Much more intelligible, because she could read it unconsciously. But still…

She concentrated—

We wish you greetings, new sapience.

“Hello. I come with reverence and new supple offerings.” This was the standard opening, one refined nearly a century ago and never changed by so much as a syllable.

And you offer?

“Further cultural nuances.” Also a ritual promise, however unlikely it was to be fulfilled. Surely this Mind knows that? Few advances into the Sagittarius had been made in the last several decades. Even the most ambitious Librarians seldom tried any longer.

Something like mirth came wafting to her, then:

We are of a mind to venture otherwise with you.

Damn! There was no record of such a response before, her downlink confirmed. It sounded like a preliminary to a dismissal. That overture had worked fine for the last six Trainees, she knew. But then, they hadn’t gotten much further before the Sagittarius lost interest and went silent again. Being ignored was the greatest insult a Trainee faced, and the most common. Humans were more than a little boring to advanced intelligences.

The worst of it was that one seldom had any idea why.

So what in hell did this last remark from it mean? Rachel fretted, speculated, and then realized that her indecision was affecting her own neural states. She decided to just wing it. “I am open to suggestion and enlightenment.” She could feel her unconscious sending what felt like heat pulses and twitches, which the Mind could interpret, too. Maybe.

A pause, getting longer as she kept her breathing steady. Her meditative cues helped, but could not entirely submerge her anxieties. She focused and all else fell away. Maybe she had bitten off entirely too much—

From Sagittarius she received a jittering cascade, resolving to:

As a species you are technologically gifted yet philosophically callow, a common condition among emergent intelligences. But of late it is your animal property of physical expression that intrigues. Frequently you are unaware of your actions—which makes them all the more revealing.

“Oh?” She sat back in her pod and crossed her legs. The physical pose might help her mental profile, in the global view of the Sagittarius. Until now its responses had been within conventional bounds; this last was new.

You concentrate so hard upon your linear word groups that you forget how your movements, postures, and facial cues give you away.

“What am I saying now, then?”

That you must humor Us until you can ask your questions about the heliosphere catastrophe.

Rachel laughed. It felt good. “I’m that obvious?”

Many societies We know only through their bit-strings and abstractions. That is the nature of binary signals. You, on the other hand (to use a primate phrase), We can know through your unconscious self. Many organic intelligences have none such.

“You want to know about me?”

We have heard enough symphonies, believe Us.

At least it was direct. Many times in the past, her research showed, it—“They”—had not been. The Architecture was paying close attention!—a coup in itself.