let the pitcher fakehim out when he was at bat.
After four years alone with the golems, Alan couldn't have been moreglad to have a brother to keep him company.
Billy got big enough to walk, then big enough to pick mushrooms, thenbig enough to chase squirrels. He was big enough to playhide-and-go-seek with, big enough to play twenty questions with, bigenough to horse around in the middle of the lake at the center of themountain with.
Alan left him alone during the days, in the company of their parents andthe golems, went down the mountain to school, and when he got back, he'dtake his kid brother out on the mountain face and teach him what he'dlearned, even though he was only a little kid. They'd write letterstogether in the mud with a stick, and in the winter, they'd try to spellout their names with steaming pee in the snow, laughing.
"That's a fraction," Brad said, chalking "3/4" on a piece of slate bythe side of one of the snowmelt streams that coursed down the springtimemountain.
"That's right, three-over-four," Alan said. He'd learned it that day inschool, and had been about to show it to Billy, which meant that Bradhad remembered him doing it and now knew it. He
took the chalk and drewhis own 3/4 -- you had to do that, or Billy wouldn't be able to rememberit in advance.
Billy got down on his haunches. He was a dark kid, dark hair and eyesthe color of chocolate, which he insatiably craved and begged for everymorning when Alan left for school, "Bring me, bring me, bring me!"
He'd found something. Alan leaned in and saw that it was a milkweedpod. "It's an egg," Bobby said.
"No, it's a weed," Alan said. Bobby wasn't usually given to flights offancy, but the shape of the pod was reminiscent of an egg.
Billy clucked his tongue. "I *know* that. It's also an egg for abug. Living inside there. I can see it hatching. Next
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