She felt light-headed, and it wasn’t the grav that did it. She knew the signs. Before falling asleep last night, she had done her usual meditation, after the prep: focusing on an active problem. In high school she had learned that this prompted her unconscious. When she awoke, she kept her eyes closed and reviewed last night’s problems. About a third of the time, a useful idea lurked, appearing immediately. She would sit up, open her eyes, and tap a note on her wrist.

This morning there had been nothing. But suddenly, looking at the gray expanses beyond the glass and water wall, an idea came. One she could use in—good grief, twenty minutes. She hurried toward the Library.

She brought out a comb to groom her hair. Something in the air seemed to tug it from her fingers. Then she recalled: the whole surface complex was a small part of the Center, enclosed in a very strong magnetic field, which deflected most charged particles from solar storms and cosmic rays. She managed to smooth her long hair and was straightening her simple formal dress as she reached the tall towers.

The soaring, fluted alabaster columns of the Library Centrex reminded her of the majesty of this entire grand enterprise, stiffening her resolve. Few other traditional sites could approach the lofty grandeur of the Library columns. Established safely off Earth, the Library itself had come to resemble its holdings: huge, aged, mysterious in its shadowy depths. In the formal grand pantheon devoted to full-color, moving statues of legendary Interlocutors, giving onto the Seminar Plaza, stood the revered block of black granodiorite: the Rosetta Stone of ancient Egypt, symbol of all they worked toward. Its chiseled face was over two millennia old, and, she thought as she passed it, endearingly easy to understand. It was a simple linear, one-to-one mapping of three human languages, found by accident. A French soldier shoring up the walls of a fort had spotted a slab with markings on one side, so pointed it out to an officer. It was an eerie foreshadowing of the many chance SETI messages found by astronomers in the twenty-first century. The stone had the same text in Greek II, which the discoverers could read.

That meant that they could deduce the unknown languages in hieroglyphic pictures and cursive Demotic forms. This battered black slab, simple and powerful, had linked civilizations separated by millennia.

She reached out a trembling palm to caress its chilly granite sleekness. Hieroglyphs had retained their pictorial shapes over millennia, unlike the ancient Greek and Roman alphabets, which had evolved into more abstract forms. Pictures were essential in SETI messages, too. She stroked a hieroglyph of a pharaoh. The touch brought a thrill. The savants who served here now were part of a grand, age-old tradition, one that went to the heart of the very meaning of being human. Of grasping across time and space and cultures.

Only the lightness of her ringing steps buoyed her against the grave atmosphere of the tall, shadowy vaults. Scribes passed silently among the palisades, their violet robes swishing after them. She was noisy and new, and everybody knew it.