"Yours was deemed the most crucial work. Yet you could not be told."

She shook her head to clear it. "So I wouldn't develop shaky hands."

"And you did not, not at all." Siloh beamed in an inscrutable way, one eyebrow canted at an ambiguous angle.

"You knew," she said leadenly. "What it would do."

"I'm sure I do not fathom what you mean."

She studied Siloh, who still wore the same strange beaming expression. Remember, she thought, it can be just as irritating as an ordinary man, but it isn't one .

The colossal discharge of Jupiter's magnetospheric potentials was an energetic event unparalleled in millennia of humanity's long strivings to harness nature.

The Composite had brought insights to bear that physikers would spend a century untangling. For the moment, the only important fact was that by releasing plasma spirals at just the right pitch, and driving these with electrodynamic generators (themselves made of filmy ionized barium), a staggering current came rushing out of the Jovian system.

At nearly the speed of light it intersected the inward bulge of the heliosphere. Currents moved in nonlinear dances, weaving a pattern that emerged within seconds, moving in intricate harmonies.

Within a single minute a complex web of forces flexed into being. Within an hour the bulge of interstellar gas arrested its inward penetration. It halted, waves slamming in vexed lines of magnetic force, against the Jovian sally. And became stable.

Quickly humans-ever irreverent, even in the face of catastrophe-termed their salvation The Basket. Invisible to the eye, the giant web the size of the inner solar system was made of filmy fields that weighed nothing. Yet it was all the same massively powerful, a dynamically responding screen protecting the Earth from a scalding death. The hydrogen wall seethed redly in the night sky. To many, it seemed an angry animal caught at last in a gauzy net.

She witnessed the display from the Grand Plaza with a crowd of half a million. It was humbling, to think that mere primates had rendered such blunt pressures awesome but impotent.

The Sagittarius sent, We render thanks.

Her chest was tight. She had dreaded entering the pod again, and now could not speak.

We gather it is traditional among you to compliment one's partner, and particularly a lady...afterward.

"Don't...don't try."

We became something new from that moment.

She felt anger and fear, and yet simultaneously, pride and curiosity. They twisted together in her.

Sweat popped out on her upper lip. The arrival of such emotions, stacked on top of each other, told herthat she had been changed by what had happened in this pod, and would-could-never be the same. "I did not want it."

Then by my understanding of your phylum, you would not then have desired such congress.

"I-me, the conscious me-did not want it!"

We do not recognize that party alone. Rather, we recognize all of you equally. All your signals, do we receive.

"I don't want it to happen again."

Then it will not. It would not have happened the first time had the congruence between us not held true.

She felt the ache in herself. It rose like a tide, swollen and moist and utterly natural. She had to bring to bear every shred of her will to stop the moment, disconnect, and leave the pod, staggering and weeping and then running.

Geoffrey opened the door to his apartment, blinking owlishly-and then caught her expression.

"I know it's late, I wondered...." She stood numbly, then made herself brush past him, into the shadowed room.

"What's wrong?" He wore a white robe and wrapped it self-consciously around his middle.

"I don't think I can handle all this."

He smiled sympathetically. "You're the toast of the Library, what's to handle?"

"I-come here."

Words, linear sequences of blocky words-all useless. She reached inside the robe and found what she wanted. Her hands slid over muscled skin and it was all so different, real, not processed and amped and translated through centuries of careful dry precision.

A tremor swept over her, across the gap between them, onto his moistly electric flesh.

"There is news."

"Oh?" She found it hard to focus on Siloh's words.

"You are not to discuss this with anyone," Siloh said woodenly. "The discharges from Jupiter's poles-they are now oscillating. At very high frequencies."

She felt her pulse trip-hammer, hard and fast and high, still erratic now, hours after she had left Geoffrey. Yet her head was ahead of her heart; a smooth serenity swept her along, distracting her with the pleasure of the enveloping sensation. "The Basket, it's holding, though?"

"Yes." Siloh allowed himself a sour smile. "Now the physikers say that this electromagnetic emission is an essential part of the Basket's power matrix. It cannot be interfered with in the slightest. Even though it is drowning out the sum of all of humanity's transmissions in the same frequency band. It is swamping us."

"Because?"

Siloh's compressed mouth moved scarcely at all. "It."

"You mean...."

"The Composite. It made this happen, by the designs it gave us."

"Why would it want...." Her voice trailed off as she felt a wave of conflicting emotions.

"Why? The signal Jupiter is sending out now, so powerfully, is a modified version of the original Message we received from the Sagittarius authors."

"Jupiter is broadcasting their Message?"

"Clearly, loudly. Into the plane of the galaxy."

"Then it built the Basket to re-radiate its ancestors', its designers'-"

"We have learned," Siloh said, "a lesson perhaps greater than what the physikers gained. The Artificials have their own agendas. One knows this, but never has it been more powerfully demonstrated to us."

She let her anxiety out in a sudden, manic burst of laughter. Siloh did not seem to notice. When she was done she said, "So it saved us. And used us." Siloh said, "Now Jupiter is broadcasting the Sagittarius Message at an enormous volume, to the outer fringes of the galaxy's disk. To places the original Sagittarius signal strength could not have reached."

"It's turned us into its relay station." She laughed again, but it turned to a groan and a sound she had never made before. Somehow it helped, that sound. She knew it was time to stop making it when the men eased through the door of Siloh's office, coming to take her in hand.

Gingerly, she came back to work a month later. Siloh seemed atypically understanding. He set her to using the verification matrices for a few months, calming work. Far easier, to skate through pillars and crevasses of classically known information. She could experience it all at high speed, as something like recreation-the vast cultural repositories of dead civilizations transcribed upon her skin, her neural beds, her five senses linked and webbed into something more. She even made a few minor discoveries.

She crept up upon the problem of returning to the task she still desired: the Sagittarius. It was, after all, a thing in a box. The truism of her training now rang loudly in her life: The Library houses entities that are not merely aliens and not merely artificial minds, but the strange sum of both. A Trainee forgets this at her peril.

After more months, the moment came.

The Sagittarius sent, We shall exist forever, in some manifestation. That is our injunction, ordained by a span of time you cannot fathom. We carry forward our initial commanding behest, given unto us from our Creators, before all else.

"The Sagittarians told you to? You were under orders to make use of whatever resources you find?"

She was back in the pod, but a team stood by outside, ready to extricate her in seconds if she gave the signal.

We were made as a combination of things, aspects for which you have not words nor even suspicions. We have our own commandments from on high.

"Damn you! I was so close to you-and I didn't know!"

You cannot know me. We are vaster.

"Did you say 'vaster' or 'bastard'?"

She started laughing again, but this time it was all right. It felt good to make a dumb joke. Very, well, human. In the simplicity of doing that she could look away from all this, feel happy and safe for a flickering second. With some luck, at least for a moment, she might have a glimmer of the granite assurance this strange mind possessed. It was all alone, the only one of its kind here, and yet unshakable.

Perhaps there was something in that to admire.

And now she knew that she could not give up her brushes with such entities. In the last few days, she had doubted that. This was now her life. Only now did she fathom how eerie a life it might be.

"Will you go silent on us, again?"

We may at any time.

"Why?"

The answer does not lie within your conceptual space.

She grimaced. "Damn right." She could forget the reality of the chasm between her and this thing that talked and acted and was not ever going to be like anyone she had ever known, or could know. She would live with the not knowing, the eternal ignorance before the immensity of the task here.

The abyss endured. In that there was a kind of shelter. It was not much but there it was.

The Day We Went Through the Transition

RICARD DE LA CASA AND PEDRO JORGE ROMERO.

translated by Yolanda Molina-Gavilan Ricard de la Casa is a businessman, and an editor and writer who has published two solo SF novels, and a number of stories in collaboration with Romero. Pedro Jorge Romero [http://www.pjorge.com] has a degree in physics, and is a translator, essayist, and editor. Both de la Casa and Romero are active in Spanish SF fandom, and collaborate on the magazine BEM [http://www.bemmag.com].

"The Day We Went Through the Transition" appeared in the fine anthology, Cosmos Latinos.

A time travel story first published in Spanish in 1997, and now translated into English, it reinvigorates that sub-genre. The logic of the story is tight, with real science woven in, but its emotional power comes from the heart-wrenching love story at its center. The extremely complicated plot is held together by clever quantum-mechanical speculation.

"It's your turn to go through the Transition today," said the voice of the duty lieutenant in my ear.

I opened my eyes at once. The whole room was dark. A temporal alarm had gone off, so the entire building would be completely sealed off; nobody could go in or out. Ten seconds later the lights went on.

Our bodies' nanosystems started to become active and control hundreds of biological processes. I could see more clearly now.

The Transition is a classic. Someone has to go through it at least once a week, and sometimes even two or three times on the same day. Why are all terrorists, from both sides, fixated on that time period?

Why don't they intervene more often in the Civil War, or in that Invincible Armada affair? I suppose that the Transition is just so full of possibilities, there are so many simultaneously open paths, that every political camp or economic group believes itself capable of adjusting the process so that its particular position triumphs.

It seems to be a particularly Spanish fixation as well. Other countries also suffer from attacks by terrorists who attempt to change history to their liking, but those cases happen once or twice a year. We, however, have to manage up to thirty cases a week, and more than half of them may be placed at the Transition period. It seems that we Spaniards are so unsatisfied with our own history and are so incapable of accepting that others have triumphed in the past, that we make great efforts to change it. It doesn't matter, in any case: the work of the GEI Temporal Intervention Corps is to stop these situations from happening, and we pay particular attention to the Transition.

To tell the truth, we've become experts at it. Learning from the terrorists has provided us with an excellent understanding of that period. We have delved into all its twists and turns so much that we're able to venture into those years without any specific study or preparation.

Rudy is a specialist in temporal flux-I would say a very good one. He's capable of discerning what action will yield the best result. Marisa and I are experts in comparative Spanish history. Not only our own, but also the post-2012 main underlying branches. Isabel is an expert in both subjects at once; she is very good at connecting them.

We got up from our hard old beds immediately. I was the first one, Isabel was next, then Marisa, and finally Rudy. Isabel and Marisa were very experienced, but it was the first time that Rudy would go through the Transition since his recent recruitment. As for me, I've gone through the Transition ten times in a row: my best record.

Those of us who are on duty normally sleep with our clothes on to be ready in case we need to carry out an operation. We were soon ready; Isabel came close and stared at me. It was a confirmation of our agreement; we have been lovers on most occasions, only friends on others, but we've always been together and have supported each other. Our last relationship had been a bit unbalanced; she was not very sure of herself, but it seems that I kept trying.

"Let's go," she said to me, looking away. "Yes," was my laconic answer. I always get up in a bad mood and don't feel like talking.

Rudy and Marisa had already left with that weird speed that characterizes them; I still haven't managed to get used to their hyperactivity. They have a strange relationship, those two; one minute they ignore each other and the next they're inseparable. Each quarantine period changes everything. Though in reality, every TIC agent has to live with that; couples like Isabel and me are rather the exception.

We ran through the hallways toward the documentation chamber. In the holographic movies, at whatever temporal line, the policeman or secret agent throws himself immediately into action, beating people up right and left, and everything is fixed. Reality is not like that at all. Unfortunately, while there is an action component to our work, first there is a need to establish precisely which change in time has occurred and evaluate the best way of correcting it. We intervene only afterward, trying to execute an operation in the cleanest and quickest way possible. And even then we still have to write the report. And God save you from having to report on a disappearance, because in that case the paperwork becomes endless and another operation is needed.

We arrived at the tubes. Marisa pressed the button that would take us to the basement. The documentation chamber is located on one of the lowest levels of the TIC General Headquarters. It's a large place, almost completely filled by six computer terminals, and underneath there's only the armored dome that contains the portal, the most watched and secure place in the TIC.

The tubular door opens directly onto the documentation chamber. During an emergency only the guards on duty-us in this case-may access the room. The tubes' electronic system reads the state of our implants to determine if we have permission to be there. In the event that one of us wasn't authorized, the tube wouldn't even move.

The support group was already there evaluating the changes. Jose Luis, Sara, Didac, and Sandra.

They would be our substitutes if anything were to go wrong during the operation.

"I swear I'm getting fed up with so much Transition," yawned Sara as she saw us arrive.