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the work—but human labor was required as well.
    That's when a group called the Merchant's Guild had taken exception to the four-hour-per-day "labor tax" and precipitated a revolt. The Guild won the short but bloody conflict, and free-form, "anything goes" capitalism took the place of the perfectly designed communities envisioned by the Committee.
    The communities collectively known as Shipdown burst forth from the Pilgrim's twenty-five-mile-long hull like fungus on a fallen tree trunk. Resources were totaled and divided into shares that were hoarded, squandered, bought, sold, combined, and redivided until the merchants controlled just about everything. They'd been ready to consolidate their power, to put an army of subsentient robots to work building their factories, when the planet decided otherwise. Now they provided what order there was, and, like most of the citizens of Shipdown, Mary was grateful.
    The sky was the color of worn aluminum and gave birth to occasional snowflakes. They drifted this way and that before hitting the ground. Anonymous scuff marks showed that others were up and about.
    More and more noises were heard as the city woke from its slumber. The solid thump, thump, thump of a carefully hidden loom, the staccato bark of a unicycle engine, the pop, pop, pop of small-caliber gunfire, and the undulating wail of a Zid prayer caller.
    She saw him off to the right. His feet rested on a crossbar, his rags jerked in the wind, and a scarf held him in place. This one was yellow, but some favored red or blue. No one knew why. No one she knew, anyway.
    The poles were curiosities at first—something to wonder at. Then, as time passed, and the T-shaped poles began to proliferate, curiosity turned to annoyance as the callers synchronized their prayers and created what amounted to a vast around-the-clock public address system.
    In spite of the fact that some died of exposure, and snipers accounted for two or three a night, the zealots persisted. Their wailing was as endless as the wind.
    Mary raised her collar and trudged up the hill. The slope had been created when the Pilgrim struck the planet's surface and skidded for more than eighty miles. Parallel ridges had been created by the waves of earth and rock shoved away from the ship's massive hull.
    As Mary climbed toward the top of "East Ridge," the Pilgrim's much-abused hull began to appear. Frost covered the hull, except where plates had been removed, and smoke poured out of makeshift chimneys. Though the ship had been emptied after the landing, thousands had returned to it after the Cleansing, and considered themselves lucky to be there.
    A raggedy man passed, straining to pull his homemade cart up the hill, boots slipping in the slush. Mary stepped out, put her shoulder to the cart, and swore when the wheels threw slush on her pants.
    The man paused at the top of the hill, nodded his thanks, and held out his hand. A ball of deep-fried dough sat nestled in the palm of a filthy black glove. Mary didn't hesitate to pop the concoction into her mouth and bite into it. It was hot and tasted of cinnamon. The man was gone before she could thank him.
    The roboticist paused for a moment to marvel at the spaceship. It blocked a third of the sky, stretched for miles in both directions, and incorporated more than two thousand years of scientific progress. Knowledge the Zid considered evil... and humans were beginning to lose.
    Mary chose her footing with care as she descended the hill. Perhaps the naysayers were right, perhaps the Pilgrim should have remained in orbit—but what of the metal she had supplied? What of the prefab city wrested from her holds? Most of it lay in ruins now, but she couldn't be blamed for that... no one could.
    A thousand pillars of smoke reached up to support the low-hanging sky as Mary made her way past a lifeless prayer caller and down the opposite slope.
    A flock of night birds, their beaks bloody from pecking at the Zid's half-frozen