Welcome to Bordertown Page 9

  * * *

  Trish looked up as the harper took the stage. He settled on his chair and lifted his hands. Oh, please, she thought, oh, please.… She buried her fingers deep in Rosco’s fur, willing it to happen. And the harper struck the opening notes of the song she needed him to play.

  How can there be an apple

  Without e’er a core

  How can there be a house

  Without e’er a door …?

  My head is the apple without e’er a core

  My mind is the house without e’er a door

  And my heart is the palace

  Wherein she may be

  And she may unlock it

  Without e’er a key

  At last, Trish heard the answers to the Riddle Song.

  My head is the apple without e’er a core.… My mind is the house without e’er a door.…

  She’d thought no one understood that. But long ago, someone somewhere had known and had written a song.

  She felt a hand on her head. She prepared herself to look up, full of apologies, at Jimmy.

  But it was Anush, tentatively stroking her hair. He crouched down beside her. “You okay?”

  Trish nodded.

  He handed her a hankie. “Want to stay? Your brother’s some kind of genius.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s with the band. He said he’ll be back.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I think we might have to dance, though.”

  “I could do that,” Trish said with a smile.

  * * *

  The gig’s a crazy success. Widdershins makes its magic even without the rest of our special effects (we don’t dare turn on the spell amps again just yet), and people dance, and the music rocks, and everyone’s happy. The band. The audience. Farrel Din. Me, I’m probably the happiest of all. I’ve finally found my long-lost sister.

  Afterward, Spider sweeps us all up and off to the Hard Luck Café for some celebratory (or is it commiseratory?) beers: the whole band, Cam and Seal from the Chimera, Trish, Anush the monster guy. Even the Queen of Elfland comes along. You know Spider, he doesn’t take no for an answer, and soon we’re all out the door and on our way. My sister keeps looking at me funny, a little bit shy and a little bit freaked out. I guess it’s weird for her. She’s the Trish I knew, but I’m just some big, galumphing guy who turns up in Bordertown one day and claims to be her younger brother. Correction, her older brother now. No wonder it’s a little stiff between us.

  It’s so late that the streets of Soho are almost quiet, or at least as quiet as they get—even on Ho Street, where the lights of Danceland are turned off, the Saturday-night crowds have melted away, and there’s only a single busker playing a mournful violin near Snappin’ Wizards. The Hard Luck is open, as it always is, and it’s crowded even at this hour. There’s a table just big enough for us all at the back if we crowd around.

  An elfin guy at the grill looks up and says, “Hey, don’t bring that Hell Hound in here!”

  “Relax, Nabber,” says Cam. “That’s no Hell Hound—that’s just Rosco. He’s with us and he’s completely harmless.”

  “What is the thing with elves and dogs anyway?” I ask Cam as the menus are passed around.

  Spider exchanges a look with the Queen of Elfland; then the two of them start snickering behind their hands. Cam just rolls her eyes and says, “Don’t even bother asking, Jimmy. It’s just one of those weird Realm things.”

  That’s it? That’s all? There’s no more explanation than that? But what the heck, I take her advice and let it go. Like so many things about the elves, this, too, will remain a mystery. They are strange in ways we humans can’t begin to fathom, and no doubt we’re just as strange to them. And it doesn’t even matter. We’re all friends around this table, human, elf, halfling, and wheezing Hell Hound.

  My sister orders some kind of weird tea, then sits quietly ruffling Rosco’s fur with a wistful, inward look.

  “Hey, sis,” I say, and take hold of her other hand. She’s startled, because we’re not a touchy kind of family—but she leaves her hand resting in mine and finally looks me straight in the eye.

  “Hey,” she says. “It’s okay. Really.”

  “It’s all kind of strange, isn’t it?” I say.

  “It’s not what I expected.”

  If she means Bordertown, I have to agree. It’s so much better. I let go of her hand as the drinks are plunked down and smile at her—but my sister’s not smiling back. Trish isn’t even looking at me now.

  And then it hits me. She’s knows I’ve come to take her home. And of course she doesn’t want to go. I wouldn’t either, if I were her. No wonder she’s being so quiet.

  “Look, Trish,” I tell her quickly, “if you don’t want to come back, I guess I can understand that now. I’m not gonna drag you back to Milltown.”

  I have her full attention now.

  “I’ll explain it to the folks. I’ll tell them that I saw you, that you’re doing fine, and that you belong here and ought to stay.”

  Trish puts her tea down with a thump. “Well, then, you would be lying,” she says to my surprise. I see her exchange a look with the monster guy, who seems to figure in her life somehow. Then she leans forward, looking through my eyes straight into my soul, like she always could.

  “You’re the one who belongs here, Jimmy. Don’t give me that look. It’s so completely obvious. How else do you explain all this?” she asks, her gaze sweeping around the crowded table. “You’ve been in town for, what, five minutes, and you have a home and a band and a café full of friends. Just like you used to on the playground, where you were always at the center of things, remember?”

  “Oh, hey—” I start to say, embarrassed. Like she has to bring that up in front of everybody?

  “Okay, you’re not the little Jimbo I once knew, but some things never change, do they? And the thing about you that hasn’t changed is that when you’re happy, you practically shine.”

  The table has suddenly gone quiet. Everyone is looking at me and Trish.

  “You’re the one who has to stay,” she says.

  “Of course he’s staying!” Spider chimes in, and there’s a raucous wave of agreement from the others.

  But of course I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I try to explain it to Trish, to everyone. “Somebody has to go back to the World and look after our family.…”

  “That somebody will be me,” says Trish firmly. “I’m the one who is going home.”

  “But—”

  “I want to go back to the World, Jimmy. Not to stay in Milltown, but to go to college like I’d always planned. Anush is going to help me find a school where I can study myth and all the things I like. There are schools that might be even better for me than Harvard, and we’re going to get scholarships. And wherever it is, I’ll keep an eye on Mom and Dad. Good heavens, Jimmy, they’re not helpless.”

  “We’re getting scholarships?” the monster guy pipes up.

  “Of course,” she says. “You need one, too, don’t you?”

  “Tara, I mean, Trish, I don’t even know if I can get back into school anymore.”

  “Then you’ll write your fantasy novel instead,” Trish says in the decisive way that I remember from years ago.

  “What novel?” he asks her, baffled.

  “The one that no one else has written yet,” she tells him, as if it’s obvious. “The one based on that Indian saga you were telling me about.”

  My sister’s friend blinks, like he’s had a revelation. (Trish has that effect on people, I remember), and Spider says, “Well, then, my friends, it’s all settled,” and he calls for another round.

  Is it really settled? Is it possible? Trish sees my expression and begins to laugh. “You may be six feet tall and nearly nineteen now, but you’re still my little brother, Jimbo. So listen to me. You’re staying. I’m going. End of discussion. Now drink your beer.”

  Monster guy gives me a long look over the beer. “Yo
ur big sister always this bossy, kid?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “You get used to it.”

  Conversation now turns to other things (to the gig, to the spell that went awry, to Farrel Din’s face when all the club went crazy) as I sit quietly, my drink in hand, entirely dumbfounded. I look over at the Queen of Elfland, who gives me a dazzling smile (my third!), and I know that my sister has read me right. I want to stay. I want more crazy nights like this. I want to finally learn that elfin girl’s name.

  “I guess that means Rosco is staying, too,” I say quietly to Trish. No one but that friend of hers is listening now. “If you’re sure—I mean really, one hundred percent sure—that Mom and Dad are going to be okay …?”

  This time, Trish gives me a little smile.

  “Don’t worry, cuddlebunny,” she assures me. “You’ll write. And you’ll be home for Christmas.”

  SHANNON’S LAW

  BY CORY DOCTOROW

  When the Way to Bordertown closed, I was only four years old, and I was more interested in peeling the skin off my Tickle Me Elmo to expose the robot lurking inside his furry pelt than I was in networking or even plumbing the unknowable mysteries of Elfland. But a lot can change in thirteen years.

  When the Way opened again, the day I turned seventeen, I didn’t hesitate. I packed everything I could carry—every scratched phone, every half-assembled laptop, every stick of memory, and every Game Boy I could fit in a duffel bag. I hit the bank with my passport and my ATM card and demanded that they turn over my savings to me, without calling my parents or any other ridiculous delay. They didn’t like it, but “It’s my money, now hand it over” is like a spell for bending bankers to your will.

  Land rushes. Know about ’em? There’s some piece of land that was off-limits, and the government announces that it’s going to open it up—all you need to do is rush over to it when the cannon goes off, and whatever you can stake out is yours. Used to be that land rushes came along any time the United States decided to break a promise to some Indians and take away their land, and a hundred thousand white men would wait at the starting line to stampede into the “empty lands” and take it over. But more recently, the land rushes have been virtual: The Internet opens up, and whoever gets there first gets to grab all the good stuff. The land rushers in the early days of the Net had the dumbest ideas: online pet food, virtual-reality helmets, Internet-enabled candy delivery services. But they got some major money while the rush was on, before Joe Investor figured out how to tell a good idea from a redonkulous one.

  I was too young for the Internet land rush. But when the Way to the Border opened again, I knew there was another rush about to start. I wasn’t the only one, but I will tell you what: I was the best. By the time I was seventeen, there wasn’t anyone who was better at getting networks built out of junk, hope, ingenuity, and graft than Shannon Klod. And I am Shannon Klod, the founder of BINGO, the lad who brought networking to B-town.

  I’ll let you in on a secret, something you will never find out by reading the official sales literature of the Bordertown Inter-Networkers Governance Organization: It was never about wiring up B-town. It was never about helping the restaurants take orders from Dragon’s Tooth Hill by email. It was never about giving the traders a way to keep the supply chains running back to the World. It was never about improving the efficiency of Bordertown’s bureaucracy.

  The reason I rushed to Bordertown—the reason I pulled every meter of copper and attached every spellbox, heliograph, and carrier pigeon to a routing center, the reason I initiated a thousand gutterpunks and wharf rats into the mysteries of TCP/IP—had nothing to do with becoming B-town’s first Internet tycoon. I don’t want money except as a means to getting my true desire. You may not believe this, but I gave away nearly every cent I brought in, literally threw it into the street when no one was looking.

  The reason I came to B-town and set up BINGO and all that glorious infrastructure was this: I wanted to route a packet between the World and the Realm. I wanted to puncture the veil that hangs between the human and elfin domains with a single piece of information, to disorder the placid surface of the membrane that keeps these two worlds apart.

  I wanted to bring order and reason and rationality to the Border. And gods be damned, I think I succeeded.

  * * *

  You may have heard that the Net was designed to withstand a nuclear war. It’s not true, but it’s truthy, in the neighborhood of true. You may have heard that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around. This also isn’t true, but it’s also truthy enough to quote.

  The fact is, the Net is decentralized and fault-tolerant. That means anyone can hook up to it, and when parts of it break down, the rest keeps going. In this regard, it is one of the most stupendous creations our stupid species can lay claim to, right up there with anything our long-lived cousins from the other side of reality can cite. They’ve got their epic magicks and their enchanted swords and their fey lands where a single frozen moment of deepest sorrow and sweetest joy hangs in a perpetual balance that you could contemplate for a thousand lifetimes without getting the whole of it.

  But gods be damned, we invented a machine that allows anyone, anywhere, to say anything, in any way, to anyone, anywhere.

  “Shannon! Shannon! Shannon!” They chanted it from the base of the spiral stairs that led up to my loft, my motley crew of network engineers, cable pullers, technicians, and troubleshooters. More reliable than any alarm clock, my army knew that I could not be roused until the world had arranged itself into a state of sufficient interestingness. “Shannon!” they chanted, and the smell of coffee wafted up through the hatchway whence cameth the stairwell’s top. They had my espresso machine down there, and it had a head of steam. The regular thunk-tamp-hiss-thump of Tikigod pulling shots of lethal black caffeine juice was a fine rhythm section for the vocals.

  The universe had attained liftoff. It was time to meet my public.

  Back in the World, I’d had a ratty and much-loved bathrobe I’d made my mom buy me after I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. I’d brought the bathrobe with me to B-town, but I got rid of it after I found my loft and realized that the regal effect of descending a wrought-iron black spiral staircase before your marshaled troops faded if they could look up at your dangling junk while you made your way. I’d had a seamstress on Water Street run me up a set of checked flannel pajamas instead and got myself a pair of matching carpet slippers. All it wanted was a pipe and a basset hound and I’d have been the picture of middle-class respectability.

  “Good morning, all and sundry,” I said, clenching my hands over my head like a prizefighter, celebrating my victory over sleep, another round lost by Morpheus, that candy-ass lightweight. “Let there be coffee!”

  The secret of my success? Coffee. Black Cat Mama was B-town’s most reliable coffee supplier, thanks to superior communications technology: She used my networks to coordinate with a variety of suppliers in the World and hadn’t run out of inventory since we put her online. She’d been trapped in B-town during the great Pinching Off and didn’t really grok networks, but she grokked coffee. She paid me in espresso roast beans, and we ground them ourselves—rather, Tikigod’s legion of love slaves ground them for her, hand-cranking the burr grinders to a fine powder that ranged from 200 to 250 microns, depending on the humidity, the beans, and the vagaries of the crema, as determined by Tikigod each morning.

  Bottom line: If you worked for BINGO, you had coffee, all day long, enough to set every hair on your body on end, enough to make the tip of your nose go numb, enough to make you clamp your jaws and tap your teeth together just to hear the bony click in your skull.

  The secret of my success? Work for BINGO and no matter how hard you danced the night before, no matter what you poured down your throat or smoked or ate, you would be a thrumming bowstring for your workday. Oh, yes.

  They cheered me, and Tikigod’s love slaves ground the beans, and the boiler hissed as its spellbox
sang a high and tight note, and the black waters flowed, and the milk frothed, and the network began its day.

  * * *

  You know what pisses me off? The whole business: the Border, B-town, the Realm, all of it. Here we have this amazing thing, this other universe sitting there, only one hairbreadth from the universe we’ve been untangling for centuries, and what do we use it for? Fashion. Music. Bohemia. Some trade, some moneymaking.

  Nothing wrong with any of it. But am I the only gods-be-damned human being who wants to sit down with whatever passes for a scientist in Elfland and say, “We call this gravity. It decreases at the square of distance and makes its effects felt at the speed of light. Tell me what you call it and how it works for you, will you?”

  We say that magic and technology are erratic in the Border, but that’s just a fancy way of saying we don’t know how they work here. That we haven’t applied systematic study to it. We have regressed to cavemen, listening to shamans who tell us that the world can’t be known. Screw that. I’m going to unscrew the universe.

  But first someone’s got to get the heliographers to stop pranking the carrier-pigeon handlers.

  The Net’s secret weapon is that it doesn’t care what kind of medium it runs over. It wants to send a packet from A to B, and if parts of the route travel by pigeon, flashing mirrors, or scraps of paper cranked over an alleyway on a clothesline, that’s okay with the Net. All that stuff is slower than firing a laser down a piece of fiber-optic, but it gets the job done.

  At BINGO, we do all of the above, whatever it takes to drop a node in where a customer will pay for it. Our tendrils wend their way out into the Borderlands. At the extreme edge, I’ve got a manticore trapper on contract to peer into the eyepiece of a fey telescope every evening for an hour. He’s the relay for a kitchen witch near Gryphon Park whose privy has some magick entanglement with the hill where he sits. When we can’t get traffic over Danceland in Soho because the spellboxes that run the amps and the beer fridges are fritzing out our routers, our kitchen witch begins to make mystic passes over her toilet, which show up as purple splotches through the trapper’s eyepiece. He transcribes these—round splotches are zeroes, triangular splotches are ones—in 8-bit bytes, calculates their checksum manually, and sends it back to the witch by means of a spelled lanthorn that he operates with a telegraph key affixed to it with the braided hair of a halfie virgin (Tikigod’s little sister, to be precise). The kitchen witch confirms the checksum, and then he sends it to another relay near the Promenade, where a wharf rat who has been paid handsomely to lay off the river water for the night counts the number of times a tame cricket sings and hits a key on a peecee in time with it. The peecee pops those packets back into the Net, where they are swirled and minced and diced and routed and transformed into coffee, purchase orders, dirty texts, desperate pleas from parents to runaways to come home, desperate pleas from runaways to their parents to send money, and a million Facebook status updates.