Maybe there was no connection. Maybe the map and the old carving supposedly stashed in the basement of the Library of All People were no more than bear fantasies about sky spirits, and Joyous Hightower’s project was a legitimate and entirely native affair. But Ysbel had the feeling that she had stumbled into the margins of a shadowy conspiracy, a rogue operation run by a cloak-and-dagger unit inside one of the departments or something even gnarlier, and her thoughts drifted to the Originists and the spectrum of their craziness. Most were largely harmless, like the old woman who stood every day at the entrance to Central Park, handing out leaflets which explained that during her long voyage Mother had been infected by a parasitic mind which had used her to create replicas of people who walked amongst her real children and were their secret controllers. Or the discussion circles which questioned Mother’s story about the failure of the colony she had founded on the Earth-like planet of a distant star, claimed that the seedship could not have survived for two hundred thousand years and tried to prove that Mother could not have built her lunar habitat and quickened the First Generation without some kind of help. Active groups of Originists like the one Ysbel had helped to uncover were rare. But if there really were people involved in the mysterious project in bear country, as Goodwill claimed, they might well be an Originist cabal. Allied with native separatists – why not? – working together to undermine Mother and the Authority, to sabotage the precarious peace between humans and natives …

At first light, she stuck her head under a gush of cold water from a handpump in the yard, shouting with the pleasurable shock, and relieved herself behind a flimsy rattan screen, brushing flies from her face with one hand and bracing against the floor with the other because her feet were too large for the indentations on either side of the stinky hole in the ground. She took several turns around the courtyard, rehearsing the conversation with Joyous Hightower, and after sharing a breakfast of strong black tea and cold rice balls and pickles with Goodwill and Swift she went outside again (there were lights in several of the windows of the printworks, now, and the faint regular noise of some kind of machinery) and launched the bot that would provide a line-of-sight connection with the comms net of the embassy on the other side of the river.

Swift politely retired behind the paper screen before Ysbel placed the call to Joyous Hightower, and Goodwill crouched on a cushion out of the view of the little bot that projected the window and acted as a static camera. The bailiff had sworn to keep his peace, but Ysbel was aware of his glowering, close-focused concentration during every second of the short, inconclusive conversation.