“I think we’re solid here.”

Cat gave her a wry twist of mouth. “You are, sure. Me, not nearly. Don’t want to go back Earthside, but jobs are scarce up here. Screw up and back down you go.” They nodded at each other.

Rachel took a long route to her appointment. The garden tube atmospherics calmed her. Plenty of green crops clinging to walls amid piped-in sublight and gusts of moist air. Gear hung off in blobs like goiters. The lava tubes and colossal voids got warmed by nuclear reactor coolant fluids that flowed in the plasto walls. Explorers a century before had found that water from ancient impacts had condensed out into snowdrifts in the tubes. Baked regolith bricks and melted regolith glass built the frames with sheets of light-emitting diodes. These shone down on ambling people and a wealth of verdant food crops. Their light was tuned to photosynthesis-optimum wavelengths that humans liked, too, a rich rainbow glow.

Compared to that Varley novel she had dipped into, this was a different future, with no sex flips necessary to make life varied. Plenty of that! There were even Loonie Absolutes who shunned all repair upgrades and so died before 100. People in Varley’s era did that, back when the oldest person ever was a Frenchwoman who lived to 122. Life-span was much worse before that. Now the oldest relic was 339 and could still host a show called How It Was with a large audience. Wispy, thin-voiced wisdom from the timeworn. He had even seen the Beatles play! They had come along a bit after Bach, as she recalled. (Her quick inboards showed her a tableau of the four of them striding purposefully across a “zebra crossing,” a curious term—Lennon in white, Starr in funeral black, McCartney in gray, and Harrison in hippie denim from head to toe—okay, a bit more after Bach, then.) The 339-year-old guy had had cryo assist for a century or so, but still—wow. He had even seen the first Lunar bootprints get made!

Hell, three centuries back, you were doing okay to get to seventy. When Jesus was around and died on the cross at about thirty-two, not so bad for the general population. So now… She took a deep breath of the cool, aero-flavored air that sent signals of ripe grass and sweet flowers, and put the thought of children and aging away. Compartment your worries, kid. Take in the scenery, it helps. She took long, looping Loonie strides to change her mindset.

The Prefect awaited.

Few other traditional sites in the solar system could approach the grandeur of the Library. Since the first detection of signals from other galactic civilizations centuries before, no greater task had confronted humanity than the deciphering of such vast lore.

She caressed the Rosetta Stone in passing and found its cool majesty comforting, the Past given Permanence itself. She had to honor that, and put her personal self aside for now. Yes.

She arrived at the Prefect’s door, hesitated, adjusted her severe Librarian shift, and took a deep breath. Gut still tight…