“Theo, what can they do to us? Reroute the river?”

Theo shook his head, sadly. “The City controllers license the hardware, sell the fuel, own twenty-five percent of the metered output and tax the rest, no matter how you make it. What do we do if the inspectors confiscate the generators?” He waved a hand at the quaking flames around the balcony. “Light candles and sing?”

I knew all that. It was why the wind turbine on my roof was disguised as a vent, after all. But the Underbridge had seemed — still seemed — too big, too important, too visible to be at the mercy of the City. “There’d be a stink if we closed.”

“There’s people lined up to run places like this. If the City closes us, they just hand our permit to the next guy, who’ll keep his nose cleaner than we did. And the nightbabies all just move on down the block. Be damned hard on Robby, man.”

I knew all that, too, I suppose. “It’s okay,” I said. Outside the windows, the moon had drowned in the cloud bank. I felt — it took me a moment to figure it out. Lonely. “If anything happens, I’ll keep it away from here.”

“Sorry, Sparrito,” said Theo.

I shrugged. “Maybe nothing will happen. Let’s do some good.”

I had color bars on monitors one and two, and zip-all on number three, which meant that either the third monitor was evil-eyed or the camera in the rigging was. I hoped it was the monitor. The camera was one of maybe five I’d seen in my life, and that only because I’d been looking. It had full remote capabilities and a twenty-X zoom, and I suspected it of having been made to military specs and used to spy on SouthAm dictators. But who am I to judge?

I jiggled connectors, and finally crawled out on the edge of the balcony, lay on my stomach on one of the crossbeams, and, by reaching as far as I could, managed to poke at the camera jacks themselves. The camera swung on its mount, and I grabbed at the beam.

“Watch the fuckin’ lights,” Spangler shouted from somewhere below me. Serve him right if I fell on his head. I wiggled my way backward off the rigging, and checked the monitor. Live, tah dah.

“I hate it when you do that,” Theo observed.

“D’you ever wonder what it was like when this stuff was new?” I asked him, waving at the mixer, the tape decks, the video gear.

Light turned the lenses of his glasses opaque pink. “Crowded,” he said, but his voice made it mean more than that.

The house lights were down, the room was dark, and thunder muttered from miles away. I slapped a tape in one of the decks and faded the image up on the projectors, on both screens at the other end of the room. At the edge of my vision I could see Theo’s hand on the mixing board, bringing up sound as I brought up my video.