Rachel reported to a Prefect, a special privilege. Catkejen, at a higher level, now answered to the enigmatic Noughts. All this staff layering the SETI Library had amassed through two centuries of calcification. Sediment, some of it. Rachel avoided those mudlands.

Rachel also dodged the advice. “How’s your Nought?”

“Let’s say he—uh, it—relishes the cadences of the language.”

“Ah! You mean it’s an incorrigible windbag.” Apparently having no actual sexual organs led to verbal ejaculations instead. Just another gender choice, it seemed.

“Right, downright gushy.” Catkejen had changed her hair to tarnished silver but her voice was still of scrap brass. Rachel envied her ability to conform to the Library’s Byzantine unspoken styles. Clothes and skin enhancers were the classic methods of competition and display. Men wore Rapunzel hair down to the shoulder blades at the moment. Women had great tangled thickets of hair in the armpits, often displayed in string-shirts. All this, despite the strange blend of decadent excess and harsh asceticism that prevailed in elite Library culture—a huddled refuge in a harsh world that could kill them easily, given a chance. To Rachel this was a special puzzle, comparable to a labyrinthine SETI message.

“I heard they thinned some Trainees last week,” Catkejen whispered, glancing around. “No announcement, just—poof!—you notice some are missing.”

“Part of the method,” Rachel said. “They’re headed back Earthside, or going miner.” She had hinted to Cat about her strategy of keeping a low one-patch role, so to this she got a curt nod—and a wink.

They had seen this before. Those Trainees of both sexes, or even none, who had gotten by back on Earthside by being pert, pretty, perky—were soon memories. The Librarians batted last.

The Library had begun as a minor academic offshoot, back when there were few SETI messages and none had been well deciphered. By way of rigorous mathematical methods, Artilects, and objective though human minds like the Noughts, it had grown in prestige and influence. Now it was a Lunar citadel where there was a fifteen-year wait for a windowless office.

Rachel said, “I hear some Trainees are planning a demonstration against these abrupt firings.”

Another of Catkejen’s patented eye-rolls. “I mentioned that rumor to my own Prefect. I got one of her rare laughs. She said, ‘Demonstrations never achieve anything—if they did, we wouldn’t allow them.’ True!”

“Ah. A word to the wise?”

“Look, my nunlike friend—you’ve got to get style here. Dig into the ramified SETI messages—thousands of ’em, thick as bees—lurking back there in the Vaults. Then see if they relate to any flybys of our or other exploring craft.” Catkejen let her exasperation out in darting phrases. “Then put pizzazz into it, next time you get an audience, or get reviewed by some clump of Prefects. Learn the pleasure in dispute, in dialectic, in dazzle. Get some freelance dash, peacock strut, daring hypotheses, knockabout synthesis—and get laid.”

Rachel felt her face tighten, struggled to manage a smile. “I’m, you know, wrong time of the—”