Eater (28 page)

Benjamin wasn’t having any. “Come on, it makes no sense.”

Arno gave him the full glowering treatment. Heavy on the eyebrows, stentorian voice, rigid at-attention gaze. “It’s the only way we can get this information to her.”

“But I’ve got
no
experience at any of this—”

“Neither does anyone here. Not anybody who can understand the material.”

“I’ve never been in space and—”

“It’s easy. I’ve done it.”

Arno did look like the type who would shell out big bucks for a suborbital shot, an hour or two of zero-g, and great views. Probably some high-level government gig had taken him up. Benjamin shook his head adamantly. “I’ll be a lot higher up in orbit. I’m not used to zero-g.”

“So maybe you’ll throw up some. So what?”

He gritted his teeth. “I won’t be worth a damn.”

A heavy pause. “It’s your duty.”

To punctuate this, a rolling series of crashes and thunder rolls swept through the center. They were so common now, nobody even cringed.

An aide ran in and said, “We got everybody out of the E wing. It’s totalled.”

“How many casualties?”

“Plenty of injured. We’re setting up Medical in G wing. Got three known dead.”

Arno nodded, waved him away, looked blankly at Benjamin. “Well?”

“Okay, I’ll go. I don’t even see how I can—”

“We’ll get you to the airstrip. I’ve got a first-stage carrier coming in from Oahu.”

“You knew I would.”

Arno grinned, an unusual expression for him. “Sure, you’re an all right guy.”

This locker room style did not bother Benjamin, though he recognized the method. “She’s in there. Close to it.”

“Near as we can tell, yes.”

“I’ll have to look after her.” A part of him said,
If there’s any chance it’s really her, I’ve got to act on it
.

“As well you should. She’s the center of coordination.”

“That antimatter trap you sent—”

“It’s a last-ditch thing. Main thing is, we’re going for the plasma assault. Kingsley thinks that’ll herd it around.”

“Enough for the nuclear warheads to get in close.”

“I know. It failed before. But maybe we can overwhelm it.”

Benjamin had no real faith in this, but he could think of nothing else. A fighter against the ropes should try to slug his way out; the time for sublety was past.

But then, a fistfight analogy was primate thinking, wasn’t it? The Eater would be quite aware of all that. Though were humans really like other, vaguely similar forms evolved around distant stars? How special were these latest products of fitness selection among hominids?

He wondered how often in history men had made desperate moves with the same lack of confidence.
The fog of battle
, he recalled the term. Delirium was more like it.

Soon enough Kingsley was seizing him by the shoulders, a remarkable gesture for him. “I’ll be alongside for the briefings. Amy, too.”

“Great. I really appreciate it.”

Their presence proved to be crucial. Benjamin sat through hurried yet extensive dissections of what they had learned of the Eater’s structures. Amy and Kingsley helped him through the spots when he would blank out, losing the thread.

“Like a brain?” one of the specialists said in answer to Benjamin’s question. “We’re stacked on top, newer brain on the outside. Form dictates function. Within the limits of being a kludge, of course—sticking new parts on while the older ones are running. On the other hand, the Eater’s able to rearrange itself whenever it wants, as nearly as we can tell. So no—it’s completely different.”

“Then why should I trust any of this?” Benjamin shot back. “It keeps changing.”

“Because it’s all we’ve got.”

This looked pretty flimsy to him, all the theorizing based on interpretations of magnetic wave packets. Channing had picked up most of the data they were using as she darted around at the fringes of the thing. There was a category of localized information the specialists called the “Remnants”—apparently, the records of civilizations encountered in the far past by the Eater.

“We figure they, too, were ‘harvested’ by the Eater,” the specialist said. “But they’re not just libraries. They interact. Talk to each other. To the Eater, wherever its intelligence is.”

“Magnetic ghosts,” Benjamin said.

“Yes, in a way.”

“All the people we shipped up to it, that’s what they’ll become?”

“We guess so. The information density in the thing is incredible.”

“That word doesn’t mean much anymore.”

One Remnant was an especially powerful agency the cybertechs called the “Old One.” “Now, that may be the essence of the Eater, the original race that started it all,” a horn-rimmed, earnest woman said. “It seems to have pieces
of itself distributed all over the magnetosphere. None of the other characteristic wave packets do that.”

“This is all just a bunch of guesses,” Benjamin said harshly.

“Right you are,” she said.

Later, still unsettled from this, he asked Kingsley and Amy, “Why doesn’t it just kill us all?”

Kingsley understood power and had a ready reply. He was holding up pretty well through all this, the upside of his classic Brit reserve. “A universal urge,” he said. “It doesn’t want us all dead; it wants us all compliant.”

Grimly, Arno convened with the survivors of high command who could reach the islands. The Eater was slamming away at the United States, pelting it with cyclones, electrical nightmares, fierce winds. Planes did not venture into the snarling skies. The American habit of taking the lead in international matters had now made it the principal target.

Arno and the others tried to raise the stakes. In the last few weeks, various backup missions had gotten into position. Arno used these. There seemed no one in the entire national power apparatus who could stop the on-rolling momentum he had started.

A manned spacecraft with hydrogen bombs tried a suicide mission. They had bombs doped with elements that might interfere with the magnetic filaments, perhaps producing an electromagnetic pulse to scramble the field lines’ snarls, lowering their information-bearing capacity.

The Eater figured this out, of course. It hulled the ship with high-speed gravel, shot from its accretion disk. The thin-walled vessel was shredded in a moment.

This rattled Benjamin considerably. The military advisers reassured him, as well as they could when he knew they were dealing with a complete unknown. What did lessons learned by such theorists, from the strategies of Waterloo and Gettysburg and Stalingrad, mean here? Less than nothing.

But Benjamin had Channing to help, they reminded him. Maybe that would matter.

In the hushed, defeated atmosphere at the Center, the staff labored on. Nobody talked much. The Eater was as chatty as ever, transmitting at high-bit rates any number of reflections on life, culture, and much else. This unnerved them all still further.

“Gee, that’s great news,” Amy said dryly. “We don’t have to worry about anything worse than this guy.”

They all laughed, utterly without humor.

They gave him one session of deep electro-sleep. To make him remotely in condition to fly, the physicians said. He had heard of the method, which in practice seemed innocent enough: small patches on his head, a soothing sound, a sensation of skating across a gray plain—and he was waking up ten hours later, feeling better than he had in months.

Then it was just airplanes. Arno’s team went with him in a convoy to the freshly scraped landing field a few kilometers from the Center. There a chopper carried him to the Kona airport. It was a deserted landscape pelted by high winds and rains. Enormous waves churned in across the black lava fields and chewed at the runways.

A sleek jet took him to Oahu. Again a barren plain with the military holding a perimeter. No flights except his. The suborbital carrier was of a design he had never seen before, bulky and somehow muscular in its aluminum sleekness. No time delays at all—they hustled him across a hundred meters of slick asphalt and into the passenger cylinder of the beast. They even had an umbrella-carrier who ran alongside. Somebody was taping his every move, too.

The rumble of its huge engines shook him as he belted in. A steward showed him the space gear, patiently explaining each and helping him try them on. He dimly saw that this was part of their method. Keep him busy, focused, no time for fear or imagination. He welcomed it. A fringe of his depression lifted as their wheels left the ground.

The craft labored up through decks of roiled clouds. Above 35,000 feet, a clarity came to the seethe outside. They crossed out of the cone that the Eater maintained over the islands. Engines fought the inrushing winds and slowly spiraled them up to 50,000 feet.

Their rise slowed as the jet gulped the thinning air. They took him into the orbital craft then, all suited up and primed with anti-zero-g medical aids. The moment when they dropped the dart-shaped ship from the jet’s bay was a foretaste of orbit, but he did not feel like vomiting. The rocket’s kick in the ass brought a heady rush. Vibration, massive weight. A blue-white view through the port that quickly eased into black. Real orbital zero-g was fun. He was enjoying playing with a floating pen and the view outside when they came for him. Into a smaller compartment he went. The pilot sat a meter away and the view was better.

“A closet with a view,” Benjamin said amiably. He was feeling so good he did not even wonder why.

“Yeah, Cap’n,” the pilot said. “They rushed me up here so fast, I’m still going through the manifest. Gimmie a min. Name’s Sharon.”

“So beautiful.”

“Real pretty for a suicide run.”

This jolted Benjamin a little. He craned to see the Eater, out somewhere near the moon. A blue speck.

“We’ve got boosters out the kazoo,” Sharon said. “Hope you’re ready for a roller coaster.”

“I’ve got a date with my girl,” he countered.
“Go
.”

Now he knew why he felt so fine.

Channing said, “That phrase, ‘my kernel intelligence’—I agree with Kingsley. That might be the Old One.”

“Could be. Can you reach it?”

She sensed Benjamin floating in the cowling of his sensaround as he watched/felt her. He was sending all sorts of secondary sensation—the headset pressure, visual processing cues, the wheeze of his shallow breathing. But these were just add-ons to his abstractions, or so they came to her. The miniboosters tugged at him as the craft accelerated and she heard their angry snarl. These she gobbled up, for they suddenly reminded her of how achingly far she was from her old, real body. Emotions washed over her aplenty, but she was sensation-starved.

“The cyberguys have identified a whole catalog of different ‘signature’ memory waves,” she said, accessing her crisp memories. “The Old One has a trademark bunch of Alfven waves tagging its parts, as nearly as they can make out. Those tags are all over the dipolar shape of the fields. A diffuse storage method. Probably to give it a holographic quality.”

“So we can kill part of it, maybe, but not all.”

“Smart bastard, it is.”

“This 200 gigaHertz band works beautifully,” he said mildly, the mellow tones telling her that they had done a
good job on him. He had weathered the trip untroubled. “You’re so…full.”

“I love having you so close.”

Somehow he was now more deeply embedded in the space of her perceptions. Like pale sunlight beams lancing through her 3-D self. The cyberfellas had been sharpening the software again.

“What’s that music?”

“Oh.” She felt the rhythm eddying through her, called up by his notice of it. “I have it all the time, I guess. Music integrates parts of the mind that make sense of memory, of timing and language. It retools me. When I started up here, I thought it was pointless, working in areas with no real use, like motor control. Until I found that the designers used those parts to pilot my Searchers. Thrifty guys.”

“It’s more than music, isn’t it. It’s…”

“Feeling? Yeah, I caught on to that once I used it some. The story they fed me is, there must’ve been neural mechanisms that deciphered music in the early hominid brain. That may have developed as a way to communicate emotion before language came along.”

“Wow, it feels different.”

“Yeah, somebody’s going to make a bundle selling this, once it gets out of the R&D stage.”

Their chat flowed easily, part of reintegrating with him. Sensory input laced with meaning, weaving a comfy fabric around them both.
Two of my favorites
—
clothes and sex
…

An echoing voice boomed suddenly, “Channing? Benjamin? This is Kingsley.”

It came as a dash of chilly rainwater on a hot skillet. They both flinched. “Yuh, yes?” she managed.

“Sorry to break in—”

“I’m surprised you can,” Benjamin said. “Pretty narrowband, though.”

“That’s the point of having you up there. I may fall out at any time. All the monster has to do is throw a plasma screen between us.”

“Your signal’s pretty jittery now,” Channing said. “Losing the low frequencies. That checks with a plasma cloak just a little too low in density.”

“I’ll be quick. Pretty rough here, it is. This signal has to go out on an undersea cable and then through a chain of satellites.”

“Everybody okay?”

His hesitation told her all she wanted to know. “As well as can be expected.”

“Judging from what I can see,” Channing said, “I’d say get away from the Center. There’s a tube of plasma flow pinning the islands like a needle.”

“And low-frequency electromagnetic stuff,” Benjamin said. “I can see it on the displays in front of me.”

“We have little choice. Arno’s arranged a bolt hole for us if it gets bad.”

“Arno must be pretty pumped,” Benjamin said.

“Indeed. He wants me to provide interface on this.”

“You can see the Eater?”

“No, nothing. It’s good at blinding us. But I do know that, using a relay through the Navy, we’ve started the plasma dumping.”

Channing felt/saw/smelled it already—a spike of barium ionization at the nearer edge of the Eater’s magnetosphere. Like a puke-green worm eating at a fat blue apple. And the dwindling motes of Searchers who had delivered the barium, zapped by the Eater within moments. But they had worked.

“Think that’ll drive it?” Benjamin asked. She could feel him sending edgy, exploring fingers through her sensorium.

“We hope so,” Kingsley said. His voice was flat, low-quality, riding a meager trail of bits. “It’s been following a slow trajectory outward, and Arno believes this will look like another ineffectual failure of an attack.”

Channing said doubtfully, “To edge it around the moon.”

“I’ll admit, this is wholly conjectural,” Kingsley said.

“Like me and my life,” she said.

Benjamin asked, “We’re
sure
it can’t decode these transmissions?”

“They are going under a screen signal. Even if it can penetrate that, we have already laid down a pattern strongly suggesting that you are a feint. So it may very well discount what it can decipher.”

“More Waterloo thinking,” Benjamin said cryptically. “I still—”

“I SHOULD THINK YOU SHOULD START YOUR DIVE!” Kingsley suddenly bellowed. “Oh, sorry, having transfer problems again. I—”

And he was gone. “Damn, this setup is rickety,” Benjamin said.

“He was right, though. I’m starting.”

Red muscle-clenchings down her spine. Quickenings. Abstractions rendered into a cool sort of body language. She sensed one hundred and thirty-four Searchers start their programmed accelerations. Her subsystems updated them every few moments. Furious work seethed just below her conscious perception, a strumming insect-hive frenzy.

Into the whirlpool
.

Her astronaut training took over. She quick-checked twenty things in the time it took to breathe out. (Thinking that, the breathing sensation came back on, full.)

She wasn’t going to survive this, but training is training.

“I love you,” Benjamin said.

“Ummm. I love you, too, but, well, love the mind, miss the body.”

He chuckled in that old way of his.

The webbed intricacy of the magnetosphere rushed at her. “Here goes.”

“Good—”

He had started to say goodbye. There had been altogether too much of that lately. More than enough for a lifetime, and
here she was into her second one. She was damned if she was going through this all sober and noble.

“Got a puzzle for you, lover. Why did kamikaze pilots bother to wear helmets?”