The station’s office, furnished in native fashion with cushions, stools and low tables, overlapping rugs and windows with shutters instead of glass, was on the upper floor of a two-storey wooden building constructed in the local style but scaled up to accommodate humans. Mitkos’s workspace was in one corner, with views west and south across the city’s crowded rooftops. He leaned back on his big cushion, hands laced behind his head, listening patiently as Ysbel explained that Goodwill Saltmire had realised that the map Joyous Hightower had purchased from Solomon Firststar was the very same map which had been found in an abandoned library in the far south some forty years ago by Goodwill’s uncle, Pilgrim Saltmire.

‘It was stolen from him soon after he found it, but he had made a sketch and published it in a short monograph about the circumstances of the map’s discovery and its possible significance. Solomon Firststar’s description of the map he sold to Joyous Hightower prompted Goodwill to look up that monograph. He photographed the sketch and sent a copy to Solomon Firststar. Firststar confirmed that it was the map he sold to Joyous, and Goodwill got in touch with me.’

‘So if I’ve got this right,’ Mitkos said, ‘this is a photograph of a sketch of a copy of what may or may not be a bear carving.’

‘Apparently, the style is typical of panels found in bear cities, and bear glyphs and iconography are mixed up with native script.’

‘If it’s a carving, it has to be more than six hundred years old. Made before the bears’ civilisation fell. If it’s as old as that, this can’t be a human being,’ Mitkos said, stabbing at the photograph with his forefinger. ‘And if this is a human being, it can’t be that old.’

‘I think that’s why Trina wanted to get hold of the map,’ Ysbel said. ‘So that she could date it. Test its authenticity. Find out whether or not it was a contemporary fake.’

‘She hardly needed to go to the trouble,’ Mitkos said, skimming the photograph back to Ysbel. ‘Either the map is a fake or your bailiff’s uncle misinterpreted it.’

‘Pilgrim Saltmire was the secretary of a respected scholar who had been studying sightings of what the natives called visitors – the close encounters that were staged in the run-up to First Contact, when we were trying to accustom them to the idea of strangers from another world. According to his monograph, that little figure is not only unique to this map, not found in any other carvings or images made by bears, it also resembles drawings made by witnesses of those close encounters.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘He died fourteen years ago.’