“Indeed. You have done the required statistics?”

“Yes.” She let her inboard systems coalesce a shimmering curtain in the air, using the Prefect’s office system. The correlation functions appeared in 3-D. The Prefect flicked a finger, and the minimax hummocks rotated, showing the parameter space—a landscape covering billions of years, thousands of stars.

“Perhaps significant.” A frown formed above his one cocked eyebrow. She recalled that the Prefect was the sort who would look out a window at a cloudburst and say, “It seems to be raining,” on the off chance that somebody was pouring water off the roof.

“They’re probably the longest-lived societies in the galaxy, since they’re around red stars that hold stable. If they can’t do cold-sleep, either—and so can’t go interstellar voyaging, like us—they’re stuck in their systems. And they’re still afraid.”

The Prefect nodded. “Correct—the cause of the dwarf-star worlds’ insularity lies in the far past. An antiquity beyond our knowing, from eras before fish crawled from our seas.”

“Whatever could have made them fear for so long?”

“We do not know. It is a history…” Mixed emotions flitted across his face, as if memory was dancing within view. “… for which adjectives are temporarily unavailable.”

“We have to be alert!” She got up and paced the office. “These aliens hunkering down around their red and brown stars—they have lasted by being cautious.”

A shrug. “That seems obvious.”

She had hoped for help, not a blasé, blunt assessment. “So we need to find out more,” she said, realizing it was lame.

He leveled a stare. “Intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many. A child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the same world available to it. This seems to be the same with societies across the galaxy.”

She nodded. “Other worlds, other minds, strange—but they have suffered the same past.”

“True. This is not a matter of dry certainties. It is a quest for archaeological wisdom.”

She whirled, her mouth a grimace, eyes wild. “Whatever they’re afraid it might be—could be comin’ right atcha!”

He was calm, further confusing her. He gave her a cautious, precise throat-clearing. “I have an allergy to dogma, including my own.”

“What’s your dogma?”

“Placing the Library on Luna, safely away from the torrents of Earth, was a primary motive. Best to contemplate the stars where one can see them anytime. In other words, take the long view.”

She was getting more frustrated by his blithe manner, but resisted raising her voice. “Look, you want me to go back to studying decrypted SETI messages, but this, this—I just couldn’t give it up.”

“Research is not devised, it is distilled.”

She let out a loud, barking laugh. “Building logic towers from premises wrung out of thin air, more like.”

“You have got it nearly right.”

“Nearly?”

He eyed her narrowly. “When we think of the Elizabethan world, it is one we perceive through our own reductive devising. We think of it as populated by the Queen and Ben Jonson and the Dark Lady and the Bard and a raucous theater full of groundlings. That’s what we know, from some texts. But the real Elizabethan world had a lot more people in it than that, and countless more possibilities. Here at the Library, we deal with not a mere handful of centuries. We have received messages sent across thousands of light-years, from beacons erected by societies long dead.”