Eater (12 page)

Benjamin clasped her to him with a trembling energy. She kissed him with an equal fervor and then, without a word or the need of any, he left for the Center.

She had agreed to rest a good part of each day, but insisted on being at the Center for a few hours, at least. Each day he hoped she would just plain rest, and each day he was disappointed. She came up around noon to catch the day’s energy at its full swell. Benjamin was pleased that even in the hubbub, people looked after her, included her in the flow of work. There was quite enough of it to share.

They had both been surprised at how quickly the U.S. government had gotten in line on the cultural transfer process. The usual cautionary voices had loudly complained about giving away secrets that could be used against all humanity, but the sheer strangeness of the Eater made it hard to see how a digitized image of the Parthenon could be a defense secret. “Good ol’ Carl Sagan,” Channing had remarked. “Who would’ve guessed that his view of aliens would have infiltrated the Congress?”

Indeed, they needed a figure like Sagan, dead now for decades, who could command the confidence of the greater public. Like all good popularizers in science, he had been roundly punished for it by his colleagues, denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the subject of
tsk-tsk
gossip by many who were not his equals as scientist
or educator. No such astronomer had arisen since Sagan’s time, and the best the profession could muster were various pale figures from the usual scientific bureaucracy. Compared with them, Kingsley did quite well, and so had undertaken a lot of the Center’s public relations work—when not shouldered aside by Arno.

Both Benjamin and Kingsley suspected that the political leadership was mounting precautionary measures, but there was no insider word of such plans. At the Center all policy matters, and even the different spectral bands of the observing teams, had become more and more boxed into neat little compartments.

The Center was preoccupied with shepherding the data flow to the Eater. Channing had become edgy and preoccupied, following the Eater news obsessively, making fun of Arno. (“Maybe his major purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.”) Sometimes she seemed to surprise even herself with her brittle humor, as if she did not fully know how black a mood lay beneath it.

Benjamin thought about her, fruitlessly as usual, as he came into the new wing of the Center. It had been thrown up in a day by teams who descended in massive helicopters. The big new office complex was a rectangular intrusion into a hillside carved unceremoniously for it. Each floor was one big room, the nondenominational Office: a three-dimensional grid bounded below by a plane of thin nylon carpet, two meters above by a parallel plane of pale acoustical tile. This space suffered punctuation by vertical Sheetrock planes that came to shoulder height, barely enough to give the illusion of partial privacy and damp conversations. Squares of recessed fluorescent lighting beamed down on the symbolic Euclidean realization of pragmatic idealism, a space of unimpeded flows. Spherical immersion tanks dotted the space between the rectangular sheets that stretched to infinity, and around them technicians moved with insect energies. In these the cyber-link specialists kept in close touch with the array of satellites and sensors they now had spying on the interloper.

A cube farm: big rooms clogged with cubicles for the drones. When something loud happened, the prairie-dog heads would pop up over the half-height walls.

As the Eater plunged closer to Jupiter, it had rhapsodized about alien cultures it had visited, sending samples of outré art via the microwave high-bandwidth links. Some were released to the public, particularly if they seemed innocuous. Predictably, distinctions between “photographs” and “art” were difficult to make. There were apparently straightforward views of landscapes, odd life-forms, stars, and planets, even some “cities” that might just as well have been regularly arranged hills. With thousands of such images to chew upon, the public seemed satisfied.

Carefully the government figures charged with filtering the information did not give away the true vast size of the galleys it sent. Nor did they release unsettling images of grotesque scenes, hideous aliens, and unaccounted-for devastation. The Eater provided little or no commentary, so battalions of assembled art critics, photo experts, and other sorts labored to interpret these.

So far the world reaction had been varied—there were always alarmists—but comparatively mild. The sense of wonder was working overtime among the world media, though that would undoubtedly give way in time, Benjamin thought.

The more advanced works were another matter. These the computers had assembled into holographic forms and an entire yawning gallery displayed them. Benjamin stopped there to see what was new. Even knowing how much effort was being marshalled worldwide on deciphering the Eater’s transmission load, he was daily astonished at how much new work appeared.

It was eerie work, subtly ominous. Portraits of creatures and places in twisted perspectives, 3D manifestations of objects that appeared impossible, color schemes that plainly operated beyond the visible range.

He went into the Big Screen Room. The ranging grid
showed the orange profile of the Eater at the very edge of Jupiter’s moon system. There was a crowd and he found a seat at the back only because a new staffer gave up his, leaping to his feet when he saw Benjamin’s ID badge.

A murmur. Benjamin watched as one of the Searcher ’scopes came online. Its high-resolution image flickered through several spectral ranges, settled on the best. Kingsley materialized in the seat beside him; a staffer had given up his for the Astronomer Royal. The incoming image sharpened at the hands of the specialists. “It’s veered in the last hour,” Kingsley whispered, “and appears headed for an outer moon of the system.”

“Couldn’t we have predicted that?”

“Some did.” Kingsley shrugged. “It does not respond to questions about its plans.”

“Still? I thought it was talking more now.”

“The linguists have given up trying to render its little parables in literal ways.”

“They seem more like puzzles to me.”

“That, too. ‘Cultural dissonance,’ as one of them termed it.”

“I’ll have to remember that one.” Benjamin grinned dryly. “Sounds almost like it means something.”

Suddenly the screen brightened. In a spectacular few seconds, the orange profile warped into a slender funnel, blazing brightly.

“It’s ingesting,” Kingsley said matter-of-factly. “I suppose it met a tasty rock.”

“We knew it had some motivation.”

“Note how no one seems very worried? I believe we are all simply too tired for that.”

“I wondered if it was just me. I figured I was beyond being surprised anymore.”

“I rather hope so.”

Benjamin had stacks of work waiting in his office, but once again he gave way to the temptation of just watching. The Eater was moving at nearly a hundredth the speed of
light, an incredible velocity. The plasma types had given up hope of explaining how its magnetic fields could withstand the sheer friction of encountering solid matter and ionizing it.

“Something beyond our present understanding is happening right before our eyes,” Kingsley murmured. “I have almost gotten used to these routine miracles it performs.”

The images coiled into a complex conduit of magnetic fields, etched out in the brilliant radiance of superheated matter. In a few moments, it had destroyed a moon, grazing it just right, so that some matter was sucked in while the majority was thrown away, adding thrust.

A keening note sounded in the room. A fresh signal, high and sharp. “It now sends us codes earmarked for audio playing, once it worked out how our hearing functions,” Kingsley whispered.

“It’s…weird. Ugly,” Benjamin said.

“I believe a proper translation is that it is singing to ‘all humanity’ as part of its payment for our cultural legacy.”

Benjamin studied Kingsley’s lean profile in the shadows. “It’s like some…”

“We should not impose our categories upon it,” Kingsley said crisply.

“Sounds like you’ve been listening to the semiotics people again.”

“Just trying to keep an open mind.”

“Damn it, to me that stuff sounds like, like…”

“A deranged god, yes.”

“Maybe in all that time between the stars, it’s gotten crazy.”

“By its own account—one we have received, but it is so complex the specialists still can’t find human referents—it has endured such passages many millions of times.”

“So it says.”

Kingsley nodded, a sour sigh of fatigue escaping. “And we have come to accept what it says.”

The semiotics teams had been feeding it vast stores of cultural information, with some commentary to help it fathom
the masses of it. Most texts, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica—still the best all-round summary of knowledge—were already available in highly compressed styles. These flowed out and were duly digested.

Material from the sciences encountered no trouble; the intruder hardly commented upon them, except to remark obliquely on their “engaging simplicity.” Benjamin took this to be an attempt at a compliment, while others seemed to see it as an insult.

The social sciences came next. These confused the Eater considerably. It asked many questions that led them back to the vocabulary lessons. The Eater did not have categories that translated readily into ethics, aesthetics, or philosophy.

The arts were even harder. It seemed unable to get beyond pictorial methods that were not nearly photographic; abstractions it either asked many puzzled questions about or ignored. In this the Eater seemed to ally with the majority of current popular taste.

“I wonder if it is telling us the truth about anything.” Benjamin mused.

Kingsley’s mouth tipped up on one end. “Why would it lie? It can stamp upon us as if we were insects.”

Benjamin nodded and suddenly felt Kingsley as a fellow soldier in arms, worn by the same incessant pressures.

“Crazy, you said?” Kingsley said distantly. “From the long times it has spent between the stars? Remember, it has been alone all its life. Do not think of it as a social being.”

“But it asks for social things, our culture.”

Kingsley mused silently, watching the orange signature on the screen creep toward the rim of the gas giant planet, and then said suddenly, “Crazy? I would rather use an Americanism,
spooky.
”

Benjamin wondered if their speculations had any less foundation than what the semiotics and social science teams said. “I heard a biologist talking at the coffee machine the other day. He pointed out that it may be the only member of its species.”

“That makes no sense. We still have no idea how it came to be.”

“Something tells me we’re going to find out.”

“From it?”

“It may not even know.”

“Find out from experience, then?”

“Yeah.”

The next several hours were as unsettling as anything Benjamin had ever encountered.

The black hole and its attendant blossom of magnetic flux swooped in toward the banded crescent. An air of anxious foreboding settled over the viewers at this meeting between Jupiter—the solar system’s great gas giant, a world that had claimed the bulk of all the mass that orbited its star—and a hole in space-time that had the mass of a moon packed into a core the size of a table.

Its trajectory arced down into the vast atmosphere. And in a long, luminous moment, the Eater drank in a thick slice of the upper layers, gulping in hydrogen with glowing magnetic talons.

The audience around Benjamin came to life. Gasps and murmurs filled the room. There were few words and he caught an undertone of uneasy dread.

The image shifted as the bristling glow followed a long, looping flyby. To study life-forms that do exist there, it said. It even sent short spurts of lectures on the forms it found. One of Kingsley’s new aides brought word of these messages, printed out from the translators, as they came in.

“Look at the detail,” Benjamin read at Kingsley’s shoulder. “Balloon life, a thousand kilometers deep into the cloud deck.”

“It is teaching us about our own neighborhood,” Kingsley said.

“Yeah, along with a few remarks about our being unable to do it.”

“Well, that is one rather human trait,” Kingsley remarked sardonically. “Plainly it loves having an audience.”

“It’s been alone for longer than we’ve had a civilization.”

In the next hour, it compared its findings with similar dives into other massive worlds it had known.

Data swarmed in. Sliding sheets of information filled screens throughout the Center. Sighing, Kingsley remarked, “Data is not knowledge, and certainly it is not wisdom. What does this
mean
?”

As they watched through a long, laboring afternoon, the swelling magnetic blossom dove and gained mass—three times. An enormous, luminous accretion disk spread out like a circle around it.

Arno appeared before them, gray and shaken. “We have just registered fresh jets of high-energy emission from it. The atmospheric entries are over. We have a preliminary determination of its trajectory.”

They all waited through a confused silence. Arno did not seem able to speak. Then he said, “The…intruder…it has again picked up speed—and is headed for Earth.”

Benjamin bowed his head and realized he had known it all along. He turned toward Kingsley and in narrowed, apprehensive eyes he saw the same knowledge.

MAY

She had hoped it was Benjamin, home early with the latest news, but instead the thrumming in the driveway was a package delivery woman. She opened the package to discover—oh, joy!—that the Right to Die Society had targeted her with an offer of a do-it-yourself home suicide kit. The four-color glossy foldout was lovingly detailed.

Their primary product was the Exit Bag, with its “sturdy clear plastic sack the size of a garbage bag, a soft elastic neckband, and Velcro fasteners to ensure a snug fit, plus detailed instructions for use.” Quite a well-done brochure, especially when one realized that they were not expecting a lot of repeat business.

She made a special trip out through the garden to throw this into the trash, heaving it with a grunt of relish. Somehow, in this age of zero privacy, her illness had become a marketable trait. Sickies were usually stuck at home, so they could be targeted. She had hung a chalkboard next to the telephone for messages and when salesmen called she would run her fingernails across it until they hung up. Somehow the sound never had irritated her, so she might as well use the fact to advantage.

She paused in the garden, drawing in the sweet tropical air with real relish, and just for fun punched Benjamin’s dartboard backing. The slam of her fists into it was no doubt
deplorable, primitive, pointless—and oddly satisfying. The exertion left her panting, head swimming.

As her reward, the world gave her the growl of a car as it spat gravel coming down their driveway. She angled over to greet Benjamin and again it wasn’t him. Kingsley unlimbered from his small sports car, one of the tiny jobs that flaunted its fuel economy. His frame was slimly elegant in gray slacks with a flowery Hawaiian shirt.

“I was going by—”

“Never mind, I haven’t seen enough of you for days and days,” she said with a quick fervor that surprised her.
Where’s that from
?

“I had hoped to catch Benjamin. I’m coming back from an emergency meeting in Hilo, held in a massive airplane standing on the runway. It would seem that is the new technique for being security conscious, control all access.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Good to see you.”

“It was more Washington people?”

“And U.N., yes. Lots of frowns, shows of concern, brave speeches. No ideas, of course.”

“Any concrete help?”

“They are hopelessly behind the curve. When confronted with something genuinely new, the bulk of the U.N. responds on time scales of years, not hours.”

“Is the United States doing any better—really?”

“A bit, but only by standing aside and letting the U Agency operate. You may recall I had something like that in mind.”

“Ah, that Brit modesty again. Most becoming.”

During the worldwide panic of the last few days, she had been more happy than ever to be on the most isolated island chain in the world. The U Agency had seized access to the Big Island and was buttoning up the place. The Agency remained mysterious even in action, which kept the media mavens abuzz but information-starved. As nearly as she could judge, with some cryptic remarks from Kingsley, it had emerged as the can-do element in the U.S. government,
in collaboration with various allies. Bureaucratic style favored setting up a new agency to actually do things, while the older agencies spent time in turf wars. This stood in the long tradition of the CIA, which begat the NSA, and onward during the late TwenCen into a plethora of acronymed “black technology infrastructure” groups, which then eventually demanded consolidation into the U Agency, with its larger than purely national agenda. Or so she gathered.

“How’s the news?” she said with an attempt at lightness, ushering him with body language into the garden.

“We made an enormous public relations error in announcing the time of the Eater’s Jupiter rendezvous. I see that now.”

“Did we have a choice? Any competent astronomer could calculate it.”

“True, but we could have controlled admittance to the large telescopes’ images. Perhaps even prevented the visual media from getting close-ups of what it did to Jupiter.”

“Don’t blame yourself. It would come out—hell, every amateur with a ten-inch telescope could
see
the flares.”

The later stages of the Eater’s devouring had been heralded by the bright jet behind it, lancing forth like a spear pointed backward at the troubled crescent of Jupiter.

Kingsley sighed, collapsing into a lounge chair. “And now everyone wants to know what can it do to Earth.”

“And the answer is?”

“As I recall, you first pointed out its ability to scorch our upper atmosphere. I opened with that and it seemed quite sufficient to induce panic among the ‘advisers’ on that airplane.”

“Good to know I’m still useful,” she said archly.

“They concluded—big surprise here—that we need to know much more about its thinking and purpose.”

“How insightful.”

“So the figures from the Air Force and NASA came forward with a new crash program to integrate the classified technology with NASA’s near-Earth craft.”

“Anticipating that it will come that close? I suppose we could field some potent ships within, say, the distance to the moon.”

Kingsley nodded pensively and she could see him thinking, so she went inside and got some drinks together, including one for Benjamin when he showed up. When she returned, he was still staring into space but stirred at her approach. He gulped the wine cooler gratefully and said, “After some years at this, I’ve learned that ‘pilot’ is a bureaucrat’s way of saying two things at once: ‘This is but the first,’ plus ‘we believe it will work, but…’ Still, they committed themselves to outfitting new ships, both manned and not, ready within weeks.”

“Let’s hope we don’t need them.”

“I suspect we all are suffering from an unconscious fatalism, brought on by weariness—at least on my part. The policy people, as well.”

“They aren’t used to confronting something this strange?”

“That may be it. In astronomy, the new is delightful, a revelation.”

“In politics, it’s a problem. Makes me wonder what the next revelation will be.”

“I don’t think you should be bothering yourself with this, truly.” Kingsley’s gaze came back from abstract distance to a worried focus on her.

“I like it. And what should I be doing, fretting over my rickety body?”

“It’s a fine one, quite worth the attention.”

He stood and she turned away toward the flowers, their heady fragrance. “Don’t start.”

“I’m only expressing what we both feel.”

“No, what you feel. I’m…” She could not think of the right word.

“Troubled, I know. But I feel radiating from you a need, and something in me wants to answer it.”

His long hands clasped her arms from behind and she bowed her head, the honeyed air swarming in her nostrils.
His hands were strong, certain, deliberate, and she was the opposite. “How…how much of this is unfinished business?”

“From decades ago?”

His voice came softly through the layered air and it helped a great deal that she could not see him. But the hands remained on her upper arms, calm and reassuring and altogether welcome.

“Somehow it’s not over,” she managed to get out.

“When I saw you again, after so long…”

“Me, too.”

“I don’t believe we’re being altogether rotten about this.”

She laughed silently, head hanging. “Not so far.”

“I didn’t mean that. Only that you need support and—”

“And if Benjamin’s too busy to give it, you will.”

“Someone must.”

“Support, that’s all?”

He turned her gently with the long, big hands and she tilted her head up to look into his eyes. They were unreadable. “Maybe that was one thing I always liked about you, that I couldn’t tell what you were going to say or do.”

“And with Benjamin you could.”

“Something like that. The lure of the unknown.”

“I don’t mean anything wholly sexual in this,” he said with an almost schoolboy earnestness.

“I know. I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“I’m quite certain not, yes.”

She wished she were half as sure as he seemed. She could not predict what she was going to do these days, or understand why. “It’s emotions here, not actions.”

“Yes, yes.” He seemed suddenly embarrassed.

“New territory. I’ve never died before.”

“It’s…the physicians…they—”

“Pretty damned sure. I’ve got maybe a few weeks.”

“Benjamin knows.”

“Some of it. The technical stuff is pretty boring.”

“Shouldn’t you be under more care?”

“I hate hospitals, and the hospice I stopped by gave me the creeps.”

“But surely—”

“I’m giving in to my personality flaws. Without them I’d have no personality at all, most days.”

He smiled wanly. “Your tongue is as fine as ever.”

She kissed him suddenly and just as suddenly broke it off.

He blinked, engagingly flustered. “I scarcely expected…it would not have been…”

“Appropriate? Right.”

“There are levels here…” He was appealingly awkward.

“Yeah, and me, I’m at one with my duality.”

This provoked a grin from him, dispelling his mood. “You’re amazing.”

“Just improbable. Side effect of the chem supporters they’ve shot me full of.”

“Medication?” His eyes widened in alarm.

“A new line of delights. Keeps your metabolism running pretty flat and steady, just ducky until the whole system crashes. I’ve got some embedded chips just below the skin, tasting my blood and titrating into it some little bags of wonder-drug stuff.”

“I think I read something about those.”

“The bags they tipped into my upper thighs. They don’t even itch or anything.” This was too much detail, she saw.

His hands had lessened their hold and she could sense him wondering how to get out of this moment. Very delicately, taking all the time in the world, she kissed him lightly on his uncertain lips. “Thanks. A gal needs some appreciation.”

“More than that.”

“Love, if you want. I still love you, in a way I haven’t got the language for. Just having you here is fine, nothing more expected.”

“I knew when I saw you again, knew it instantly.”

“So did I.”

She leaned down and kissed his right hand. It seemed an
infinitely precious movement, living in a moment carved in the elastic, fragrant air, as if all life should be fashioned from such passing, exquisite gestures. An hypnotic illusion, of course, quite possibly the outcome of titrated solutions doing their chemical work, but absolutely right at this time, this place.

He dropped his hands and they stood in a quiet glade of the garden, silent and warm. Then came the spitting of gravel and Benjamin’s car rumbled to a stop in the driveway.

She hung in the long easeful glide away from that jeweled moment, passing as they all do, clinging to it while Benjamin arrived and she kissed him. So soon after Kingsley, it felt awkward. Kingsley retreated to his silent reserve. In the first moments, she felt a tension between the two men, as though Benjamin sensed something and did not know how to deal with it. Then he visibly shrugged and accepted a drink with a wobbly smile.

Benjamin cracked whatever remained of her crystal serenity with news. The updated determination of the Eater’s trajectory confirmed that it was bound on an accelerating orbit for Earth. “Unmistakable,” Benjamin said firmly as they moved indoors.

“How much time do we have?” Kingsley asked, his voice full of caution, as though he was still prying himself out of the last half hour.

“A few weeks, if it continues at its present acceleration.”

“Surely it must run out of fuel.”

“There are several asteroids it could snag on the way.”

“Ah, a chance to learn something more of its processes,” Kingsley said judiciously.

“Digestion, you mean,” Channing said, handing Benjamin a dark wine cooler.

“Quite so.”

“Wish we hadn’t named it Eater. The media’s, well, eating it up. Scaring the whole damn world.”

Benjamin seemed to come out of some other place, eyes taking in the garden at last, then her. “How are you?” He put
down the drink and embraced her, his hands on her arms in an eerie echo of Kingsley’s.

“Glad to have my two favorite men here. I needn’t suffer in silence while I can still moan, whimper, and complain.”

“Which she never does,” Kingsley said gallantly.

“Better living through chemistry,” she said lightly, feeling light in the head as well. “Come, fair swains, ply me with technobabble.”

Which they did.