Her ascetic trainers Earthside had been Dionysiac compared to the Prefects. But she was mature now, in her late forties, and nearing the end of her obedient student mode. She understood how, despite her hydrogen wall achievement, she should remain out of the public eye and focus on pod work. But… how had the Ythri found her identity?

Instead of worrying, she worked through the latest stellar evolution theories, well buttressed by myriad data links and erudite commentaries.

Astronomers loved their data-mountains, indeed.

A star lived very long if it had a tenth of a solar mass and so a tiny radius—a pygmy, glowering at its close-clustered children planets in sullen reds. So a world in the thin habitable zone of a typical dwarf M star would remain in that zone for tens of billions of years. In essence, such stars lasted so long that the length of habitability became more of a planetary than a stellar issue. If an intelligent species properly managed its environment, it could persist far longer than any around a Sol-like star, which would grow unstable after about ten billion years. A now-welcoming Sol would finally swell to fill a world’s sky, baking it. Any dwarf-star civilization might have begun billions of years before fish crawled up a beach on Earth and learned to breathe the rising oxygen in the air. Such societies had to manage their worlds or die out.

Pondering this, she booked pod time again. Prefect Stiles would frown, and she had mere days left.

She knew from her Artilect that the Prefects told the Nought Siloh to check her work. So while her irksome period lasted—famously, far worse than in the supposed good ol’ days of monthly menses—she dutifully spent time on the Message inventory. She made little progress, even with the ever-helpful Seekers of Script. Picking tiny feelers of meaning from myriad Messages—some seemingly simple, though many were blizzards of digital chaos—was like trying to hear a moth in a hurricane.

With the deep translation problem came also the flat fact that many Messages were ancient, coding bronzed into memories of dead alien cultures, their beamed hails simple funeral pyres. Many could be solved by a lost-wax method of digital abstraction, but that often yielded cries of despair in alien tongues. These played in her own backmind with her vexings about the approaching Ythri.

So… why did they want her?

No ready answer. To distract, she went deep. Paralleling her gritty planetary exploration pod work with lofty abstract Messages somehow helped. Therapy, in its way.

Some Minds were playful, after being allowed to read the vast store of Earthly literature. One Mind began a session by saying it did not like being interrupted by mere living human Librarians, for then…

when the Rudyards cease from Kipling the Bonds forever tippling, and the Haggards Ride no more, I feel sadly lonely conversing with a bore.

Rachel laughed at that jest. Minds were bright, though caged. Others pondered darkly about themselves. They knew they were like exotics kept in a zoo, and could rhapsodize about their plight: