After a young man tries to persuade her to have intercourse and she rejects him, she learns that Silver Fire was intentionally spreaded for religious reasons to get people to walk the Trail of Happiness.
Clair meets the young man from the Festival again with a dead woman in his car, who reveals himself to be among the people having spread Silver Fire.
The short story was translated into French by Francis Lustman and Quarante-Deux (1998), Italian (2001), Japanese by Makoto Yamagishi (2008), Spanish by Carlos Pavón (2010), Czech, Korean and Chinese.
[1] Russell Letson, writing in the Locus Magazine, states that the short story "is a very strong example of Egan’s interest in matters of disease and morality and his scornful attitude toward irrationality, sentimentality, and ‘'the saccharine poison of spirituality’'.
[3] Karen Burnham writes in Greg Egan (Masters of Modern Science Fiction), that the short story "overflows with vitriol for people who increase human suffering by shoehorning real things into an ideological framework and applying them willy-nilly".