For ten days, Gordon's life followed a new pattern. As if to catch up on six months' road weariness, he slept late each morning and awoke to find Abby gone, like the night's dreams.

Yet her warmth and scent lingered on the sheets when he stretched and opened his eyes.  The sunshine streaming through his eastward-facing window was like something new, a springtime in his heart, and not really early autumn at all.

He rarely saw her during the day as he washed and helped with chores until noon - chopping and stacking wood for the community supply and digging a deep pit for a new outhouse.  When most of the village gathered for the main meal of the day, Abby returned from tending the flocks.  But she spent lunchtime with the younger children, relieving old one-legged Mr. Lothes, their work supervisor.  The little ones laughed as she kidded them, plucking the wool that coated their clothes from a morning spent carding skeins for the winter spinning, helping them keep the gray strands out of their food.

She barely glanced at Gordon, but that brief smile was enough.  He knew he had no rights beyond these few days, and yet a shared look in the daylight made him feel that it was all real, and not just a dream.

Afternoons he conferred with Mrs. Thompson and the other village leaders, helping them inventory books and other long-neglected salvage.  At intervals, he gave reading and archery lessons.

One day he and Mrs. Thompson traded methods in the art of field medicine while treating a man clawed by a "tiger," what the locals called that new strain of mountain lion which had bred with leopards escaped from zoos in the postwar chaos.  The trapper had surprised the beast with its kill, but fortunately, it had only batted him into the brush and let him run away.  Gordon and the village matriarch felt sure the wound would heal.

In the evenings all of Pine View gathered in the big garage and Gordon recited stories by Twain and Sayles and Keillor.  He led them in singing old folk songs and lovingly remembered commercial jingles, and in playing "Remember When."  Then it was time for drama.

Dressed in scrap and foil, he was John Paul Jones, shouting defiance from the deck of the Bonne Homme Richard.  He was Anton Perceveral, exploring the dangers of a faraway world and the depths of his own potential with a mad robot companion.  And he was Doctor Hudson, wading through the horror of the Kenyan Conflict to treat the victims of biological war.

At first Gordon always felt uneasy, putting on a flimsy costume and stomping across the makeshift stage waving his arms, shouting lines only vaguely recalled or made up on the spot.  He had never really admired play-acting as a profession, even before the great war.

But it had got him halfway across a continent, and he was good at it.  He felt the rapt gaze of the audience, their hunger for wonder and something of the world beyond their narrow valley, and their eagerness warmed him to the task.  Pox-scarred and wounded - bent from year after year of back-breaking labor merely to survive - they looked up, the need greatest in eyes clouded with age, a yearning for help doing what they could no longer accomplish alone - remembering.