Eater (13 page)

He opened his front door to get the newspaper, gummy-mouthed and rumpled, and found a camera snout eyeing him from two feet away. “Just a word, sir, Doctor, about—”

Thus did he discover that he was the target of what he would later hear termed a “celeb stakeout.” He slammed the door hard and several thoughts rushed by in parallel. Sure, they were just doing their jobs, all for a public that Really Wanted To Know. But this was
their
house. He felt invaded. How was he going to fetch his newspaper?

He felt a spike of swirling anxiety, his trajectory out of control. And then a third sensation: a spurt of excitement. People, millions of them,
wanted to know
about him. There was a primitive primate pleasure in being paid attention to. He was
interesting
. Tomorrow maybe a hurricane in Florida or a babe in a scandal would be better, but for today, it was Dr. Benjamin Knowlton.

This diffuse delight lasted until he and Channing got into the Center, past a gauntlet of security and media that lengthened by the day. Only weeks ago the Center had been a comfortable two-story complex with broad swaths of grass and tropical plants setting it off. The only visible sign of its purpose had been the large microwave dishes on nearby hills. Now bare tilt-up walls framed the buildings, windowless and gray slabs forking into wings. Not a blade of grass re
mained anywhere; all was mud or “fastcrete,” the new wonder material.

“Wow.” Channing pointed. “They’re putting up another new building.”

“One of those prefab jobs, chopper them in and lower the walls into that fast-dry concrete.” Benjamin wondered what fresh echelon of overseers this heralded.

“We could use more thinking, less managing,” Channing said.

“That Semiotics Group, can I sit in?”

“I think they’re inside an ‘information firewall,’ as the jargon puts it.”

“But how are we going to link the maps of the Eater, which are sharpening as it approaches, with how it actually works?”

She shook her head wordlessly in the calm way that had come over her in the last few days. They had given up their daily battle over her coming into the Center. She
would
, and that was that. When he went in alone, she followed in her car. He had toyed with disabling it and realized that she would simply get a ride some other, more tiring way.

They went through the newly expanded main foyer. News items shimmered on big screens, where a crowd of media people watched. Arno was giving a briefing elsewhere in the complex, his head looming on a screen here like a luminous world with hyperactive mountain chains working on it. “Not again,” Channing said. “He’s up there every day.”

“I think he has to be. The Story of the Millennium, they’re calling it.”

She scoffed. “Barely started on the millennium and we’re laying claim to it. And Arno, his talks are like a minibikini, touching on the essentials but not really covering much.”

“That’s a talent now, not a lack.”

She went into the Semiotics Division hallway and he entered his new office suite. He had his own foyer—like this morning, a spurt of delight;
he was being paid attention to
—from which radiated prefab, bone white, fluorescent-lit hall
ways and byways where hundreds of astronomers and data analysts labored.

Within half an hour, the high had dissipated in the usual swamp of memos, Alert Notices, data dumps, and plain old institutional noise. These absorbed his morning, but not his attention, which kept veering off. He suppressed the urge to sit in on the meetings Channing attended, with her instinct for ferreting out the most interesting work. He wanted to be in those sessions, both to be with her and to hear about something other than optical resolution, luminosities, report summaries, spectra, and fights over ’scope time. Thus were his days whittled away, with precious few moments to actually think.

Just before noon he had to take an important issue “up top,” as the U Agency termed it, and so walked into Kingsley as he stood before a TV camera, while on a huge wall screen the President of the United States lounged in a terrycloth robe, hair wet, with an indoor swimming pool behind him. A glass of orange juice, half-empty, stood on a small table and the President’s legs were thick with black hair.

Kingsley stood at attention, addressing his remarks to a pointer mike, his face concentrated. Kingsley’s secretary left Benjamin standing in shadows and he stayed there, suspecting something afoot. Kingsley had not noticed him, blinded by a brilliant pool of light with the emblem of the Center behind him. The man knew how to play to the dramatic. His small staff sat farther away, people new to the Center who ignored Benjamin. A technician gave the start sign.

The President’s warm drawl described how “a swarm of Searchers is damn near ready to go, so you’ve got no worry there.” The man was obviously speaking from prepared notes, eyes tracking left and right as he spoke, but it came over as utterly offhand and sincere. He deplored the “spreading panic” and was sorry “that this makes you astronomers’ job even harder,” though—with a chuckle—“now you know what it’s like being in the media fishbowl.”

Kingsley said, “Sir, we have doom criers surrounding the observatories farther up the mountain.”

“I thought the island was sealed.” A puzzled frown, a glance off camera.

“These are locals, I fear.”

“Then we’ll just have ’em rounded up.”

“I would appreciate that.”

“Want and expect the best of you, Mr. Kingsley.” A flicker of the eyelids. Someone had told him of the slip, but the President saw no way to correct easily, so just glided on. “You’ve been doin’ great.”

Benjamin had to admit as the conversation went on that Kingsley was adroit, slick, even amusing. Though British, he easily rode over the issue of nationality, getting the President and the Pentagon to promote him as controller of Earth’s response to the Eater’s approach. Benjamin stood undetected by Kingsley’s staff, who were all watching the President as though hypnotized. Well, the man did have a presence, a quality Benjamin knew he would never acquire. That was why, in a way, he chose a slight pause in the talk to walk straight onstage, taking a spot next to Kingsley.

“Mr. President—” and he was into a quick introduction, as though this had all been planned. “Sir, I’m Benjamin Knowlton, head of Astronomy Division. This is a world problem, and you can’t let it seem as if you’re ignoring the rest of the planet.”

A curious glance to the side. “Well, I never intended—”

“No doubt, sir, but that is how it’s playing out here. I’m more in touch with the international astronomical community than anyone else here, even Kingsley. I know how this is playing among those we must rely upon for full-sky coverage of the Eater, continuous contact, and the use of many dozens of telescopes on Earth and off.”

His pulse thumped, he could not quite get enough breath, but he held his place. One of Kingsley’s aides gestured from off camera, someone whispered, “Get security,” but Benjamin knew—or hoped he did—that Kingsley would not permit the appearance of disorder here. Pure luck walking in on this, and he had to go with it.

“I haven’t heard anything from State about such trouble.”

“This isn’t about diplomats, it’s about keeping ourselves in an alliance with others. I had trouble with a German satellite manager just this morning, demanding that we forward data and images that they don’t have. I receive similar demands every day, and the voices are getting more strident.”

“I’d think, this being science, that you all would share.” The President appeared genuinely puzzled.

“That’s how it should work. But this buttoned-up security posture is a mistake. You can’t keep this under wraps—particularly if it’s wrapped in the U.S. flag.”

This line seemed to tell. The President blinked and said with calculated shrewdness, “You have a bargain in mind?”

“Just an idea. How to work it out I leave”—he could not resist—“to Mr. Kingsley. I believe we should have shared control of the Mauna Kea facility and the world network of astronomers. Full disclosure at dedicated Mesh sites. Nothing held back.”

“Nothing?” Plainly the President had never heard of the idea from any of his staff.

“For the moment, nothing.”

“I hear it’s not telling us much about what it plans,” the President said.

“Precisely why it should be safe to reveal it,” Kingsley came in smoothly. “I endorse Dr. Knowlton’s proposal.”

The President blinked again. “I’ll have to think about this. How come that Arno fellow didn’t say anything about it?”

“He thought it best if I—we—proposed it directly,” Benjamin said, looking straight into the camera in the way he had gathered conveyed sincerity. Very useful, especially when lying.

“Well, I appreciate your views.” The President looked ready to sign off, in fact raised eyebrows toward someone off camera, but then said, “Say, you really think they’d do that? The other astronomers? Cut us off from their data and so on?”

“I do, sir,” Benjamin said, and in another second the President’s image dwindled away, like water down a drain.

Channing heard about the fracas on the way back from lunch. She had wondered why Benjamin did not join her, but she was grateful for the chance to just sit by herself, eat quickly, and leave. The others in the Semiotics Group knew enough to leave her alone, so she got to simply lie down on a convenient bed in the infirmary to snag an hour’s delicious nap. When she woke up, he was there.

“I hear you made a name for yourself today,” she murmured sleepily.

He grinned, obviously on a high. “Ah, but what name’s that?”

“‘Bastard,’ I overheard that. Also ‘maniac’ and ‘amateur.’”

“You’ve been listening to U Agency types.”

“Not entirely, but yes—they talk more than astronomers.”

“Kingsley was frosty after we went off the air. I was amazed that he recovered fast enough not to appear provoked, to just stand there while I went on.”

“His job—and yours—depends on Washington’s confidence in him.”

“Sure, but then to endorse my idea—that was amazing.”

“We talked about these issues only last night.”

“Sure, but that was dinner conversation.”

“Kingsley wasn’t saying anything like that to the President, then?”

“Not at all. I’m afraid he’ll try to get even now.”

“Kingsley? Not his style.”

“He’s not a saint. Look, in your NASA days, you’d have done the same.”

“I don’t get even, I get odder.” She liked the small smile he gave her at the joke, an old one but serviceable enough to break the tension she felt in him.

“Come on. Arno called me in, and I’d like you there.”

“Sure, I’m all slept out,” though she wasn’t.

The virtue of scientists lay principally in their curiosity. It could overcome hastily imposed U Agency management structures with ease. Fresh data trumped or bypassed the arteriosclerotic pyramids of power and information flow the Agency had erected, all quite automatically, following its standard crisis-management directives. Kingsley understood quite well the habits of mind that advanced, classified research followed, though he had given few hints about how he had acquired the knowledge.

Standard security regulation used strict separation of functions, at times keeping the right hand from even knowing there was a left hand. The Manhattan Project had been the historically honored example of this approach, dividing each element of the A-bomb problem from the other, with transmission only on a Need to Know basis.

Historians of science now believed that bomb production had been delayed about a year by this method. Under a more open strategy, the United States could have used bombs against Berlin, perhaps destroying the German regime from the air rather than on the ground. This might have kept the U.S.S.R. out of Europe altogether, vastly altering the Cold War that followed. Bureaucracy mattered. It irked scientists, but it shaped history.

Astronomy defeated even this outdated compartmenting method. The entire science depended upon telescopes that could peer at vastly different wavelengths, spread over a spectrum from the low radio to gamma rays, a factor in wavelength of a million billion. Seldom could an astronom
ical object be understood without seeing it throughout much of this huge range.

As well, the habits of mind that astronomers brought to the Eater would not stop at a wavelength barrier. To understand the steadily deepening radio maps, for example, demanded spectra in the optical or X-ray ranges. Astronomy was integrative and could not be atomized. This fact—as much as Benjamin’s walking into “a presidential conversation that took me days to organize!”—brought Arno to a rare fit of anger.

The first part of the meeting was predictable, and Channing found herself nodding off. She reprimanded herself, whispering to a concerned Kingsley that it was like dozing at a bullfight, but in fact Arno could do nothing but bluster about Benjamin’s intervention. The President was considering his proposal, and that was that. No amount of U Agency tweaking could put the horse back in the barn. Still, Benjamin had been doing more—sending needed information to groups outside the Center.

“I hold you responsible for these leaks, Knowlton,” Arno finished his military-style dressing-down, smacking a palm onto the desk he sat upon.

“‘Leaks’? My people are merging their different views to make sense out of them,” Benjamin said, looking rather surprised at how calm he had remained in the face of a five-minute monologue.

“We can’t have it.”

Kingsley at last said something, waiting until the right moment. “I believe we have a fundamental misunderstanding here, friends. The Eater is perhaps a week or two away. No one with the slightest sense of proportion will sequester data that might help us deal with it, once it has arrived.”

“That’s not the way we work here,” Arno said, pausing between each word.

“Then it must become so,” Kingsley said amiably.

“I’m going farther up the chain on this,” Arno said darkly.

“I’m afraid we have already done that,” Kingsley said.

She saw suddenly that Kingsley had played this exactly right, yet again maneuvering with an intuitive skill that could not be conscious. Benjamin’s move, which he obviously had been pondering for days and yet had not revealed to her, was deliberate and risky. But Benjamin was like Salieri playing alongside Kingsley’s Mozart. Already Kingsley had co-opted Benjamin’s point and used it against Arno, a triumph that would undoubtedly echo in the echelons back in Washington.

She returned to the Semiotics Group meeting and Benjamin came along. “Done enough for today,” he said affably. “You guys are having better ideas. I might as well hear them.”

Perhaps so, she told him, though some people, even in NASA, were showing the strain, carried away by the majesty of the Eater and its beautiful disk. “A higher form of life, virtually a god,” one of them had said at a coffee break.

“I hope that doesn’t catch on,” Benjamin said.

On their way, they passed through the main foyer. At its new high speed, the Eater would reach Earth within an estimated time that kept changing as it encountered fresh mass to ingest. Tracking its velocity, a digital clock now loomed over the tallest wall of the foyer. It had begun ticking down the time remaining. One of the media sorts had already dubbed it the Doomsday Clock. Benjamin grimaced. Beside it, feeds from observatories gave views of the magnetic labyrinth and its plasma clouds.

They settled into seats in the back row and listened to arguments about how to best communicate, negotiate, and placate the Eater. She was still impressed by the fact that any understanding could pass between entities of such different basic substrata: a magnetically shaped plasma talking to walking packets of water. The specialists argued that this was possible because there were general templates for organizing intelligence.

This must be true in a very sweeping way, a woman from Stanford argued. Scientists often congratulated themselves
on having figured out how the universe worked, as if it were following our logic. But in fact humans had evolved out of the universe, and so fit it well. Our minds had been conditioned by brutal evolution to methods of understanding that worked finely enough to keep us alive, at least long enough to reproduce. Some ancient ancestor had found the supposedly simple things of life—how to move, find food, evade predators—enormously complicated and hard to remember. Such an ancestor faded from the gene pool, selected against by the rough rub of chance. We had descended from ancestors who found beauty in nature, a sense of the inevitable logic and purity in its design.

Intelligence reflected the universe’s own designs, and so had similar patterns, even though arising in very different physical forms. This view emerged as she and Benjamin watched, until one grizzled type from the University of California at Irvine remarked, “Yeah, but the animals are a lot like us, too, and look at how we treat them.”

Benjamin asked ironically, “You mean we should not expect it to share our view of our own importance?”

The gray-bearded man nodded. “Or our morality. That’s an evolved system of ideas, and this thing is utterly asocial. It’s a loner.”

Benjamin seemed commendably unembarrassed to speak among specialists in a field he did not know. She admired his courage, then realized that if the detailed talk she had heard here before could not be translated into something others could comprehend, it would be useless in the days ahead.

Benjamin asked, “Cooperation with others of its kind never happened, as far as we can tell. The latest transmissions from it say that it was made by a very early, intelligent civilization whose planet was being chewed up by the black hole. They managed to download their own culture into it, translating into magnetic information stored in waves.”

This sent a rustle through the room. Benjamin leaned toward her and whispered, “Just as I thought. This firewall
security system has kept a lot away from the guys who actually need it.”

His revelation provoked quick reactions, which Benjamin fielded easily. It was very big news and he enjoyed delivering it in an offhand way.

Now she understood why he had come here. He was still on the move, steering through treacherous waters nobody knew. She felt a burst of love for him, and to her surprise, fresh respect. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

“What else can you tell us?” the graybeard asked.

Benjamin plunged in. Sure enough, some important Eater messages had either not gotten through, or were distorted. “Experts with an axe to grind, putting their own spin in.” Benjamin summed it up.

The discussion turned into just the sort of free-for-all she had missed so far among the rather stiff semiotics gang. She turned over the issues as others with more energy attacked them, and somehow the ideas mingled with a vaguely forming plan of her own.

This being had lived longer than the Earth had existed. To it, a million years would be like a day in a human life. She tried to think how it would view life-forms anchored on planets.
Mayflies
. Whole generations would pass as flashes of lightning, momentarily illuminating their tiny landscapes. Eons would stream by, civilizations on the march like characters in some larger drama witnessed only by the truly long-lived. Birth, death, and all agonies in between—these would merge into a simultaneous whole. Rather than a static snapshot, such a being could see a smear of lives as a canvas backdrop to the stately pace of a galaxy on the move, turning like a pinwheel in the great night. Whole species would be the players then, blossoming momentarily for the delectation of vast, slow entities beyond understanding.

Compared to it, humans were passing ephemerals. To a baby, a year was like a lifetime because it
was
his lifetime, so far. By age ten, the next year was only a 10 percent increase in his store of years. At a hundred, time ticked ten
times faster still. She tried to imagine living to a thousand, when a year would have the impact of a few hours in such a roomy life.
Now multiply this effect by another factor of a million
, she mused.

She wondered if anyone was paying attention to the Eater’s own artworks, beamed down in compressed digital packets. It had remarked,

What would its creations say to them if they could be seen in their natural form?