Eater (26 page)

Blessed are the flexible, for they can tie themselves into knots
.

She had thought this state would be sublime, ghostly. Instead, she had hauled along her whole stinky, tangled neuroses-ridden self. Sure, she now flew in space in a way no astronaut could. But her mind was still tied to her body. Worse, knowing the body was a digital figment did no good.

Tracking the beast demanded fresh navigation skills, fast movement, and her reward was sore “muscles.” The programmers, in her opinion, had left entirely too much of her mind-body link. If she overused her gorgeous ion jets, they ached. Turn too fast and the “knees” smarted, sharp and cutting.

Simulation she might be, but why the body’s baggage? What next, callused feet?

The illusion was good. Her breath whooshed and wheezed in and out. No oxygen at all here, but they had thought she needed the sensation to quiet her pseudo-nervous system, make it think she was breathing. In fact,
it
was breathing
her
.

She took a deep nonbreath and fell into a shadowy space dotted by orbiting debris. This was a messy Eater, gobbling up satellites and leaving twinkling motes. She shepherded her Searchers through this in pursuit of the glowing archwork ahead. Or below; directions were free of gravity’s grip, here.

Far better than being an astronaut in the creaky old space station. She had watched the dear old patchwork of bad plumbing and congressional nightmares—abandoned, finally—as the Eater dismembered it. Good riddance! It had crippled the pursuit of better goals for decades. They owed the monster for that, at least.

But nothing else. She felt her giddy sense of weightless purpose as her pretty blue ion jets thrummed and spewed, taking her up/down/sidewise. Getting better at this, but still it made her balance whirl. Thank God they had edited out the entire inner-ear responses.

Now the hard part. She glided into the first filmy tendrils of the beast. Ionized streamers marked the feathery magnetic fields. Their tug she felt as a brushing pressure against her aluminum carapace.
Careful, don’t alert the misbegotten monster. Down, hard
—
then a calculated swerve
.

If at first you don’t succeed, kiddo, skydiving is not your sport
.

She had lost a dozen Searchers finding out scraps of largely incoherent information. The labyrinths of fields confined dense thickets of Alfven waves, forming webbed patterns. It did not seem to mind intrusion, but the rule was, read and be eaten.

“I’m back,” Benjamin’s wavering tones came. She grasped them like ripe, liquid fruit. The message’s cypherdefenses peeled away as she filtered them—their only defense against the Eater eavesdropping. So far it seemed to have worked. Seemed.

“Missed you. It’s not so much the dark here, but the cold.”

“I thought you couldn’t feel temperature.”

“Category error, lover. It feels like a chill, so it is. Maybe it’s actually the color green in disguise.”

“I had to go to a meeting, find out what’s happening.”

“What’s that cliché? About nobody on their deathbed regretting time missed at the office?”

“I suppose you’d know.” He was too somber, needed some joshing.

“I always kinda missed the ol’ office. Remember, though, this is the me of when they recorded. How long has it been?”

He blinked, startled. “Weeks. My God, you don’t know what’s happened?”

“Oh sure, I got all the news. A bath of it. But no personal stuff.”

He wore his thoughtful distraction expression. It was looking ragged. “Hundreds of thousands have died. And I don’t give a damn.”

“You don’t have the room for it.”

“That’s a good way to put it. I’ve felt like a monster.”

“Caring only about my dying doesn’t make you an ogre, not in my book.”

“Getting the balance right…”

His voice trailed off and she knew exactly what he was thinking.
Well, better face it
. “I’m alive this way, and all those people dead, really dead—all because of the Eater.”

“Yeah. Life’s going too fast for me now, kid.”

He was back to putting on a brave face, but it wouldn’t work with her. She could feel how close to shattering he was. “Me, too. Just live in it, Benjamin, like a suit of clothes.”

He blinked. “That’s what it’s like for you?”

“Has to be. I don’t even sleep anymore.”

“My God, that must be…”

“Refreshing, actually. The thought just doesn’t come up.”

“You’re always wide awake?”

“Yep, and without my old love, caffeine, too.”

“What’s it like to pilot a rocket?” He was still uncomfortable, but they had always used their love of the technical to get through bumpy spots.
Fair enough
.

“It’s made me realize that when we open our eyes each morning, there’s waiting a world we’ve spent a lifetime learning to see. We make it up.”

“And you’re free of that now?”

“No, just so
aware
of it. When I was living down there,
I’d see everything with a filter over it—experience, habit, memory.”

“Now it’s all new.”

“Not entirely. I swoop, I dive, but it feels like running, not really flying. My body is always, in a very profound way, telling me a story.”

“The body you don’t have.”

“Right. Weird, huh? So I wonder what the Eater feels. It has no solid body.”

“Even the black hole really is a hole. Not a mass, a thing it can feel.”

“I suppose. The magnetic storage of information, I wonder what it feels like?”

“Stay away from that,” he said with quick alarm.

“I think I’ve got to go there.”

“Observe. That’s all you’re supposed to do.”

“Y’know, I’m in charge up here.”
Just to slide the point in
.

“Don’t scare me.” His face was naked again and she felt a burst of warmth for him.

“Tell me what you guys know now, then. I need to know.”

He was glad to lapse into tech-mode again. The experts thought it was best for her to get her input this way, through Benjamin, and neither of them cared to know why. They liked it; that was all that mattered.

“The way Amy describes it, there are captive—well, ‘passengers’ might be the best word—in the Eater’s magnetic ‘files.’ It keeps records of cultures it has visited.”

Channing said, “That’s what it calls ‘Remnants’?”

“You know about that?”

“They gave me thick files of what it’s been saying. I can read it ten thousand times faster than I could with eyes.”

“Does that help?”

“Understand it? At least it puts me on a processing level more nearly like its own.”

“Ominous stuff it’s sending, seems to me,” Benjamin said delicately.

“I’ve picked up waves from the distinctive knots in the magnetic structure. There are tens of thousands of them, at a minimum. They’re living entities, all right. Somehow they share its general knowledge, so some at least have learned to speak to us. They say they were ‘harvested’ by the Eater.”

“Magnetic ghosts.” He shivered; she could feel his inner states by reading the expressions of his pinched mouth.

“There’s something else, an ‘Old One.’ Any idea what that is?”

“Last I heard, the theory people here think it might be the original civilization that uploaded itself into the magnetosphere. Just a guess, really.”

“Ask Amy for me? See if there’s anything new on this ‘Old One’?”

“Sure.”

“I suppose you don’t have to. This whole conversation, it’s monitored, right?”

“I suppose so. Haven’t thought.”

Dear thing, he wouldn’t
. “Privacy is not giving a damn.”

She had not expected this to make him cry, but it did.

Kingsley stood beside Benjamin as they watched the launch on a wall screen. History in the making, if anyone lived to write it down.

He was partly there to see the event, but mostly to steady Benjamin, should he start to fall over. That had happened twice already from apparently random causes. If Benjamin were seen to get visibly worse—distracted, morose, or worse—Arno would see him off the property straightaway. That would depress the man even more. Leaving him alone in their house would invite something far worse still.

“Steady there,” he whispered. Benjamin took no notice, just stared.

The view was of a lumbering airframe framed by puffball clouds that could have been anywhere; these were above Arizona. He still had a bit of trouble getting excited about these air carrier, three-stage jobs. Takeoff from any large airport, drop the rocket plane at 60,000 feet, whereupon the sleek silver dart shot to low Earth orbit. This one would in turn deposit its burden, a fat cylinder instructed to find and attach to the Channing-Searcher craft.

The modular stairway to the stars, as the cliché went. Economical, certainly. Without it, they could never have fielded an armada of Searchers and support vessels to meet the Eater. Still, he missed the anachronistic liftoff and rolling thunder.

The dagger-nosed rocket plane fell from the airframe belly and fired its engine. In an eye blink, it was a dwindling dot.

Benjamin murmured stoically. Kingsley wondered what was going through his friend’s mind and then, musing, recalled Arno and the Marcus Aurelius reference made by the Eater. Why had the creature dwelled upon Aurelius?

Stoic indeed, that was the smart course in such times. Did the isolation of Aurelius at the top of the Roman Empire correspond remotely to the utter loneliness of the Eater? The paradoxical permanence of change must loom as an immensely larger metaphor for it.

Such a being, though constructed by an ancient intelligence, surely had undergone developments resembling evolution. Parts of so huge an intelligence could compete and mutate as magnetic fluxes carrying the genetic material of whole cultures. There could presumably be selection for what Kingsley supposed could be called “supermemes”—to coin an utterly inadequate term for something that could only be conjectured.

Amy said from Benjamin’s other side, “They’ve set up a bar.”

“Capital idea,” Kingsley said with utterly false enthusiasm.

“Think that’s a good idea?” Benjamin asked mildly.

“I believe it to be a necessity.” Kingsley made a beeline for the bar before the crowd noticed it. It was admirably stocked and he complimented Arno on it as the man took a gin and tonic and the barman prepared Kingsley’s exact specifications.

Arno seemed pleased and proud. “Great idea, wasn’t it?”

Unlikely he was referring to the bar, but what else? Before Kingsley could rummage through a list of suspects, Arno added, “The antimatter thing.”

“Quite so.” This would not seem immodest because clearly Arno had forgotten who had thought of it.

“My guys are sure it’ll work—and they should know.”

“Certainly.”
How to play this
? Arno was not exactly a torrent of information at the best of times. His habits of concealment, well learned in other agencies known chiefly by their initials, still held.

“They’ve done the simulations, pretty sure it’ll work.”

“The physics is a bit dicey. I—”

“They’ve discovered a lot of new stuff.”

Arno’s certainty was granite-hard, so Kingsley tried a mood-altering diversion. “Well, the classic joke about scientists and women is true of me, I’m afraid.”

Arno frowned. “Haven’t heard it.”

“For scientists, it is better for a woman to wear a lot of clothes that take time to take off, you see, because they are always more excited by the search than by the discovery.”

This got a hearty laugh that did not appear to be put on.
Pressures of the job escaping
, Kingsley surmised. From Arno’s lined face he could see that it would be good to keep things going on the good-fellow front. Always a wise idea, but essential in a crisis of any size; and there had never been one larger.

“Timing is crucial, of course,” he said quickly—to pry forth some information before Arno’s mood shifted.

“We’ve put down that U.N. negotiation position, too,” Arno said. “They wanted to give it everything.”

“All the people?”

“And more. You’ve seen the new list?”

“It wants more?”

“You bet. Raising the ante to over half a million names.”

“Extracted from the news media, I imagine.”

“No wonder it got so hot about our turning the TV and radio off.”

“The moral landscape has turned into a minefield, admittedly. Some voices are arguing that we are likely to incur more than half a million dead if it decides to skate along the atmosphere and give us the jet again.”

Something in Arno’s smile gave him warning. “Maybe you should be reading the list instead of listening to those ‘voices,’ my Royal Astronomer.”

“I’m on the list?”

“The monster watches a lot of TV.”

“And you?”

“Yeah. Damned if I know how it got me.”

“Benjamin?”

“Sure. Half the people working on this, easy.”

“My God.”

“Apparently that’s what it thinks it is.”

This sobering talk made the alcohol all the more necessary, in Kingsley’s opinion. Still, quite enough had been done along the lines of intimidate-the-out-of-it-scientist. Before he left the bar, he decided a gesture of indifference was required. “I’d go like a shot if it would settle this matter,” he said.

“You haven’t been keeping up on the gusher of transmissions it sends,” Arno said comfortably. “It doesn’t like the ‘harvests’ we routed to it, of people recorded using the electromagnetic-induction technique.”

“The technique Channing received?”

“Yes, only she got more detailed attention. Lots more. We’re having to do all this in a rush, people knocking themselves out, around the clock—”

“Why does the bastard not like the results?”

“Low definition of some areas of the brain, I hear.”

“We knew that. The regions that regulate body function, digestion and motor skills and the like.”

“Yeah, it says it wants more of them.”

“I gather we impose some body simulation to make up the difference?”

“Not good enough, it says. It prefers the skull-shaving technique some other countries used.”

“Ah. Have to rethink my position, then.” He kept his tone light and collected the drinks before beating a retreat.

He was on firm ground with Arno when discussing astrophysics, but the man had an uncanny way of getting the stiletto in when the subject shifted. The matter-of-fact horror of it all weighed heavily now. And Arno had a sly relish
in unveiling the latest faces of the thing that hung in their sky like a great, glowering eye.

“New drink?” Amy asked, peering at his.

“Pernod and tequila with a dash of lemon. I believe it’s called a ‘macho.’” This joke went unrecognized, perhaps justifiably, and Benjamin began discussing the Eater’s dynamics.

“You’ve learned a lot from her,” Amy said.

“That’s the idea, right?” Despite his earlier eyebrow raising, Benjamin slurped down his beer. “Give her a ‘friendly interface,’ the Operations term was.”

“I’m sure you’re the crucial element,” Kingsley said, believing every word. Certainly fellows like Arno would have driven Channing to suicide by now if they’d been in the loop.

“I wonder why it doesn’t like the EM reader method?” Amy mused.

Kingsley said, “I expect it is a connoisseur in such matters.”

“How?” Benjamin looked both puzzled and distracted, a difficult combination to fathom.

“It has enforced such orders and used the results perhaps thousands of times before,” Kingsley said.

“I wonder what it does with them?” Amy asked, taking a strong pull at her gin and tonic.

“I rather suspect we do not wish to know.”

Benjamin looked soberly into Kingsley’s eyes. “That bad, huh?”

“Morality is a species-specific concept. The Eater transcends species themselves, since it is an artificial construction left to evolve now for a time longer than the Earth has existed. Outside our experience in a way that does not reward considerations of right and wrong.”

Benjamin gave a grim smile. “Sounds like a classy way of saying it can do what it damn well pleases, so don’t think about it.”

“Well put,” Kingsley said as an aide tugged at his elbow.
The man whispered, “You’re needed immediately in Conference B.”

Kingsley shot back, “I’m bringing these two with me.”

“Sir, they weren’t included—”

“Then I’m not coming.”

“Well, I don’t know, I’ll have to—”

“Come along.” He ushered Amy and Benjamin forward.

When they reached the inevitable battalion of Security personnel, there was the usual orchestration of knitted foreheads and worried doubts. He got through that with a combination of bluster and can’t-tolerate-this-oversight fast talk.

“No matter,” he said to Amy as they walked down a hall with a phalanx of guards. “This is just the usual confusion. The U Agency is acting in this crisis like what the world plainly needs—a multinational government by default. Yet it will share all the irksome traits of the old style nation-state, principally rust in the gears.”

“Your wife is still undercover?” Amy asked.

“Comfortably so, I gather.”

She had caught on. Rather than skulk around, it was better to quite obviously flout their rules. Doing so earned a certain measure of grudging bureaucratic respect. Such strategies had served well in these days.

He had learned a lot. To avoid getting entangled in interference-blocking, running errands, and other lubricating distractions, he had to step lively. There were nations to soothe and endless anxieties issuing from the ever-intruding snout of the media pig. And with exquisite irony, the reward for many, including himself, was to make the Eater’s list.

Straightaway he gathered the intent of the meeting. Arno was running it. His mouth twisted at the sight of Amy and Benjamin, but something kept him from objecting—quite possibly, time pressure. Each figure around the long table had a little sign detailing their positions, chimpanzee hierarchy again, but the discussion was the least formal of any Kingsley had yet seen.

Everyone was in a barely controlled panic. The magnetic
attack had placed one rim of the loop upon the Center and another upon installations of “strategic value” elsewhere in the Hawaiian Islands, one woman from Defense said. A similar loop had landed about an hour later upon the area outside Washington, quite neatly destroying communications. No one had heard from the President since. “Whereabouts and fate unknown,” Arno summed up.

For a world that routinely looked to the United States to pull together alliances, this was a trauma. It did not help that as the meeting proceeded news came of a third loop on its way. Some men rushed out to get details.

“It is now obvious that we had better carry on independently,” Arno said. “We can’t rely on anyone else.”

“We can still reach Channing from here?” Benjamin asked.

The entire table looked at him as though he had shouted in church. He was not a policy maven, but they knew who he was. Their gaze said that his role was to be a gallant warrior, bravely talking his sim-wife through it all, and leave the actual thinking to them.

“I believe so, yes,” Arno answered after a two-beat pause. “We have DoD antennae positioned offshore in case these here—the replacement ones, after our losses—get knocked out again.”

“Where is our fallback installation?” Kingsley asked.

“We want to keep that information closely guarded,” a severe woman in a black pants suit said. She was new, like most of the faces here. Probably from Washington. Crisp, narrow-eyed, the usual.

“Just how are we to flee there, then?”

Arno snorted testily, “All right, it’s up at the ’scopes.”

“The top of Mauna Kea?” Benjamin said disbelievingly. “But that’s so exposed.”

“Everything is,” Arno shot back. “We’re living at the bottom of a well.”

“And we can line-of-sight to the fleet,” the DoD woman added. “Gives us a big effective platform for operations.”

Apparently both U.S. Pacific fleets had been drawn secretly into a perimeter around the Hawaiian Islands. Kingsley had not heard of this, but there did seem a lot of military aircraft in the sky lately, many of them heavy helicopters suitable for carrying substantial equipment up the slopes to 14,000 feet. That they had constructed a redoubt atop the mountain without even Center personnel noting the fact was a tribute, probably to someone in this room.

“We are counting on another attack, once our assault begins,” Arno said. “Maybe even the jet.”

This sobered everyone. “It’s out near geosynchronous orbit now, finishing off the rest of our satellites,” a man nearby said. “Cracks ’em open like nuts. That jet can’t reach this far, I heard.”

Kingsley came in smoothly, “I believe Dr. Knowlton is the expert on this.”

It was best to build Benjamin’s position here on technical grounds, not let him be seen as distraught-husband-off-the-rails. Benjamin seemed to get this point without even a glance at Kingsley. He deftly led them through a discussion of the jet, highlighting what his astrophysics team had learned by observing it incinerate Washington. “The magnetic focusing will work at just about any distance,” Benjamin concluded. “The Eater sets up a circuit effectively. Beautiful physics. The current in the jet self-pinches itself, and the return route for the circuit flows through the cocoon of plasma the jet generates outside it.”

“Very neat,” someone commented. A puzzled silence.

Kingsley understood this remark, however. He wondered for an instant if an appreciation for the aesthetics of physics and engineering could form a better grounds for comprehension between utterly different life-forms than the old routine of serial language.

Such abstractions were swept away, however, by a minor tsunami of moral objection from several around the table. How dare the fellow speak well of the monster, etc.? In the name of decency, and more along those lines.