“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had put it, witnessing the ruins of ancient Egypt, in Afrik.

At the very beginnings of the Library, humanity had found that it was coming in on an extended discourse, an ancient interstellar conversation, without notes or history readily provided. Only slowly did the cyber-cryptographers fathom that most alien cultures were truly vast, far larger than the sum of all human societies. And much older.

Before actual contact, nobody had really thought the problem through. Historically, Englishmen had plenty of trouble understanding the shadings of, say, the Ozzie Bushmen. Multiply that by thousands of other Earthly and solar system cultures and then square the difficulty, to allow for the problem of expressing it all in sentences—or at least, linear symbolic sequences. Square the complexity again to allow for the abyss separating humanity from any alien culture.

The answer was obvious: any alien translator program had to be as smart as a human. And usually much more so.

The first transmission from any civilization contained elementary signs, with which to build a vocabulary. That much even human scientists had guessed. But then came incomprehensible slabs, digital Rosetta stones telling how to build a simulated alien mind that could talk down to mere first-timers. The better part of a century went by before humans worked out how to copy and then represent alien minds in silicon. Finally what some then called the Alien Library was built, to care for the Minds and Messages it encased. To extract from them knowledge, art, history, and kinds of knowing for which humans might very well have no name.

And to negotiate with them. The cyber-aliens had their own motivations.

3.

“I don’t understand your last statement.”

I do not need to be told that. You signal body-defiance with your crossed arms, barrier gestures, pursed lips, contradictory eyebrow slants.

Rachel noted the shift to first person singular. Was this a way of being friendly? “But these tensor topologies are not relevant to what we were discussing.”

They are your reward.

“For what?”

Giving me of your essence. By wearing ordinary clothes, as I asked, and thus displaying your overt signals.

“I thought we were discussing the heliosphere problem.”

We were. But you primates can never say only one thing at a time to such as We.

Huh—back to plural pronoun… what did that mean? The Sagittarius Architecture was complex, but what nuances did these bits of grammar mean? She felt acutely uncomfortable. Working in the pod was odd enough, without this element. The Prefects and Noughts would no doubt be concerned, too. This entity is both smart and canny… better be careful.

Her sessions built big slices of the strange, a zap to her synaptic net. The shock of unending Otherness moistened her body somehow with meaning, sometimes with special stinks, grace notes, blaring drawings that flickered in the air, illuminating without instructing.

“Uh, this picture you gave me… I can see this is some sort of cylindrical tunnel through—”