He hollered once more, "Anybody hear me?" No response in the camp, except from a small brown lizard that scurried away from the noise. "Okay, Mom," Tut said, "I’ll help look around. But it sure seems like nobody’s home."

Tut was right: nobody was home. He took the four huts in the middle of the line, Festina took the four on the north, and I took the four to the south. We found no survivors, and no corpses either — just empty living quarters, with no indication of trouble.

Each hut had a bed, a closet, and a desk, plus a utility table whose contents varied by team member. One person’s table supported an electron microscope; another had a collection of soil samples; a third had a megarack of computer memory bubbles, while the last hut I looked in had dozens of small, mirrored stasis fields. (I cracked a sphere open. It held a partly dissected beetle.) The huts displayed military neatness, diminished only by a few last-moment touches of disarray from people hurrying to get to breakfast on time. A jacket tossed over the back of a chair. Wrinkles on the coverlet, where someone sat down after making the bed and didn’t straighten the sheets after standing up. An orange fern leaf on the floor — maybe blown in by the wind, maybe tracked in on somebody’s boot.

Apart from these lapses, the huts would easily pass the most stringent inspection. Clean, tidy, almost impersonal. On each desk sat a small holo globe showing a posed family scene — the number of parents varying from one to six, but the number of children always exactly the same: one son, one daughter, their ages two years apart — and every such globe was precisely the same size and placed in precisely the same position on the desk, as if the Unity had strict regulations for the proper display of one’s family unit. Maybe they did. The Unity reputedly liked to regiment people’s home lives as much as it regimented everything else.

But one area in each hut was not regulated: the mask shrine. The shrines hung on the wall immediately opposite the door, suspended at eye level beside the closet. Each shrine had a shelf, a backdrop, and a pedestal for the mask itself… but there the similarities ended. In the first hut I entered, the shelf, backdrop, and pedestal were all matte steel, and the mask a metallic thing of wire, gears, LEDs, and chrome; its eyeholes were covered with mirror glass, and its soul-gem, in the middle of the forehead, was a yellow industrial diamond. By contrast, the next hut’s shrine was constructed entirely of organic things — a mahogany shelf upholstered with bird feathers, a backdrop of growing vines, and a pedestal made of bone, all supporting a mask of deerhide with a pearl soul-gem above its eyes. Next door had an outer-space motif, with a photographic starscape as background and star-shaped sequins everywhere else. The soul-gem had the pockmarked look of a stony meteorite. In the final hut I entered, the entire shrine was shrouded in lush black velvet, but the mask itself was pure white silk. The gem was a black opal: black on white on black.

I wasn’t a stranger to extravagant shrines — every home on Anicca had at least one Buddha surrounded by small offerings and written vows to pursue enlightenment. But in the otherwise immaculate Camp Esteem huts, the mask shrines appeared too garish… as if the Unity members used the masks and the shrines as a way of venting all the emotion/anarchy/creative impulses they normally suppressed.

Of course, my reaction to the shrines was colored by what I knew. The straitlaced Unity, so restrained and socially delicate, had created a religion of total excess: primal, barbaric, orgiastic. Every night they donned masks… drugged or danced themselves into altered states of consciousness… then ended with ritual fights and copulation. If I’d been born in the Unity, I would have lost my virginity at my first sacred dance, around the age of twelve — but I would scarcely remember the experience or any other coupling thereafter, because all such sexual encounters took place in a trance-like delirium where normal mental processes were suppressed.

Copulation without conscience. Riot without responsibility. It was easy to see the attraction… and just like the Unity to cold-bloodedly design their religious practice as a psychological release valve rather than genuine spirituality.

Still… when I thought about the masks in the huts, I wondered what totem I might have chosen if I’d been a Unity child. What mask would I hide behind when I wanted to lose myself? Unbidden, a mental picture arose: a smooth woman’s face sculpted in copper-brown leather, but with the left cheek gashed open by a knife.

Trying to force the image from my mind, I hurried to join the others.

We went to the mess hall next. It was just as the probe had shown — abandoned partway through breakfast, food on the table undisturbed by insects. I hadn’t seen or heard any insects in the entire camp; the only living creature I’d spotted was that lizard who scuttled away when Tut yelled. I wondered if local fauna could have been "eaten" by the EMP cloud… but that didn’t make sense. If nothing else, the cloud was mobile: it had, for example, enveloped us on the floodplain. But there’d been plenty of insects down on the flats. So even if the cloud was an insectivore, why would it devour all the bugs around camp but leave the floodplain swarms untouched?

Festina stuck her head out of the kitchen. "I found the source of the probe’s IR reading. There’s a gas stove still burning. Anybody want scrambled eggs that have gone all black and crispy?"

Tut immediately said, "I’ll try some."

"Before you do," I said (knowing the only way to keep Tut from consuming burned eggs was to distract him till they vanished from his mind), "have you noticed there are no insects on the food? Don’t you find that odd?"

"Nah," Tut said. "The Unity are great at insect repellants. It’s one of the first things they do on a new planet — figure out what disgusts local insects, then gene-jiggle themselves to pump out the appropriate chemicals. Usually in their sweat. Remember, Mom, Unity folks have no sense of smell. They don’t care if they stink to high heaven. Makes for some pretty exotic reeks in Unity cities, let me tell you."

Though I’d been breathing cookhouse air for at least a minute, I couldn’t help sniffing in search of "exotic reeks." It didn’t smell like much of anything — just a slight burned odor from the kitchen. The eggs had incinerated themselves more than thirty-six hours ago, so the worst of the char stench was gone. Tut also gave a sniff, then shrugged. "Mutan insects don’t have Earthling noses. Maybe this place stinks of something we can’t smell."

"Or maybe," I said, "the camp did stink while the Unity people were here — enough that insects cleared out and built their nests elsewhere. Now that Team Esteem is gone, the smell has faded too… but it’s only been a day and a half, so the insects haven’t found their way back yet."

"Hmph." That was Festina, returning from the kitchen. She went to the dining table and studied it. Tut and I did the same. Just like the recon photos — cutlery set down haphazardly, chairs pushed back… as if everybody had suddenly decided to rush outside and never returned.

But wait. Now that I looked, I saw not every place had been abandoned hurriedly. One chair on the far side of the table was tucked away tidily. The plate was clean except for a few crumbs, and the juice glass was empty. The cutlery had been neatly set aside. "See that?" I said. "One person had finished eating and left the table."

"Looks like it," Tut agreed. "But even in the Unity, there’s always one person who eats faster than anyone else."

"Maybe," said Festina, "that person had reason to eat faster yesterday morning. Pressing work to be done. He or she ate quickly, then left the mess hall. Probably to get started on work."