Siloh made a gesture she could not read, an arm twist and foot flick.

She had expected some congratulations on her work, but then, Siloh was a Nought and had little use for most human social lubrications. He said slowly, “This cylinder through the Io plasma—the physikers say it is intriguing.”

“How? I thought the intruding interstellar plasma was overpowering everything.”

“It is. We lost Ganymede Nation today.”

She gasped. “I hadn’t heard.”

“You have been immersed in your studies, as is fitting.”

“Does Catkejen know?”

“I gather she had relatives there. She has been told.”

Not by you, I hope. Siloh was not exactly the sympathetic type. “I should go to her.”

“Wait until our business is finished.”

“But I—”

“Wait.”

Siloh leaned across its broad work plane, which responded by offering luminous information. Rachel crooked her neck but could not make out what hung shimmering in the air before Siloh. Of course; this was a well-designed office, so that she could not read its many ingrained inputs. He was probably summoning stuff all the while he talked to her, without her knowing it. Whatever he had learned, he sat back with a contented, small smile. “I believe the Sagittarius Composite is emerging in full, to tantalize you.”

“Composite?”

“A deeper layer to its intelligence. You should not be deceived into thinking of it as remotely like us. We are comparatively simple creatures.” Siloh sat back, steepling fingers and peering into them, a studied pose. “Never does the Sagittarius think of only a few moves into its game.”

“So you agree with Youstani, a long-lived Translator Supreme from the last century, that the essential nature of Sagittarius is to see all conversations as a game?”

“Are ours different?” A sudden smile creased the leathery face, a split utterly without mirth.

“I would hope so.”

“Then you shall often be deceived.”

Rachel went to their apartment immediately, but someone had gotten there before her. It was dark, but she caught muffled sounds from the living room. Was Catkejen crying?

Earth’s crescent shed a dim glow into the room, an ivory cast from their ceiling feed of the surface. She stepped into the portal of the living room and in the gloom saw someone on the viewing pallet. A low whimper drifted in the darkness, repeating, soft and sad, like crying, yes—

But there were two people there. And the sobbing carried both grief and passion, agony and ecstasy. An ancient tide ran in the room’s shadowed musk.

Murmured words flowed in a voice she knew. The other person was Geoffrey. Moving with a slow rhythm, he was administering a kind of sympathy Rachel certainly could not. And she had not picked up the slightest clue of this relationship between them. A pang forked through her.

The pain surprised her. She made her way out quietly.

Catkejen’s relations had not made it out from Ganymede. She had to go through the rituals and words that soften the hard edges of life. She went for a long hike in the linked farming lava tubes, by herself. When she returned she was quieter, worked long hours, and took up sewing. The somber prospects of the Ganymede loss cast a pall over all humanity, and affected the Library’s work. This disaster was unparalleled in human history for its scale, the loss of all their outer colonies, a tragedy greater even than the Nation Wars.