Shadows of Eternity

by Gregory Benford

Genres: Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

"A fascinating plunge into a new world. I loved the idea of the SETI Library on the moon. Chasing wormholes is also a wild ride!"—Jack McDevitt, bestselling author of Octavia Gone



Shadows of Eternity is legendary author Gregory Benford's return to interstellar science fiction as a discovery within the SETI library on the moon turns out to be deadly.



Shadows of Eternity is a novel set two centuries from now. Humanity has established a SETI library on the moon to decipher and interpret the many messages from alien societies we have discovered. The most intriguing messages are from complete artificial intelligences.



Ruth, a beginner Librarian, must talk to alien minds—who have aggressive agendas of their own. She opens doors into strangeness beyond imagination—and in her quest for understanding nearly gets killed doing it.

Release date: October 19, 2021

Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press

Print pages: 448

Sample

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.

 

2.

“Your ambition?” Prefect Stiles raised an eyebrow.

She had not expected such a question. “To, uh, translate. To explore, to learn.”

It sounded lame even to her ears, and his disdainful scowl showed that he had expected some such rattled response. He was tall and bald, his Asian features expressive. Very well then, be more assertive. Use her idea.

“Particularly, if I may, from the Sagittarius Architecture.”

This took the Prefect’s angular face by surprise, though he quickly covered by pursing his leathery mouth. “That is an ancient problem. It was transmitted over a millennium ago, received half a century ago. Inscrutable, though sentient. Surely you do not expect that a Trainee could make headway in such a classically difficult challenge.”

“I might,” she shot back crisply. “Precisely because it’s so well documented.”

“Decades of well-marshaled inquiry have told us very little of the Sagittarius Architecture. It is a specimen from the highest order of Sentient Information, and will not reward mere poking around.”

“Still, I’d like a crack at it.”

“A neophyte—”

“May bring a fresh perspective.”

They both knew that by tradition at the Library, incoming candidate Trainees could pick their first topic, though few did. Most deferred to the reigning conventional wisdom and took up a small Message, something from a Type I Civilization just coming onto the galactic stage. Something resembling what Earth had sent out in its first efforts—to which it got few replies. To tackle a really big problem was foolhardy.

But some smug note in the Prefect’s arrogant gaze had kindled an old desire in her. She felt it simmering.

He sniffed. “To merely review previous thinking would take a great deal of time.”

She leaned forward in her chair. “I have studied the Sagittarius for years. It became something of a preoccupation of mine.”

“Ummm.” The Prefect was strangely austere in his unreadable face, the even tones of his neutral sentences.

She had little experience with people like this. Deciphering him seemed to require the same sort of skills she had fashioned through years of training—riddling out the alien, yes. But at the moment she felt only a yawning sense of her inexperience, amplified by the stretching silence in this office. The Prefect could be right, after all. She started to phrase a gracious way to back down. He eyed her for a long moment.

“I have found that we here often have an experience that is deeply enlightening, one not granted to everyone. It is the experience of finding that you have been wrong about something. The world has been greatly damaged by political and religious leaders who were sure they knew the truth. We learn to profit from error.”

Rachel saw that this man was balanced at a turning point. He could go either way. An idea occurred. She knew the next seconds would decide the issue, so she used it.

“About the Sagittarius. There is an ancient story about the composer Mozart.” The Prefect frowned, interested. She rushed ahead. “A man approached Mozart and said, ‘I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any suggestions as to how to get started?’ Mozart said, ‘A symphony is a very complex musical form. Perhaps you should begin with something simpler. A song, perhaps.’ His admirer said, ‘But, Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were eight years old.’ Mozart said, ‘Yes, but I never asked anybody how.’ ”

A surprised smile creased the Prefect’s face. That looked odd, as though it had been delivered to the wrong address.

He suppressed a laugh and then made a small sound, something like a sigh. “Very well. Report weekly.”

She blinked. “Um, many thanks.”

The Prefect turned away, waving a 3-D screen into view, where it hung in the air, awaiting use. An abrupt dismissal.

 

3.

After the interview she had expected some ceremonious welcome. The Prefect’s grave dignity implied such, but reality handed Rachel a swift descent. She went to a Chief Clerk and delivered a thumbprint, an optical eye read, and some DNA, then signed agreements in the old-fashioned way with the linked IDs in digital concert. The clerk who did this yawned, her tongue fidgeting among her teeth for some morsel left over from breakfast. The clerk nodded, head-wagged toward a side door—and Rachel was back in the main corridor, dismissed without a word. Again.

The Purser’s office was across the hall. She went into it and soon enough was back in the same hall. Everyone here seemed to think she, in the Purser’s words, “knew the drill,” but she didn’t. She had forgotten to study the curt notes her wrist yielded up, once she thought to tap it. That had always been a problem for her. She had gotten out of a small town in Louisiana by learning to focus on problems until she could solve them, sure. But that always meant she ignored the obvious in the rest of the world, including prompts sent to her by the Library staff. She sighed and got on with it.

Rachel smoothed her ornate, severely traditional Trainee shift as she left the Purser’s office, an old calming gesture she could not train away. The shift was pricey in the sense that she could not cover it with her ready cash. She simply signed for it to be taken from her monthly wage, and the Purser printed out hers in blue.

Now her big mouth had gotten her into a fix, and she could see no way out. Not short of going back in there and asking for the Prefect’s guidance, to find a simpler Message, something she could manage.

She stopped in midstride. To hell with that. No going back. She shook her head to cement her resolve.

Take a walk, she thought. Let your unconscious process all this.

She had come down from low Lunar orbit only the day before. The rotating funicular had brought her compartment gracefully into a snug magnetic catcher, zooming down in a box, in the obliging gravity. A week before she had been in Melbourne, Australia. The Councilors liked to keep a firm hold on who entered the Library’s labyrinths. They had put candidates through their final scholastic work in a bustling focal point beside foaming waves and tawny beaches. Those Trainee candidates who could resist the sunny temptations made it through. As a sheep-goat separator—a saying her mother used, from her old farming days—it worked well. Luna was a more solemn place, time-steeped and unchanging. Plus, it was basically a bunch of boxes with dry, cool air and tricky grav.

She savored the stark ivory slopes of craters in the distance as she walked in the springy gait of one still adjusting to the gravity.

Sagittarius, here I come.

 

4.

Rachel found she wanted to talk. Catkejen was the obvious victim.

So she went back to the apartment. Her mind was jumpy with delight and ambition, despite the blasé Chief Clerk and the bored Purser. So she sat down and fetched forth from her luggage her 3-D chess kit. It popped up, a simple one with no attention light prompts and no tech for making remote moves. The transparent trays and pieces were simple, too, no ornamentation.

She put on music that helped her focus, set up the game, and started on a solo platform, when—in came Catkejen. “Finished early. Had a system datajam, the AIs have to untangle it first, so here I am. What’s that music?”

Rachel said, “ ‘Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan.’ Which means ‘What God does is well done.’ ”

“New to me. What period?”

“Baroque, Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed this church cantata in 1724.”

Catkejen listened for a long moment to the Bachian sibilant strum cascading through the room, shook her head as if to clear it, and said, “Hey, is that three-D chess?”

“Uh, sure. I use it to keep sharp. A trick I learned in preTrainee school.”

“When I was growing up, I thought chess was the biggest waste of smarts outside Earthside governments.”

“We’re not Earthside, so…”

A shrug, raised eyebrow. “I never learned three-D. Show me.”

Catkejen sat decisively across from Rachel, so she decided to be diplomatic and not go too fast. “We call it solid chess. You’ve played flat chess?” That would help a lot.

“Some. This has more pieces and another dimension to move in, right?”

“More than that. The idea is, the extra dimension is outer space. Earth plays out with knights and queens and all, like ancient times, but the deeper moves are up, into space.”

Catkejen frowned, fingering some of the nonclassic pieces. “So these ships fly to planets?”

“These small ones are robo-freighters, move one space at a time, like pawns. Sailships driven by beams are like bishops, moving laterally, too. Big passenger ships move in lateral jumps, like knights.”

Catkejen twisted a lip, pondering. “The theme here is…?”

“Earth versus the solar system. War in the heavens.”

They started a game and it went steadily, though Catkejen took her time, until finally she said, “Why seek out such complexity? Flat chess is hard enough.”

“Trainee school encourages this. It helps you think of patterns in multiple ways.”

“Like reading the Messages?”

“I hope playing this for over a decade helps me when I start.”

Catkejen swept the boards with both hands, saying brightly, “Hey, right! So much for your prep! You’re in. Let’s go out, celebrate!”

“I start tomorrow. I think I should meditate a bit, get rested—”

Catkejen stood, so energetic she rose to the ceiling and bounced off the cushions there. “I have some guys ’n’ gals you’ll want to meet. C’mon!”

---

Most Lunans—the Earthside polite term, though Rachel soon learned that people here preferred to call themselves Loonies, with a bit of swagger—lived in lava tubes. Tubes were plentiful, since Luna had no plate tectonics and all the early volcanoes still stood above their maria plains.

Catkejen led her into a big one filled with bioteched bamboo forests, the grass of Luna. The slender rods ten meters high rustled with the warm breeze that made them wave like fields of giant grain. “You get hungry for live color here,” Catkejen said. “The white plains of Luna don’t cut it for us. So we have green and yellow and even pink bamboo. Better than old-style Earthy trees.”

Rachel was surprised to find giant agapanthus blooming in the looming tube cavern. The pioneer colonizers had left among the bamboo thickets sculptures of fat Asian wise men with stony basilisk stares. These lined the lava tube, two hundred meters down. The tube walls were dark reds and blacks and nearly airtight. Once lava had flowed here, before heavy impacts slowed and the restless young satellite began to cool, about four billion years back. Along the stretched-out town a stream tinkled and splashed. “An extravagance,” Catkejen said, doing a graceful dance on a skinny bridge crossing the stream. Above, skybridges carried purring motor traffic and ziplines let people crisscross above them.

“This is the Contemplation Garden,” Catkejen said. “Calming. Plus a shortcut to the clubs.”

They walked through long winding paths amid the rattling of bamboo. These thin, fast-growing rods made sturdy building strength—beams and slats, leaves pulped into paper and hard cardboard. Buzz saws whined in the distance as robo-carpenters harvested the latest. Ground-up bamboo oddments sloshed around in spinning tubs, making blended topsoil with regolith crushed rock. Bamboo dust tainted the air with a lively spice. Rachel took springy longsteps along the pathways, for exercise. The complex was a brutalist style with countering soaring arches, all gray but offset with bamboo greenery.

A green-skinned gardener kneeled beside the footpath, and Catkejen greeted her. The woman kept kneading the rugged regolith soil, saying, “Planted as seedlings, no taller than chives.” The slow chant continued as they walked away and Rachel murmured, “Impeccable dactylic tetrameter, too.”

Catkejen chuckled. “Forgot, roomie, your Trainee discipline showing, O Seeker After Patterns.”

They rounded a corner and suddenly it was all bright, airy, and overlit. Transparent walls, neon-bright, downright gaudy. Noisy, too.

“We’ve got plenty of silicon, so glassy stuff the robots make, right here straight from regolith,” Catkejen said, thumping a wall of ruby-colored stuff. “Plus Mooncrete, solid and firm but no water needed, just flash-gouts of electricity to do the binding.”

Floodlights glared from artful shrubbery and bathed a lattice-walk a hundred meters high. Crowd chatter rained down on them as they climbed a rope ladder out of the Contemplation Garden into its opposite cacophony. Brilliant white light emphasized black-trimmed, three-story windows rising in uninterrupted, eye-leading verticals toward a dominant, austere dome mimicked from some classic pile of ancient Rome. But beneath all this was five layers of shops and bars.

The ramps hosted dives where people were lively, doing crazy-looking dances in the low grav and slurping up outrageous drinks. Some did a kind of square dance, bouncing off the padded walls. The gaiety was grand, but a keep-your-hands-on-your-purse vibe pervaded. “Honky-Tonk Avenue,” Catkejen said with a grandiose, satiric arm-wave.

Rachel saw in a single glance flicking alligator shoes a-dancing, fancy fedoras, flouncy scarlet dresses, camel-hair sheath coats, and purple antique suits in wool and a lurid shantung. The dives had ornate names: Palace of Green Porcelain next to the Tolstoy of the Zulus, Smoke’em If You Got’em rubbing shoulders with the Red, White & You, and Hell & High Water, whose garish signs said it featured drinkable drugs. Catkejen waved these away and led her into So Eat Already, where a welcoming table of Catkejen’s friends erupted in noisy greetings.

Rachel sat and stayed silent, listening to the talky barrage:

“—that damn pressure door sealed tighter than a constipated frog’s ass—”

“—way I figure it, illegal pheromones give guys too much advantage—”

“—but me, when politics gets exciting, I reach for my hat.”

“—I swear, after that grainy gruel we got at the cafeteria yes’day, I dreamed of Prefects eating supper, slurping up beef and champagne, with a tail-coated snooty footman behind every chair—”

“—thing is, just data isn’t information. Information isn’t knowledge. The Message AIs—”

“—so even though it’s a spaceship, not a seaship, they say things like ‘they have him tied across a table in the fo’c’sle’; then he’s saved by a raiding party of pirates, one of them strides into the scene and says, ‘God, this here ship’s a very floatin’ Gomorry!’ and—what are you laughing at?”

Rachel wondered how she could catch up. That bar they’d passed, named Smoke’em If You Got’em—she had no idea why; a classical allusion?

Catkejen shushed them. “Hey, this is my new roommate, Rachel Cohen. A Trainee, passed the Prefect’s sniff test.”

“Next comes the… Naaaughttt…” A bony guy used deep bass notes to convey menace, grinning.

“May he rust in piss,” came a voice.

“He? Not a he or a she, that’s the point,” a big guy said. Rachel noted he sported ruffled silver hair and an air of casual elegance. He gave her a glance, looked away.

Catkejen said, “Hey, gang, keep our normal smartassery level down a bit, Rachel’s not used to our lacerating Loonie lingo.”

Rachel blinked and wrapped her face up with a fixed smile. The buzz moved on and she took it in, soaking in the talky tides. She considered the strata that ruled here, sanctified by over a century of intense work. They had been abstractions to her before, but here were real.

The pyramid of power in the Library of Intelligences, traditionally called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was rigid:

1. Prefects
2. Noughts
3. Librarians
4. Trainees
5. Seekers of Script
6. Miners

Below those higher ranks were the Novices, from whose ranks Rachel had just graduated after years of hard work, back Earthside. She had gained a First, meaning she’d leapfrogged over two ranks to become a Trainee. Below her now were Seekers of Script, who assisted Trainees and reported to Librarians. Below them, and the real strength of the Library, were Miners, more commonly referred to among the lower ranks as Hounds. The venerable terms came from the “data dogs” or “code miners” of nearly ancient times, before the Library had moved to Luna. At least she did not have to deal with the sexless Noughts. And most around this crowded table were, like Catkejen, Seekers of Script. And rowdy, now, in the company of someone fresh from Earthside, who had sprinted past them….

“To the Prefects we’re all just happy little data points,” said a bulky woman to her left, snapping Rachel out of her introspections. The woman was the one who had made the “rust in piss” comment. She had billowy blond hair and a dominant air, and turned to Rachel with, “How you like living on Luna?”

“Let’s just say our bathroom is not a religious experience.”

A snort. “Let’s just say? Trainees and Hounds can’t choose.”

Rachel nodded grimly.

“Name’s Ruby,” the woman said, shooting out a hand. “I’m a Hound.”

Rachel shook; strong grip. “Rachel Cohen.”

The woman leaned near and chuckled, “Succulent,” maybe just the booze talking. “Some say I’m a reg’lar hound dog.”

Feeling uncomfortable, Rachel sought a simple topic. “How many people work in the Library?”

“About half.” Ruby gave a big, booming laugh.

Catkejen leaned in from Rachel’s right and whispered, “Smile and sling the slang and keep your lip zipped. Unless you’d like to kiss a likable somebody.”

This was going too fast for Rachel. Luckily a spindly woman came to the table, surveying them with authority, and they all fell silent. She smiled and barked out, “Greetings to the newbie, welcome, Rachel. I’m MeiLee. We’ll start with heirloom tomatoes, fresh from the agro lava tubes.”

So it was. Servers brought plates with big red slices on them, richly flavored with oil.

Rachel blinked. “There’s dirt on them.”

MeiLee said, “Yeah, our robo-scrubbers clean this place too damn much. Best to go farm-to-fork, direct. Good old-fashioned dirt with microbes galore helps your health, especially allergies. So we say, screw the robos. I engaged last night with a miner who played by percentages in a certain card game. Never bet on percentages; skill carries the day over time. I came out ahead and swept up his latest crop, grime as an extra spice.”

Rachel tasted one. “Delicious.” She could not keep her surprise out of the word.

The silver-haired guy leaned toward her and said, “See, dirt here’s salty, a good thing. Salt acts as a facilitator of ion transfers and, simply put, enables your taste buds to get the food signal at a higher volume than without the salt-based assistance.”

Not to be outdone, Ruby came in with, “Plus, the amount of salt matters. There are specific ratios of salt to water in your saliva where too much salt will activate some of the receptors you don’t want activated so much and give you a surge of bitter or sour reaction. If you’ve ever oversalted something, that’s what I’m talking about.”

Silver Hair flowed right back: “Salt’s just a volume knob for your food. At lowish doses, it boosts the signal on many of your sweet and savory receptors, but at too high a dose, you get feedback, and that’s when the ‘salty’ kicks in.”

Catkejen intervened. “Around here, as you can see, you can never be overdressed or overeducated.”

Soon enough the gang was taking up anagram challenges. Minds skipped playfully through language. Now that Rachel thought of it, that was somewhat the task of the Library: to sense the deeper realms of alien Messages. The silver-haired guy won with an instant solution to “phoneboxes,” snapping out, “Got it—‘xenophobes,’ my friends.”

Oddly, he said it in a soothing, melodic voice. That was… interesting—Rachel’s usual dodge description. She had always disliked the way women would refer to men as “cute” and think that explained something. Men weren’t cute. They were handsome or ugly or boyish or an éminence grise in the making. Cute, no; not to Rachel. More like rugged.

A plonking rhythm started up on the other side of the ample room.

Behind the semielliptical bar four cowboys who had never been near a cow sang western songs. These sounded as if they had originated in the Far East, at best. Somebody dropped the acoustic dome over their table, a sonic interferometer, and the fake folksy mercifully faded.

Somebody passed an inhalant she called a “spritzer” and Rachel had a lung or two. Then a sip, maybe two, of a red wine somebody said was Lunagrown and tasted like it. Talk accelerated around her, an effect she noted with owlish fascination.

“—so I said to him, quoting the old saying, ‘Don’t look into laser with remaining eye.’ And he just shrugged. Not like he can’t get his fried one replaced.”

“—as Lunaticky as a plaid rabbit—”

“—this guy’s face is his autobiography, right there.” A man flaunting oakpale hair beside her shot back, “These days, a woman’s face is her work of fiction.”

“—We all need to wake up and smell the Kafka, gang—”

“—the Cauchy singular integral operator on weighted variable Lebesgue spaces—how charming!”

Here came a refresh of her old lesson: watching other people getting drunk and more brilliant by the moment, so they thought, was even less interesting than watching other people having sex. Though that, at least, had an athletic payoff.

She just sat and drank some and watched, gathering info, while a guy across from her directed a fast stream of talk at her, a standard brilliant disheveled klutz, going on about something in basic decoding software. She relaxed. Men loved explaining things. But when a guy was explaining something you already knew, she had learned that while it might be tempting to say, “I already know that,” it was not a wise move. Instead, she let him explain it to make him feel useful. That gave her time to think about how to avoid him in the future. Plus about a half dozen others among the present company, off her list. She was studying her social landscape and making maps. Not for the first time, or even the dozenth. Still, fun, in its way.

A hand jerked her up, out of her seat, away. “Bedtime, roomie,” Catkejen whispered.

“What? Uh. I was just—”

With a sigh, Catkejen said, “See that bongo silver-haired guy from Mars? As sleek as a jet plane with all the right muscular massive curves in all the right swervy places, with the kind of quiet voice that does nothing to disguise the turbocharged power purring under that immaculate chassis.”

“Uh…”

“He’s eyeing you. Best not let him see you barf up the slop we’re ingesting. Unladylike, even by Earthside standards.”

“Oh, I…” Was she feeling sick? Rachel looked back at the laughing, talking, drinking gang. They seemed unfazed—but then, they were used to Luna’s oddities.

Somehow without feeling her legs at all she was moving away, tugged by her roomie, who said, “I’ve had my fill of spleen-venting, spittle-spattering mirth, so let’s get outta—”

Ruby the boisterous moved up and shot out a hand again, not for a shake. Instead, she wrapped a muscular arm around Rachel’s waist. Her face loomed up and planted a big smacking kiss.