At last she’d cross the railway and double back, past the paper manufactory; past a shrine to the natives’ Mother, the tutelary spirit of the planet; returning to the wooded hills and her cabin. She had been living there for almost a year now. Some of the locals were still wary of her, but most were friendly enough: this rural area was as yet untouched by the unrest that was troubling towns and cities, still cleaved to a way of life that relied for the most part on wind and water and muscle power, and upheld traditions that were dying out elsewhere. Ploughing and planting and harvest, gatherings in the spring mating season and naming ceremonies of pups born in the autumn, the midwinter festival when male striplings quit the hearths where they had been raised. In her spare time, Ysbel made sure that she did her share of labour on community projects, from barn raising to scrub clearance and road mending, and had helped Dalsy Diwasdaughter, the station’s cultural-exchange officer, to document the midsummer market, where natives across the region gathered to sell and buy produce and handcrafts, and the roundup, where wild saddle maras were ridden bareback, bucking and kicking, until they accepted the authority of their new owners.

Ilan said that she was staging an unconscious recreation of Henry Thoreau’s experiment in simplified living and immersion in nature, but when she read the surviving fragments of the ancient philosopher’s chronicle Ysbel thought the comparison superficial. She enjoyed Thoreau’s account of trying to balance his self-willed solitude with a need for human society, but didn’t share his zeal for moral reform, and wasn’t trying to strip her life down to the bare essentials. She was living more or less like the natives, sure, but she had better techne and a commuter link to the city.

Still, reading Thoreau led her, with the guidance of one of Mother’s little helpers, into pre-Burn Line literature about immersion in nature and attempts to live sustainably and off-grid, and heart-breaking chronicles of what had been lost to industrialisation, over-population and global heating. Fragmentary records describing the failure of geoengineering and other interventions, and abortive attempts to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars.