Makers by Cory Doctorow (best romance ebooks .TXT) 📖

not just yet. There were limits to what Tjan could do from Boston, after all.
He got back in his car and peeled across the road to the shantytown and the guesthouse.
“Kettlewell!” He thumped the door. “Come on, Landon, it’s me, Perry. It’s an emergency.”
He heard Eva curse, then heard movement. “Whazzit?”
“Sorry, man, I wouldn’t have woken you but it’s a real emergency.”
“Fire?”
“No. Cops. They’ve shut down the ride.”
Kettlewell opened the door a crack and stared at him with a red-rimmed, hung-over eye. “Cops shut down the ride?”
“Yeah, they say there’s an injunction.”
“Gimme a sec, gotta put some pants on.” He closed the door. As Perry listened to the sounds of him getting dressed, he reflected that he’d done Eva the favor she’d been seeking: he’d found something to keep Kettlewell busy.
Kettlewell quizzed him intensely as they drove back across the road to the police-cars. He called Tjan and got voicemail, left a brief message, then got out of the car and stood still outside it, waving at the cop-cars.
“What?”
The male cop looked even more dyspeptic.
“Hi there! I wondered if I could get you to explain what’s going on here so we can open up shop again?”
“We’ve shut you down to enforce an injunction.”
“What injunction is that?”
“A court injunction.”
“Which court?”
The cop looked really angry for a second, then he got back in his car and fished around. “Broward County.” He sounded aggrieved.
“Is that the injunction there?” Kettlewell said.
“No,” the cop said, too quickly. They both knew he was lying, jerking them around.
“Can I see it? Does it have information about who to talk to to get the injunction lifted?” Kettlewell’s tone was even, pleasant and very adult. The voice of someone used to being obeyed.
“You’ll have to go to the courthouse. They open in a couple hours.”
“I’d really like to see it.”
“Oh for chrissakes,” the female cop said. “Just show it to them, Tom. God.” She spat on the ground. Her partner gave her a look, then handed the paper over to Kettlewell, who pored over it intently. Perry shoulder surfed him and gathered that they were being shut down for infringing Disney Parks Company trademarks. That was weird. You could hardly go ten feet in Florida without tripping over a bootleg Mickey, so why should the market-stalls’ Mickey designs trigger legal action?
“All right, then,” Kettlewell said. “Let’s make some phone calls.”
They got in the car and drove across the road to the shantytown. There was a tea-house that opened early and they commandeered its window table and spread out their things. Perry called Lester and woke him up. It took two or three tries to get his head around it—Lester couldn’t figure out why they’d shut down the market-stalls, but once he got that the ride was down too, he woke up fast and promised to meet them.
Kettlewell’s conversation with Tjan was a lot more heated. Perry tried to eavesdrop but couldn’t make any sense of it.
“All the rides are down,” he said once he’d dropped the phone to bounce a couple times on the tabletop, making the coffees shiver. “Every one of them was shut down by the cops this morning.”
“You’re shitting me. But they don’t all sell the same stuff.”
“They were shut down because of Disney trademarks in the ride itself, or so it seems. Now, what are we going to do? Tjan’s hired a lawyer for the Boston group and we can hire one for here, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to hire fixers everywhere that there’s a ride. That’s going to be really expensive. Disney’s filed all the injunctions at the state level—they have an industry association they work through that has cooperating attorneys in every city in the country, so it was easy for them.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah. Who did you piss off, Perry?”
Damned if he knew. He literally couldn’t think of a single person who’d want to do this—someone had convinced the Disney company to clobber him like Godzilla going after Tokyo. It just didn’t make any sense.
“So what do we do?”
Kettlewell looked at him. “I have no clue, Perry. You aren’t a company. You aren’t a network of companies. You aren’t an industry association. No one can speak for you. You can’t lobby or even field a spokesman. I mean, none of that stuff works for you—and that’s the only way I know to fight back in court.”
“I thought we were immune to this stuff. If there’s no one to sue, how can they sue us?”
“If there’s no one to sue, there’s no one to show up in court and object, either.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think we can incorporate you in time to make a difference,” Kettlewell said. “So we need to think of something else.”
Suzanne slid into the booth beside them. Her hair was tied back and her makeup was spare and severe. She had on European-cut trousers, high like a bolero-dancer’s, and a loose, flowing white cotton over-shirt on top of a luminescent pink tank. Perry couldn’t tell whether it was formal or informal, but it looked good and a little intimidatingly foreign. She didn’t meet Perry’s eye.
“Brief me,” she said. She held out her phone and put it in record mode.
Kettlewell ran it down quickly and she nodded, jotting notes.
“So what happens next?”
“Not much we can do,” Kettlewell said.
“The riders will be along shortly. Oh, and the merchants.” Perry still couldn’t catch her eye.
“I’ll go take some pictures,” she said.
“Be careful,” Perry said.
She mugged for him. “Sweetie, I take pictures of the mafiyeh.” Then it was all right between them again, somehow.
“Right,” Kettlewell said. “How’s our time looking?”
“Got thirty minutes until the first of the merchants show up. An hour until the riders start turning up.”
“You don’t have a lawyer, do you?”
Perry quirked his funny eyebrow.
“Stupid question. OK. Right, I’ll make some more calls. Let’s get some people out of bed.”
“What can I do?”
Kettlewell looked at him. “Huh. Um. This is really my beat now. I suppose you could go keep Suzanne company.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Something wrong with Suzanne?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Suzanne,” he said. “OK, off I go.”
He set off on foot. The shantytown had woken up now, people getting ready for the hike to the early busses into places where the few remaining jobs were.
He took his phone out and tossed it from hand to hand. Then he called the number that he’d programmed in all those days ago in Madison but had never bothered to call. He forgot until the ringing started that it was another time-zone there—an hour or two earlier. But when Hilda answered, she sounded wide awake.
“Nice of you to call,” she said.
“Nice of you to answer.” Her voice sent a thrill up his spine.
“We’ve got cops outside of the ride here,” she said. “We’ve only been live for a week, too.”
“They’re at every ride,” he said. “They shut us down too.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“What am I going to do about it?”
“Sure, this is your thing, Perry. We woke up and discovered the cops this morning and the first thing everyone did was wonder when you’d call with the plan.”
“You’re kidding. What do I know about cops?”
“What do any of us know about cops? All we know is we built this thing after you came and talked to us about it and now it’s been shut down, so we’re waiting for you to tell us what to do next.”
He groaned and sat down on a curb. “Oh, crap.”
Then she sighed heavily at the other end. “OK, Perry, you need to pull it together. We need you now. We need something that explains what’s going on, what to do next, and how to do it. There’s a lot of energy out here, a lot of people ready to fight. Just point us in the right direction.”
“I have a guy who’s trying to figure that out right now.”
“Perfect. Now you need to set up a conference call with every ride operator so we can talk this over. Get online and post a time and an address. I’ll chat it up and make some calls. You make some calls too. Everyone likes to hear from you. They like to know you’re on their side.”
“Right,” he said, getting back to his feet, turning around to get his computer out of his trunk. “Right. That’s totally the right thing to do. I’m on it.”
“Good man,” she said.
A little pause stretched between them. “So,” he said. “How you doing, apart from all this?”
Her laugh was merry. “I thought you’d never ask. I’m looking forward to your next visit, is how I’m doing.”
“Really?”
“Of course really.”
“You sounded a little pissed at me there is all.” He sounded like a lovesick teenager. “I mean—” He broke off.
“Your ass needed kicking, was all.” Pause. “I’m not pissed at you, though. When are you coming for a visit?”
“Got me,” he said. “I guess I should, right?” He really sounded like a teenager.
“You need to visit all the sites, check in on how we’re doing.” Pause. “Plus you should come hang out with me some.”
He almost pointed out all her warnings about only having a one-night stand and not missing the people he was away from and so forth, but stayed his tongue. The fact that she wanted him to come for a visit was overshadowing everything, even the looming crisis with the cops.
“It’s a deal.”
“Deal.”
“Well, bye.”
“Bye.”
He almost said, “You hang up first,” but that would have been too much. Instead he just kept the phone at his ear until he heard her click.
Suzanne was pointing and shooting like mad. Perry sat down on the cracked pavement beside her and unfolded his computer and started sending out emails, setting up a conference-channel. He gave Suzanne a short version of his talk with Hilda, being careful not to give a hint of his feelings for her.
“She sounds like a sensible girl,” Suzanne said. “You should go and pay her another visit.”
He blushed and she socked him in the shoulder.
“Take your call,” she said. The cops were giving them the hairy eyeball, and Perry screwed in his headset.
The conference channel was filling up. Perry checked off names as reps from all the rides came online. There was a lot of tight, tense chatter, jokes about the fuzz.
“OK,” Perry said. “Let’s get it started. There’s cops blockading every ride, right? Use the poll please.” He posted a poll to the conference page and it quickly got to 100 percent green. “So I just found the cops outside of mine, too, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I’ve got some dough for a lawyer, but I can’t afford lawyers for everyone. To make that work, we’d have to fly attorneys to every city with a ride in it, and that’s not practical as I’m sure you can tell.”
A half-dozen flags went up in the conference page. “I need someone to play moderator, ’cause