While Mother had been fully occupied with quickening a new generation of humans and preparing to implement her plans for First Contact, the Other Mother had been able to reassemble her shattered self and develop her own plans, creating a ghost network of natives and humans, acquiring evidence of the disastrous contact with bears, and working up a way to cure them of the endemic retrovirus (‘Easier than you think if you know the origin of their infection.’). She had used Ysbel, Goodwill and the others as bait, inviting them to the Dreaming because she knew that Mother and Special Operations would track and follow them. And when Mother had uncovered hidden infrastructure and a communications network that she believed would lead her to the physical location of her old enemy, the Other Mother had infiltrated and overmastered her, and shut down her assets on the Moon and in low Earth orbit.

The Other Mother had lost very little. Segments of her comms network, a number of bots, including the one Ysbel and the others had met, several balloon works. But her comms network had been quickly patched, and there were many other balloon works and every balloon they spat into the sky was a seed.

‘Most will fall and fail,’ the Other Mother had told Ysbel and Goodwill. ‘But some will fall and thrive, and build new nodes for the highly distributed network I inhabit. The bears and I will share the Dreaming. I ask that neither of your peoples make any landings here.’

It was still not known how much of her story was true, but one thing was clear: Mother had fallen silent. The last telemetry from her lunar sanctuary suggested that everything in it was being powered down, the ferries and heavy haulers which had shuttled between the Moon and low Earth orbit, a traffic controlled entirely by Mother, were unresponsive, and the satellites which relayed communications and surveyed the planet had either shut down or de-orbited and burned up in the atmosphere. From now on, unless and until the Other Mother decided to renew contact, human beings must chart their own path into the future. There were plans to modify hoppers for travel to the Moon, so that the full extent of Mother’s fall could be established and her library, if anything remained of it, could be explored and copied. But that would take some time to accomplish, especially as, in the short term at least, most resources would be needed for organising and making accommodations and adjustments to the new normal.