Geoffrey sat, but not before he twirled his chair up into the air, making it do a few quick, showy moves, using just two fingers. “When I saw you two at that place, So Eat Already, I was just sneaking in for some of the refreshments. I’m a lowly Hound, well below you two.”

Rachel said, “I thought HiGee folk were, well—”

“More devoted to the physical? Just manual labor types, miners? Not proper fodder for the Library?” He grinned.

Rachel felt her face redden. Was she that easy to read? “Well, yes.”

“My parents, my friends, they’re all focused on athletics. Me, I’m a rebel.”

Catkejen smiled. “Even against the Noughts?”

He shrugged. “Mostly I find a way to avoid them.”

Rachel nodded. “I think I’d rather be ignored by them.”

“Y’know,” Catkejen said reflectively, “I think they’re a lot like the Minds.”

Rachel asked slowly, “Because they’re the strangest form of human?”

Geoffrey said, “They’re sure alien to me. I’ll give up sex when I’ve lost all my teeth, maybe, but not before.”

“Noughts are born, not made. They give me the shivers sometimes,” Catkejen said. “I was fetching an ancient written document over in the Hard Archives last week, nighttime. Three of them came striding down the corridor in those capes with the cowls. All in black, of course. I ducked into a side corridor—they scared me.”

“A woman’s quite safe with them,” Geoffrey said. “Y’know, when they started up their Nought Guild business, way back, they decided on that all-black look and the shaved heads and all, because it saved money. But everybody read it as dressing like funeral directors. Meaning, they were going to bury all our sex-ridden old ways of interpreting.”

“And here I thought I knew a lot about Library history,” Catkejen said in an admiring tone. “Wow, that’s good gossip.”

He shrugged. “History is just gossip about the great, as some Nought puts it.”

“But the Noughts have made big breakthroughs,” Rachel said.

“Historically—”

“Impossible to know, really,” Catkejen interrupted. “The first Noughts refused to even have names, so we can’t cite the work as coming from them.”

Geoffrey said mock-solemnly, “Their condition they would Nought name.”

“They’ve missed things, too,” Catkejen said. “Translated alien epic sensual poems as if they were about battles, when they were about love.”

“Sex, actually,” Geoffrey said. “Which can seem like a battle.”

Catkejen laughed. “Not the way I do it.”

“Maybe you’re not doing it right.” Geoffrey laughed with her, a ringing peal.

Rachel pursed her lips, thinking. “Y’know, I wonder if the Noughts ever envy us?”

Geoffrey grunted in derision. “They save so much time by not having to play our games. It allows them to contemplate the Messages at their leahzure.”

He took a pressed-regolith coffee cup and made it do a few impossible stunts in midair. Rachel felt that if she blinked she would miss something; he was quick. His compact body had a casual grace, despite the thick slabs of muscle. The artful charm went beyond the physical. His words slid over each other in an odd pronunciation that had just enough inflection to ring musically. Maybe, she thought, there were other amusements to be had here in the hallowed Library grounds.