“Indeed. As it is with your Symphony. Wondrous! Though by performing the work, it did escape into common knowledge. People Earthside have piled onto your ideas, methods.” He waved up a message that hovered in air:

Such music sets in order what life cannot.

“Much commentary and copycat work has emerged. We screen you from such bothersome offspring.”

Rachel sat silent, so he went on, “Ideas steam ahead rapidly when their time comes. Catching that steamer is harder still. More, it is not your task. Such would distract you.” Masoul rose with an elegant grace and waved a hand to produce a text, hanging in the air. “This is from a recent scientific paper, built upon your methods.”

She gathered that he was circling something big, but would approach it warily. So she read the abstract hanging in the air:

A theoretical formalism explains why basic ordered patterns emerge in music, using the same statistical mechanics framework that describes emergent order across phase transitions in physical systems. I first apply the mean field approximation to demonstrate that phase transitions occur in this model from disordered sound to discrete sets of pitches, including the twelve-fold octave division used in Western music. Beyond the mean field model, numerical simulation is used to uncover emergent structures of musical harmony. These results provide a new lens through which to view the fundamental structures of music and to discover new musical ideas to explore, as in the Sigma Structure Symphony. They imply that alien minds will make music we can enjoy, or at least understand.

Rachel wrinkled her brow and suppressed a laugh. “Thank God I’m not an Earthside academic.”

“Thank our Library, I believe,” Masoul said with a smile.

Rachel sat up straight and said her prepared speech. “I must report that my most recent half-year work with, and on, and goddamn well inside—that’s how bad it was—the Osiris Constellation has… failed.”

The Prefect nodded. “I gathered so from your several months of silence.”

“Sorry ’bout that.”

“I must say, ‘sorry’ is good to hear, but I fear you have concluded more than that.”

“Ummm… yes, I have.”

“And?”

“I wonder if I’m cut out for this.”

“You have achieved much already.”

“I feel like… well… quitting.”

“You must understand that among those at your level there is truly only one condition you must obey.”

“Oh?”

“It is simple. Do. Not. Quit.”

“Ah…”

“Do not.”

“But I failed. I worked so hard! Couldn’t get through to that damned Osiris.” A sigh, then she snapped her fingers. “Then I could. Zap! Then it showed me I had been playing a game with it. Just a game. That I wasn’t up to talking to its enormous godlike Elders. Then it, it… dismissed me.”

“As it does. For centuries.”

“Oh? I studied all previous attempts—”

“Such are erased. In those older times the Library allowed Analysts—so they were called then—to omit their failures.”

“But, but—that’s research! Obliterating it—”

“An institutional error, granted.”

“I had no idea—”

“Others before you guessed, or ferreted out from code, the sour, sad past history. So they did not attempt.”