Ysbel didn’t entirely trust the Other Mother’s story either, but she thought that it should be taken seriously. Special Operations clearly did. And if the Other Mother had been telling the truth, she hadn’t had time to tell them everything. Such as, had the people who had helped to organise and enact First Contact been killed when the bears had rebelled, or had some survived? And if there had been survivors, what had happened to them? Ysbel hoped that they had been allowed to live out the rest of their lives as happily as possible, because if Mother had disposed of people who had outlived their use six or seven hundred years ago, she would not hesitate to dispose of her and Goodwill and the others, too. Sacrifice them for the greater good. Erase them, as she had attempted to erase every trace of her failed attempt to befriend the bears, and its aftermath.

Despite his doubts, the ramifications of the Other Mother’s story nagged at Goodwill as well. ‘If your Mother infected the bears with crazed bloodlust and destroyed their civilisation, what might she have done to my people?’ he said one day.

‘Perhaps she wanted to free your ancestors,’ Ysbel said. ‘Perhaps that’s why the bears turned against her.’

‘I mean after that. We know that she gifted us with new techne to prepare us for First Contact. What else might she have done, in the centuries after the fall of the bears? We thought that we were in charge of our destiny. But now we discover that we may have been shaped and manipulated by your Mother to suit her plans.’

Ysbel tried to placate him, telling him that his people were better than hers, that unlike her distant ancestors they lived in harmony with the land and with each other, that they had never fought a war or driven other species into extinction, but it did no good.

‘Everything we have achieved is tainted by your interference,’ he said. ‘You tell yourselves that you did it out of the best intentions. That it was for our own good. But you did not ask us what we wanted, and although you claim that we are equals, you treat us like pups who have to accept your authority, your control, your choices.’

‘Some of us have been trying to change that,’ Ysbel said. ‘You might think we are all the same, but we aren’t.’

‘Neither are we!’

Goodwill’s eyes were slits stitched in his mask; his whiskers bristled.

Ysbel was shocked by his sudden vehemence. Shocked and somewhat indignant. Hadn’t she always tried to do her best by the natives? Hadn’t she called out people like Landers Landersson, who too often were too careless of native customs and laws, and behaved as if the mainland was some kind of playground?