Ysbel hoped that the helper was still watching over her, but he did not show himself or respond when she called his name. She told the air that control of the flitter should be returned to her, said that things would go better if she made her own way to Concord and searched for Goodwill without the oversight of Special Operations, but received no reply.

With nothing better to do, she perched spraddle-legged on one of the rails and absent-mindedly ate what was either a late lunch or an early supper from a ration pack, and considered her options. It didn’t take long. She hadn’t learned everything she wanted to know, had run out of leads and had been asked to take Mother’s side in a power struggle with Special Operations and the Authority.

She remembered the old man who’d used to drop into the Data Analysis offices every now and then. He’d been the section chief in the frantic, exhilarating years after First Contact, and after his retirement had taken to revisiting the scene of his old triumphs because he couldn’t find much else to do with his life, his partner dead, his children busy with their careers on the mainland. He’d be welcomed by the current section chief, they’d talk over tea in the chief’s office and afterwards he’d wander around, hoping to find some way of being useful, asking questions but not really listening to answers, poignantly needy, adrift and out of touch.

Mother’s intervention, and her claims about a shadowy cabal, seemed to spring from a similar struggle with increasing irrelevance. Like everyone else, Ysbel had been schooled in devotion and loyalty to her, but it was founded on history and tradition, gratitude for what Mother had once been and what she had once done, not what she was now. Even before First Contact, people had outgrown her lunar cradle and mostly lived on Earth, and no longer needed her help or advice. She was still a power, which was why Ysbel had been asked to satisfy her curiosity about the map, but this was something deeper and more treacherous: an attempt to gain some measure of control over something that might completely reconfigure the relationship between humans and natives. It would be dangerous to refuse her, but Ysbel reckoned that it would be equally dangerous to cross Iryn Moonsdaughter.

At least, she thought, she was going to be taken to where she wanted and needed to go. If she could find Goodwill, if he’d found something useful, if he still trusted her, perhaps she could find some way of placating both parties. And if that proved impossible, maybe she could throw in with him, and the native authorities, and see where that took her. If she was going to be shamed and disgraced, it should at least be for the right cause.