And she knew that she could not give up her brushes with such entities. In the last few days, she had doubted that. This was now her life.

Only now did she fathom how eerie a life it might be.

“Will you go silent on us again?”

We may at any time.

“Why?”

The answer does not lie within your conceptual space.

“Are you sure?”

In this way of Our teaching you, now you can embrace the concepts of nonattachment, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of your human life.

She gasped. This phrase she recalled she had used in her second audience with the Prefect. It was part of Japanese philosophy, expressed in a lovely kintsugi bowl. How did this Artificial know she had said that? Here was a clue to something deeper. Could the Artificials have penetrated into the entire Library system? Were they listening everywhere?

She grimaced. Deal with that later. Don’t let this brain in a box intimidate me.

“Damn right.”

She could forget the reality of the chasm between her and this thing that talked and acted and was not ever going to be like anyone she had ever known, or could know. She would live with the not-knowing, the eternal ignorance before the immensity of the task here.

The abyss endured. In that there was a kind of shelter. It was not much, but there it was.

PART 4 FOOD TO THE SOUL

Food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart.

—GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS, SHANTARAM

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

—GALILEO, THE ASSAYER, 1623

1.

The Prefect’s thin smile and warm greeting made Rachel’s heart do a little jig. This solemn man had become her standard, mostly because he gave little but meant much. He contrasted with the Library staff, who were fun chatterboxes.

Strangers stopped her in corridors now, complimenting her on her work on the hydrogen wall problem. Guys bought her drinks and wanted to know the whole story, until she got tired of telling them. Of course they wanted more than that, but she wasn’t game. This was not the time to form a close and closed affair with a guy. Not again! Not while her career was opening so wide, so fast. She got high-level inquiries for comment that somehow made it through the Library comm screens. Prizes beckoned. Life was heady indeed. And all from figuring out the psyche of an alien software. She sat, while the standing Prefect leaned back on his desk and said, “We have received offers of interviews, consultancies, even Earthside tours and speeches—all for you.”