Rachel knew that the great equalizer in all communication, across vast ranges and starfields, was the speed of light and gravwaves alike. This led to motives, once societies achieved technology to transmit powerfully, if they wished. The grand goals of alien minds could be imagined, but digging them out of endless streams of code was usually impossible. She had studied for years the simpler Messages, come to know through them the goals of alien minds. Many echoed human desires, at least superficially. She had her own list, worked up through experience. Aliens sought to embed meanings that broke down into categories. Her application to the Library for Trainee status had used them, and might have tilted the odds in her favor. She had memorized it:

Kilroy Was Here: Memorials to dying societies.

High Church: Records of a culture’s highest achievements. The essential message is: this was the best we did; remember it. A society that is stable over thousands of years may invest resources in either of these first two paths. The human prospect has advanced enormously in only a few centuries; the life-span in the advanced societies has risen by 50 percent in each of the last two centuries. Living longer, we contemplate longer legacies. Time capsules and ever-proliferating monuments testify to our urge to leave behind tributes or works in concrete ways. The urge to propagate culture quite probably will be a universal aspect of intelligent, technological, mortal species (Minsky, 1985).

The Funeral Pyre: A civilization near the end of its life announces its existence.

Ozymandias: Here the motivation is sheer pride; the Beacon announces the existence of a high civilization, even though it may be extinct and the Beacon itself tended by robots.

Help!: Quite possibly societies that plan over time scales ~1,000 years will foresee physical problems and wish to discover if others have surmounted them. An example is a civilization whose star is warming (as ours is), which may wish to move their planet outward with gravitational tugs. Many other scenarios are possible.

Join Us: Religion may be a galactic commonplace; after all, it is here. Seeking converts is common, too, and electromagnetic preaching fits a frequent meme.

Ineffables: Aliens quite likely have/had desires and philosophies inscrutable to us. These could be powerful and enigmatic and have consequences we cannot anticipate. Possibly the motives listed above are common, but not the major impulses of advanced, strange minds. We should expect the unexpected.

Rachel relished the prospect of finally grasping the quiet, tense, mysterious, transcendent world of the Message Minds.

PART 3 THE MILKY WAY’S LIBRARY

This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,

And there is in this business more than nature

Was ever conduct of.

—ALONSO IN SHAKESPEARE’S LATE MASTERPIECE THE TEMPEST

1.

The Prefect put a kintsugi bowl in Rachel’s hands. These ceramic bowls were three hundred to four hundred years old, she knew. Their special aspect was that somewhere along the way they had broken into shards and were glued back together with a fifteenth-century technique using Japanese lacquer and gold.