This time my blink wasn’t for show. “Good grief. You’re not kidding. You use wind?”

“Solar panels.”

“Wind’s better,” I said absently. “Or water. You can’t replace photovoltaics anymore, unless you know about a warehouse I haven’t found.” Then I woke up “Chango, anyone can spot a solar panel! If you want to get busted, why not just carry the damn thing downtown?”

Mr. Lyle’s smile was benevolence itself. “You don’t understand the island. Besides, the City can’t afford a helicopter.”

Of course. The building that held my treasure house stood in plain sight of Ego and her tall sisters. The spinning vent on my roof had to pass daily inspection. Who would see anything here? This was one of the tallest buildings I’d seen since we left the Deeps. “I don’t have any tools with me.”

Mr. Lyle shrugged and stood up in the same motion, as if his shoulders pulled the rest of him along. “Come see what we have.”

So I was shown through the dining room, the kitchen, the pantry, and, finally, into the power shed, opening off the pantry. I was a little disappointed. There were enough tools, but no more, and they were only of reasonable quality. The inverter was all right, but I had one rated for twice the load, and another hidden away, still crated, for when the first began to show its age.

This wasn’t the opulent marvel that the rest of the house was; this wasn’t the magnetic center of anything, for anyone. While I took the inverter apart and assaulted it with multimeter probes, I asked Mr. Lyle, casually, what they ran off it. Answer: a pump, some lights, some fans, a couple of recharging units. No audio, no video? A shortwave radio. So this wasn’t Paradise, after all.

Mr. Lyle must have seen something in my face. He said gravely, “There are so few disks and tapes left, and they cost so much, that it’s easier to fall back on other things. Books, and live music, and theater. There’s a lot of that on the island.”

“Anyone recording the music?”

He looked at me as if I hadn’t spoken a language he knew.

“The trouble is finding blank tape stock. It would be great to videotape the plays, but there was never as much tape or hardware for that, so it’s hard to get. I think we’ve lost the movie biz for good.”

Then, appalled, I shut up. Enthusiasm had possessed me for a moment, tricked me into an openness as foreign to me as… well, as any number of things. I’d be giving guided tours of the archives, if I went on like this.

The output off the inverter seemed steady. I put the cover plate back on. “Hand me the lamp and we’ll test it.”

The fluorescent tube clinked like microscopic bells and lit. Mr. Lyle stared at it, pleased, and the light sketched chilly blue-white highlights over his bare scalp, down his nose, along his upper lip, and across his chin like a scratchboard drawing on the brown of his skin. “My first name is Claudius,” he said. “Feel free to use it.”