Eater (6 page)

Benjamin nodded, rueful that he had let the discussion
take so personal a turn. They were all under a lot of pressure, but that did not justify rubbing rhetorical salt into old wounds.

The talk swerved to other aspects of the problem. Data was pouring in from ground observers and space-based alike. The astronomical data streams on the Internet were thick with discussions and endless inquiries.

Already, theorists were demanding that they publish their findings on the Internet. Worse, some had written papers explaining various pieces of the puzzle, posting their hasty work to the high-display Net showcases. There were advantages to “publishing” electronically: considerable speed, nailing down credit for an idea, while not waiting for the reviewing process. Indeed, the more hot-topic areas of science now resembled a shouting mob more than a scholarly discourse, thanks to instant democratic communication.

They were all besieged by colleagues through e-mail. Others had simply buttonholed them in the Center corridors. Everyone local was working on sifting the data stream, but few knew what was up, overall, because there were so many pieces of the puzzle to assemble. And the Gang of Four arrangement had not facilitated communication, either, Benjamin had to admit, though it was efficient at giving ideas a thorough thrashing over before they escaped into the larger community. In a media-saturated culture, cloisters of reflection were invaluable.

“So what’ll we do?” Amy asked the older and presumably wiser heads.

“Get out a paper?” Channing asked wanly. Plainly she had no desire to write it. The hunt was all for her, not talking about it afterward.

“I think not,” Victoria Martinez said, jaw set firmly.

Benjamin had nearly forgotten that she was in the room. She sat at the far end of the table and had taken many notes, but she had added nothing until now. He was again embarrassed that she had seen the cut and thrust between him and Kingsley.

“Definitely not,” she said, carefully looking at each of them in turn. “This is an enormously energetic object, behaving strangely, and if it continues at its present velocity, it will reach the inner solar system within a month. Am I correct?”

“Yes,” Kingsley answered, “though remember, it is decelerating.”

Benjamin became aware of a tension between Victoria and Kingsley, whose mouth had compressed into a thin line. The intruder’s incredible velocity had moved it the distance between the Earth and the sun in about half a day. They all knew this, but the consensus among the Gang of Four had been that worrying about future effects was pointless until they got a good handle on what the thing was. Plainly Victoria did not feel the same.

“One point you’ve skipped over, I believe, is that it appears to be headed straight inward.”

Amy said, “Well, yes, there’s no sign of sideways movement yet. But at these velocities it would be hard to detect right away.”

“But I take your drift,” Kingsley said. “A possible danger.”

Benjamin blinked. He had not thought along these lines in detail. “Of what? Chances of it coming near the Earth—”

“Are impossible to estimate, since it changes velocity with every encounter—correct?” Victoria Martinez said incisively.

Amy answered quietly, “Well, maybe. There’s a little Doppler shift in the lines after every collision. If the gamma-ray bursts do represent collisions.”

“Let’s assume they do, until we have some better idea,” Martinez said. “How else can it find its next iceteroid, unless it changes velocity?”

“Quite true,” Kingsley said in his pontifical drawl, “but not yet cause for alarm.”

“I agree, Dr. Dart, that it is hard to accept some of the ideas I’ve heard bandied about the room this last hour. But we have nothing more in the pot, and it’s time to cook.”

This metaphor went past Benjamin. “‘Cook’?”

“I have to get back to a lot of people about this. Word gets around. The NSF and NASA both fund this Center, and they do like to be kept in the loop. I’ve been shielding you folks while you worked, but I have to start speaking for you now. Unless you’d rather do it yourself?”

“Oh no,” Benjamin said, knowing this was what she wanted. “You do it.”

“Good. Then I’ll be answering a lot of phone calls I’ve been stalling. And you four start writing up a statement.”

“Statement?” Benjamin felt uncomfortably that he was asking stupid questions whose answers were obvious to the others.

“For the media,” Kingsley said offhandedly. “Quite so.”

Martinez said, “At its present speed, it could reach us within a month.”

“I suggest we not emphasize that aspect,” Benjamin said, choosing his diction so that it echoed Kingsley’s precision. “Especially since it is not headed for us at all.”

“Oh?” Martinez looked surprised.

He realized he had not shown his trajectory plots around yet. “It’s curving in and downward, heading at an angle to the ecliptic plane. I can’t pick out any destination. It will pass through the solar system and leave, as it is unbound. It is moving very fast.”

She could remember drinking coffee to stay awake and keep working; now she needed it to wake up at all.

Running mostly on caffeine, Channing puttered around in her home office, immersed in cyberspatial bliss: sleek modern desk the size of a tennis court; ergonomic chair that was better than a shiatsu massage—and cheaper; picture window on the Pacific (today looking anything but); overstuffed leather chaise where she spent far too much time recouping; big tunnel skylight leading up to a turquoise tropical sky.

Self-respect demanded that she not work in pajamas. That left a lot of room in a vast sartorial wasteland, from T-shirts and khaki to turtlenecks down to jeans, running shorts, and tanks. All those were off the menu if she was going to do a visual conference with anybody, in which case she needed at least a decent frilly blouse, say, or even a full dress suit—top only needed, of course, since her camera had a carefully controlled field of view. She had heard of the new image managers that touched up your face as you spoke, smoothing out lines and wrinkles and even black eyes if you wanted. To order up one on the Net would be quick, easy to install…and the vanity of it would pester her inner schoolmarm for weeks.
Nope, let ’em see the truth. That’s what science is about, right? Why not treat scientists the same way
?

Today something clingy, island-soft, and cool. In blue, it cheered her.

She had liked working at home the first month, despised it thereafter. After all, “I work at home” carried the delicate hint that you were in fact just about unemployed, or downsized out of the action, at the fringe of the Real World.

So she tried to be systematic. No distractions, that was the trouble. After years working at the Center, it was hard to get by with no coffee break, water cooler chat, endless meetings with clandestine notes passed ridiculing the speaker, business lunches, the sheer simple humanity of primates making a go of it together.

Work at home and you could never quite leave it. Slump onto the couch at nine at night when Benjamin was on a trip, all ready to kick back and veg out like any deserving, stressed adult…and down there at the end of the hall lurked the reproachful glimmer of the desk lamp. It was hard to walk down there and turn it off and walk back to a sitcom without checking the e-mail or looking at tomorrow’s calendar, especially since its first screen was the latest selection from
Studmuffins of Science
.

She suspected her social skills, honed in the labyrinths of NASA and the NSF, were atrophying. So she did the next best thing, first off in the morning: answer vital e-mail, delete most without answering, and look over her notes. This kept her in a sort of abstract cyber-society.

The more traditional Net temptations no longer carried their zest. No point in doing an Ego Surf on her name; it showed up only on historical mesh sites now. Her Elvis Year, the time of popularity, was now long gone, back when shuttle missions made you a pseudo-celeb among some of the Internet tribes.

Since then she had been happier, more satisfied, steadily getting more obscure. Funny thing about contentment, some years just got lost.
Seen it, done it, can’t recall most of it
.

Through those dimly recalled years, she had been happier with Benjamin than she probably had any right to be, and
now that it was nearly over, to review it all seemed pointless. There were parts of the play she would have rewritten, especially the dialogue. Somehow, despite all her theories and ambitions, she still regretted not having children. The career had seemed more important, and maybe it still was to her, but regrets don’t listen to theories. There were plenty of roads not taken and no maps.

She finished her e-mail and looked over the work she was doing on spectral analysis. The data pouring into the Center needed careful attention and she had been pitching in, giving the multitude of optical line profiles a thorough scrutiny. She popped the most puzzling ones up on her big screen and ran a whole suite of numerical codes, sniffing around. This took two hours and much intricate tedium. Still, the repetition was soothing, somehow: Zen Astrophysics. She was feeling the slow ebbing fatigue she knew so well when a clear result finally surfaced.

Three optical lines emitted from the intruder came out looking decidedly odd: each was split into two equal peaks. These were not the Doppler shifts they had spotted earlier. They were much smaller, imposed on the Doppler peaks themselves.

There are very few ways an atom can emit radiation at two very closely spaced intervals. The most common occurs if the atom is immersed in a magnetic field. Then its energy would depend upon whether its electrons aligned with the field or against it.

These three splittings she had pulled out of the noise, imposing several different observations from several different ’scopes. And they led to a surprising result: the magnetic field values needed to explain these up-and-down shifts were huge, several thousand times the Earth’s field.

“Good grief,” she muttered to herself, instantly suspicious.

Most amazing results were mistakes. She burned another hour making sure this one was not.

Then she sat and looked at the tiny twin peaks and liked
knowing that Benjamin would be thrilled by it. The give-and-take with the others at the Center, especially the Gang of Four, was great fun, but his reaction was still the crucial pleasure for her.

Abruptly she remembered her first experience of astronomy, as a little girl. Camping out, she had awakened after midnight, faceup.
There they were
. Even above the summer’s heat, the stars were immensely cold. They glittered in the wheeling crystal dark, at the end of a span she could not imagine without dread. High, hard, hanging above her in a tunnel longer than humans could comprehend.

When she had first felt them that way, she had dug her fingers into the soft warm grass and
held on
—above a yawning abyss she felt in her body as both wonderful and terrible. Impossible to ignore.

She had not realized until years later how that moment had shaped her.

She took a break, stretched, felt the tiredness fall away a little, and glanced out a window. From the abstract astrophysical to the humid neighborhood, all in one lungful of moist air.

It was so easy to forget that she dwelled in what most people regarded as the nearest Earthly parallel to heaven. The volcanic soil was rich, lying beneath ample rains and sun. Irrigated paddies gave taro’s starchy roots, which made
poi
when mashed. There were ginger and berries, mango, guava, Java plum, and of course bananas. The candlenut tree gave oily brown nuts, which, strung together, burned to give hours of flickering light. The sheer usefulness of candlenuts to humans seemed like an argument from design for a God-made world, customized to smart primates. But it was also a paradise with mosquitoes and lava flows—counterarguments. Well, she could settle the argument about God and paradise within a year. Probably less, the doctors said in their cagey way.

Her fatigue evaporated. The man she had been thinking of now for days was coming up the path.

There were Englishmen and then there were quintessential Englishmen, the types everyone expected to meet and never did. All had their points, in her experience, except maybe the ones whose accents were pasted on and covered over sentiments as soft as sidewalk. There was the jolly fellow who had many friends who would surely stand him a drink, all unfortunately out of the room just now. There was the erudite type who knew more about Shakespeare than anybody and so never went to see anything modern. He was better than the lit’ry one who kept rubbing his foot against your calf under the table while he wondered very earnestly what you did think of that recent novel, really? She liked the slim, athletic engineery types who were modest about their feats and never spoke of them but could fix a balky engine or conjugate a French verb, often simultaneously. They were even good in bed, though she got tired of the modesty because in the end it was fake, a social mannerism, a class signature.

The Englishman coming up the path from the driveway was none of these, but he did have that Brit habit of knowing an awful lot about the right subjects. He had known a lot about politics when people thought it mattered, was by his own description “infrared” until it became clear that the left was truly dead, and even recently could tell you the names of which ministers voted for what measure. He applied the same acuity to the currents of astronomy. Now he was just as sure of himself as ever, his instincts having carried him quite handily to the top. She felt that she should see him as something more than a somewhat scrawny man in a green suit badly wrinkled by the tropical damp.

She greeted him at the door with “Kingsley, what a surprise,” though she had been half-expecting him and they both seemed to know that.

“Thought I’d drop by, was on my way to look at a flat.”

They went into the spacious, sunlit living room and she sank a little too quickly onto a rattan couch. The trades stirred the wind chimes and she remembered to offer iced
tea, which he gratefully accepted, drinking half of the glass straight off. She was infinitely glad that she had chosen the clingy blue dress, though did not let herself dwell on why. Best to keep things on a conversational level, certainly. He was being unusually quiet, getting by with a few compliments about the house, so—

“You’re planning on staying for a while, then?” she prodded.

“I can put aside the Astronomer Royal business for a bit. If I am to be something of a scientific shepherd, I should be where things happen. I think it inevitable, given our experience of the last few days.”

“Ummm. Lately, experience is something I never seem to get until just after I need it.”

His face clouded and she could see he had been trying to keep this a strictly professional discussion. Well, too bad; she was feeling fragile and human now, and not very astrophysical after a morning of it.

After a pause, he said, “I’m so sorry about your condition.”

“Oh Lord, Kingsley, I wasn’t fishing for sympathy. I just meant that this intruder has taken me by surprise in a way I did not think possible anymore. I
like
it. Keeps me guessing.”

She half-opened her mouth to bring up the magnetic field splittings, then decided to let Benjamin be the first. After all, she thought with a sudden wry turn of mind, Kingsley had been the first in an earlier, important way that Benjamin had probably always suspected.

“Sorry, um, again,” he said lamely.

She felt a burst of warmth at this chink in the Astronomer Royal’s armor. “You can just move here immediately?”

He smiled grimly. “My home situation is not the best. Angelica and I are separated, so I might just as well be here.”

“Now it’s my turn to be sorry.”

“It’s been coming for some time, years really.”

“She’s a brilliant woman,” Channing said guardedly.
Friends with marital strife were tricky; some wanted you to slander their mates, like a weird sort of cheerleader.

A wobbly smile. “You’ve forgotten her mean side, I fear.”

“Funny, I don’t remember being absentminded,” she said, hoping the weak joke would get him off the subject. He plainly did not want to go there, yet some portion of him did; a familiar pattern with divorces, she had found.

He laughed dutifully. “Tell me about your condition. I truly want to know.”

“Bad, getting worse. A cancer they barely have the name for.”

“I thought we had cracked the problem down at the cellular level by using an entire array of treatments.”

“Oh, drugs help. I do well with what they call ‘selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.’ I take a whole alphabet’s worth of them. Endless chemical adjustments known only by their acronyms, since no human could remember their true names—or want to.”

He was regaining some of his composure, sitting on a stool and sipping. His voice recovered some of the High Oxbridge tones as he said, “Recalls, from my random reading, a line from Chekhov. ‘If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.’ As true in the twenty-first century as the nineteenth.”

She shrugged. “I muddle through, to use a Brit expression.”

“What was that old saying of yours? ‘Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts.’ Quite so.” He actually chuckled at this obscure mathematical pun, or else was a far better actor than he had been.

“Lately, the imaginary has been more fun.”

“That reminds me of one of your sayings. ‘I don’t get even, I get odder.’ Quite
Channing
, I used to think. Good to know you’re still that way, that this damned thing hasn’t…”

“Snuffed out one part of me at a time?” She might as well be up front about it. “That is the way it feels sometimes.”

A sudden stark expression came onto his face and he said
nothing. She said soothingly, “I plan on living forever, Kingsley. So far, so good.”

“I wish I had your, well, calm.”

“It may be plain old exhaustion.”

“No, you had it the other day, leading us all by our noses on that deceleration calculation. Energetic calm.”

She could see that he meant it and thanked him warmly. “You’ve changed some, too.”

He shrugged. “It is famously easier to get older than wiser.”

“I have a lot of trust in your judgment.”

He grinned. “You showed good judgment two decades ago, dumping me for Benjamin.”

“I did
not
‘dump’ you. I got the distinct impression that you were more interested in astronomy than in me.’

“Well, of course,” he said quite innocently, then laughed at the baldness of the truth. “That is, I was a monomaniac then.”

“Would Angelica say anything has changed?”

“Good point. Probably not.”

“You weren’t going to change, and Benjamin was what I wanted, anyway. Not that it wasn’t fun…” She put a lot into the drawn-out last word.

He said seriously, “Yes, it certainly was.”

They sat for a long, silent moment. The wind chimes sang merrily and the soft air caressed them both, a tangy sea scent filling the room as the trade winds built. She let the moment run, something she would not have done until recently. She relaxed into the sweet odors of plumeria and frangipani, both lush now in her garden. A few years before, she had not even known their names. The garden itself was a recent hobby, all due to the damned disease, which she fought by concentrating upon the present. Zen Dying.