Some struck the Earth. Ruddy red waves made choppy orange froth around the Earth’s own blue lines of protection.

“I don’t need a detailed description of what that means,” she said. “Bad news.”

Your world is like many others, a spherical capacitor. Your surface is the inner, your ionosphere the outer. Your spin makes this a generator. Lightning strikes all around your globe to balance the charges reaching down, from high above the simple plains where you evolved. Disruption of your electrodynamic equilibrium will endanger the fragile skin of life.

From the Sagittarius came a sudden humid reek—her bodily reaction. It filled her pod. She flinched, sneezing, snorting, eyes runny. Sheeting sounds churned so low that she felt them as deep bass notes resounding in her. Wavelengths longer than her body rang through her bones. Her heart abruptly pounded. A growling storm rose in her ears.

“I… I will take this… and withdraw.”

Have this as well, fair primate—

A squirt of compressed meaning erupted in her sensorium.

It will self-unlock at the appropriate moment.

She freed herself and staggered away.

5.

Opened, the first fraction of the squashed nugget of information was astonishing. Even Siloh let itself appear impressed. She could tell this by the millimeter rise of its left upper lip.

“This text is for the Prefect’s attention.” When Siloh rose and walked around its work-plane she realized that she had never seen so plainly Siloh’s extent—nearly three meters of lean muscle, utterly without any hint of male or female shaping. The basic human machine, engineered for no natural world. It stopped to gaze at her. “This confirms what some physikers believe. Jupiter is the key.”

Within an hour, the Prefect agreed. He eyed them both and flicked on a display. “The Sagittarius confirms our worst suspicions. Trainee, you said that you had captured from it yet more?”

She displayed the full data-nugget They had given her. A pyrotechnic display arced around a simulated Jupiter—

“There, at the poles,” the Prefect said. “That cylinder.”

The fringing fields carried by interstellar plasma swarmed into the cylinder. This time, instead of ejecting fierce currents, Jupiter absorbed them.

“That tube is electrically shorting out the disturbance,” Siloh said. “The cylinders at both poles—somehow they shunt the energies into the atmosphere. Absorb it into gas.”

“And not into ours,” Rachel said. “Sagittarius has given us a solution.”

The Prefect said, “What an odd way to do it. No description, just pictures.”

Siloh said slowly, “Ummmm… and just how do we build those cylinders?”

They looked at her silently, eyes veiled, but she got the message: find out.

The sensations washing over her were quite clear now. She had asked for engineering details, and it had countered with a demand. A quite graphic one.

This is my price. To know the full extent of the human sensorium.

“Sex?! Orgasm? You want to—”

It seems a small measure in return for the life of your world.

Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “But you’re not—”