She worked steadily, subjecting each microsecond of her interviews with the Architecture to elaborate contextual analysis. Codes did their work, cross-checking furiously across decades of prior interpretation. But even the best software needed the guidance of the person who had been through the experience: her.

And she felt the weight of the Library’s history upon her every translation. Each cross-layered correlation with the huge body of Architecture research brought up the immense history behind their entire effort.

When first received centuries before, the earliest extraterrestrial signals had been entirely mystifying. The initial celebrations and bold speeches had obscured this truth, which was to become the most enduring fact about the field.

For decades in the twenty-first century, astronomers had rummaged through the frequencies, trying everything from radio waves to optical pulses, infrared to ultraviolet, and even the occasional foray into X-rays. They found nothing. Conventional wisdom held that the large power needed to send even a weak signal across many light-years was the most important factor. Therefore, scrutinize the nearby stars, cupping electromagnetic ears for weak signals from penny-pinching civilizations. The odds were tiny that a society interested in communication would be nearby, but this was just one of those hard facts about the cosmos—which turned out to be wrong. The local-lookers fell from favor after their increasingly frantic searches. By then the Galactic Center Strategy had emerged. Its basis lay in the discovery that star formation had begun in the great hub of stars within the innermost ten thousand light-years. Supernovas had flared early and often there, and stars were closer together, so heavy elements built up quickly. Three-quarters of the suitable life-supporting stars in the entire galaxy were older than the sun, and had been around on average more than a billion years longer.

Most of these lay within the great glowing central bulge—the hub, which humankind could not see through the lanes of dust clogging the constellation of Sagittarius. But in radio frequencies, the center shone brightly. And the entire company of plausible life-sites, where the venerable societies might dwell, subtended an arc of only a few degrees, as seen from Earth. Humanity truly lived in the boondocks—physically and, as became apparent, conceptually as well.

Near the center of the hub, thousands of stars swarmed within a single light-year. Worlds there enjoyed a sky with dozens of stars brighter than the full moon. Beautiful, perhaps—but no eyes would ever evolve there to witness the splendor.

The dense center was dangerous. Supernovas drove shock waves through fragile solar systems. Protons sleeted down on worlds, sterilizing them. Stars swooped near each other, scrambling planetary orbits and raining down comets upon them. The inner zone was a dead zone. But a bit farther out, the interstellar weather was better. Planets capable of sustaining organic life began their slow winding path upward toward life and intelligence within the first billion or two years after the galaxy formed. An Earthlike world that took 4.5 billion years to produce smart creatures would have done so about 4 billion years ago.