(Mick Skinner knows what happened to me, said my nerve endings.)

I moved around the room touching things — my talismans, the trappings of my sect. More books: the ones I needed to keep that room working, and the ones that would disappear (and their owner with them) if it were known I had a copy. Thought-contraband in fiction and nonfiction. The video monitor fifteen inches, with three switchable levels of resolution. The record/playback hardware: three videotape decks; a video editing board; three audio cassette decks, one digital; a CD player; an eight-channel reel-to-reel recorder; a turntable, probably used in a radio station; two 120-watt amplifiers from the middle of the last century, probably likewise, but heavily modified for my purposes; a six-channel audio mixer with EQ and other enhancements; two pairs of headphones. And the diamond: a studio-quality recording CD unit and a case of blanks.

(Mick Skinner knows…)

And, of course, the archives. They were mostly copies; I’d sold the previous generation of each one after I’d dubbed it, to collectors rich enough, crazy enough to own something rare and powerful and useless. Then I’d taken the money and spent it on hardware, and on more product, and the media to record it on.

Audio- and videotapes, their mylar bases fragile with age. Vinyl audio disks, brittle as porcelain. Audio CDs, their information becoming vague as if with senility. Two thousand movies, four thousand albums, music and words and pictures like voices whispering from a sweet, sunny past, degrading every time they were played.

It ought to have been depressing — just as every day should be depressing, because it leads to the grave. On bad days I sat in the next room and thought about the value of the plastic tape shells alone to a reprocessor, never mind the mylar, I could be rich… But they were like slaves on an underground railroad, outlaws I hid from the sheriff. Who’d keep them alive, if I abandoned them?

(Mick Skinner knew about…)

I sat in my valuable, comfortable chair and contemplated the possible distractions. I’d found a new CD two days before; I’d check that over. I rolled the chair over to the rack, powered up the CD player, and plugged headphones into the amplified jack. The insert under the scarred plastic of the jewel box was a faded drawing of five bemused-looking people sitting or standing around an immense antique car with a startling paint job. It was only one page, front and back, with a ragged edge — there had been more, once. The name of the group wasn’t familiar. I cleaned the silver rainbow disk, set it in the tray, closed the phones over my ears, and put my feet up.

The first cut opened with a sweet whine of fiddle, the tsk of a cymbal, a muttering of bass. Two women’s voices traded lyrics, as if they were telling each other a story.

Pretty Tommy Belmont was shooting up in back,

Fixing up his hair and digging through his pack.