Ysbel, feeling that the atmosphere was growing dangerously charged, told the arbiter that she was sorry if Special Operations had upset her and her people, said that all she wanted to know was what happened when the camp closed. ‘Where the people, yours and mine, went. Whether they took the bears with them.’

‘First we knew about it was the shipments for the camp stopped coming. Where the people running it went, or why, I couldn’t tell you.’

‘The people from the camp, and the bears, they didn’t pass through here, on their way to somewhere else?’

‘If they’d brought any strange bears here, they wouldn’t have got far,’ the arbiter said. ‘My boys and I would have seen to that.’

Ysbel waited out the chorus of agreement from the arbiter’s crew and said, ‘May I ask about the bear in the cage, over by the sidings? Is he from the camp? Did he escape, was he left there?’

‘Old Stink? No, he’s just a bear. As crazy bad as all the rest. And before you start in about how it’s against some law or other, I’ll remind you that you just admitted that your people conspired to break a higher law. The Mother made the bears as they once were, and as they are now. She punished them for their apostasy and freed our people. So it stands to reason that trying to cure them is not only unnatural, but goes against Her will.’

The arbiter seemed genuinely angry, pelt bristling, black lips pulled back from small sharp teeth, gaze flat and unforgiving. She pointed her staff at Ysbel, rattle bells jangling.

‘I remember when one of your people passed through here some years back. Before the camp was built. When we still had a station chief, and my mother was our arbiter. This fellow said he was surveying the border and asked all kinds of questions, just like you, and your friends before you. As if he had a right to ask us anything he wanted, and expected us to answer like pups being schooled. My mother turned things around by insisting he share some redweed with her. We grow some good strong redweed here,’ the arbiter said. ‘Puts you right close to the Mother. And this fellow I’m telling you about, it soon loosened his tongue. He told us about your Mother, the other Mother up in the Daughter Moon, and said he knew something about her most of his people didn’t. Said that just as his people were more powerful than us, and had been trying to raise us up, make us more equal, so she had been raised up by others more powerful than her.’

‘What kind of others?’ Ysbel said.

‘He said that they live amongst the stars in the sky, as fish live in the rivers or the sea. Perhaps you have heard of them.’