“A proof of what?”

“That is obscure, I must admit. Their symbols are hard to compare to ours. My preliminary finding is that the Bach cantata proves an elaborate theorem regarding confocal hypergeometric functions.”

“Ah.” Masoul allowed his mouth to take on a canny tilt. “Can we invert this process?”

“You mean, take a theorem of ours and somehow turn it into music?”

“Think of it as an experiment.”

Rachel had grown up in rough, blue-collar towns in the American South, and in that work-weary culture of calloused hands had found refuge in the abstract. Yet as she pursued mathematics and the data-dense world of modern Library science (for a science it truly was, now, with alien texts to study), she became convinced that real knowledge came, in the end, from mastering the brute reality of material objects. She had loved motorbikes in high school and knew that loosening a stuck bolt without stripping its threads demanded craft and thought. Managing hard reality took knowledge galore, about the world as it was and about yourself, especially your limitations. That lay beyond merely following rules, as a computer does. Intuition brewed from experience came first, shaped by many meetings with tough problems and outright failure. At times she had pictured a lady knight astride her stallion, in cardboard breastplate and tinfoil helmet, wielding a toilet plunger. Glory! In the moist bayous where fishing and farming ruled, nobody respected you if you couldn’t get the valve cover off a fouled engine.

In her high school senior year she’d rebuilt a Harley, the oldest internal combustion engine still allowed. Greasy, smelly, thick with tricky detail. Still, it seemed easier than dealing with the pressures of boys. While her mother taught piano lessons, the notes trickling out from open windows into the driveway like liquid commentary, she worked with grease and grime. From that Harley she had learned a lot more than from her advanced calculus class, with its variational analysis and symbolic thickets. She ground down the gasket joining the cylinder heads to the intake ports, oily sweat beading on her forehead as she used files of increasing fineness. She traced the custom-fit gasket with an X-knife. Then she shaved away metal fibers with a pneumatic die grinder, and felt a flush of pleasure as connections set perfectly into place with a quiet snick. She’d learned that small discoloring and blistered oil meant too much heat buildup, from skimpy lubrication. A valve stem that bulged slightly pointed to wear with its silent message. You had to know how to read the language of the seen. Such was so with the Library pods, too, with very different flavorings.

The Library’s bureaucratic world was labyrinthian. A manager’s decisions could get reversed by a higher-up, so it was crucial to your career that reversals did not register as defeats. That meant you didn’t just manage people and process; you managed what others thought of you—especially those higher in the food chain. It was hard to back down from an argument you made strongly, with real conviction, without seeming to lose integrity. Silent voices would say, If she gives up so easily, maybe she’s not that solid. From that had evolved the Library bureaucrat style: all thought and feeling was provisional, awaiting more information. Talking in doublespeak meant you could walk away from commitment to your own actions. Nothing was set, as it was when you were back home in Louisiana pouring concrete.