‘I’ll think about it,’ Ysbel said, and got out of there. It was obvious that her colleagues believed that she had failed to satisfy the difficult, delicate task she’d been given. Landers’s come-on was more than a little humiliating; it was never nice to be treated as nothing more than a potential conquest by another person, but it was also laughably blatant and easy to ignore. As for Dalsy, her sympathy might be genuine, it was always hard to tell, but she definitely wanted to use this as a teachable moment. To show that her way of dealing with the natives was for the best, and Ysbel was misguided in treating them as equals because look where that had got her.

Ysbel wanted to prove her colleagues wrong, but also knew there was much more at stake than her wounded pride and her reputation. Back at her cabin she boiled up a can of coffee and worked up the costings for the revised plans for Freedom Park – she’d picked up the file in the office and would return it tomorrow, a sop to her conscience and a gift to Mitkos, who’d dropped the access key to the archives in her link.

She wanted to start mining records as soon as possible, but the first thing she did after sending the new set of costings to Mitkos was call Bakr Lunwarsdaughter, a virologist she’d befriended when they had worked on the campaign to develop and distribute a vaccine against the pneumatic zoonosis. After initial pleasantries, Ysbel asked if there were any records of bears being cured of the disease which affected their sanity.

‘Not that I know of,’ Bakr said. ‘It isn’t my area, but I think I would have heard of something like that.’

‘But it’s possible?’

‘From what I understand, it’s caused by an endogenous retrovirus. One that has inserted copies of itself in the genomes of reproductive as well as somatic cells, which is why it persists from generation to generation. You could use standard gene-editing techniques to deactivate the viral DNA in host cell genomes, or snip it out. And it might also be possible to suppress it with off-the-shelf anti-virals. Something that interferes with transcription, the way the virus uses the host cell’s machinery to make new viral components.’

‘So there are several ways of doing it.’

‘Theoretically,’ Bakr said, giving the word some weight. ‘In practice, any treatment would have to satisfy serious ethical and political concerns. And we would need the natives’ agreement, too.’

‘But if someone decided to force the issue? Or if the natives asked to help?’

‘As I said, it isn’t my area. And if it had been discussed, there would be reports, position papers … Why the interest? Is someone thinking of actually doing it?’

‘No. No, no, nothing like that. It’s purely hypothetical. One of those what-if exercises. Just in case, you know, the natives raise the idea.’