"Another cliche." Catkejen made a face. "I hope you have better luck finding something original in-what was it?"

"The Sagittarius Architecture."

"Brrrrr! I heard it was a hydra."

"Each time you approach it, you get a different mind?"

"If you can call it a mind. I hear it's more like a talking body."

Ruth had read and sensed a lot about the Sagittarius, but this was new. They all knew that the mind-body duality made no sense in dealing with alien consciousness, but how this played out was still mysterious. She frowned.

Catkejen poked her in the ribs. "Come on, no more deep thought today! Let's go for a fly in the high-pressure dome."

Reluctantly, Ruth went. But her attention still fidgeted over the issues. She thought about the challenge to come, even as she swooped in a long, serene glide over the fern-covered hills under the amusement dome, beneath the stunning ring of orbital colonies that made a glittering necklace in the persimmon sky.

Into her own pod, at last!

She had gone through a week of final neural conditioning since seeing Siloh, and now the moment had arrived: direct line feed from the Sagittarius Architecture.

Her pod acted as a neural web, using her entire body to convey connections. Sheets of sensation washed over her skin, a prickly itch began in her feet.

She felt a heady kinesthetic rush of acceleration as a constellation of fusions drew her to a tight nexus.

Alien archi tectures used most of the available human input landscape. Dizzying surges in the ears, biting smells, ringing cacophonies of elusive patterns, queasy perturbations of the inner organs-a Trainee had to know how these might convey meaning.

They often did, but translating them was elusive. After such experiences, one never thought of human speech as anything more than a hobbled, claustrophobic mode. Its linear meanings and frail attempts at linked concepts were simple, utilitarian, and typical of younger minds.

The greatest task was translating the dense smatterings of mingled sensations into discernible sentences. Only thus could a human fathom them at all, even in a way blunted and blurred. Or so much previous scholarly experience said.

Ruth felt herself bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from her own body. These were her own in-board subsystems coupled with high-bit-rate spatterings of meaning-guesses, really.

She had an ample repository of built-in processing units, lodged in her spine and shoulders. No one would attempt such a daunting task without artificial amplifications. To confront such slabs of raw data with a mere unaided human mind was pointless and quite dangerous. Early Librarians, centuries before, had perished in a microsecond's exposure to such layered labyrinths as the Sagittarius.

Years of scholarly training had conditioned her against the jagged ferocity of the link, but still she felta cold shiver of dread. That, too, she had to wait to let pass. The effect amplified whatever neural state you brought to it. Legend had it that a Librarian had once come to contact while angry, and been driven into a fit from which he'd never recovered. They had found the body peppered everywhere with micro-contusions.

The raw link was as she had expected: A daunting, many-layered language. Then she slid into an easier notation that went through her spinal interface, and heard/felt/read: Much more intelligible, but still.... She concentrated- We wish you greetings, new sapience.

"Hello. I come with reverence and new supple offerings." This was the standard opening, one refined over five centuries ago and never changed by so much as a syllable.

And you offer?

"Further cultural nuances." Also a ritual promise, however unlikely it was to be fulfilled. Few advances into the Sagittarius had been made in the last century. Even the most ambitious Librarians seldom tried any longer.

Something like mirth came wafting to her, then: We are of a mind to venture otherwise with you.

Damn! There was no record of such a response before, her downlink confirmed. It sounded like a preliminary to a dismissal. That overture had worked fine for the last six Trainees. But then, they hadn't gotten much farther, either, before the Sagittarius lost interest and went silent again. Being ignored was the greatest insult a Trainee faced, and the most common. Humans were more than a little boring to advanced intelligences. The worst of it was that one seldom had an idea why.

So what in hell did this last remark from it mean? Ruth fretted, speculated, and then realized that her indecision was affecting her own neural states. She decided to just wing it. "I am open to suggestion and enlightenment."

A pause, getting longer as she kept her breathing steady. Her meditative cues helped, but could not entirely submerge her anxieties. Maybe she had bitten off entirely too much- From Sagittarius she received a jittering cascade, resolving to: As a species you are technologically gifted yet philosophically callow, a common condition among emergent intelligences. But of late it is your animal property of physical expression that Intrigues.

Frequently you are unaware of your actions-which makes them all the more revealing.

"Oh?" She sat back in her pod and crossed her legs. The physical pose might help her mental profile, in the global view of the Sagittarius. Until now its responses had been within conventional bounds; this last was new.

You concentrate so hard upon your linear word groups that you forget how your movements, postures and facial cues give you away.

"What am I saying now, then?"

That you must humor Us until you can ask your questions about the heliosphere catastrophe.

Ruth laughed. It felt good. "I'm that obvious?"

Many societies We know only through their bit-strings and abstractions. That is the nature of binary signals. You on the other hand (to use a primate phrase), We can know through your unconscious self. "You want to know about me ?"

We have heard enough symphonies, believe Us.

At least it was direct. Many times in the past, her research showed, it-"They"-had not been. The Architecture was paying attention!-a coup in itself.

"I'm sorry our art forms bore you."

Many beings who use acoustic means believe their art forms are the most important, valuable aspects of their minds. This is seldom so, in Our experience.

"So involvement is more important to you?"

For this moment, truly. Remember that We are an evolving composite of mental states, no less than you. You cannot meet the same Us again.

"Then you should be called...?"

We know your term "Architecture" and find it-your phrasing?-amusing. Better perhaps to consider Us to be a composite entity. As you are yourselves, though you cannot sense this aspect. You imagine that you are a unitary consciousness, guiding your bodies.

"And we aren't?"

Of course not. Few intelligences in Our experience know as little of their underlying mental architecture as do you.

"Could that be an advantage for us?"

With the next words came a shooting sensation, something like a dry chuckle.

Perhaps so. You apparently do all your best work off stage. Ideas appear to you without your knowing where they come from.

She tried to imagine watching her own thoughts, but was at a loss where to go with this. "Then let's...well..."

Gossip?

What an odd word choice. There was something like a tremor of pleasure in its neural tone, resounding with long, slow wavelengths within her.

"It sounds creepy," Catkejen said. She was shoveling in food at the Grand Cafeteria, a habit Ruth had noticed many Gannies had.

"Nothing in my training really prepared me for its...well, coldness, and..."

Catkejen stopped eating to nod knowingly. "And intimacy?"

"Well, yes."

"Look, I've been doing pod work only a few weeks, just like you. Already it's pretty clear that we're mostly negotiating, not translating."

Ruth frowned. "They warned us, but still...."

"Look, these are big minds. Strange as anything we'll ever know. But they're trapped in a small space, living cyber-lives. We're their entertainment."

"And I am yours, ladies," said a young man as he sat down at their table. He ceremoniously shook hands. "Geoffrey Chandis."

"So how're you going to amuse us?" Catkejen smiled skeptically.

"How's this?" Geoffrey stood and put one hand on their table. In one deft leap he was upside down, balanced upon the one hand, the other saluting them.

"You're from HiGee." Catkejen applauded.

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, showymoves. "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 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 that 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.