Her next and most important appointment was with the Head Nought. The Noughts reported to the Prefect and handled most details of the Library. She had gone through the usual online protocols, clearing assurances with lesser lights, so was swiftly ushered forward.

Beside the ample office entrance was a wall saying displayed in Anglish and Mandarin:

YOU ACCOMPLISH THE GREAT TASK

BY A SERIES OF SMALL ACTS. —LAO TZU

With a ritual bow, an underling escorted her into the presence of Siloh, a smooth-skinned Nought who apparently had not learned to smile. Or maybe that went with the cellular territory; Noughts had intricate adjustments to offset their deeply sexless natures. Noughts thought of themselves as People, not he or she or any of the mindsets, once useful and yet now often illusory, that evolution had written into the species.

The tall eminence carefully seated her and stood beside a large screen display. Within its depths she could see multidimensional threads growing, seething. This was a visual key to the ongoing efforts to interweave the enormous database of received Messages. Many were intertwined, because far older societies had laced their Messages with the histories of much cross-talk among the stars.

Siloh said in a slow, gravelly tone, “I do hope you can find a congruence with the Sagittarius Architecture.” The Nought murmured as if to itself in a flat tone that ended each sentence with a purr. Rachel could not help thinking of this person as masculine. The body was sleek, muscular, utilitarian without being sexual at all. More like a store robo-dummy, she realized, than a person. “Though I regret your lost effort to come.” A soft sigh.

“Lost?” She shifted uncomfortably in her metal-frame chair.

“You will fail, of course.”

“Perhaps a fresh approach—”

“So have said many hundreds of candidate Trainee scholars. These were once charming, usually naïve, ambitions. Not now. I remind you of our latest injunction from the Councilors—the heliosphere threat.”

“I thought there was little anyone could do.”

“So it seems.” Siloh scowled. “But we cannot stop from striving. There is perhaps a bare chance that buried somewhere in our trove is relevant information of use to the species as a whole.”

“Of course we should not stop from striving,” she said in what she hoped was a demure manner, deliberately choosing his phrasing. This person might not share the constraints of being man or woman, but surely was not above a dash of vanity? “Though I gathered our predicament is rare?” She noted that she had allowed a softly feminine lilt to her statement, turning it in the last words into a question.

“We must try.”

Using the Library as a tool for big issues was far from her mindset.

Siloh gave her an unblinking stare as he sat behind his bare bamboo desk. She saw how little she could make of this person, who gave off nothing but sentences. No warmth.

Noughts had proven their many uses a century before. Their lack of sexual appetites and apparatus, both physical and mental, gave them a rigorous objectivity. As diplomats, Contractual Savants, and neutral judges, they excelled. They had replaced much of the massive legal apparatus that had come to burden society in earlier centuries. They were fair evaluators, bringing rigor to reason.