The rings of Sofor-5 were barren. The triumphant stadiums empty. The plazas devoid of life. The festival was absent from the spot that it had occupied for the last four thousand cycles. The gravity generators, still spinning quietly in their Fron-Ganto cages, had weakened, and the amusement complex which had once held the greatest rocket propelled coaster ever devised in the system was unmoored from the foundations formerly secure sheets of ice and frozen methane that had held from the reign of Arthanor the Great.
It would have been the opening ceremony.
Would have been.
But the prior year, diplomatic disaster had struck.
The host of the festival, the moon of Flofor, had invited the people of the other moons to