I grinned. “Reminds me of that screed about you and me. It said in big type, ‘Humanity’s Saviors (retired).’ ”

Fraq chirped a crisp Yth insult. “Because that stick-man Prefect Stiles tried to force you back to the Library?”

“Yep! He figures Librarians can never move on.”

“You did pioneer using your exoplanet data to correlate with Messages, then map the wormhole network.”

“Not me—us, m’dear.”

Which was how the media had got a line on the first-sex-with-aliens story, I recalled. That scandal would never die out. My career abstracted into hubba-hubba caricature.

The media attention, Earthside, Mars, and on dear ol’ Luna—mushrooming in the three years after Fraq and I got into, through, and back out of the wormring—had finally forced me back into Worm-scale piloting. Now everything was about figuring out the bright new field of Worm Navigation, as the authorities termed it—which was turning into a real occupation. One I loved. Despite the death toll of the young, ambitious, cocky newbies.

I leaned back, ruffled his feathers again. Kane, that guy on Mars (what was his name?), now weird, handsome, bristly Fraq… nope, I’ll never settle down to domesticity. Maybe never have children at all. The whole damn galaxy’s open to us now, if we seize it….

My mind drifted, wondering yet again where I would be if once, just once, I had taken another challenge, deflected, or just plain failed to solve so many elements…. The hydrogen wall solution, a rude introduction to the evil that Message Minds could do… to me, to humanity. Sex with an alien AI! Whatta story!—which, thanks to the Prefects and Noughts, had never happened to get out to the smelly media.

The Sigma Structure Symphony, too. If I had failed to see how the piled-up mathematics implied a musical structure… the whole field of Alien Music would not exist. It tempts me even now, after so much has sailed past on the river of time.

Fraq’s challenge flight on Luna, if I had just said no…

And no, too, at the Great Plunge? Everest? That black smoker, then the Marsmat?… And on to the wormhole, and then the wormring after that. My crazy fun desire to become a high-risk pilot. To fly in a big, open, universal tangle of wormholes…

Scary, it is, to think how twisted my path to here-now has been. Inspiring, too. This mild-mannered southern gal has gone to the stars, without really setting out to. All from that small girl, curled up in a hammock beside the salty Gulf, reading-reading-reading… into a life.

I digested this slow reflection and said, “Hey, Fraq. Maybe it’s time to put something into the Library. Not one of those newbie cloud-consciousness pop-experiment thingies, either. Could be, I’ll write a good ol’-fashioned actual, linear-sentence damn book about all this, what’s happened.”

Librarying, Ythris, wormholery, the works. Maybe third-person smartass voice, my fave. Already had a working title, too: A Fabulous, Formless Darkness.

Or maybe I’d call it Pursuit as Happiness. It’ll be fun!