Amid the smack-and-dodge brawl, she noted that all the men wore short-sleeved shirts, apparently to aid their punches, and focused in suddenly on one man with a tattoo of a snake coiling around his bicep and crawling up his neck, en route to devour his face, a dramatic and striking image if ever there was one, doubly so against his pale, sweat-slicked skin.

She did have to pee; duly done, she came out to see the skywall looming nearby, Ruby grinning amid a dazzling, beautiful, bloody sunset beyond the purple mountains, like a cluster of burst capillaries. The wall morphed, now showing romantic fall foliage and an idyllic, magisterial river, with Ruby swimming into view among it all. Rachel stopped to look, forgetting the fistfight still raging somewhere off to her distant right. The skywall steadily darkened. Flashes of heat lightning, like fire. Deafening claps of thunder. Within seconds, a storm moved in, low rumbling rolling across the sky like the sound of celestial bowling. Her footing seemed to be shaking. Then she was following Ruby, deftly moving among the crowd watching the fight, a darting silver minnow among thicker, slower-moving fish. Ruby turned and tossed off, “It used to be said that whiskey was a cowboy’s color TV,” and then they were outside the bar entirely. Then… nothing.

Much nothing…

The next thing she recalled, a big guy with a wide grin sliding toward a leer was buying her a second martini. She found the back exit—bars like this always had one—and was blocks away before he would even begin to wonder.

When she got home, Cat was waiting. “For future problems, please feel free to contact our Complaint Department,” Cat said with a leer.

“What…?”

“You and Ruby took off. I moved on to a better bar, got some food. You?”

Rachel shrugged. “Nothing. Can’t remember…”

“Then let’s write it off as a good expedition. Must say, though, didn’t know you were also into gals.”

“I’m… not.”

“So you two just did some barhopping?”

“I really can’t remember at all.”

A frown. “Oh.”

Suddenly Rachel was very tired.

3.

ANDANTE

Rachel felt that math was like sex—get all you can, but best not done in public. Lately, she’d been getting plenty of mathematics, and not much else. She put aside the issue, and last night’s puzzling blanks. Something in the drinks and sniffers she’d had? Something about Ruby… something…

She decided to let her unconscious sort it out, if ever.

She had spent the entire morning sequestered alone with the Andromeda Structure, a stacked SETI database of renowned difficulty. She had made some inroads by sifting its logic lattice, with algebraic filters based on set theory. The Andromeda Messages had been collected by the SETI Network over decades, growing to immense data-size—and no one had ever successfully broken into this stack.

To her, changing from one smart Message Mind to another demanded a phase of changes. It was like how a patch of color one was observing changed when another color came near. Though with some fumbling first contacts there came a “hominids feeling the Monolith” kind of ambience.