Lunch was smoked fish and a salad of beansprouts and sweet little tomatoes and a small flask of coffee. Ysbel mixed in the rice balls left over from breakfast and, after she’d eaten, stretched out on the cushions and read the rest of Pilgrim Saltmire’s monograph.

She must have dozed off, because she startled awake when Goodwill and Swift came in, bringing news of the arrangements they had made, and the gift for the person who would help them find Swift’s old, overlooked carving.

11.

A few hours later, as they were climbing towards the low cliff of the Library of All People, Goodwill asked Ysbel why her Mother and her Mother’s servant did not know that some of her people had been secretly working with some of his.

‘She isn’t omnipresent and all-seeing, like your Mother,’ Ysbel said. ‘She’s more like a bigger, smarter version of Zaquil. Once upon a time, she and her children worked closely together, united by a common plan. A shared goal. We’ve diverged somewhat, since then. Since First Contact. Her up on the Moon, with her plans. Us down here, with ours.’

‘It sounds as if you have distanced yourself from her, much as the separatists want to distance our people from yours.’

‘Some people’s plans and ideas may have diverged more than others,’ Ysbel said, thinking of the Originists again.

She didn’t need to show the letter Zaquil had got up to gain entrance to the Library; their contact, a senior librarian named Clarity Forrester, was waiting for them in the entrance hall. He led them through service corridors to his office, where he accepted the gift Goodwill had brought, eagerly untying the double knot of its pale white fabric wrapping so the rest fell open like a blossoming flower, revealing a small stack of paper sheets interleaved with cardboard slips. It was a complete run of the first of the so-called Overlord stories, in which a band of humans who lived in a floating castle had adventures on the surface of the world below, saving hapless natives from criminals or maddened bears, rescuing them from burning buildings, sinking ships, runaway trains and other disasters. Crude tales crudely told, overlooked or scorned by the scholarly community, according to Swift, who had sourced it from one of his bookseller contacts, but collectors like Clarity Forrester believed that they gave valuable insights into populist opinion immediately after First Contact.

Ysbel and Goodwill watched as the librarian picked through the four-sheets with delicate care, sniffing them, holding them up to the light of the floor lamp in the cubbyhole of his office and moving them up and down and side to side a handsbreadth from his face, murmuring his appreciation.

‘Very good. Very good indeed.’