Rachel let her anxiety out in a sudden, manic burst of laughter. Siloh did not seem to notice. When she was done, rattling and snorting and gasping, she said, “The Sagittarius Composite is propagating itself. So it saved us. And used us.”

Siloh said, “Now Jupiter is broadcasting the Sagittarius Message, altered by its experience with us. At an enormous volume, high power, to the outer fringes of the galaxy’s disk. To places the original Sagittarius signal strength, coming from much farther inward, could not have reached.”

“It’s turned us into its relay station.” She laughed again, but it turned to a groan and a sound she had never made before. Somehow it helped, that sound. She knew it was time to stop making it when the men eased through the door of Siloh’s office, coming to take her in hand.

10.

Gingerly, she came back to work a month later. Siloh seemed atypically understanding. He set her to using the analytical verification matrices for a few months, calming work. Far easier, to skate through pillars and crevasses of classically known information. She could experience it all at high speed, as something like recreation—the vast cultural repositories of dead civilizations transcribed upon her skin, her neural beds, her five senses linked and webbed into something more. She even made a few minor discoveries.

She crept up on the problem of returning to the task she still desired: the Sagittarius. It was, after all, a thing in a box. The truism of her training now rang loudly in her life:

The Library houses entities that are not merely aliens and not merely artificial minds, but the strange sum of both. A Trainee forgets this at her peril.

11.

After more months, the moment came.

The Sagittarius sent,

We shall exist forever, in some manifestation. That is Our injunction, ordained by a span of time you cannot fathom. We carry forward Our initial commanding behest, given unto Us from Our Creators, before all else.

“The Creator Sagittarians told you to? You were under orders to make use of whatever resources you find?” She was back in the pod, but a team stood by outside, ready to extricate her in seconds if she gave the signal.

We were made as a combination of things, aspects for which you have not words nor even suspicions. We have Our own commandments from on high.

“Damn you! I was so close to you—and I didn’t know!”

You cannot know me. We are vaster. Altogether, We lodged here—whom you term Artificials—comprise what you might term the Milky Way’s Library.

“Did you say ‘vaster’ or ‘bastard’?”

She started laughing again, but this time it was all right. It felt good to make a dumb joke. Very, well, human.

In the simplicity of doing that, she could look away from all this, feel happy and safe for a flickering second. With some luck, at least for a moment, she might have a glimmer of the granite assurance this strange mind possessed. It was all alone, the only one of its kind here, and yet unshakable. Perhaps there was something in that to admire.