Still, solid work helped for a while. But after weeks, Rachel needed a break, and there weren’t many at the Library. Anything robustly physical beckoned. She had gone for a swim in the spherical magnetic pool, of course, enjoying the challenge. And flown in broad swoops across the Greater Dome on plumes of hot air. But a simmering frustration remained. Life had changed. She and Catkejen had both developed a new, friendly, work-buddy relationship with Geoffrey. Much of this was done without words, a negotiation of nuances. They never spoke of that moment in the apartment, and Rachel did not know if they had sensed her presence. Cat had Geoffrey for fun, fine. Rachel did not but liked him anyway.

Perhaps more than ever, Geoffrey amused them with his quick talk and artful stunts. Rachel admired his physicality, the yeasty smell of him as he laughed and cavorted. HiGeers were known for their focus, which athletics repaid in careers of remarkable performance. The typical HiGee career began in sports and moved later to work in arduous climes, sites in the solar system where human strength and endurance still counted, because machines were not dexterous and supple enough.

Some said the HiGeer concentration might have come from a side effect of their high-spin, centrifugal donut habitats. Somehow Geoffrey’s concentration came out as a life-of-the-party energy, even after his long hours in intense rapport with his own research.

Appropriately, he was working on the Andromeda Manifold, a knotty tangle of intelligences that stressed the embodied nature of their parent species. Geoffrey’s superb nervous system, and especially his exact hand-eye coordination, gave him unusual access to the Manifold. While he joked about this, most of what he found could not be conveyed in words at all. That was one of the lessons of the Library—that other intelligences sensed the world, and the body’s relation to it, quite differently. The ghost of Cartesian duality still haunted human thinking.

Together the three of them hiked the larger craters. All good for the body, but Rachel’s spirit was troubled. Her own work was not going well.

She could scarcely follow some of the Architecture’s conversations. Still less comprehensible were the eerie sensoria it projected to her—sometimes the only way it would take part in their discourse, for weeks on end.

Finally, frustrated, Rachel broke off connection with the Architecture and did not return for a month. She devoted herself instead to historical records of earlier Sagittarius discourse. From those had come some useful technical inventions, a classic linear text, even a new digital art form. But that had been decades ago, before most Librarians abandoned it for other Messages.

Siloh kept poking her about it. Reluctantly she went back into her pod and returned to linear speech mode. “I don’t know what you intend by these tonal conduits,” she said to the Sagittarius—after all, it probably had an original point of view, even upon its own motivations.

I was dispatched into this Realm in order to carry my Creators’ essentials, to propagate their Supreme Cause, and to gather knowing-wisdom for them.