I’ve written this at Sherrea’s request. Or is it a request when someone drops twenty-five pounds of manual typewriter and a monstrous pile of paper beside your plate at dinner, then asks if you’d rather do it in longhand?

“Do what?” I said.

“Your version of what happened to the power monopoly,” she told me, as if I ought to have known.

It was, and is, a very large typewriter. Finally I asked, “Does it have to rhyme?”

She said she wants a record of it for the Engineers, but I think she also means it to be therapy for me. Or maybe she doesn’t. But I’ve treated it as if it was; I’ve tried to faithfully reproduce the person who woke up on the river flats, and understand, and forgive. I’ve made progress on the first two.

Even so, I think this must be three-quarters lying. I can’t have remembered everything; and the process of trying is like reconstructing a dream. You put the connective tissue in where it never existed, because without it, you’ve got, not a narrative, but a string of senseless images.

I don’t trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff left on the sand when the tide of experience recedes. As long as they’re part of that process, there’s something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

But what if something exists only as a remembrance, that was never an experience? What if it even leaves artifacts in the mind: English, Spanish, French, and a thorough knowledge of semiconductor electronics? These, in me, began as pure memory, untroubled by life or the sensible continuity of time. The experience came later.

What if Sleeping Beauty woke behind the briers alone, in the dark, to the knowledge that the curse was not sleep but waking, and that family, childhood, fairy godmothers and all were dreams spun to amuse a virgin mind in mothballs?

She/he/it would have no choice but to make something of the awakening. I do, as best I can.

Theo and I, in a rash moment over a flask of cherry brandy, resolved to restore the old municipal telephone system to replace Albrecht’s graft- and bribery-powered party lines. After three months of learning experiences, we have half an exchange up; but it’s interesting work.

I found that Loretta, the old woman at China Black’s house, was right: communal hydro generators, regularly spaced along the riverbank, are a reasonably cheap and reliable method for getting power to most of the City. We have four running so far.

Now that the power monopoly is broken, a surprising amount of photovoltaic technology is turning up. Surprising to me, anyway. Last week a storm took the roofing off a house on the south end of town and revealed three solar panels hidden in the rafters. I went down to direct the salvaging of them, and felt like an archaeologist who’d found the library at Alexandria intact.

People come to me for things like that, and for information, and training. I’m learning to talk to them. I’m learning to live with being recognized on the street. A frightening number of people know who I am, and even what I am, and I have to get on with life as if that didn’t matter. Someday maybe it won’t.