Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  Mostly, this stuff runs. On average. I mean, in particular, it’s always falling apart for some reason or another. Watch me knock some heads and you’ll get the picture.

  The heliographer’s tower is high atop The Dancing Ferret. Everyone told me that if Farrel Din could be persuaded to get involved with BINGO, all of Soho would follow, so I did some homework, spread some money around, and then I showed up one day with a wheelbarrow filled with clothbound books that I’d had run up by the kids who put out Stick Wizard.

  The fat elf came out of the stockroom with a barrel of dandelion wine and a thoughtful look. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s Wikipedia, Mr. Din. Let me explain.” And that was the start of a beautiful friendship. I’d printed and bound every Wikipedia entry as of the day the Border reopened (I’d put a copy on a memory stick on my way out the door), as well as the discuss link for every page. It filled two hundred volumes, each as big as a phone book, and Din installed a special set of spelled bookcases for it on a wall of the bar, fronted with glass that would only swing open twice for every drink you bought. It created an entirely new trade for his establishment, a day crowd that turned up to drink small beer and pore over the collected and ridiculous wisdom of the World.

  The Dancing Ferret’s door stood open to catch the spring breeze when I got there, sometime before lunch. One of Farrel Din’s flunkies had set out sofas around the bookcase, and they were crowded with elves and halfies and even humans. I figured the humans were people who’d lived through the Pinching Off in B-town, trying to figure out WTF had happened to the World in the blink of an eye.

  Din came out of the back room looking just as he had the day I’d met him, three years before. Elves age much slower than us, and our little mayfly lives must zip past them like a video stuck on 32X fast-forward. He shook his head at me and pulled a face. “They’re at it again, huh?” He rolled his eyes at the ceiling, indicating the tower on the roof and the mischievous heliographers.

  I nodded. “Kids will be kids.” Yes, I was only a couple years older than them, but I wasn’t a kid; I was a respectable businessman. Someone had to be the grown-up at BINGO. “I’ll get ’em into line.” I nodded at the crowd poring over the books. “Looks like you’re doing pretty good there,” I said. There were even a couple of suits from up the Hill, proper businessmen and straight cits who you wouldn’t ever think to find in Soho, let alone slumming it at The Dancing Ferret. But knowledge is power and knowledge is money, and I’d given Farrel Din a very concentrated lump of knowledge.

  He made another face. “Bah.” He actually said “Bah,” like someone in a fairy tale. Gods-be-damned elves. What a bunch of drama queens. “Used to be you could have a real, proper, no-fooling, bona fide pointless bar argument around here: a fight over someone’s batting average or how many moons Jupiter has or what the Eight Wonders of the World are. Now”—he shook a fist at the bookcases and the customers who sat before them—“someone just goes and looks up the answer. Where’s the romance in that? I ask you. Where’s the chance to use rhetoric, force of personality, style, and wit to prove a point in a world where any tight-assed fool can have an answer, a fact, in a second?”

  I tried to figure out if he was pulling my leg. It was nearly impossible to tell. Elves.

  “Okay, well, you just let me know if you want me to take them out again.” I’d heard that there were three more print shops working on their own Wikipedias, brought from the World on thumb drives and laptops, more up-to-date than what Farrel Din’s fifty-odd linear feet of shelving supported. I welcomed the competition: Once there was a thriving market for Wikipedias in B-town, I’d unveil my secret weapon—a BitTorrent client I’d rigged up right on one of our fastest nodes, downloading a daily tarball of the latest Wikipedia edits. In other words: let them try to compete with me, but I would always have the most up-to-date version.

  Farrel Din grinned suddenly, without any mirth, his fat face somehow wolfish. “Not on a bet, sonny. Those things have sucked up so much—” He used an elfin word that I didn’t recognize, though it sounded like the word for “curiosity,” like they shared a common root. “I figure they’ll be ripe in a few years, and then …” He got a faraway look in his eyes. I shook my head. Elves. In a few years, I’d have punctured the Border; I’d have plumbed the unplumbable; I’d have—

  “Okay, whatever you say, Mr. Din. I gotta go bang some skulls now.”

  He waved absently at me as I ascended the narrow ladder that led to The Dancing Ferret’s roof. The rungs had some minor spell on them that was supposed to make them grippy and safe, but the magic didn’t work as advertised (surprise, surprise). Some of the grips were so sticky it felt like they’d been covered in honey, others felt like splintery wood, and one right up at the top felt like it had been coated in Vaseline. Gods be damned. I’d have to come back here with a roll of skateboard tape and take care of it the old-fashioned, brute-force World way.

  Up on the roof, I planted my hands on my hips and squinted at the tower top high above me, where the heliograph’s disk winked. Holding the angry-dad pose, I waited for my wayward children to glance down at me, feeling slightly foolish but committed to ensuring that they knew there was about to be hells to pay for their shenanigans.

  Nothing. Indeed, as I watched, someone swung the heliograph’s glittering mirror around suddenly, tilting it downward, and raucous laughter emanated from the tower top. I imagined I could hear the outraged squawk of a distant pigeon as it was blinded by the burst of light, sent veering off course along with its payload of precious data.

  Bugger this. I put my tongue behind my teeth and my hand in my pocket and mimed a whistle as I touched the spelled-carved cricket I keep in my jeans. Everyone respects someone who can whistle so loud it’s like a physical blast, a “missile whistle,” but the truth is, I can’t manage anything more than a squeak. It’s the carved cricket, made from a piece of knotty fig from Australia and tweaked by an Elfmage so that it fires off a positively violent sound, like the blast from a referee’s whistle, and if I do the mime at the same time, you’d never know it wasn’t me.

  Two heads poked over the parapet of the semaphore tower. One was shaved and one sported a huge spray of pink hair whose split ends were visible from the ground. There was one missing. I made with the whistle again, emphatically tracing out the rune over the cricket’s back. A third head poked out, with deliberate slowness, this one topped with a mop of green dreads that hung down like long snakes.

  “Ladies, gentleman,” I said, cupping my hand to my mouth. “If I might have a quiet word?”

  I fancied that I could see their guilty expressions despite the distance, all but Jetfuel, my bright and reckless little protégé with the dreads, a natural leader who, it seemed, couldn’t help but make trouble wherever she went.

  They continued to stare at me. “Down here,” I said. “Now.”

  Gruntzooki and Gruntzilla (Baldy and Pink Hair) came down the ladder, keeping three points of contact at all times. But Jetfuel stood up, hiked up her greasy, torn jeans, and stepped off the platform, snagging the bug-out pole with one hand just before gravity snatched her out of the sky and dashed out her pretty brains. She coiled her powerful legs around the pole, squeezing it with her thighs to slow her descent so that she touched down at the same time as her colleagues.

  They lined up like the naughty children they were, so comical that I had to struggle to keep my face serious. “Who’s winning?” I asked.

  They shifted uncomfortably.

  “Come on. Who’s in the lead?”

  Gruntzilla and Gruntzooki pointedly didn’t look at Jetfuel. I leaned toward her, noticing that she’d added some new piercings since I’d last seen her—two studs in her left cheek that she’d threaded with a genuine, old-school punk-rock safety pin. I had to admit, it looked good.

  “Oh, Jetfuel?” I said sweetly. I could tell she was trying not to laugh. It was an infectious laugh. A pandemic laugh. “How many points ahead are you?”
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  “Three hundred and seventeen,” she said, and the laugh was in her voice. Jetfuel is a halfie with a supernatural gift for juggling routing tables in her head, and I’ve never figured out if she had some kind of glamour that made her so impossible to get properly angry with, or whether it’s just that she’s beautiful, smart and good at her job, and doesn’t give a damn about anything.

  “How many points per pigeon?”

  “Fifteen.”

  I’m good at math. “You’ve zapped twenty and one fraction of a pigeon?”

  “I got two extra points for knocking a Silver Suit off his bike.”

  Oy vey. “So, besides hardworking avians and the duly-appointed officers of the law, is there anyone else you’ve been zapping with that highly polished, highly critical, and highly expensive mirror up there?”

  She pursed her lips, making a show of thinking. “I got a dragon once,” she said. “That time a big old bastard came down from the Border along the Mad River? I got it right in the eyes. But no one else saw, so it didn’t count.”

  I whispered a charm that was supposed to keep away the evil eye (“hinky-dinky-polly-voo, out, out, bad spirits, this means you”). “You’re joking.”

  She pursed her lips again, shook her head. “Nuh-uh. It looked like it had found true love for a second, then turned and flapped away. Guess you could say I saved B-town from being incinerated by a giant, fire-breathing mythological beast, huh? Sure wish I’d had a witness. Dragons should be good for like a thousand points.”

  It’s a glamour that keeps you from getting angry with her. It must be. I was trying so hard, but I wanted to grin. “Jetfuel,” I said, “we’ve talked about this. You are a truly kick-ass heliograph operator, and I think you’re a very nice person and all, but if you zap one more pigeon—”

  “You’ll turn her into a goon?” Gruntzooki snorted and Gruntzilla hid her mouth with her hand.

  “I’ll turn you into an unemployed person,” I said. “With no coffee.” I nodded at the thermos clipped to her belt with a carabiner that had been imported from the World at great expense. “When was the last time you bought even a featherweight of beans? How long do you imagine you could function once you had to pay street price for your jet fuel, Jetfuel?”

  I could see that one hit home. She slumped a little.

  “Shannon,” she said. “It’s just that it’s so lame. We don’t need the pigeons. They crap everywhere. They have crazy latency. Cats eat them.” I recognized her tone, and it warmed my heart: the sound of a techie who was offended at the existence of an inelegant solution to a challenging problem.

  I nodded at Gruntzilla and Gruntzooki, then tipped my head toward the unoccupied tower. They took the hint and clambered up the ladder, and a second later, their mirror was winking furiously at the other towers we’d put up all over B-town. All over town, dozens of router managers made note of the fact that The Dancing Ferret station was up and routing again.

  “Over here,” I said, walking to the edge of the roof and sitting with my legs dangling over the street below. Jetfuel sat down beside me, unscrewed her thermos, and titrated some caffeine into her bloodstream. I fished some black licorice gum out of my shirt pocket and popped it into my gob. We all have our vices. “You remember when I got here? You remember what I wanted to do?”

  She’d been the first one who’d believed in my ideas, and she’d brought a dozen of my first recruits into the shop, trained them herself, climbed buildings in jingling harness to set up repeaters.

  She screwed up her face into an improbably pretty look of disbelief. “You mean the Elfnet?” We’d called it that as a joke, but it stuck.

  I nodded.

  “Oy,” she said. She’d gotten that from me. “Really? Now?”

  “Why not now?” I asked.

  She flapped her arms over Bordertown, arrayed before us. “Because,” she said, “it’s all working now. You’ve got one hundred percent coverage; you’re signing up customers as fast as you can punch down nodes and kludge together peecees to stick on them. Shannon, you’re rich. You’re practically respectable. They write about you in the good newspapers now, not just the free sheets.”

  “Why are you zapping pigeons, Jetfuel?”

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Answer the question. Honestly. What did those poor birdies ever do to you?”

  She shrugged and looked down at her dangling feet. “I guess …” She shrugged again. “I dunno. Bored? That’s it, just bored.”

  I nodded. “Once it’s good, once it all runs tickety-boo, the challenge goes out of it, doesn’t it?”

  She looked at me, really looked at me, with the intensity I remembered last seeing through the lenses of a pair of binocs as we stared at each other across a mile of freespace, trying to get our first two mirrors lined up exactly right. Most of my people saw BINGO as a maintenance problem, keeping the whole hairball running. But Jetfuel was in it from the start. She saw the mission as building stuff.

  “Oy,” she said.

  “Oy,” I said.

  She finished her coffee and screwed the lid back on, then stood up and dusted off her hands on the seat of her torn jeans. “All right,” she said, holding out a hand to me. “Let’s go storm Elfland.”

  * * *

  No human can enter the Realm. No information about the Realm can pierce the Border, except in the mind or scrolls of an actual elf, and from what I understand, the information changes somehow when they pass through the Border. Like the information has an extra dimension that can’t fit into our poor, stupid 3-D world.

  There’s a book called Flatland, about all these two-dimensional beings who can only move from side to side and are visited by a 3-D person. It’s a good book, if a little weird. But the thing is, it is possible for the 3-D and 2-D people to talk to each other; they just need to work it all out.

  That’s why I think I can do it. The Internet is designed to be fault-tolerant and transport-independent. I can route a packet by carrier pigeon, by spell, by donkey, or by runic script written on vellum and tucked into a diplomatic pouch behind the saddle of a highborn courier. My architecture doesn’t care if the return volley arrives late; it doesn’t care if it returns out of sequence. That’s fault-tolerant. That’s transport-independent.

  The first-ever Internet connection wasn’t much to write home about: A computer at UCLA and a computer at Stanford were painstakingly wired together, and a scientist at UCLA began to log in to the remote end. He typed “L-O,” and then the computer crashed. From those first two bytes, the network was gradually, inexorably improved upon, until it was the global system that we know and love today. That’s all I need: a toehold, a crack I can jam a lever into and pry, until the gap is as wide as the whole world. Just let me round-trip one packet over the Border and I’ll do the rest. I know I can.

  Jetfuel and I walked down to the river, headed for BINGO headquarters. Our heads nodded together in solemn congress, as they’d done countless times before, when BINGO was just a dumb idea.

  “Have you found a remote end?” Her voice had an odd quality, a weird and almost angry sound that I hadn’t ever heard in it before.

  “No,” I said. “Not yet. But there are so many Highborn on the Net these days, I thought I’d just look around at our best customers and see if anyone’s name jumps out as a good candidate.”

  “It’s going to be a delicate operation,” she said. “What if you ask someone to help you and he rats you out instead?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure there’s anyone to rat me out to. It’s not like there’s a law against piercing the Border, right? I mean, there’s like a natural law, like the law of gravity. But you don’t go to jail for violating gravity, right?”

  She snorted. “No, usually you go to the hospital for trying to violate gravity. But, Shannon, that’s the thing, you don’t understand them. They don’t have laws like you think of them. There isn’t a Trueblood Criminal Code Section Ten, Article Three, Clause
Four that says ‘Humans and human communications apparatuses are prohibited from engaging in real-time congress across the Border that separates our realities.’ The laws of the Realm are more like”—she waved her long, slim fingers, all chipped glitter nail polish and anodized hot-pink death’s head rings—“they’re like paintings.”

  “Paintings.”

  She twisted her face up. “Okay, ever see a painting and go, ‘Whoa, that’s some painting’?”

  I nodded.

  “You ever wonder why? Why it grabs you by the hair and won’t let go? Why it compels you?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t really look at a lot of paintings.”