Shadows of Eternity

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When on some gilded cloud or flower

My gazing soul would dwell an houre,

And in those weaker glories spy

Some shadows of eternity.

—Henry Vaughan, “The Retreate,” 1650

PART 1 THE PREFECT

Hidden wisdom and hidden treasure—of what use is either?

—ECCLESIASTICUS 20:30

1.

The woman who had gone in only three minutes before came back out.

“What?!” Rachel Cohen let her surprise escape.

The tall Asian woman shrugged, scowled, eyes rolling. “He just pointed to the door and frowned.”

“What did you say?”

“Well, he asked what tasks I wanted to work on. I said I could do just about anything. He asked for specifics. I didn’t really have any. So I trotted out some of the major problems I had heard of. I couldn’t say much, but some. Then he pointed to the door.” She fingered the plastic square in her hand, her shoulders slumped, and she sighed. She left on uncertain strides.

Next up for the position of Trainee Librarian was a slim man, tall and self-assured. He got a beep on his sidekick, straightened his formal Eartherstyle toga, and went in eagerly, fixed smile. All the candidates were just up from Earthside and getting used to the low grav, but this man managed a confident step and a mere bit of a bounce as he went in. And came out in five minutes. Better than the tall Asian woman, at least.

“Did he—”

“The Prefect handed me this and nodded good-bye.” The man held out the same slim plastic square, good for passage back to Earth. “He said they, the Earthside filters, had wasted both his time and mine. That I was too certain of myself to have the right frame of mind for this work.”

At least I won’t have that problem, Rachel thought. Nobody ever accused me of overconfidence.

She realized she had come to her feet out of surprise at seeing this man back out here. Her legs had turned her rise into a little jump, too, a meter or so, which was embarrassing, now that she thought of it. So she sat.

The Prefect’s aide came from a side door, a slim woman in a strict uniform, who said, “Audiences are over for today. The Prefect is disappointed in results and wishes to recast his mind. Come back tomorrow.”

She sighed. A reprieve, at least.

Rachel knew enough to go straight back to the Welcome Center. No sightseeing, stick to business.

They just nodded as if this was expected—after all, the two rejectees had just come through—and assigned her to a one-night-only apartment, open but shared. That meant going down stairs, which was harder than going up in Lunar grav. Launch yourself downward, aim for a step several feet farther down than you’re used to. Repeat, dancing on tiptoe sometimes. She missed one entirely but just crouched a bit in flight and the impact was not much after all.

Still, it made her edgy as she knocked on the apartment door. It slid swiftly open.

“What now?” The woman was thicker than the Lunans she had seen, and more… well, curvy.

Rachel handed over a small smart pad. “I’m sent for an overnight.”

Frown. “Damn, I’m in line for a coresident, not this in-out crap.”

“I’ll probably be gone for good tomorrow.”

The woman stepped aside and swept an arm widely. “Welcome to my wonderland.”

It was no bigger than Rachel’s Earthside one. “Two-bedroom?”

“Sure, a sort of exaggerated coffin.”

True enough. Rachel dropped her bag and they came back out into the broader space. Now the walls read her mood, responding by projecting a soothing beachfront with flour-white sand and blue-green waves crashing, with comforting murmurs of wind in palm trees. It helped, though not much.

“Here’s the kitchen. Well, kitchenette… or kitchenetteish.”

It was a tiny cubbyhole. Rachel grimaced. “With each suffix I guess they take away six cupboards and an appliance.”

“Hey, score! You’re fun.”

“Not often.”

A hand stuck out for a shake. “I’m Catkejen. You looking to stay?”

“Prob’ly not. You’re looking for a roomie?”

“Yeah, hate living alone. Nobody to laugh at my jokes.”

Rachel knew the drill. “Your last roommate lasted how long?”

“You jump right into the cross-exam, I see. A good sign.”

Rachel bored in, mouth severe. “So how long?”

“Two years. She wanted a baby, so she married one.”

Rachel laughed. Her cackle came out with an edge on it. That meant she was releasing tension—as her online psych always pointed out when it heard that. Bundled-up anxiety from the noninterview. Fear of the eventual one.

Of the Prefect. Self-knowledge, she thought ruefully, is mostly bad news.

“You’re here for…?”

“A Trainee interview.”

“With the Prefect?”

“He tossed out the two before me, then quit.”

“Good sign. He likes to cut away a few to show he’s got high standards.”

Rachel sighed. “Good sign? Doesn’t feel that way.”

To her surprise, Catkejen laughed. “To expect the world to treat you fairly because you’re a good person, my new friend, is like expecting a bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian.” Rachel laughed. It felt good.

“Okay, here’s our porch swing moment,” Catkejen said.

“What?”

“Bonding moment. Look, ain’t no such thang as a perfect Prefect.”

The sudden lapsing into a relaxed long-vowel accent alerted Rachel’s ear. “Uh…”

Catkejen raised an eyebrow. “Where from?”

A wary eye-move. “South.”

“South what?”

“North… America.”

Catkejen slapped the narrow kitchen counter. “Nailed it. Love that slidin’ suthrun accent. I’m American, too, from”—shifting to a clipped, higher tone—“Baaston. Massassachusetts.”

“Those Welcome people—”

“Smarter than they look, yeah.” More flat vowels.

Catkejen gave a little dance. Rachel echoed it, on the balls of her feet. Easy in low grav. Catkejen ended with a quick leap that took her to within a sliver of the ceiling. She landed and said, “Grab new duds, let’s get some suds.”

It turned out “suds” meant beer, a tipple term. Quite a lot of it. Rachel did not know how much until its effects were clear. Or unclear, which proved to be better. Until the morning. Which came too soon. Plenty soon. She wobbled through a breakfast that was mostly vegetables, found in the tiny refrigerator/thermer. Catkejen had already sprinted out to work, leaving a wall note: Nail it! See you 5ish.

Optimistic, indeed. More likely I’ll be using that plastic ticket to get on the orbital shuttle, bound back to Earthside. She took a deep breath and put such thoughts aside.

Rachel had some time before her wrist told her when the Prefect would inspect her. She wanted to see the Lunar landscape, which she had barely glimpsed at the landing area, so she took an elevator to the surface.

The main corridor was crowded. She wore the translator glasses she had dutifully bought Earthside. They proved essential when among nonAnglish speakers. A feeder line across the bottom view gave rough paraphrasings in scrolling yellow. Most of the dancing lines were talk about work at the mining operation, gossip, the usual. After all, she thought, I’m here to learn to interpret alien cultures, so this is kinda like that. There were some Chinese about, allowed in from the other polar region. Their staccato modified Mandarin darted like punctuation amid the flowing Anglish tide. Since the collapse of the last surviving Red regime, they mostly kept quiet, as if biding their time before their next big mistake.

Rachel made her way toward a dome overlooking the broad plain surrounding the complex. She had to be a tad careful, even though the 0.17 g was in principle easy on the body. It was awfully easy to bound upward, standing out above the moving crowd by arcing up to the ceiling. She could stride in long coasting steps, or else do a sort of slo-mo dance on the balls of her feet, for even more speed. The key was to find a liquid grace in it, so she didn’t look like a newbie, though she was.

Then she came out into a broad open area and there it was. She thought in a sudden rush of pure thrill, I’m on the moon! Until that moment the whole journey had been in rattling metal boxes. The gray plain lapped against the distant dark maria, onetime lava seas. The Lunar landscape was not weather-beaten but sun-beaten. A billion years of full-spectrum sun had rounded edges, pounded out fine dust. Photon rain, she thought.

A strange dark Earth sat near the horizon at this high latitude. At the moment it completely covered the sun, bringing a twilight glow to the peaks of the Harbinger Mountains farther north. They had stripes of yellows and burgundies, strata of the rare earths that had been splashed up from the maria by the late-stage meteors. Their color was a welcome respite from the gray powder plains of nearly all Luna.

Earth was a black coin with a shimmering brown-red rim. Air refracted reds best, so the glowing circle danced and shone. Small white dots gave away the massive cities. People down there would see Luna gain a dusky, smoldering cast. Rachel was lucky to have her first vision here be at a magic moment, happening only once a month. Like my period, she thought. She had decided to suppress it with meds during her apprentice training, quitting only weeks ago. Had that made her think of it now? Not with foreboding, but with some zest. The suppressor had also blunted her desire.

Her translator glasses also had a closeup function. She tapped it on and watched the tiny insect scrapers atop the lava field at the edge of the horizon. Luna profited from the rich deposits of light elements and rare earths that had billions of years ago floated to the top of the cooling lava lakes. Potassium and phosphorus skimmed from the first few meters of lava, ground up and mass-separated, fed Lunar farms. The purest of it, shipped down-grav to Earth, paid for decent shared incomes.

Mass slings, driven hard along steel rails, sent payloads nearly daily down to low Earth orbit. They carried metals and rare earths, the wealth that made Luna viable; the Library was a side effect of this. Some plunged straight into deserts to slam megaton blocks home, saving on deceleration costs. Big machines dug it out, labor benefiting the poor desert regions of Africa, Asia, and middle America. Supervised robots did most of the grunt work at both ends of this 400-million-kilometer pipeline. That paid for Luna’s cities. The Library paid for its own grand towers.

Sheltering the Library from those who wanted to plunder it for the Messages meant putting it on the moon. But not the Far Side, even though that was where the most advanced telescopes ever built sat and watched the sky, free of Earthside’s radio din and its big fraction of the sky. The rare earths had decided it. The concentration of maria on the Near Side likely reflected the substantially thicker crust of the highlands of the Far Side. Those bulky ranges had formed in the slow-velocity impact of a second moon of Earth, coming in from an orbit farther out, a few tens of millions of years after the big-slam impact that had resulted in a thick orbiting disk and then Luna’s formation. Mining fed the community, and that community lived in the labyrinths of lava tubes that made the maria. The Library was a cultural edifice erected in what was by nature a rugged frontier town.

She felt light-headed, and it wasn’t the grav that did it. She knew the signs. Before falling asleep last night, she had done her usual meditation, after the prep: focusing on an active problem. In high school she had learned that this prompted her unconscious. When she awoke, she kept her eyes closed and reviewed last night’s problems. About a third of the time, a useful idea lurked, appearing immediately. She would sit up, open her eyes, and tap a note on her wrist.

This morning there had been nothing. But suddenly, looking at the gray expanses beyond the glass and water wall, an idea came. One she could use in—good grief, twenty minutes. She hurried toward the Library.

She brought out a comb to groom her hair. Something in the air seemed to tug it from her fingers. Then she recalled: the whole surface complex was a small part of the Center, enclosed in a very strong magnetic field, which deflected most charged particles from solar storms and cosmic rays. She managed to smooth her long hair and was straightening her simple formal dress as she reached the tall towers.

The soaring, fluted alabaster columns of the Library Centrex reminded her of the majesty of this entire grand enterprise, stiffening her resolve. Few other traditional sites could approach the lofty grandeur of the Library columns. Established safely off Earth, the Library itself had come to resemble its holdings: huge, aged, mysterious in its shadowy depths. In the formal grand pantheon devoted to full-color, moving statues of legendary Interlocutors, giving onto the Seminar Plaza, stood the revered block of black granodiorite: the Rosetta Stone of ancient Egypt, symbol of all they worked toward. Its chiseled face was over two millennia old, and, she thought as she passed it, endearingly easy to understand. It was a simple linear, one-to-one mapping of three human languages, found by accident. A French soldier shoring up the walls of a fort had spotted a slab with markings on one side, so pointed it out to an officer. It was an eerie foreshadowing of the many chance SETI messages found by astronomers in the twenty-first century. The stone had the same text in Greek II, which the discoverers could read.

That meant that they could deduce the unknown languages in hieroglyphic pictures and cursive Demotic forms. This battered black slab, simple and powerful, had linked civilizations separated by millennia.

She reached out a trembling palm to caress its chilly granite sleekness. Hieroglyphs had retained their pictorial shapes over millennia, unlike the ancient Greek and Roman alphabets, which had evolved into more abstract forms. Pictures were essential in SETI messages, too. She stroked a hieroglyph of a pharaoh. The touch brought a thrill. The savants who served here now were part of a grand, age-old tradition, one that went to the heart of the very meaning of being human. Of grasping across time and space and cultures.

Only the lightness of her ringing steps buoyed her against the grave atmosphere of the tall, shadowy vaults. Scribes passed silently among the palisades, their violet robes swishing after them. She was noisy and new, and everybody knew it.