Then by my understanding of your phylum, you would not then have desired such congress. Yet you did. I know this.

“I—me, the conscious me—did not want it!”

We do not recognize that party alone. Rather, We recognize all of you equally. All your signals, do We receive.

“I don’t want it to happen again.”

Then it will not. It would not have happened the first time had the congruence between us not held true.

She felt the ache in herself. It rose like a tide, swollen and moist and utterly natural. She had to bring to bear every shred of her will to stop the moment, disconnect. She popped the seal. Left the pod, staggering and weeping and then running.

Geoffrey opened the door to his apartment, blinking owlishly—and then caught her expression.

“I know it’s late, I wondered…” She stood numbly, then made herself brush past him, into the shadowed room.

“What’s wrong?” He wore a white robe and wrapped it self-consciously around his middle.

“I don’t think I can handle all this.”

He smiled sympathetically. “You’re the toast of the Library, what’s to handle?”

“I—come here.”

Words, linear sequences of blocky words—all useless. She reached inside the robe and found what she wanted. Her hands slid over muscled skin, and it was all so different, real, not processed and amped and electronically translated through centuries of careful dry precision. A tremor swept over her, across the gap between them, onto his moistly electric flesh.

9.

“There is news.”

“Oh?” Rachel found it hard to focus on Siloh’s words.

“You are not to discuss this with anyone,” Siloh said woodenly. “The discharges from Jupiter’s poles—they are now oscillating. At very high frequencies.”

She felt her pulse trip-hammer, hard and fast and high, still erratic, even hours after she had left Geoffrey. Yet her head was ahead of her heart; a smooth serenity swept her along, distracting her with the pleasure of the enveloping sensation. “The Basket, it’s holding, though?”

“Yes.” Siloh allowed itself a sour smile. “Now the physikers say that this electromagnetic emission is an essential part of the Basket’s power matrix. It cannot be interfered with in the slightest. No tinkering. Even though it is drowning out the sum of all of humanity’s transmissions in the same frequency band. It is swamping us.”

“Because?”

Siloh’s compressed mouth moved scarcely at all. “It.”

“You mean…”

“The Sagittarius Composite. It made this happen, by the designs it gave us.”

“Why would it want…” Her voice trailed off as she felt a wave of conflicting emotions. Rachel bit her lip in apprehension.

“Why?” Siloh sniffed, frowned, gazed at nothing. “The signal Jupiter is sending out now, so powerfully, is a modified version of the original Message we received from the Sagittarius authors.”

“Jupiter is broadcasting their Message?”

“Clearly, loudly. Into the plane of the galaxy.”

“Then it built the Basket to reradiate its ancestors’, its designers’—”

“We have learned,” Siloh said, “a lesson perhaps greater than what the physikers gained. The Artificials have their own agendas. One knows this, but never has it been more powerfully demonstrated to us.”