Rachel said to her friend Catkejen, “I’m going crazy. Or maybe I’ve already arrived.”
“Brain-fried with work, maybe,” Catkejen said with a sardonic eye-roll, sipping a barely acceptable red wine—but also the only available, fresh from the fragrant farm domes deep underground.
Rachel still wore the single white patch on her collar—“the mark of the least” as they were known. One-patchers were greener than summer grass. Catkejen had two, so was one leg up in the ladder from Trainee to Librarian. Amid the hub and bub of techtalk of the other Trainees she was sporting a fine plum-colored coat with a laced waistcoat in a deftly contrasting shade, crossed diagonally with a red ribbon. With leggings and heater shoes, current Lunar fashion stressed subtle resistance against the creeping cold of their world, despite the ferocious warmth shed by their reactors. Rachel just wore heavy pseud-wool dresses in severe gray, plus close weave black tights—all free downloads and printouts, but yes, dull. Thrifty was not nifty here, but she didn’t care. She wanted to escape notice, to tend her own internal gardens.
“I’ve added to my historical studies of the dwarf stars,” Rachel made herself say amid the babble of the open-air restaurant, gazing down on the gray work expanses of the lunar plain below. “Something odd going on there.”
“Great era, that was,” Catkejen said, distracted by the stellar displays that coursed across their social area ceilings. Rachel thought the images odd, skies of galaxies and erupting stars. The psychers said such spectacles fended off the boxed-in phobias that plagued many Loonies. “Centuries ago, right? First closeups of the neighbors, the 550 ‘scopes just getting started.”
“I’m looking at the old missions, the microwave-beamed sail ships that scoped out the nearbys.”
Catkejen eyed a passing guy, maybe looking for an evening elsewhere; some of the higher-ups had their own singleton rooms—great for parties, and of course a romantic perk. Catkejen yawned, a clear come-on signal, but the guy just kept moving. “Yeah, long before we knew what a web of interstellar messaging there was.”
Rachel leaned forward to keep Catkejen from diversions. “I’m looking at the 550 lens data, too. Plenty of life-bearing planets around the galaxy’s dwarfs, that says. Some with signs of a civilization, too. But most dwarfstar globes are shrouded in clouds, hard to see.”
Indeed, Rachel loved roving through the images gathered from coasting telescopes of the great theater in the sky, the worlds of the galaxy itself on display. The sun’s focus spot was 550 A.U. out, where gravity gathered starlight into an intense pencil. The many sailship telescopes there fed back distorted images of faraway solar systems, as if seen through a funhouse mirror.
Rachel had learned much by scanning those images. The talent for not dying was distributed undemocratically. Few worlds could dance blithely through a gigayear, or far from their parent star. So many planets—crisp and dry, cloudy and cool, cratered yet with shimmering blue atmospheres—and stars, sometimes in crowded clusters, at times seen close-up and going nova in bright, virulent streamers, or in tight orbits around unseen companions that might be neutron stars or black holes. After a while even exotic alien landscapes became repetitious for her: blue-green mountain ranges scoured by deep gray rivers, placid oceans brimming with green scum, arid tan desert worlds ground down under heavy brooding brown atmospheres. Many ways for life to blossom, or die: ice worlds aplenty beneath starry skies, grasslands with four-footed herds roaming as volcanoes belched red streamers in the distance, oceans with huge beasts wallowing in enormous crashing waves, places hard to identify in the swirling pink mists. Life adapts, indeed.
Catkejen rolled her eyes. “Um. That improves your stats?”
“In time, sure. Mostly I just … follow my nose.”
Catkejen leaned forward too, her ironic wry grin mocking. “Look, your nose should lead you to use the Seekers of Script more. You’re behind in code-processing—way behind, gal!”
Meaning, of course, Look, I have two patches already. The Seekers of Script were supposedly below Trainees, but more experienced in deciphering SETI messages, using brute force methods from cryptology. They assisted Trainees and reported to Librarians. Rachel reported to a Prefect and Catkejen, at a higher level, now answered to the enigmatic Noughts. All this staff layering the SETI Library had amassed through two centuries of calcification.
Rachel dodged the advice. “How’s your Nought?”
“Let’s say he—uh, it—relishes the cadences of the language.”
“Ah! You mean it’s an incorrigible windbag.” Apparently having no actual sexual organs led to verbal ejaculations instead. Just another gender choice, it seemed.
“Right, downright gushy.” Catkejen had changed her hair to tarnished silver but her voice was still of scrap brass. Rachel envied her ability to conform to Library’s Byzantine styles. Clothes and skin enhancers were the classic methods of competition and display. Men wore Rapunzel hair down to the shoulder blades at the moment. Women had great tangled thickets of hair in the armpits, often displayed in string-shirts. All this, despite the strange blend of decadent excess and harsh asceticism that prevailed in elite Library culture. To Rachel this was a special puzzle comparable to a labyrinthine SETI message.
“I heard they thinned some Trainees last week,” Catkejen whispered, glancing around. “No announcement, just—poof!—you notice some are missing.”
“Part of the method,” Rachel said. They had seen this before. Those Trainees of both sexes, or even none, who had gotten by Earthside by being pert, pretty, perky were soon memories.
The Library had begun as a minor academic offshoot, back when there were few SETI messages and none had been well deciphered. Under rigorous mathematical methods, Artilects, and objective though human minds like the Noughts, it had grown in prestige and influence, into a citadel where there was a
