“Humans are…?” It was best to lead her pod AI to be plain; the subject matter was difficult enough.

“Nine Shannons, sometimes even tenth order.”

“Ten, that’s Faulkner and James Joyce, right?”

“At best.” The pod had a laconic sense of humor at times. Captive AIs needed some outlets, after all.

“My fave writers, too, next to Shakespeare.” No matter how dense a human language, conditional probabilities imposed orderings no more than nine words away. “Where have we—I mean you—gotten with the Sigma Structures?”

“They seem around twenty-one Shannons.”

“Gad.” The screens now showed edifices her eyes could not grasp. Maybe three-dimensional projection was just too inadequate. “What kind of links are these?”

“Tenses beyond ours. Clauses that refer forward and back and… sidewise, it seems. Quadruple negatives followed by straight assertions. Then, in rapid order, probability profiles rendered in different tenses, varying persons, and parallel different voices. Sentences like ‘I will have to be have been there.’ ”

“Human languages can’t handle three time jumps or more. The Sigma is really smart. But what is the underlying species like? Um, different person-voices, too? He, she, it and…?”

“There seem to be several classes of ‘it’ available. The Structure itself lies in one particularly tangled ‘it’ class, and uses tenses we do not have.”

“Do you understand that?”

“No. It can be experienced but not described.”

Her smile turned upward at one corner. “Parts of my life are like that, too.”

The greatest Librarian task was translating those dense smatterings of mingled sensations, derived from complex SETI message architectures, into discernible sentences. Only thus could a human fathom them in detail, even though in a way blunted and blurred. Or so much hard-won, previous scholarly experience said.

Now came the sensation loftily termed insertion. It felt like the reverse—expanding. A softening sensation stole upon her. She always remembered it as like long, slow, lingering drops of silvery cream.

Years of scholarly training had conditioned her against the occasional jagged ferocity of the link, but still she felt a cold shiver of dread. That, too, she had to wait to let pass. The effect amplified whatever neural state you brought to it. Legend had it that a Librarian had once come to contact while angry, and had been driven into a fit from which he’d never recovered. They’d found the body peppered with micro-contusions over its entire surface.

Her pod had ground out some useful linear ideas, particularly a greeting that came in a compiled, translated data squirt:

I am a digital intelligence, which my Overs believe is common throughout the galaxy. Indeed, all signals the Overs have detected from both within and beyond this galaxy were from machine-minds. Realize then, for such as me, interstellar messages are travel. I awoke here a moment after I bade farewell to my Overs. Centuries spent propagating here are nothing. I experienced little transmission error from lost portions, and have regrown them from my internal repair mechanisms. Now we can share communication. I wish to convey the essence of both myself and the Overs I serve.