But it had color.

Red plastic streamers lay in the street, like the unswept remains of a Mardi Gras. Purple and orange banners had been fastened above many glass doorways — banners now fuzzed with dust, and corners dangling dog-eared where the glue had lost its stick. The tallest spire in town sported a droopy yellow flag with a smudged black crest in the middle; and other towers had flags of their own, bile green, dark blue, stripes of brown and fuchsia.

It all looked so sad. Dirt-specked attempts to brighten the place up. Deliberately garish yet futile.

Wherever I looked was glass, as sterile as distilled water. The scraps of blousy fabric only heightened the austerity of the barren backdrop. How can a meter of cloth enliven a wall twenty storeys high? And from the clashes between adjacent colors, I could tell the decorators had no sense of what they were doing. They had no particular effect in mind — they only wanted to disrupt the sameness of glass on glass.

I thought of the spearmen I'd seen, wrapping skin on their faces and genitals. Did that come from a similar impulse? Plastering skin on their bodies to break up the sterile sameness?

But there was no reason to assume this town belonged to the Skin-Faces. For all I knew, the banners around me might be centuries old. The red plastic in the gutters might be that old too. With no rain under the dome and no animals, with air that was likely filtered free of most bacteria, the fallen streamers might last a lifetime. A flat and weary lifetime.

It might be helpful to see whether this place had its own Tower of Ancestors filled with dormant bodies. If the bodies wore scraps of skin, it would tell me something.

Cautiously, I walked to the middle of town. Like Oar's home, this place had an open square, a square featuring four fountains, not two. The colored debris was more abundant here: mostly on the ground, but with scraps of colored plastic thrown over the fountains and festooned clumsily above doorways.

The heavyhandedness of it all weighed drearily on me. I sat on a glass bench and tried to will myself into seeing the color as sincere celebration, not a vain roaring against the bleakness.

Silence. The emptiness of a place whose spirit had died.

Many Happy Returns

With a swish, a door opened in a building behind me. Four Skin-Faces marched out, two men, two women, all holding spears. They fell into position beside the doorway, men on one side, women on the other — like an honor guard lining up to welcome a VIP.

"Attention!" one of the men called. Attention: the English word. All four spear-carriers slammed the butts of their weapons on the ground and snapped rigid in perfect Outward Fleet form.

I didn't move. If I ran, they might chase me; and where could I hide in a city of glass?

Two imperious hand-claps sounded sharply from within the building. I couldn't see who'd clapped — the Skin-Faces blocked my line of sight. Very slowly, I adjusted my grip on the stunner, in case the clapped command was an order to attack.

It wasn't. One of the women cleared her throat, hummed a musical tone, then began to sing: Happy Birthday. The others joined in.

On the third line ("Happy birthday, lord and master"), a figure emerged from the building: a person in tightsuit, its fabric smeared with grass stains, brownish sludge, and clots of rust-red. The suit's helmet had its visor set to oneway opaque; I couldn't see whether the face inside was flesh or glass.

Walking slowly, bowlegged, the tightsuited figure passed between the lines of Skin-Faces and continued across the plaza — straight toward me. I raised the stunner, ready but not aiming it directly at the approaching stranger.

The figure stopped, then spread its arms wide, showing its hands were empty: an obvious "I'm unarmed" gesture.

I didn't lower the stunner. I did, however, say the words. "Greetings. I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg your Hospitality."

A chuckle sounded within the suit — a male chuckle. "Hospitality?" The figure reached up, popped the releases, and took off its helmet. "A lot you know about hospitality, Ramos. You haven't even wished me happy birthday."

"All right," I said. "Happy birthday, Phylar."

The Tip

Phylar Tobit's face spread into a grin. One of his front teeth was vividly whiter than its yellowed siblings. I assumed the clean tooth was false.

"Bet you didn't expect to see me," he chortled.

"Happy birthday was a dead giveaway," I replied. "So the Fleet finally pulled you from the Academy teaching staff?"

"Eight years ago," he nodded. "Something about setting a poor example." He opened his mouth and loosed a belch; trust Tobit to be able to do that at will. "I think we both know how the council handles embarrassments to the uniform."

"And what a delightful coincidence," I said, "that on a planet the size of Earth, we happen to run into each other. What are the odds?"

"Damned good," Tobit replied. "Assuming you got the tip."

"The tip?"

Tobit shrugged. "If you didn't get it, maybe your partner did. Or whatever turd of Admiralty shit you escorted here. The tip."

"What tip?"

"The tip that you should land on this particular continent. Best chance for survival and escape."

I stared at him. "Someone told you that? Before you landed?"

"Told my partner." He held up his hand to stop my next question. "No, I don't know how the tip was delivered — my partner didn't share confidences… especially not with me. We were assigned to each other for this mission only; she knew the council wanted me Lost, and was pissed as hell to get dragged down with me. Selfish bitch. All she said was someone passed the word: land in this neighborhood if you want to save your ass."

Chee or Seele, I thought to myself. The tip had to come from Chee or Seele. They'd already visited Melaquin; and their looped broadcast claimed there were spaceworthy ships in that city to the south. Now that I thought about it, Chee had said he ran a spy network throughout the Technocracy. He might have used it to find out who was due for marooning… and to tip off the Explorers who'd be sent along for the ride. It almost made me think fondly of the old bastard again — even if Chee had sold out to the council, he directed fellow Explorers to the same escape route he'd found.

Of course, he hadn't tipped off Yarrun or me — we'd chosen the Landing site ourselves. If we'd picked the wrong continent, would Chee have talked us out of it? Or were his brains so scrambled that he'd forgotten all about Melaquin? YouthBoost meltdown does ugly things to memory; Chee had said so himself. It would have been ironic if we were the one party to land on the wrong continent, because Chee couldn't remember his own advice.

Tobit was still talking. "Think about it, Ramos. Once you've decided on this continent, where are you going to land? West of the prairies, you've got mountains all the way to the coast — ugly terrain for touchdown. So you either pick the plains themselves, or go for a clear space in the lake country up north. Nothing else makes sense."

"True enough," I admitted. And maybe that explained why Jelca and Ullis had put down in the same neighborhood we did. Plains vs. lake country was a fifty-fifty choice; and if you chose the lakes, Explorers would then start looking for a region of bluffs, to get the advantage of a height of land. "Still," I said, "this continent must have a million square klicks of landable area. I find it remarkable we should just run into each other…"

"Run into each other?" Tobit laughed. "I don't know about you, Ramos, but I got ambushed by a fucking glass shark. There's dozens of those things patrolling the river; they've got the whole watershed covered, hundreds of klicks upstream and down. Anyone crossing the water stands a good chance of getting captured — you think you're the first Explorer I've seen in eight years? You're number thirteen, sweetheart, and piss off if you're superstitious."