The plasma torus of your gas giant world, Jupiter. I suggest it as a way to funnel currents from the moon Io.

“Wow. The detail! How did you get this?”

I inferred from my access to your general information files. I used knowledge my species gleaned from another Message we received millennia ago.

“I appreciate this, and will forward it—”

There is more to know, before your level of technology—forgive me, but it is still crude, and will be so for far longer than you surmise—can make full use of this defense.

Rachel suppressed her impulse to widen her eyes. Defense? Was this it? A sudden solution? “I’m not a physiker—”

Nor need you be. I intercept your host of messages, all unspoken. Your pelvis is visible beneath your shift, wider and rotated back slightly more than the male Supplicants who come to Us. Waist more slender, thighs thicker. Navel deeper, belly longer. Specializations impossible to suppress. Ah, to savor such.

Where was it—They?—going with this? “Those are just me, not messages.”

It is becoming of you to deny them. Like your hourglass shape perceived, say, across an ancient plain at great distance. Your thighs admit an obligingly wider space, an inward slope to the thickened thighs, that gives an almost knock-kneed appearance.

“I beg your pardon—”

A pleasant saying, that—meaning that We have overstepped—another primate gesture—your boundaries? But I merely seek knowledge for my own repository.

“I—we—don’t like being taken apart like this!”

But reduction to essentials is your primary mental habit.

“Not reducing people to their bodies!”

Ah, but having done this to the outside world, you surely cannot object to having the same method applied to yourselves.

“People don’t like being dissected.”

Your science made such great strides—unusual even upon the grander stage of worlds—precisely because you could dexterously—note the allusion to your hands—divide your attentions into small units, all the better to understand the whole.

When They got like this it was best to humor Them, she had gathered from prior Librarian notes. “People don’t like it. That is a social mannerism, maybe, but one we feel strongly about.”

And I seek more.

The sudden grave way the Sagittarius said this chilled her. It carried an undertone she could not parse.

4.

Siloh was not happy, though it took a lot of time to figure this out. The trouble with Noughts and Prefects alike was their damned lack of signals. No slight downward tug of lips to signal provisional disapproval, no sideways glance to open a possibility. Just the facts, ma’am. They seemed to think that conveyed objectivity. “So it is giving you tantalizing bits.”

“They, not it. Sometimes I feel I’m talking to several different minds at once.”

“It has said the same about us.”

The conventional theory of the human mind was that it was a kind of legislature, always making deals between differing interests. Only by attaining a plurality could anyone make a decision. Rachel bit her lip to not give away anything, then realized that her bite was visible, too. “We’re a whole species. They’re a simulation of one.”