This was in a dusty coastal town several hundred kilometres south of Ogres Grave. Its inhabitants wove carpets from the hair of a local breed of mara that grazed seaweed along the rocky coast, grew edible kelp on ropes trailing from rafts, trawled for sardines and pilchards and line-fished for mackerel and shark. Negotiations about building a plant to freeze-dry fish for export to other territories, involving the town’s council, the Bureau of Development and Works and a native business cartel in the capital of the Union, had been stalled by protests organised by fisherfolk and young activists. After the latest rally got out of hand and D&W’s local office was trashed and set on fire, Ysbel and Landers Landersson were dispatched to try to find a way of peaceably ending the dispute.

The unrest was rooted in an increasingly common clash of values. Native investors wanted to make local resources available to new markets; the fisherfolk and their supporters said that increasing catches would lead to overfishing of their waters and an imbalance in their Mother’s harmony, and did not trust the results of the surveys of local shark and mackerel populations carried out by Development and Works, claiming that fish had been disturbed and frightened away by its sonar equipment.

With the help of an energetic young zoologist from the Invisible College who had volunteered to advise fisherfolk, Ysbel and Landers negotiated the preliminary terms of a settlement. The leaders of the fisherfolk would help to organise a new survey and take part in discussions about increasing catch sizes and quotas, and a percentage of the new plant’s budget would be used to improve the town’s harbour. Landers blamed the D&W staff for the trouble, saying that they could have headed it off by addressing the grievances of the fisherfolk at the outset, but Ysbel thought that unfair. The staff were young, inexperienced and overstretched, managing projects in towns and settlements along a thousand-kilometre stretch of coast, and the protests were a local manifestation of universal problems created by First Contact and the industrial revolution it had kickstarted. Wealth was no longer a common resource shared out equally in tribal territories but was being accumulated by a small elite of families and individuals who were extracting it from the labour of the majority. Capital projects like the freeze-drying plant generated even more income for rich investors, deepening inequality and breeding resentment. Organisation of resentment created protest movements, and attempts to suppress protest fuelled further resentment in an escalating cycle.