That mind had something roughly comparable to a human unconscious—and yet it could see into its own inner minds at will. It was as if a human could know that all of his/her impulses came from a locus of past trauma, or just a momentary anger—and could see this instantly, by tracing back his/her own workings. The strange power of human art sprang in part from such invisible wellsprings. To be able to unmask that sanctum was an unnerving prospect. The Sagittarius Architecture had that capability. So to venture into contact with it made Rachel wary.

Her pod acted as an active, intimate neural web, using her entire body to convey connections. Sheets of sensation washed over her skin; a prickly itch began in her feet.

She felt a heady kinesthetic rush of acceleration as a constellation of fusions drew her to a tight nexus. Alien architectures used most of the available human input landscape. That meant her unconscious, too.

Dizzying surges in the ears, biting smells, ringing cacophonies of elusive patterns, prickly skin dances, queasy perturbations of the inner organs—a Trainee had to know how these might convey meaning. But not consciously.

These sensations fed into her unknown inner territories.

They often did disturb, but translating them was elusive. After such experiences, she never thought of human speech as anything more than a hobbled, claustrophobic mode. Its linear meanings and frail attempts at linked concepts were simple, utilitarian, and typical of younger minds. Real thinking lay beyond speech, in the realms of intuition.

The greatest task was translating the dense smatterings of mingled sensations into discernible sentences. Only thus could a human fathom them at all, even if that was in a way blunted and blurred. Or so much previous scholarly experience said.

Rachel took deep breaths. Claustrophobes could never do this. She felt herself bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from her own body. These were her own inboard subsystems coupled with high-bit-rate spatterings of meaning—guesses, really. She had an ample repository of built-in processing units, lodged in her spine and shoulders. No one would attempt such a daunting task without artificial amplifications. To confront slabs of raw data, marshaled by an alien artificial consciousness, with a mere unaided human mind, was pointless and quite dangerous. Early Librarians, centuries before, had perished in a microsecond’s exposure to such layered labyrinths as the Sagittarius.

Years of scholarly training had conditioned her against the jagged ferocity of the link, but still she felt a cold shiver of dread. That, too, she had to wait to let pass. The effect amplified whatever neural state you brought to it. Legend had it that a Librarian had once come to contact while angry, and been driven into a fit from which she’d never recovered. They had found the body peppered with micro-contusions over its entire surface.

The raw link was as she had expected: