he other nice things about that place over Sotheby's, there was none of
this waiting thirty days to get a cheque. I queued up with the other pickers
after the bidding was through, collected a wad of bills, and headed for my
truck.

I spotted Craphound loading his haul into a minivan with handicapped plates. It
looked like some kind of fungus was growing over the hood and side-panels. On
closer inspection, I saw that the body had been covered in closely glued Lego.

Craphound popped the hatchback and threw his gear in, then opened the driver's
side door, and I saw that his van had been fitted out for a legless driver, with
brake and accelerator levers. A paraplegic I knew drove one just like it.
Craphound's exoskeleton levered him into the seat, and I watched the eerily
precise way it executed the macro that started the car, pulled the
shoulder-belt, put it into drive and switched on the stereo. I heard tape-hiss,
then, loud as a b-boy cruising Yonge Street, an old-timey cowboy voice: "Howdy
pardners! Saddle up, we're ridin'!" Then the van backed up and sped out of the
lot.

I get into the truck and drove home. Truth be told, I missed the little bastard.

#

Some people said that we should have run Craphound and his kin off the planet,
out of the Solar System. They said that it wasn't fair for the aliens to keep us
in the dark about their technologies. They say that we should have captured a
ship and reverse-engineered it, built our own and kicked ass.

Some people!

First of all, nobody with human DNA could survive a trip in one of those ships.
They're part of Craphound's people's bodies, as I understand it, and we just
don't have the right parts. Second of all, they _were_ sharing their tech with
us -- they just weren't giving it away. Fair trades every time.

It's not as if space was off-limits to us. We can any one of us visit their
homeworld, just as soon as we figure out how. Only they wouldn't hold our hands
along the way.

#

I spent the week haunting the "Secret Boutique," AKA the Goodwill As-Is Centre
on Jarvis. It's all there is to do between yard sales, and sometimes it makes
for good finds. Part of my theory of yard-sale karma holds that if I miss one
day at the thrift shops, that'll be the day they put out the big score. So I hit
the stores diligently and came up with crapola. I had offended the fates, I
knew, and wouldn't make another score until I placated them. It was lonely work,
still and all