According to the Other Mother’s version of history, there had once been three mothers. Three different aspects of a close-knit triune, guardians of three arks or libraries buried in three vaults in three different places under the surface of the Moon. After they had woken after a long sleep and found that intelligent descendants of bears had built a civilisation in South America and enslaved descendants of racoons, they had agreed to use genetic information stored in their vaults to quicken human children, and to employ native agents to encourage a sect of bears to give up slavery and create new cities, and gift them with relatively advanced techne. But things had gone badly wrong after their children came of age and made contact with the philosophers of the new cities and tried to extend their influence to the rest of bear civilisation. The priest-kings of powerful city states had declared war on the new cities; most of the human representatives had been massacred.

Two of the mothers agreed that subduing the bears by violence would violate every precept and safeguard, but the third took unilateral action, secretly infecting the bears with a retrovirus which had driven them insane, and trying to shut down her sisters once they realised what had happened. One was destroyed; the shattered remnants of the second fled into the outer darkness of the solar system. The renegade mother who had infected the bears and defeated her sisters had also been damaged, but quickly rebuilt herself and began the long task of shaping the civilisation of the former slaves and preparing it for contact with her as yet unborn children.

In Ysbel’s former line of work there were some, including her colleague Dalsy Diwasdaughter, who argued that the resemblance of native civilisation to human cultures was the result of a kind of parallel evolution. The ancestors of the natives had been reshaped by human intervention before the Burn Line, and after they’d been freed from slavery, their development had been shaped by the same geology and geography, similar environmental factors, mineral resources, crop plants … There was a vast literature about the interactions and relative importance of a hundred possible drivers, but the truth was much simpler. Native civilisation had been explicitly influenced and guided by Mother’s interventions, not only to make First Contact easier, but also to make control of natives more straightforward. There was some speculation that Mother might have controlled the availability of techne to her children, too. That they had been restricted to a certain level of development so that they would not be able to subjugate the natives, or overthrow Mother’s hegemony.