To Hank and Angie

Dawn was breaking on Earth, and it could seldom have been more beautiful. The eastern sky wore a gorgeous stippling of salmon-pink and light gray clouds, the perfume of opening blossoms scented an easterly breeze, and soft bird-song filled the air.

Dougal MacDougal stared around him and hated every bit of it.

“Come on, come on,” he said to the short, scruffy man standing at his side. “I thought you said you knew the way? Get me out of this stink.”

His nose, accustomed to the filtered air of the Ceres habitats, wrinkled in disgust. Every moment that they stood on the surface of Earth, spores and bacteria and unknown filth made their way into his delicate and unprotected lungs. His boots, which five minutes before as they stepped clear of the Link exit point had gleamed bone-white, already bore a thin layer of grime picked up from the ground — the ground, he reminded himself, composed entirely of dirt to an unknown depth.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir .” Kubo Flammarion did not move. It was a flaming lie; he had never told Dougal MacDougal that he knew the way. All he had admitted, back on Ceres, was that he had been to Earth a few times himself. But that had been twenty and more years ago, and the place had seemed like Madworld even back then. Earth had scared the life out of him, long before the quarantine of Sol had led to the general going-to-hell of everything in the solar system.

On the other hand, they couldn’t stand here forever. Flammarion didn’t mind dirt; as a man who had spent lonely years out on the Perimeter where personal hygiene was a matter of choice he kind of liked it. But the natives close to the Link exit point were watching them and a few of the shadier specimens were starting to shuffle in their direction. Flammarion knew the sales pitch — he’d once fallen for it himself; but Dougal MacDougal, lordly Ambassador to the Stellar Group, was unlikely to appreciate it.