7.

Months passed with momentum.

The colossal discharge of Jupiter’s magnetospheric potentials was an energetic event unparalleled in millennia of humanity’s long strivings to harness nature.

The Composite had brought insights to bear that physikers would spend a century untangling. For the moment, the only important fact was that by releasing plasma spirals at just the right pitch, and driving these with electrodynamic generators (themselves made of filmy ionized barium like a pewter cloud storm), a staggering current came rushing out of the Jovian system.

At nearly the speed of light it intersected the inward bulge of the heliosphere. Currents moved in nonlinear dances, weaving a pattern that emerged within mere minutes, moving in intricate harmonies.

Within a single moment, a complex web of forces flexed into being.

Within an hour, the bulge of interstellar gas arrested its inward penetration.

It halted, waves slamming in vexed lines of magnetic force against the Jovian sally. And became stable. It flexed and foamed in ivory turbulence—but the defense held.

Quickly humans—ever irreverent, even in the face of catastrophe—termed their salvation the Basket. Invisible to the eye, but luminous in plasma frequencies, the giant web the size of the inner solar system was made of filmy fields that weighed nothing. Yet it was all the same massively powerful, a dynamically responding screen protecting the Earth from a scalding death. The hydrogen wall seethed redly in the night sky. To many, it seemed an angry animal caught at last in a gauzy net.

Rachel witnessed the display from the Grand Plaza with a crowd of half a million. It was humbling, to think that mere primates had rendered such blunt interstellar pressures awesome but impotent.

8.

Rachel had stayed away from the Sagittarius for all the time the Jovian engineering occurred. Thousands worked furiously out there while she became a hermit. She worked on learning more about the other intractable Artificial Messages and, with Siloh’s permission, ignored the Sagittarius. It sent her messages. Artificials had that Right of Sentience. They could become unstable if left in total isolation. She responded to the polite eletters with equally courteous evasions. Her equilibrium returned, somewhat reluctantly.

Climbing back into the pod, with attendants hovering near, felt precarious. She made herself breathe slowly, deeply. In the close confinement, fully wired in now, it sounded like wheezing.

Now the Sagittarius sent,

We render grateful thanks. For our fine moments together.

Her chest was tight. She had dreaded entering the pod yet again, and now could not speak. Her throat rasped with the effort.

We gather it is traditional among your species to compliment one’s partner, and particularly a lady… afterward.

“Don’t… don’t try.”

We became something new from that moment.

“We?”

I meant my self-entity. But, thanks to your erratic and fuzzy Anglish, I see the ambiguity. Indeed, here “we” includes yourself.

She felt anger and fear, and yet, simultaneously, pride and curiosity. These twisted together in her. Sweat popped out on her upper lip. The pod air was curiously fragrant—or was that musk some signal of the Sagittarius? The arrival of such emotions, stacked on top of each other, told her that she had been changed by what had happened in this pod, and would—could—never be the same. “I did not want it.”