Under the steadily rising pressure of the thickening interstellar gas and dust, that pressure front was eroding. The sun’s course slammed it against the dense hydrogen wall at sixteen kilometers per second and its puny wind was pressed back far faster into the realm of solar civilization. Pluto’s Cryo Base had been abandoned decades before, and Saturn’s only recently. The incoming hail of high-energy particles and fitful storms had killed many. The Europa Ocean’s strange life was safe beneath its ten kilometers of ice, but that was small consolation to the humans communicating with them, who had fled.

“But what can we do on our scale?” Rachel insisted.

“What we can.”

“The magnetic turbulence alone, at the bow shock, holds a larger energy store than all our civilization.”

Siloh gave her a look that reminded her of how she had, as a girl, watched an insect mating dance. Distant distaste. “We do not question here. We listen.”

“Yes, Self.”

This formal title, said to be preferred by Noughts to either sir or madam, seemed to please. Siloh went through the rest of their interview with a small smile, and she could almost feel a personality beneath its chilly remove. Almost.

3.

Rachel stepped back into the corridor and thought for a moment. Siloh seemed skeptical of the entire enterprise here. Because of being a Nought? Hard to know.

She left the Executat Dome with relief. Her sense of joy at getting through the interview sent her bounding up to the ceiling. She adjusted, damping her energies to about a sixth of the emphasis she would exhibit Earthside. Train your muscle memory.

A viewscreen that filtered out the sunblast of the gray plains outside drew her. The Library sprawled across the Locutus Plain, lit by Earth’s stunning crescent near a jagged white horizon. Beneath that preserved plain lay the cryofiles of all transmissions received from the Galactic Complex, the host of innumerable societies that had flourished and sent Messages—most of them long before humanity was born. A giant, largely impenetrable resource. The grandest possible intellectual scrap heap.

Libraries were monuments not so much to the Past, but to Permanence itself. (The Library’s shibboleths preferred Capitals.) Rachel shivered with anticipation. She had passed through her first interviews!—and was now free to explore the myriad avenues of the galactic past. The Sagittarius was famous for its density of information, many-layered and intense. A wilderness, beckoning.

Still, she had to deal with the intricacies of the Library, too. These now seemed as steeped in arcane byways and bureaucratic labyrinths as were the Library’s vast contents. Rachel cautioned herself to be careful and, most especially, to not let her impish side show. So she strolled, practicing the light-footed gait, thinking. She bowed her head as she passed an aged Nought, for practice. It merely nodded.

The greatest ancient library had been at Alexandria, in Afrik. It was part of the original Musaeum—the Institution of the Muses—from which the Anglish word museum was derived.

A historian had described the lot of Librarians there with envy: they had a carefree life including free meals, high salaries, no taxes to pay, very pleasant surroundings, good lodgings, and servants. There was plenty of opportunity for quarreling with each other.