So it spoke of itself as “I” today—meaning that she was dealing with a shrunken fraction of the Architecture. Was it losing interest? Or withholding itself in spite, after she had stayed away? “That is your goal?”

Partly. I have other functions as well. Any immortal intelligence must police its own mentation.

Now, what did that mean? Suddenly, all over her body washed sheets of some strange signal she could not grasp. The scattershot impulses aroused a pulse-quickening unease in her. Concentrate. “But… but your home world is toward the galactic center, at least twenty thousand light-years away, we gather. So much time has passed—”

Quite so—my Creators may be long extinct. Probabilities suggest so. I gather from your information, and mine, that the mean lifetime for civilizations in the Realm is comparable to their/our span.

“So there may be no reason for you to gather information from us at all. You can’t send it to them anymore.” She could not keep the tensions from her voice. In earlier weeks of incessant pod time, she had relied upon her pod’s programming to disguise her transmission. And of course, the Sagittarius knew this. Was anything lost on it? Or… Them?

Our motivations do not change. We are eternally a dutiful servant, as are you. Or so I grasp.

Ah, an advance to “We.” She remembered to bore in on the crucial, not be deflected. “Good. If the interstellar plasma presses in more, gets near Earth—”

We follow your inference. The effects We know well. Our Creators inhabit(ed) a world similar to yours, though frankly, more beautiful. (You have wasted so much area upon water!) We managed the electrical environs of our world to send our beacon signal, harnessing the rotational energy of our two moons to the task.

Rachel felt a tingling thrill. This was further than anyone, in a lifetime of Librarians, had gotten with Sagittarius about its origins. She felt a spike of elation. “Okay, what will happen?”

If the bow shock’s plasma density increases further, while your ordinary star ploughs into it, then there shall be electrical consequences.

“What… consequences?”

Dire. You must see your system as a portrait in electrodynamics, one that is common throughout the Realm. Perceive: currents seethe forth—

A three-dimensional figure sprang into being before her, with the golden sun at its center. Blue feelers of currents sprouted from the sun’s angry red spots, flowing out with the gale of particles, sweeping by the apron-strings of Earth’s gnarled magnetic fields. This much she knew—that Earth’s fields deflected huge energies, letting them pass into the great vault where they would press against the interstellar pressures.

But the currents told a different tale. They arced and soared around each world, cocooning each in some proportion. Then they torqued off into the vastness, smothering in darkness, then eventually returning in high, long arcs to the sun. They were like colossal rubber bands that could never break, but that forces could stretch into fibrous structures.

And here came the bulge of interstellar plasma—a broad knife, a sword thrusting into the buttery ball of magnetic fields that encased the planets. The whole system had a bow shock where it met the interstellar gas and dust. The dagger thrust straight into this broad prow. Lightning forked all along its intrusion. It engulfed Jupiter, and spikes of yellow coronal fury arced far out from the giant planet. These streamers curled inward, following long tangents toward the sun.