Terra herself was less solemn. Except for the court, which still felt bound to follow daylight around the globe for one exhausting ceremony after another, Birthday had become simply an occasion to hold carnival. As his aircar hummed over great dusking waters, Lord Markus Hauksberg saw the east blaze with sky luminosity, multi-colored moving curtains where fireworks exploded meteoric. Tonight, while the planet turned, its dark side was so radiant as to drown the very metro-centers seen from Luna. Had he tuned his vid to almost any station, he could have watched crowds filling pleasure houses and coming near riot among festively decorated towers.

His lady broke the silence between them with a murmur that made him start. “I wish it were a hundred years ago.”

“Eh?” Sometimes she could still astonish him.

“Birthday meant something then.”

“Well … yes. S’pose so.” Hauksberg cast his mind back over history. She was right. Fathers had taken their sons outdoors when twilight ended parades and feasts; they had pointed to the early stars and said, Look yonder. Those are ours. We believe that as many as four million lie within the Imperial domain. Certainly a hundred thousand know us daily, obey us, pay tribute to us, and get peace and the wealth of peace in return. Our ancestors did that. Keep the faith.

Hauksberg shrugged. You can’t prevent later generations from outgrowing naïveté. In time they must realize, bone deep, that this one dustmote of a galaxy holds more than a hundred billion suns; that we have not even explored the whole of our one spiral arm, and it does not appear we ever will; that you need no telescope to see giants like Betelgeuse and Polaris which do not belong to us.