On the day after the Passing Festival, three men walked out of the swamps and came into town to kill a woman.

* * *

Normally, Karsman would have been one of the first to know about the strangers. But while the strangers were making their way across the salt flats that lay between the city and the distant marshes, Karsman was a good four or five kilometers away, heading out of town along the Road.

He walked hand in hand with a young woman. She had lilac hair, and fine gold wires were woven into the flesh of her right ear. The gray wind jacket that she wore was crisscrossed with colored ribbons. Her name was Mera, and he had known her for just two days and nights.

On the Road ahead of them, the vast wheeled bulk of a Temple advanced at slightly less than walking pace, towed by a dozen tractors, its spires and minarets stark against the hazy orange of the sky. Long strings of prayer flags flapped in the wind. Behind the Temple, a column of trucks and vans crept along in bottom gear, towing flatbed trailers laden with struts and panels: pieces of prefabricated housing that would be reassembled to make a new town somewhere farther down the Road. Young children stared sleepily from the cabs of the trucks and last night's revelers lay sprawled on top of the cargo like wounded soldiers being carried off the battlefield.

Karsman and Mera walked at the tail end of the procession, holding themselves a little apart from the other walkers.

"I should go back soon," said Karsman for the second or third time. Mera tightened her grip a little, holding on to his large hand possessively.

"Why?" she said. "Why not come with us?"

He considered the question. In truth, there was little enough reason to go back. The strip-town behind him was like any of a thousand others: not much more than a cluster of shacks thrown up along the fringes of the Road, huddled in the shadow of an abandoned Builder city. The only manmade structure of any solidity or size was the Temple, twin to the one now moving ponderously down the Road ahead of them. Even after twelve years, Karsman had few real attachments there — a handful of friends, some drinking companions, a couple of occasional lovers — no one he would really miss. The possessions he had left behind in his own shack would scarcely fill a small knapsack. Nothing he owned was worth the trouble of going back.

At the side of the Road, two young girls stood holding hands. They paid no attention to the crowd, which parted to move around them and closed up again. One of the girls had pushed her goggles up onto her forehead so that she could stare into her companion's eyes, and Karsman recognized her as the daughter of one of his neighbors. There was something so theatrically tragic about her expression that Karsman could not help smiling.

As he watched, she dropped the other girl's hand and turned away. Her lover stared after her for a few moments more, then shrugged, turned on her heel, and broke into a slow jog, hurrying to catch up to the trucks ahead.

It was the same at every Passing Festival. Temporary alliances formed during two days of revelry, then quickly dissolved as the passing Temple moved on down the Road. A few festival pairings became something more permanent. One person might choose to stay behind with a lover when the Temple left. Another would say good-bye to home and family and follow a new partner down the Road to an unknown destination, attaching themselves to a different Temple and making a new life in a new community. The arrangement might or might not last. Often, defectors simply drifted back after a few months, riding a road train back down the Road and picking up their lives again where they had left off.

Karsman had seen it all before. On a couple of occasions, he had considered the idea of moving on himself. But this was the farthest he had ever taken it, the farthest he had ever been from town since his arrival. He had the feeling that he was approaching a point of no return.

Mera tugged at his hand. "Come on," she said.

He let her lead him off the Road and up the slope of the windbreak. For most of its length, the Road ran level, raised no more than a half meter above the surrounding terrain. Here and there, however, great berms of concrete and earth were raised up on the sunward side of the roadway. Their inner faces were studded with niches that served as storm shelters. At their highest point, the windbreaks rose as much as eighty meters above the road, more than tall enough to protect even the tallest spires of a Temple from a gale blowing darkward.

Karsman and Mera sat down on the lip of the windbreak, feet dangling, watching the convoy roll slowly past below them. There were already a handful of other couples there, taking advantage of a last few moments together or simply admiring the view.

The view, such as it was, was made up of alternating stripes of color. Immediately below them lay the broad band of the world-girdling Road, its smooth black surface strangely resistant to the blowing dust that colored everything else a dull red. The Road ran arrow-straight all the way to the horizon in either direction, so flawless in its undeviating regularity as to seem almost unreal. Seen from above, it looked like a fissure splitting the planet in two.

On either side of the Road lay a wide strip of desert, dry red earth and rock, speckled here and there with grayish clots of dead vegetation. From the top of the windbreak it was possible to make out the irregular scratches of dry watercourses, like abstract writing on the arid ground. Rainstorms strong enough to fill them were rare. Over the years, the stream beds gradually filled with red dust and the wind blurred their outlines, softening and smoothing them until they blended back into the desert.

Far to sunward it was just possible to make out the beginning of the next band of color, a swathe of yellow-gray mudflats that marked the limits of the desert. From their present vantage point nothing else was visible, but Karsman had climbed some of the taller towers in the Builder city and knew that the banding continued. Beyond the mudflats lay a belt of swampland, visible as a confused scribble of contrasting textures: the black of floating vegetation mixed with glimmering patches of open water and the rusty knobs of outcrops. On rare clear days, you could sometimes see beyond the swamps to a white line of breaking waves and the red glint of the open ocean beneath a liquid shimmer of heat haze. Over it all hung the fat orange blob of the sun, perpetually hovering a few degrees above the horizon.

"So, why not come with me?" Mera asked.

Karsman shrugged. "I have —" He hesitated. "Responsibilities." He was aware of the absurdity of the phrase even before he finished speaking. He bit his lip, embarrassed by his own pomposity.

Mera, however, took him seriously. "Because you're the mayor," she said.

"I — what? No, that's just something they call me. It's more a joke than anything else."

Karsman's mayorship was entirely unofficial, his qualifications no more than a steady temperament and the willingness to occasionally thump a few heads together in the interests of keeping the peace. The local Muljaddy held the monopoly on spiritual and political power; the Temple guards were the only sanctioned wielders of coercive force.

"And you're not curious to see what's down the Road?" Mera continued.

He shrugged again....