He stepped back and in a whisper asked, “Your perception?”

She held it gingerly. It had golden veins running through, making it more beautiful, she could see, than the original condition. “There’s a dimension of depth. I sense the original life it had, the rupture, and then the way it so beautifully healed. In this way it embraces the concepts of nonattachment, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of human life.”

“Good. You are tapping your inner mind.”

She knew this was a pointful moment, a way to get her mind out of the dirty river of information she had been swimming in for the last two weeks. “I will remain…” She searched for the right term. “Watchfully patient.”

The Prefect nodded and took back the bowl, then placed it on a gray stone slab. “To fathom a Message using your entire mind gives a sense of depth below depth. It resembles an innocent wild vertigo, as one falls through its levels.”

“I will remain open.” She knew this was the essential manner, though she feared she could not be sure. Uncertainty was part of the seeking, too.

“The Greeks had a concept of kairos time, which is not quantitative like chronos—our normal conception of time as countable. Kairos is qualitative, a proper or opportune moment for action—rich or empty, the meaningful hour or the hurried moment. When you’re with beauty, in art or in nature, you tend to move at kairos time—slowly, serenely, but thickly.”

“I see.” Though she was unsure she did.

“I remind you that we of the Library translated—or perhaps I should say, caused a realization of?—an ancient Message that led to a great discovery: that spacetime is made of microscopic constituents, which then have bulk-properties like viscosity. That realization led to the discovery that spacetime has effects normally associated with crystals such as birefringence, or the dispersion of light. And then, that gravitation may be considered, like thermodynamics, a science of basic properties in the large. These realizations were immensely useful and so profitable. Such is our goal, for humanity.”

“Including the hydrogen wall…”

“Yes. That has urgency, but do not make haste. Immersed in a Message, do less. In gliding slowness you may glimpse the seeds of eternity.”

Somehow she knew this was the end of her second Prefect audience. She rose, folded her robes, and left the Dome for her first immersion. Her heart pounded, despite the Prefect’s serene instruction.

After two weeks of tech training, she was done with the new-girl pose. So no more joyful and jaunty newbie, all eager-beaver smiles, dancing eyes, and expressive head tilts. No more Ms. Nice Gal. Now was not Basic, but Trial.

She had gone through neuro trials to sniff out her indices: depression inventory, heart rate variability, neuro system resilience, and amygdala elasticity. She was suitable, but new. As she approached the Pod Building, a broad pyramid in a large lava tube, she passed under the motto, hanging solemnly in the flexing air: