He switched his support from one hand to the other. “I find this paltry 0.19 Lunar gee charming, don’t you?”
Ruth pointed. “As charming as one red sock, the other blue?”
Unfazed, Geoffrey launched himself upward. He did a flip and landed on two feet, without even a backward step to restore balance. Ruth and Catkejen gave him beaming smiles. “Socks are just details, ladies. I stick to essentials.”
“You’re in our year, right?” Catkejen asked. “I saw you at the opening day ceremonies.”
Geoffrey sat, but not before he twirled his chair up into the air, making it do a few quick, showy moves. “No, I was just sneaking in for some of the refreshments. I’m a lordly year beyond you two.”
Ruth said, “I thought HiGee folk were, well—”
“More devoted to the physical? Not proper fodder for the Library?” He grinned.
Ruth felt her face redden. Was she that easy to read? “Well, yes.”
“My parents, my friends, they’re all focused on athletics. Me, I’m a rebel.”
Catkejen smiled. “Even against the Noughts?”
He shrugged. “Mostly I find a way to go around them.”
Ruth nodded. “I think I’d rather be ignored by them.”
“Y’know,” Catkejen said reflectively, “I think they’re a lot like the Minds.”
Ruth asked slowly, “Because they’re the strangest form of human?”
Geoffrey said, “They’re sure alien to me. I’ll give up sex when I’ve lost all my teeth, maybe, but not before.”
“They give me the shivers sometimes,” Catkejen said. “I was fetching an ancient written document over in the Hard Archives last week, nighttime. Three of them came striding down the corridor in those capes with the cowls. All in black, of course. I ducked into a side corridor—they scared me.”
“A woman’s quite safe with them,” Geoffrey said. “Y’know, when they started up their Nought Guild business, centuries back, they decided on that all-black look and the shaved heads and all, because it saved money. But everybody read it as dressing like funeral directors. Meaning, they were going to bury all our sex-ridden, old ways of interpreting.”
“And here I thought I knew a lot about Library history,” Catkejen said in an admiring tone. “Wow, that’s good gossip.”
“But they’ve made the big breakthroughs,” Ruth said. “Historically—”
“Impossible to know, really,” Catkejen said. “The first Noughts refused to even have names, so we can’t cite the work as coming from them.”
Geoffrey said mock solemnly, “Their condition they would Nought name.”
“They’ve missed things, too,” Catkejen said. “Translated epic sensual poems as if they were about battles, when they were about love.”
“Sex, actually,” Geoffrey said. “Which can seem like a battle.”
Catkejen laughed. “Not the way I do it.”
“Maybe you’re not doing it right.” Geoffrey laughed with her, a ringing peal.
“Y’know, I wonder if the Noughts ever envy us?”
Geoffrey grunted in derision. “They save so much time by not having to play our games. It allows them to contemplate the Messages at their leah-zure.”
He took a coffee cup and made it do a few impossible stunts in midair. Ruth felt that if she blinked she would miss something; he was quick. His compact body had a casual grace, despite the thick slabs of muscle. The artful charm went beyond the physical. His words slid over each other in an odd pronunciation that had just enough inflection to ring musically. Maybe, she thought, there were other amusements to be had here in the hallowed Library grounds.
* * *
She worked steadily, subjecting each microsecond of her interviews with the Architecture to elaborate contextual analysis. Codes did their work, cross-checking furiously across centuries of prior interpretation. But they needed the guidance of the person who had been through the experience: her.
And she felt the weight of the Library’s history upon her every translation. Each cross-correlation with the huge body of Architecture research brought up the immense history behind their entire effort.
When first received centuries before, the earliest extraterrestrial signals had been entirely mystifying. The initial celebrations and bold speeches had obscured this truth, which was to become the most enduring fact about the field.
For decades, the searchers for communications had rummaged through the frequencies, trying everything from radio waves to optical pulses, and even the occasional foray into X-rays. They found nothing. Conventional wisdom held that the large power needed to send even a weak signal across many light-years was the most important fact. Therefore, scrutinize the nearby stars, cupping electromagnetic ears for weak signals from penny-pinching civilizations. The odds were tiny that a society interested in communication would be nearby, but this was just one of those hard facts about the cosmos—which turned out to be wrong.
The local-lookers fell from favor after many decades of increasingly frantic searches. By then the Galactic Center Strategy had emerged. Its basis lay in the discovery mat star formation had begun in the great hub of stars within the innermost ten thousand light-years. Supernovas had flared early and often there, stars were closer together, so heavy elements built up quickly. Three-quarters of the suitable life-supporting stars in the entire galaxy were older than the Sun, and had been around on average more than a billion years longer.
Most of these lay within the great glowing central bulge—the hub, which we could not see through the lanes of dust clogging the constellation of Sagittarius. But in radio frequencies, the center shone brightly. And the entire company of plausible life sites, where the venerable societies might dwell, subtended an arc of only a few degrees, as seen from Earth.
We truly lived in the boondocks—physically, and as became apparent, conceptually as well.
Near the center of the hub, thousands of stars swarmed within a single light-year. Worlds there enjoyed a sky with dozens of stars brighter than the full moon. Beautiful, perhaps—but no eyes would ever evolve there to witness the splendor.
The dense center was dangerous. Supernovas drove shock waves through fragile solar systems. Protons sleeted down on worlds, sterilizing them. Stars swooped near each other, scrambling up planetary orbits and raining down comets upon them. The inner zone was a dead zone.
But a bit further out, the interstellar weather was better. Planets capable of sustaining organic life began their slow winding path upward toward life and intelligence within the first billion or two years after the galaxy formed. An Earthlike world that took 4.5 billion years to produce smart creatures would have done so about four billion years ago.
In that much time, intelligence might have died out, arisen again, and gotten inconceivably rich. The beyond-all-reckoning wealthy beings near the center could afford to lavish a pittance on a luxury—blaring their presence out to all those crouched out in the galactic suburbs, just getting started in the interstellar game.
Whatever forms dwelled further in toward the center, they knew the basic symmetry of the spiral. This suggested that the natural corridor for communication is along the spiral’s radius, a simple direction known to everyone. This maximized the number of stars within a telescope’s view. A radius is better than aiming along a spiral arm, since the arm curves away from any straight-line view. So a beacon should broadcast outward in both directions from near the center.
So, rather than look nearby, the ancient Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence searchers began to look inward. They pointed their antennas in a narrow angle toward the constellation Sagittarius. They listened for the big spenders to shout at the less prosperous, the younger, the unsophisticated.
But how often to cup an ear? If Earth was mediocre, near the middle in planetary properties, then its day and year were roughly typical. These were the natural ranges any world would follow: a daily cycle atop an annual sway of climate.
If aliens were a
nything like us, they might then broadcast for a day, once a year. But which day? There was no way to tell—so the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence searchers began to listen every day, for roughly a half-hour, usually as the radio astronomers got all their instruments calibrated. They watched for narrow-band signals that stood out even against the bright hub’s glow.
Radio astronomers had to know what frequency to listen to, as well. The universe is full of electromagnetic noise at all wavelengths from the size of atoms to those of planets. Quite a din.
There was an old argument that water-based life might pick the “watering hole”—a band near one billion cycles/second where both water and hydroxyl molecules radiate strongly. Maybe not right on top of those signals, but nearby, because that’s also in the minimum of all the galaxy’s background noise.
Conventional Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had spent a lot of effort looking for nearby sources, shifting to their rest frame, and then eavesdropping on certain frequencies in that frame. But a beacon strategy could plausibly presume that the rest frame of the galactic center was the obvious gathering spot, so anyone broadcasting would choose a frequency near the “watering hole” frequency of the galaxy’s exact center.
Piggy-backing on existing observing agendas, astronomers could listen to a billion stars at once. Within two years, the strategy worked. One of the first beacons found was from the Sagittarius Architecture.
Most of the signals proved to have a common deep motivation. Their ancient societies, feeling their energies ebb, yet treasuring their trove of accumulated art, wisdom and insight, wanted to pass this on. Not just by leaving it in a vast museum somewhere, hoping some younger species might come calling someday. Instead, many built a robotic funeral pyre fed by their star’s energies, blaring out tides of timeless greatness:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had put it, witnessing the ruins of ancient Egypt, in Afrik.
At the very beginnings of the Library, humanity found that it was coming in on an extended discourse, an ancient interstellar conversation, without notes or history readily provided. Only slowly did the cyber-cryptographers fathom that most alien cultures were truly vast, far larger than the sum of all human societies. And much older.
Before actual contact, nobody had really thought the problem through. Historically, Englishmen had plenty of trouble understanding the shadings of, say, the Ozzie Bushmen. Multiply that by thousands of other Earthly and solar system cultures and then square the difficulty, to allow for the problem of expressing it all in sentences—or at least, linear symbolic sequences. Square the complexity again to allow for the abyss separating humanity from any alien culture.
The answer was obvious: any alien translator program had to be as smart as a human. And usually much more so.
The first transmission from any civilization contained elementary signs, to build a vocabulary. That much even human scientists had guessed. But then came incomprehensible slabs, digital Rosetta stones telling how to build a simulated alien mind that could talk down to mere first-timers.
The better part of a century went by before humans worked out how to copy and then represent alien minds in silicon. Finally the Alien Library was built, to care for the Minds and Messages it encased. To extract from them knowledge, art, history, and kinds of knowing for which humans might very well have no name.
And to negotiate with them. The cyber-aliens had their own motivations.
“I don’t understand your last statement.”
I do not need to be told that. You signal body defiance with your crossed arms, barrier gestures, pursed lips, contradictory eyebrow slants.
“But these tensor topologies are not relevant to what we were discussing.”
They are your reward.
“For what?”
Giving me of your essence. By wearing ordinary clothes, as I asked, and thus displaying your overt signals.
“I thought we were discussing the Heliosphere problem.”
We were. But you primates can never say only one tiling at a time to such as We.
She felt acutely uncomfortable. “Uh, this picture you gave me . . . I can see this is some sort of cylindrical tunnel through—”
The plasma torus of your gas giant world, Jupiter. I suggest it as a way to funnel currents from the moon, Io.
“I appreciate this, and will forward it—”
There is more to know, before your level of technology—forgive me, but it is still crude, and will be so for far longer than you surmise—can make full use of this defense.
Ruth suppressed her impulse to widen her eyes. Defense? Was this it? A sudden solution? “I’m not a physiker—”
Nor need you be. I intercept your host of messages, all unspoken. Your pelvis is visible beneath your shift, wider and rotated back slightly more than the male Supplicants who come to Us. Waist more slender, thighs thicker. Navel deeper, belly longer. Specializations impossible to suppress.
Where was it—They—going with this? “Those are just me, not messages.”
It is becoming of you to deny them. Like your hourglass shape perceived even at a distance, say, across an ancient plain at great distance. Your thighs admit an obligingly wider space, an inward slope to the thickened thighs, that gives an almost knock-kneed appearance.
“I beg your pardon—”
A pleasant saying, that—meaning that We have overstepped (another gesture) your boundaries? But I merely seek knowledge for my own repository.
“I—we—don’t like being taken apart like this!”
But reduction to essentials is your primary mental habit.
“Not reducing people!”
Ah, but having done this to the outside world, you surely cannot object to having the same method applied to yourselves.
“People don’t like being dissected,”
Your science made such great strides—unusual upon the grander stage of worlds—precisely because you could dexterously divide your attentions into small units, all the better to understand the whole.
When They got like this it was best to humor Them. “People don’t like it. That is a social mannerism, maybe, but one we feel about.”
And I seek more.
The sudden grave way the Sagittarius said this chilled her.
* * *
Siloh was not happy, though it took a lot of time to figure, this out. The trouble with Noughts was their damned lack of signals. No slight downward tug of lips to signal provisional disapproval, no sideways glance to open a possibility. Just the facts, Ma’am. “So it is giving you tantalizing bits.”
“They, not It. Sometimes I feel I’m talking to several different minds at once.”
“It has said the same about us.”
The conventional theory of human minds was that they were a kind of legislature, always making deals between differing interests. Only by attaining a plurality could anyone make a decision. She bit her lip to not give away anything, then realized that her bite was visible, too. “We’re a whole species. They’re a simulation of one.”
Siloh made a gesture she could not read. She had expected some congratulations on her work, but then, Siloh was a Nought and had little use for most human social lubrications. He said slowly, “This cylinder through the Io plasma—the physikers say it is intriguing.”
“How? I thought the intruding interstellar plasma was overpowering everything.”
“It is. We lost Ganymede Nation today.”
She gasped. “I hadn’t heard.”
“You have been immersed in your studies, as is fitting.”
“Does Catkejen know?”
“She has been told.”
Not by you, I hope. Siloh was not exactly the sympathetic type. “I should go to her.”
“Wait until our business is finished.”
“But I—”
“Wait.”
Siloh lean
ed across its broad work plain, which responded by offering information. Ruth crooked her neck but could not make out what hung shimmering in the air before Siloh. Of course; this was a well-designed office, so that she could not read its many ingrained inputs. He was probably summoning information all the while he talked to her, without her knowing it. Whatever he had learned, he sat back with a contented, small smile. “I believe the Sagittarius Congruence is emerging in full, to tantalize you.”
“Congruence?”
“A deeper layer to its intelligence. You should not be deceived into thinking of it as remotely like us. We are comparatively simple creatures.” Siloh sat back, steepling its fingers and peering into them, a studied pose. “Never does the Sagittarius think of only a few moves into its game.”
“So you agree with Youstani, a Translator Supreme from the twenty-fifth century, that the essential nature of Sagittarius is to see all conversations as a game?”
“Are ours different?” A sudden smile creased his leathery face, a split utterly without mirth.
“I would hope so.”
“Then you shall often be deceived.”
* * *
She went to their apartment immediately, but someone had gotten there before her. It was dark, but she caught muffled sounds from the living room. Was Catkejen crying?
Earth’s crescent shed a dim glow into the room. She stepped into the portal of the living room and in the gloom saw someone on the viewing pallet. A low whimper drifted in the darkness, repeating, soft and sad, like crying, yes—
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