Makers Part 55

"You must be Perry," she said, setting the laptop down and giving him an unexpected hug. "That was from Hilda. I saw her a couple hours ago. She was very adamant that I pa.s.s it on to you."

"Nice to meet you, he said, accepting a cup of tea from an insulated jug on a cardboard side-board. "Hilda is all right?"

"Sit down," the lawyer said.

Perry's stomach turned a somersault. "Hilda's all right?"

"Sit."

Perry sat.

"She was ga.s.sed with a neurotoxin that has given her a temporary but severe form of Parkinson's disease. Normally it just renders people immobile, but one in a million has a reaction like this. It's just bad luck that Hilda was one of them."

"She was *ga.s.sed*?"

"They all were. There was a h.e.l.l of a fight, as I understand it. It really looks like it was the cops' fault. Someone told them that there were printed guns in the ride-location and they used extreme and disproportionate force."

"I see," Perry said. His blood whooshed in his ears. Printed guns? No frigging way. Sure, ray-guns in some of the exhibits. But nothing that fired anything. He felt tears begin to stream down his face. The lawyer moved to his sofa and put her arm around his shoulders.

"She's going to be fine," Candice said. "The Parkinson's is rare, but it goes away in 100 percent of the the cases where it occurs. What this means is that we've got an amazing chance of taking a huge bite out of the local law that we can use to fund future defense. Tjan told me that that's the strategy and I think it's sound. Plus the harder we hit the law today, the more reluctant they'll be to rush off half-c.o.c.ked the next time someone trumps up a BS trademark claim. It could be much worse, Perry. There's a kid who lost an eye to a rubber bullet."

Perry fisted the tears away. "Let's go get her," he said.

"They say she shouldn't be moved," Candice said.

"What does our doctor say?"

"I phoned a couple MDs this afternoon and got conflicting stories. Everyone agrees that not moving her is safer than moving her, though. The only disagreement is about how dangerous it would be to move her."

"Let's go see her, then."

"That we can do."

Perry had trouble with the search at the prison hospital. His cast and their scanners didn't get along and they couldn't be satisfied with a hand search. For a couple minutes it looked like he was going to be kept out, but Candice -- who had changed into a power-suit before they left the office -- put on a stern voice and demanded to speak to the duty sergeant, and then to his commanding officer, and in ten minutes, they were on the hospital ward, where the metal-railed beds had prisoners handcuffed to them.

"Hilda?" She looked sunken and sick, her face slack and her jaw askew. Her eyes opened and rolled crazily, they focused on him. Her body shook through two waves of tremors before she was able to raise a shaking hand toward him, trailing IV tubes. She was trying to say his name, but it wouldn't come out, just a series of plosive Ps.

But then he took her hand and felt its fine warmth, the calluses he remembered from all those months ago, and he felt better. Actually better. Felt some peace for the first time in a long time.

"h.e.l.lo, Hilda," he said, and he was smiling so broadly his face hurt, and tears were running down his cheeks and dripping off his nose and running into his mouth. She was weeping, too, her head vibrating like a bobble-doll. He bent over her and took her head in his hands, burying them in her thick blond hair, and kissed her on the lips. She shook under him, but she kissed him back, he could feel her lips move on his.

They kissed for a long time. He subconsciously took note of the fact that Candice had moved back, giving them some privacy. When the kiss broke, he had an overwhelming desire to tell her he loved her, but they hadn't taken that step yet, and maybe a prison hospital bed wasn't the right place to make p.r.o.nouncements of love.

"I love you," he said softly, in her ear, kissing the lobe. "I love you, Hilda."

She cried harder, and made choking sobs. He hugged her as hard as he dared. Candice came back and stood by them.

"They think that she'll be better in the morning. She's already much better off than she was just a couple hours ago. Sleep's the only thing for it. They've got her mildly sedated, too."

Hilda smelled like he remembered, the undersmell beneath her shampoo and the chemicals clinging to her hair. It took him back to their night together, and he stroked her cheek.

"I'll stay here," he said.

"I don't think that they're going to let you do that, Perry. This is a prison, not a hospital."

"I'll stay here," he said again. "Just make it happen, OK? We're going to sue them into a smoking hole, right? That's got to give us some leverage. I'll stay here."

She sighed and looked at him for a long time, but he wouldn't take his eyes off of Hilda. His broken arm throbbed and he was out of painkillers. They'd have painkillers here.

Candice went away, and then, a while later, she came back. "Stay here," she said. "I'll come and get you in the morning."

"Thanks," he said. Then he thought that he should say something more, and he turned around, but the lawyer had gone.

He fell asleep holding Hilda's hand with his good hand, and woke up with an unbelievable pain in his broken arm and couldn't find a nurse. He bit down on the pain and spent a long watch that night staring at Hilda, thinking of all she meant to him and how weird it was that she meant so much when they'd had so brief a moment together. They hadn't let him bring his phone in, or he'd have taken a thousand pictures of her face in repose. He nodded off again.

He woke when she did, stirring in her bed. Her movements were still weak and feeble, but they lacked the uncontrolled tremors of the night before. He leaned in for a kiss, not caring about his sour breath or hers.

"Good morning," he said.

"Morning, gorgeous," she said, and took him in a soft, sleepy hug.

Candice sprung them and took them across town to her doctor, a young man who took great care in examining Hilda, explaining patiently which fluids he was drawing and which tests he planned on running on them. Perry had noticed that midwesterners came in two flavors: big Scandinavian Aryans with giant shoulders and easy smiles, and exchange students and immigrants in varying shades of brown, who looked hurt and bent alongside of the natives -- looked like the people he knew from back home, people who didn't have ready access to medical care or good nutrition in their formative years.

The doctor was Vietnamese, but he was at least a couple generations in, judging by his accent, and he had the same midwestern smile and seemed big and bulky compared with the Vietnamese people Perry knew in Florida. He watched the man peer intently at a screen after taping some electrodes to Hilda's head, and felt like he'd come to some land of Norse giants.

The doctor eventually told Hilda to go home and rest, and she promised she would. Perry and she got into the back of Candice's car and cuddled up to one another, dozing. It wasn't until Perry got back with her to her apartment -- every stick of furniture made from clever cardboard -- and emptied out his pockets that he remembered to switch his phone on again.

He was down to his boxers and she was in cotton PJs with s.e.xy cowgirls printed on them, and when he powered the phone up, it went bonkers, lighting up like a Christmas tree, vibrating, and making urgent bleats.

"s.h.i.t," he said, and began to sort through the alerts while his back and neck muscles tightened. He sat on the edge of the bed and prodded at the phone with his right hand, holding it awkwardly in his left hand, trying to work around the cast. Hilda took the phone and held it for him so he could work more freely and they both read what was going on.

A second round of lawsuits had been filed that night, and the injunctions had been reinstated. The story about the rides being a source of printed arms and munitions had spread, and in San Francisco the ride had been taken apart by Homeland Security bomb robots that had detonated several key pieces of equipment. Three of the San Francisco ride-crew ended up in the hospital after clashes with overreacting cops.

Hilda nodded and took the phone from him and set it down.

"Right, what's the game-plan?"

"How should I know?" Perry said. He could hear the whine in his voice. "I just build stuff. Tjan and Candice say that they think we can sue the cops over the brutality and use the money to fund legal defenses, but Disney's denial-of-service attacking us in the courtroom. They're also getting all this destruction dealt to us by the cops."

"You know how you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let's break this down into small component pieces and work on solutions to them, then call up the troops and let them know what's going on. I'll get a conference call set up while we chat."

She was still moving slowly and weakly, and he tried to get her to put down her laptop and rest, but she wasn't having any of it.

And so they worked, dividing the problem up into manageable pieces: incorporating a nonprofit co-op, writing the by-laws, getting the word out through the press, re-opening the rides, putting together sc.r.a.pbooks of the carnage wrought.

It all seemed do-able once it was reduced to its component parts. Perry put it all online and then conferenced Tjan and Kettlewell in.

"Perry, do you think it's a good idea to tell our enemies how we plan to respond to them?"