Expendable

Part XII SKIN

Hiding

The skin-covered face peered down a few seconds more, then withdrew. I stayed put, hoping Oar would do the same — she was under orders not to come out until I gave the okay. Still, she had only a brief supply of air, and was inexperienced using a scuba breather; I gave the signal to surface at the two minute mark, even though I would have preferred to stay under much longer.

Oar emerged silently and kept her mouth shut. Good; no matter how she might be given to outbursts, her cultural heritage placed priority on not being noticed. They built their villages underwater, they made themselves transparent, they cleaned all trace of their presence from the environment… no wonder Oar had the instinct to stay quiet when strangers were near.

I wondered if Skin-Face was the reason Oar's people were so good at hiding.

For five minutes we remained in the water with only our heads showing. All that time, some devil's advocate in my mind kept asking why we should cower. The skin on that glass face was probably just animal hide — perhaps leather from a buffalo carcass, scraped clean of fur and worn for harmless adornment. Believing it was human skin was morbid imagination… that and the blurriness of looking at the Bumbler screen through muddy water.

But if it had been human skin, it came from an Explorer, not someone with a glass body. And perhaps the accompanying radio transmissions had come from Explorer equipment: equipment stolen from my fellow ECMs along with their skins.

I made myself get out of the water when I could no longer control the chattering of my teeth — not fear, but the physical chill of a creek in waning autumn. For a while I shivered on shore, until the sun warmed me back to a tolerable temperature. Thank heavens R D made the tightsuit from quick-dry fabric; I would only stay soggy for half an hour, after which the material's natural insulation would be as good as a dry parka. In the meantime, I had to hug myself for warmth and wonder if Skin-Face would reappear.

He didn't… or possibly she didn't, although I was inclined to think of the stranger as male. Some atavistic prejudice in my subconscious still believed men were scarier than women.

Say it was a man, a glass man of Oar's species: he must have heard the Bumbler's alarm beeping and came to investigate. It had taken him more than a minute to arrive, so he hadn't been nearby… close enough to hear it, but far enough away that he hadn't recognized the sound as unnatural. When he saw nothing out of the ordinary, he must have decided the noise was just bird cry. One quick look, then he went back about his business.

What was his business? It was time to find out.

It was also time to get the stunner out of my pack.

Three Spears

Motioning Oar to stay put, I swam the creek with the stunner in my mouth, in case I might need it quickly. The afternoon continued quiet and undisturbed — the chirp of birds, the light hiss of breeze ruffling the prairie grass. On the far side of the water, I climbed the dirt bank: steep, but only three meters high, the damp earth providing plenty of purchase. When I was almost at the top, I dug my feet firmly into the soil and did a quick scan with the Bumbler, X-raying through the last few centimeters of bank to make sure Skin-Face wasn't lurking above. The screen was clear except for pebbles and roots; so with straining caution, I lifted my head over the edge for a look.

No Skin-Face close at hand; but a kilometer downstream, three humanoid figures tracked along the bank, walking away from me. The Bumbler gave me a telescopic view of the trio: three males, all carrying spears and shoulder bags, all wearing strips of skin on their faces. They had skin on their genitals too, carefully wrapped around penis and testicles. One also had a patch of skin on his chest — I could see it through his transparent back.

Perhaps that was the chieftain: the man who could commandeer the largest share of a kill.

Still hoping I was wrong, I magnified the view a few notches higher. Maybe the skin strips were some kind of harmless ornamentation…

No. In extreme close-up, there was no mistake. It was brown human skin, complete with wisps of hair, fastened to the underlying glass flesh.

One man lifted his hand and pointed at the creek ahead of them. The chieftain nodded, and all three started down the bank toward the water. My guess was they had reached a point shallow enough to ford; they were obviously reluctant to cross where the creek was over their heads. That gave me useful intelligence about the enemy… and already I was thinking of them as enemies, although they had showed no sign of hostility toward me or anyone else.

Explorers habitually regard strangers as threats. Shaking hands is for diplomats.

Simple Prairie Hunters

The men appeared on the far side of the creek a short time later and continued north. On their present path, they would run into the buffalo herd we had seen that morning… and that might be their goal. They might be simple prairie hunters, searching for food to feed their families.

Simple prairie hunters who carried radios.

I shook my head to clear it. Explanations would come eventually… or else they wouldn't. Unsolved puzzles were a permanent frustration of the job.

At last the spearmen disappeared behind a copse of trees and I waved for Oar to join me. She crossed the creek with the scuba breather in her mouth, even though it couldn't have much air left in it. I didn't say anything — if she was happier to get air from a machine rather than holding her breath for the few seconds the water was over her head, so be it. The little tank was self-charging, given enough solar energy and access to air; in twenty-four hours it would be usable again.

From the top of the bank, I led us straight to the nearest clump of trees, to make sure we were shielded from the spearmen's eyes — even though they were more than a klick away, the prairie allowed for long sight-lines. The men had come from this direction; we found their footprints in the dirt when we stopped to collect ourselves.

One good thing about people as dense as glass: they leave deep, clear footprints.

"Who were those people?" Oar blurted when we were safely under the trees.

"I was going to ask you the same question," I answered. "You don't know who lives in this area?"

"No. I thought…" She stopped herself. "I thought something very foolish."

Her face was troubled; I suspected I knew why. Oar might have believed she and her ancestors were the only people in the world. She had seen the transmission from Chee and Seele talking about another city to the south, but she had dismissed that as an Explorer lie. The three Skin-Faces may have been the first strangers she'd seen… the first non-Explorers anyway. Their presence upset her more than they upset me. They were proof she wasn't unique.

I didn't belabor the subject. "You said you came this way once before… when you decided to follow the other Explorers. You didn't see the Skin-Faces?"

"No."

"But you did get this far?"

"Yes, Festina. The great river where I stopped is still ahead."

I frowned. Why hadn't she seen Skin-Faces on her last trip? Had she just been lucky? Or were the three spearmen outside their usual territory? Maybe they were the only people of their kind here on the plains; or maybe there was a tribe of thousands, but they usually stayed south of the great river Oar talked about.

Maybe we were walking straight into the arms of a horde who had already killed one set of Explorers and now wore their skins.

Jelca? Ullis?

I gritted my teeth. "Let's get moving," I said. "But keep your eyes open for trouble."

"I am ready, Festina."

She swung her silver axe to her shoulder. I couldn't tell if the gesture was meaningful, or if she was simply getting ready to move out. Did she understand that her axe could be a weapon, or did she only see it as a tool for clearing trees?

I shivered. Spears. Axes. Weapons.

Feeling the weight of the stunner in my hand, I headed off at Oar's side.

Night on the Plains

The footprints of the spearmen had come from the southwest; therefore I headed southeast, setting a brisk pace until the depths of dusk. We camped for the night in a stand of a dozen trees — large enough to conceal us from prying eyes, but small enough that we still had a clear view in all directions.

Before we went to sleep, I tuned the Bumbler's intruder scan to cover the maximum possible area. With so much ground to cover, the Bumbler wouldn't be as sensitive — it would probably overlook snakes, for example, especially ones moving slowly — but it would detect glass spearmen at almost a klick away.

Frankly I didn't give a damn about snakes that night… even rattlers.

When sleep finally came, my dreams were ugly: Yarrun as a Skin-Face, tattered flesh hanging from his disfigured jaw. He tried to kill me with a spear, or maybe it was Oar's axe; I couldn't keep my attention on the weapon with that ravaged face in front of me. As sometimes happens in dreams, it kept repeating itself ineffectually — Yarrun would lunge and I would dodge, much too slowly. The weapon came in, but nothing happened, as if my mind didn't care whether the blow actually landed. The moment passed, then the whole thing started again: Yarrun attacking again and again, with both of us sluggish, as if slowed by water.

It was a tiring dream… like doing hard work hour after hour. Eventually I woke, still in darkness. I lay on my back and stared at the stars for a long time. Maybe the dream really happened then: when I assembled the random nonsense floating through my mind and interpreted it as Yarrun attacking. Some psychologists claim that's the way dreams work — invented after the fact, when you try to impose order on the mental chaos. Perhaps I owed it to Yarrun to dream about him. Who knows?

If I thought about Yarrun, I would cry. If I thought about Chee, I would probably cry too. If I thought about Jelca… I wouldn't cry, but it wouldn't help my mood.

In the end, I passed the time devising ways to fight people made of glass. How to punch them without breaking my hand. Where to kick for maximum effect. Whether their greater density made them harder or easier to take down with a leg sweep. And the perennial question of any martial artist raised under League of Peoples's law: how to batter opponents into unconsciousness without the risk of killing them.

No one has ever answered that question to my satisfaction. That made it a good topic for thought in the restless night… letting my mind swirl around the possibilities until finally, sleep took mercy on me.

Dragons

There was frost the next morning — a white feathered coating across the broad green of the prairie. Oar considered it an aesthetic improvement; she also enjoyed the way her breath turned to steam when she huffed out.

"I have become a dragon," she told me. "Haahhhhh! I am breathing fire."

"How do you know about dragons?" I asked.

"My sister told me."

"Before or after she met the other Explorers?"

"I cannot remember."

Idly, I wondered if her sister heard about dragons from Jelca and Ullis, or if the dragon myth was so old, these people remembered it from long-ago days on Earth.

Less idly, I wondered if dragons weren't a myth on Melaquin: if there really were fire-breathing creatures, created by bored bioengineers. Exposed out here with open space in all directions, would we suddenly see a flying giant in the sky?

Sometimes I hate the way an Explorer's mind works.

The River

We reached the great river shortly after noon, having seen no further sign of glass-people. Although the day had started clear, gray clouds stole in throughout the morning, making the sky morosely overcast. The river was none too cheerful either: half a klick wide, muddy, and festooned with deadfalls. Every dozen meters or so, bare branches protruded from the water, remnants of trees that had fallen upstream, floated a while, then run aground in shallows. Here and there, larger logs lurked under the surface, their slime-coated wood a jaundiced yellow.

"I do not like this river," Oar said.

"Because it came close to drowning you?"

"It is also mean and spiky."

The spiky bits — the deadfalls — worried me too. Before seeing the river, I had planned to cross using some suitably floatable log: Oar would cling to the log, while I dog-paddled to push it from one bank to the other. Now I realized that was easier said than done. Finding a log wasn't the problem; we could chop down a tree from the many stands dotting the shore. However, threading the log through the erratic palisade of deadwood, without running afoul of sunken obstacles… that would take luck.

I hated relying on luck. When it worked, it made me feel so damned eerie.

To give myself time to think, I led Oar east for a while, tracking the shoreline to see if we'd find somewhere better to cross. Three bends of the river later, nothing had changed: deadfalls in the shallows and sunken trees farther out. Worse, I hadn't any new ideas and the longer we dithered on shore, the more chance we might be spotted by people we wanted to avoid. The clincher was the sky darkening minute by minute. Rain was coming: rain that would fill the river with fast-running mud.

"Here's a good place," I said, trying to sound chipper. "A good straight stretch of open water." It was only half a lie: the river did run straight for a klick, but it was just as congested as everywhere else.

It took fifteen minutes to find a fallen tree, trim its branches with the axe, then drag the trunk to the river. Oar's glass muscles did most of the work. Soon we were in the water, positioned on the upstream side of our "boat" — if we did run into a sunken log, I didn't want us squeezed between the log and our tree trunk. For final preparations, I held the stunner in one hand and slung the recharged scuba device around my neck. Oar wasn't happy I kept the rebreather for myself, but it was the rational thing to do. She couldn't die by drowning; I could. The re-breather would also give me a chance to pull us both out of trouble if something went wrong.

The water was not as cold as the stream we'd hidden in the day before, or maybe it just seemed warmer because the air had turned cool. Clearing the shore proved easy enough — we only snagged once on a deadfall, and Oar chopped us free within seconds.

Good axe.

The current was slow but strong, moving about a meter per second. As I flutter-kicked us forward, the far shore slid dreamily sideways. Oar kept up a steady chatter of encouragement. "We are doing very well, Festina. We are going to miss that log there… yes, see? And if we go a little faster… yes, we have cleared that one too. We are doing very well. Very, very…" She stopped. "What is making that beeping sound?"

"The Bumbler," I panted. "Proximity alarm."

"Is this where we say Oh shit, Festina?"

"Let me get back to you on that."

Scanning for Trouble

The alarm scan was still set on its longest range — at least we had ample advance notice for whatever the Bumbler had detected. There were no Skin-Faces on shore, no hypothetical dragons soaring through the sky. That suggested the danger might be in the water with us… and a scary suggestion it was. On this setting, the Bumbler wouldn't notice anything as trifling as a lamprey, piranha, or water moccasin; it had to be something bigger.

If we were lucky, it might be a freshwater dolphin. If we weren't… I told myself the river was too cold for alligators, and snapping turtles seldom bit anything larger than pickerel.

"Keep as still as you can," I told Oar. "If you don't move, your legs are almost invisible in the water. You won't look like anything's supper."

She said nothing — her "stay quiet, don't be seen" instincts had kicked in again. I fumbled with the Bumbler, trying to locate what it was beeping about.

Radio first. No signals.

Visual scan. Nothing.

IR… and immediately it showed a strong heat source in the water, one hundred meters upstream.

The temperature was too high for a reptile; it had to be warm-blooded. That suggested a dolphin; but the heat trace on the screen looked bigger than any fresh-water dolphin I'd heard of. In fact, the bogey looked as big as a killer whale, and as hot as a gas-powered engine.

Holding the Bumbler high out of the water, I dialed "Visual telescopic" and aimed the scanner in the direction of the IR blob. A moment later, the screen showed a sharklike fin cutting the surface in a straight line toward us.

The fin was made of glass.

The Glass Fin

"Have you heard of glass dolphins?" I asked Oar.

Her answer was barely audible. "No."

I scowled. Possibly, the engineers of Melaquin made glass versions of higher cetaceans as well as humans — the animals were, after all, sentient in their own way. Even so, the blob on the Bumbler's screen had a furiously bright IR signature. Hotter than Oar. Hotter than any blubber-insulated orca built to avoid leaking body heat into cold surrounding water.

The fin continued straight for us.

Still working with the Bumbler, I tried to resolve a better picture of the thing — particularly its tail. Cetaceans have horizontal tail fins; fish have vertical. The image on the screen was still too blobby for me to be certain, but this tail looked vertical. And the thing's body wasn't moving properly: no undulations to provide propulsion. The body stayed completely rigid, more like a submarine than a living organism.

I thought of Oar's glass coffin boat. Perhaps Skin-Faces had boats too, built with intimidation in mind.

"Shit," I said.

"Oh shit," Oar murmured, like the response in a litany.

Raising my voice, I shouted at the onrushing fin, "Greetings! I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg… aw, fuck it."

Lifting my stunner, I shot the beast right in the dorsal.

Accidental Music

Hit by sonics, the fin sang like a glass harp. The sound reminded me of the hum from running a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass. I could actually see the vibrations, strong on the fin's tip, damped down where the fin entered the water.

Without hesitation, I shoved the stunner into the river and fired again.

Ouch.

My hand tingled with numbness — in water, the tight sonic beam didn't hold its cohesion, and a fraction of it radiated back at me. My grip didn't loosen enough to drop the gun, but I couldn't pull the trigger again till my fingers got over the shock. Still, the incoming bogey took a hard hit too: water conducts sound better than air.

A moment later, the fin disappeared.

On the Bumbler screen, the bogey's heat signature veered to one side and angled into a steep dive. If it used sonar, it would have quite a headache — maybe enough to send it running in pain. For that matter, it looked like it was going to…

I swear I felt the jar of impact as the bogey's nose hit the river bottom. The heat blob on the Bumbler dimmed to half, as muck bloomed up from the collision site and fuzzed the IR scan. Still, I could see the bogey reverse its way out of the mud and angle off in another direction, only to run into a sunken log as it neared the surface.

The log cracked. I hoped the bogey did too.

Our tree trunk rocked wildly as waves swept across us, hard and fast. For a moment, my attention was occupied with keeping hold of the Bumbler and the stunner; to avoid losing the weapon, I transferred it to my other hand. That left only my numb arm for clinging to the tree trunk. Awkwardly, I slung the arm over the tree, not holding on but only propped up with the trunk snug under my armpit.

I was just turning back to look for the bogey when it jumped straight out of the water.

It was a shark the size of a killer whale, but clear as glass and just as stiff. As it soared upward, head clearing the water, then fins, then tail, I could see its nose was starred with cracks from its collision with the log: the beast wasn't invulnerable. Without hesitation, I raised the stunner and shot straight at its cracked snout while it still sailed through the air.

The sonics struck the glass like a gong. For one brief moment, the bogey reverberated — a pure deep tone of whale song. Then the arc of its jump brought it splashing into the river, more than a ton of glass bellyflopping in front of me.

Tsunami time.

Submerged

One moment my numb arm was propped over our tree trunk; the next I was hammered by a wall of water, knocking me loose and burying me under its weight. It drove me deep below the surface, battering my head and shoulders, almost stunning me. Instinct was all that kept me holding my breath. I was left disoriented, dizzy… which way was up? And even if I could figure out the direction to swim, could I do it with one bad arm and the Bumbler weighing me down?

Yes, I could. I could do it.

The rebreather was still around my neck. I shoved it into my mouth, cleared it, and took a breath. Air. Yes. I was in control.

Light meant up, dark meant down. The light looked a long way off, but I could make it. I just had to take it easy. Once I found air again, I could search for Oar. Probably she was still afloat; with strength like hers, it would take more than a tidal wave to knock her off our tree trunk.

I swam upward, filled with the calm that comes when survival demands it. Up toward the light. I could see it better now. I could…

Bump. My outstretched hand touched glass.

The whale-shark floated between me and the surface.

Around the Belly

Maybe it was dead. No, it had to be a machine; say that it was broken, not dead. But I had shot it three times, it had smashed into the river bottom and the log, then it had suffered the crashing smack of bellyflopping into the water after its jump. All that buffeting must have taken its toll.

The machine lay still now. I prayed it was too damaged to move. Keeping my hand against the thing's hull, I began to feel my way around it: under its belly, up to fresh air.

Clang.

The sound was soft. I didn't hear it so much as feel it through my fingertips. Something had shifted inside the glass machine.

Just broken equipment, I told myself, banging together.

I didn't believe it. I gave a good kick, trying to hurry to the surface.

Whir.

An engine spun into life. I could feel that through my fingers too.

Shit.

I was still palming my way along the hull when the whale-shark started to move. The motion was jerky-damaged. I wanted to press my stunner against the machine's glass belly and keep pulling the trigger till the gun's battery was exhausted; but there might be an echoing backwash that left me unconscious in the water. My arm was still numb from that earlier bounce-back. All I could do was hurry, and hope Oar and I got out of the water before the glass monster came to its senses.

The hull under my hand was starting to curve upward. I was around the bulge. Pushing off, I swam hard toward the light. Beside me, the machine moved forward, its wake pulling me around in a spiral. Ignore it — up was up, and I was almost at the surface.

For some reason, I thought I'd be all right if I could reach fresh air again.

My head emerged into the light. Some distance away, Oar still clung to the tree trunk, her body frozen, not looking in my direction. I was about to swim toward her when something grabbed my leg.

I was dragged under again, fighting and kicking. There was time to see glass tentacles stretching from the whale-shark's mouth to my ankle. Then I was pulled inside.

Jonah

For such a big machine, the interior was cramped — too cramped to bend and loosen the glass grip on my leg. The Bumbler pressed hard into my kidneys, the pain stinging sharp; so I wriggled and squeezed to roll the other way, facing the Bumbler instead of having it at my back. Having a Bumbler jammed against my stomach wasn't comfortable either, but I could stand it for a while. With less than two minutes of air in the rebreather, I had worse troubles.

The whale-shark's mouth began to close. I tried to hold it open, tried to grab its jaw and pull myself free; but the hold on my ankle was as strong as iron, chaining me in place.

Better to stop fighting. My air would last longer that way.

Concentrate, I told myself. Slow breaths. Wait.

I had no idea what I was waiting for; but no one builds a river-shark just for the hell of it — not one with tentacles for grabbing passersby. This machine was designed to capture people… and I hoped it took them alive.

Yes. Of course it must want me alive. If its purpose was to eliminate intruders, it would have killed me by now. It could have zipped out a knife to slit my throat the second I was immobilized.

Unless it wanted my skin intact. Unless the machine's job was to supply the Skin-Faces with fresh Explorer pelts.

Concentrate! I growled mentally. Slow, slow breaths.

Somewhere inside the shark, machinery started grinding. It was an unhealthy, damaged sound — the stunner had shattered some part of the glass mechanism. Slowly though, slowly, the water around me gurgled away. The shark was pumping water out, and (I hoped) pumping breathable air in.

Taking a chance, I raised my head into the clear space and inhaled shallowly through my nose. So far so good. I completely filled my lungs and waited.

No dizziness, no sudden rush of blackness. The shark wasn't even doping the air with knockout gas.

What a wimp-ass planet.

Pumps Clanking

The water level dropped till half the interior was filled with air. I expected the water to continue receding; it didn't.

Why did that bother me?

The whale-shark contained no light source, but it swam close enough to the surface that weak daylight filtered through the machine's glass hull. The dim illumination showed why the water level wasn't dropping anymore: as fast as the pumps sucked water away, more water seeped through the cracks where the shark had hit the log. It looked like the glass bent slightly inward up near the snout — as if the water pressure outside had enough strength to buckle the hull, now that the inside was half air.

"Okay," I said aloud, "I am now officially worried."

Minutes passed. The grinding noise in the tail section got worse, punctuated occasionally by soft electric crackling. If that was the sound of the pumps, they wouldn't last long.

I held the rebreather in front of my face. The gauge was hard to read in the dimness, but the little tank still held sixty seconds of air. Careful breathing could stretch that out, but not forever.

Lifting my head into the air space, I filled my lungs as deeply as I could. By the time I finished, there was no doubt possible: the water level was back on the rise.

Arrival

In an entertainment bubble broadcast, I'd be saved at the last second — just as the chamber was completely full, just as my rebreather gasped out its last molecule of oxygen. Life doesn't match that standard: you do not find a job just as you run out of money, a couple's orgasms seldom arrive simultaneously, and salvation may not sweep to the rescue at the point of peak drama. For me, salvation arrived with some minutes to spare — better than mistiming its cue in the other direction.

To make a long story short, the whale-shark's gullet still held a few fingers of air at the end of the machine's journey.

My first hint we were close to our goal was a sharp dive: I couldn't tell if we were going down intentionally or some new breakdown was sinking us at speed. The dim and distant daylight from the river's surface faded to darkness. After half a minute, I asked myself how deep the river could be. We hadn't traveled far enough to reach the ocean. Perhaps we had come to a lake whose bottom was lower than the river feeding into it.

Down and down and down. I was glad the water level had risen now — it helped balance the fearsome pressure pushing on the shark's broken nose. Even so, the damaged area creaked in protest… and perhaps it was in the nick of time that the machine passed through an airlock into bluish-silver light.

The shark's mouth opened, spilling water onto a concrete jetty.

The tentacled grip on my ankle eased. Stiffly, I pulled myself past the Bumbler (still pressed against my stomach), and crawled out of the shark's mouth. Thirty seconds later, I was on my feet, the Bumbler strapped to my back, and my stunner in hand.

Silence.

No one rushed to attack me. The entry chamber was small and empty, with blank concrete walls. At the far end was a metal door with a red pushbutton beside it.

Enter freely and of your own will, I thought to myself.

The Colored Town

There was no way to go back the way I came. Even if I could start the whale-shark again, I'd drown on the return journey. That left two choices: sit where I was, or move forward. Staying put just avoided the future. Better to head out now, and find cover before anyone came for me.

I walked straight to the door and pressed the button. With a rusty whine, the hatch opened toward me. I stepped through.

Glass towers. Glass homes. Glass blockhouses.

It was larger than Oar's village, but built on the same model. A black hemispherical dome loomed overhead, no doubt holding back a million tons of water. The buildings on the perimeter were low-built, while the ones in the middle reached high into the air, stretching more than halfway to the roof. Like Oar's home, the place had an abandoned air: quiet and unpeopled.

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."