Part 30 (1/2)

”I'm saying yes,” Tjan said, grinning piratically. ”I'm saying that I'll join your little weird-a.s.s hobby business and I'll open another ride here for the Ma.s.sholes. I'll help you run the franchising op, collect fees, make it profitable.”

Perry felt his face tighten.

”What? I thought you'd be happy about this.”

”I am,” Perry said. ”But you're misunderstanding something. These aren't meant to be profitable businesses. I'm done with that. These are art, or community, or something. They're museums. Lester calls them *wunderkammers* -- cabinets of wonders. There's no franchising op the way you're talking about it. It's ad hoc. It's a protocol we all agree on, not a business arrangement.”

Tjan grunted. ”I don't think I understand the difference between a agreed-upon protocol and a business arrangement.” He held up his hand to fend off Perry's next remark. ”But it doesn't matter. You can let people have the franchise for free. You can claim that you're not letting anyone have anything, that they're letting themselves in for their franchise. It doesn't matter to me.

”But Perry, here's something you're going to have to understand: it's going to be nearly impossible *not to* make a business out of this. Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good s.h.i.+t.”

”Tjan, I want you to come on board to help me create an octopus,”

Perry said.

”I can try,” Tjan said, ”but it won't be easy. When you do cool stuff, you end up making money.”

”Fine,” Perry said. ”Make money. But keep it to a minimum, OK?”

The next time Perry turned up at Logan, it was colder than the inside of an icebox and s.h.i.+tting down grey snow with the consistency of frozen custard.

”Great weather for an opening,” he said, once he'd climbed through the roof of Tjan's car and gotten snow all over the leather upholstery. ”Sorry about the car.”

”Don't sweat it, the kids are murder on leather. I should trade this thing in on something that's less of a deathtrap anyway.”

Tjan was balder than he'd been in September, and skinnier. He had a three-day beard that further hollowed out his normally round cheeks. The Lada sports-car fishtailed a little as they navigated the tunnels back toward Cambridge, the roads slick and icy.

”We scored an excellent location,” Tjan said. ”I told you that, but check this out.” They were right in the middle of a built-up area of Boston, something that felt like a banking district, with impressive towers. It took Perry a minute to figure out what Tjan was pointing at.

”That's the site?” There was a mall on the corner, with a boarded up derelict Hyatt overtopping it, rising high into the sky. ”But it's right in the middle of town!”

”Boston's not Florida,” Tjan said. ”Lots of people here don't have cars. There were some dead malls out in Worcester and the like, but I got this place for nothing. The owners haven't paid taxes in the ten years since the hotel folded, and the only shops that were left open were a couple of Azerbaijani import-export guys, selling junky stuff from India.

”We gutted the whole second floor and turned the ground-floor food-court into a flea-market. There's an old tunnel connecting this to the T and I managed to get it re-opened, so I expect we'll get some walk-in.”

Perry marveled. Tjan had a suit's knack for pulling off the ambitious. Perry had never tried to even rent an apartment in a big city, figuring that any place where land was at a premium was a place where people willing to spend more than him could be found. Give him a ghost-mall that was off the GPS grid anytime.

”Have you managed to fill the flea market?” It had taken Perry a long time to fill his, and still he had a couple of dogs -- a tarot reader and a bong stall, a guy selling high-pressure spray-paint cans and a discount p.o.r.n stall that sold naked shovelware by the petabyte.

”Yeah, I got proteges up and down New England. A lot of them settled here after the crash. One place is as good as another, and the housing was wicked-cheap once the economy disappeared. They upped stakes and came to Boston as soon as I put the word out. I think everyone's waiting for the next big thing.”

”You think?”

”Perry, New Work is the most important thing that ever happened to some of those people. It was the high-point of their lives. It was the only time they ever felt useful.”

Perry shook his head. ”Don't you think that's sad?”

Tjan negotiated a tricky tunnel interchange and got the car pointed to Cambridge. ”No, Perry, I don't think it's sad. Jesus Christ, you can't believe that. Why do you think I'm helping you? You and me and all the rest of them, we did something *important*. The world changed. It's continuing to change. Have you stopped to think that one in five American workers picked up and moved somewhere else to do New Work projects? That's one of the largest American resettlements since the dustbowl. The average New Work collective s.h.i.+pped more inventions per year than Edison Labs at its peak. In a hundred years, when they remember the centuries that were America's, they'll count this one among them, because of what we made.

”So no, Perry, I don't think it's sad.”