They climbed out of the forest as the last light was fading from the sky, and made camp in a grassy hollow by a cold swift stream. Trina sent up a bot to make contact with the long-range bot that was keeping watch at the rendezvous point, and reported that there was still no sign of Raia and Seven, and they gathered wood from a stand of windbent junipers and built and lit a signal fire on a shelf of bare rock and broke out their ration packs. After a while, their desultory conversation came around to the last of the Other Mother’s claims. The most fantastic; the least discussed.

It was generally agreed that there had been no voyage to the habitable planet of another sun, no failed attempt to settle it, no return. That Mother had never captained a seedship, for there never had been any seedship. It was all misdirection, a fantasy got up to hide the truth about First Contact with the bears and its aftermath. But if she had been one of the caretakers of three vaults buried on the Moon before the Burn Line, as the Other Mother had claimed, the circumstances of their awakening more than six centuries ago had yet to be settled.

‘Have you heard the Other Mother’s explanation?’ Ysbel said to Trina. ‘The story about the visitors from a distant star?’

Those visitors had been part of a civilisation that had expanded across this part of the galaxy like a ripple across a pond, according to the Other Mother. Passing through the solar system, touching the Earth and the Moon, discovering the vaults and repairing them and waking their guardians before moving on.

‘It seems pretty implausible,’ Trina said. ‘Even the Originists don’t think much of it.’

‘It reminded me of a story I heard about powers that lived amongst the stars,’ Ysbel said. ‘At the time, I thought it was just a fantasy got up by someone who’d smoked too much redweed while visiting some natives. But those natives lived in the railhead near the border with bear country, not far from the camp where the articulate bears were raised, and I wonder now if their visitor could have been one of the Other Mother’s children.’

Trina looked at her across the campfire. ‘If he was, he told his hosts the same fairy tale the Other Mother told you. Doesn’t make it any truer.’