Positional notations such as the Sphinx display were notoriously concept-poor, but the Library group had applied to it the arcane talents of steganography. This meant “concealed writing,” a branch of encryption that dealt with hiding secret information within publicly viewable items. Or seemingly obvious telegraphic code-structures, she learned. A simple example was when captives in another culture gave the finger to their unsuspecting jailers, to discredit images that showed them smiling and comfortable.

The Library had set whole teams to using the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message—a form of security through obscurity. And they had found the subcoding that opened the true density of the text.

She jerked up in her chair. With a brief message from Prefect Stiles himself, without preamble, the screen showed a deciphered image. A Weltraum sky of gauzy stars and embedded coordinates—around the sun. Yellow dots sprinkled across it, no doubt with embedded content.

They had it at too low resolution to pinpoint the location to better than a million miles. But they were clues. To wormhole sites? Or was there one wormhole, and these were the locations where it seemed to be, as seen over millions of years?

Seen by… whom? What?

Rachel saw suddenly that maybe, just maybe, these were the harvest of the Mat’s lenses, over a vast, incredibly long age. Crude as they were, the Mat’s lenses had the limitations of early-twentieth-century telescopes. They had captured and stored, then, as much as they could.

She felt a fine, strange chill. Rachel hugged herself against the night, and stared at the winking points set against the hard, stellar black.

The gates to an entire galaxy might lie in those dots. Or even farther—there was, the physicists said, no reason that the early universe had to contrive its foldings and corridors of spacetime within the local alleyways of mere galaxies.

So… this might be it. The liberation of humanity. Brought forth, in a manner no one could have anticipated, by a rogue alien who had come to their world because of vagrant signals, lodged in the inventories of the SETI Library.

Being a Librarian was much more fun than she had ever thought it could be. Whatever this latest riddle meant, she knew that she would stick with it. She loved adventure, and she was, yes, a Librarian. On the move.