Eater (15 page)

JUNE

In her purse lurked her neuroses writ small. Survivalist provisions like chocolate bars and breath mints, nail polish and Kleenexes, Chap Sticks and thread and a palm computer and a wrinkled notebook and assorted pens: yellow, blue, black. She also had taken lately to hoarding: unpaired gloves, broken eyeglass frames, bits of tape and twine. Peering in, she felt as if she gazed into her unconscious, where dark objects conspired with painful memories. She had retreated to ever-larger purses roughly at the time she was diagnosed. Before she had used briefcases or book bags, the businesslike approach of a woman who no longer announced that she carried her house on her back. Yet she still associated purses with her mother’s generation: solid, sure, but also awkwardly dressed and uptight, clunky and a bit out of it. The purse’s shadowy collective unconscious now prompted her with fragments of her past selves. It reeked of pruderies and fears, anxieties hidden from the world but carried everywhere, like a Freudian fanny-pack.

She used this bulky brown satchel to keep herself afloat at the Center. She could hide her medication and carry it with her, and when a nurse came to administer the more difficult injections, she could use Benjamin’s spacious office, with its little “executive alcoves” for deal-making away from the main room of walnut desk and Big Screen Comm Center. When Benjamin or Kingsley—the only people who took
much notice of her, luckily, in the hubbub—protested that she should be home working, she quoted Einstein: “Only a monomaniac gets anything done.”

“All too true,” Kingsley said somberly, his luminous eyes looming over his slender, lined face. “You’re…looking well.”

She had an urge to laugh at his obvious struggle to find a remotely plausible compliment, but suppressed it. “You’re a dear, dear liar.” She kissed him lightly, a satisfying soft smack.

To her surprise, this flustered him. To smooth matters over, she went with him for a coffee and deliberately chose one of the high-octane variety named Kaff. He looked troubled most of the time now, but her choice made him frown further. “Should you be, well—”

“Taking in caffeine? Mendenham says not to, but my body says, ‘Either gimme some or lie down.’”

“A demanding body.”

“You should know.”

Again he startled her by blushing. “I believe I can recall,” he managed.

“As the prospect of having much more of it fades, I live in my sensual past.” Teasing him was unfair, but the world was not exactly packed full of fun lately, and she needed the ego boost. So she rationalized as she watched him put his composure back on. She could even see it happening in his face, mouth getting resolute again. Under the pressure here, maybe his barrier against facial giveaways was falling.

“You have every right to,” came out judiciously phrased. “If there’s anything—”

“A lot, but it’s probably immoral or something. Content me by telling me the gossip.”

This put him on his favorite ground, the slightly disguised lecture. The great game now was not astrophysics but amateur alien psychology. “The creature going on obliviously, chattering about all sorts of things, as if we are all waiting here for its orders.”

“And we aren’t?”

“The leadership is saying and doing nothing.”

“They’ve had two days to think it over—”

“My dear, this is a matter for the entire world. In two days, they cannot agree on the color of blue.”

“They’d better hurry.”

“There’s mildly good news there. It’s braking.”

“Ah, good. How?”

“Only an astronomer would make that her first question.” He grinned and for a quick moment some of the old joy brimmed between them. “Most would want to know how many more days that gives us, which is perhaps now fifteen in all. To answer
how
—through a forward-pointing jet, quite powerful. Apparently it found fresh quarry and has extended this jet, anchoring it firmly with magnetic flux ropes in a helical pattern. That funnels and ejects hot matter from its accretion disk.”

The coffee had given her enough energy to be incredulous. “That’s slowing it enough?”

“I know, a simple calculation shows that slowing a mass exceeding our moon’s, down from a velocity of hundreds of kilometers a second is, well, an incredible demand.”

“It’s an incredible creature. What’s it
say
about this?”

“Its deceleration? Nothing. Not one to give way to Proustian introspection, it seems.”

“Skip the literature. I’ll settle for hearing how it does the jet trick.”

“Understanding how it thinks is now critical, I gather.”

“Sure, right after we understand how we think.”

“Touché. It did refer to Proust the other day, I saw. Something about his understanding of time being what one would expect of ‘doomed intelligences,’ I believe the phrase was.”

“Well, as a fellow doomed intelligence, I agree. Never could abide Proust, anyway.”

“Nor I. Its transmissions are fascinating stuff and I look in on them when I can.”

“I should, too,” she said distantly.

“It’s sending masses of stuff, a million words a day.” Too casually he looked at her hands, which were fidgeting—and not due to the Kaff. “I gather you have been looking at its own inventory of art.”

“Ummm, yes. It appended a note saying that these were representative works from other members of our class.”

He frowned. “‘Class’? As technological civilizations?”

“No, as what it called ‘dreaming vertebrates.’ With the implication that our class is fairly common.”

“Good Lord. I wonder if those working out its orders know that. I’ll have to tell them.”

“Orders?”

“Oh yes, it has a menu and proceeds to order up whatever it fancies.”

“From what? Our broadcast media?”

“And references such as the Encyclopaedia. Still having a bit of trouble keeping straight that people pass from the scene so quickly. Or else thinks we’re somehow hiding them away still.”

“Who does it want?”

“Artists, scientists, sports figures. It caught transmissions from decades past as it approached our solar system. It even sends the pictures of those it wants. Lauren Bacall, Einstein, Bob Dylan, Gandhi, Esther Dyson, Jack Nicholson, and Hillary Clinton, as I remember.”

She felt a chill then at the reality of what was coming at them across the solar system. “Good…grief.”

“Yes, imagine the feelings of those on the list.”

“They’ve been told?”

“It would seem. Of course many are dead, but others are now near death. Arno wondered aloud if any would be willing to, you know, give up the remainder of their lives”—he shrugged, eyes rolling skyward—“for humanity and so on.”

“To…copy…them.” The word was hard to get out.

“It has already sent ‘helpful additions’ to our computing and other technologies that it says will permit us to ‘read’ a
good deal of the memory stored in brains. Seems incredible to me.”

“It…wants all the person?”

“So I gather.” He looked at her quizzically.

“Why should we do it?”

“It does not need to brag about its threatening abilities, of course. Apparently brute intimidation has worked before.”

“We all judge from our experience,” she said lightly. “What does this tell us about other intelligent life in the galaxy?”

“They must have complied, I suppose, else it would not think this a winning strategy.”

“Something about the idea gets me in my, well, my gut.”

“Me, too. In terms of game theory, doing a cost-benefit sort of analysis—”

She chuckled loudly. Kingsley stopped, blinked. “You think I’m off the mark.”

“‘Applying game theory’—that’s the kind of idea only an intellectual would believe. This is a gut issue.”

Ruefully he tried to share in the humor of it, managing a thin smile. “I suppose I betray my origins.”

“You may think that way, but I’ll bet ordinary people sure don’t.”

He nodded energetically. “I think you’re dead-on right.”

“To deal in people this way is as profound an insult as I can imagine.”

“Ummm. Perhaps this hints at what we should call a fate worse than death?”

“How are people reacting?”

He sighed with gray exasperation. “Those above are dithering, terrified. News has gotten out, of course. Arno tried to see that all radio telescopes that could pick up the Eater’s transmissions were in our control, but that notion failed immediately.”

“Too many?”

“Far too many. A small dish with superior software in Sri Lanka picked up the vital part of the story. The Eater sent it
several times in different terminology, apparently to be sure it was understood.”

Benjamin came by, saw them, and hurried over. “Been looking for you both. Come on. You can watch in my office.”

From his tight-mouthed expression she could read that the morning had not gone well. She labored up from her chair. “More trouble with Arno?”

“He’s trying to find scapegoats for the leaks.”

“This place is a sieve, in any case,” Kingsley said amiably, unconcerned, as they both slowed to her pace.

“The Sri Lanka was bad enough, but somebody’s letting other stuff get out,” Benjamin said as they entered his office. Two assistants waved for his attention, but he in turn waved them away. Something had toughened in him in all this and he seemed more assured than he had ever been. She was proud of him, especially when she saw the strain on the faces of Center personnel. Benjamin’s expression was unlined, though intent.

He punched up the international news—not difficult, since channels carried virtually nothing else since the Eater had left Jupiter space. “What’s the reaction?” Channing asked, sinking into a form-fitting chair that clasped her in its leathery embrace.

“Horror,” Benjamin said. “Here—”

They watched reaction shots from some of those ‘ordered up’ on the Eater’s menu. After the third one, her attention drifted and she let events slide by for a while. When she came back, there was the news Benjamin had brought them in for.

Some totalitarian governments had started to comply. Footage of people rounded up—criminals, the politically out of favor—and being herded away.

“To have their brains sliced-and-diced and uploaded into computers,” Benjamin said. “Incredible.”

“And the bastards in charge are claiming to do it for the benefit of all mankind,” Kingsley said.

“Transparent,” Benjamin said with disgust.

The twenty-first century had no lack of dictators. In the crush of populations among the tropical nations particularly, the strongman promises of order and equal shares, though seldom fulfilled, found a ready audience.

“They know their unsavory reputations,” Kingsley observed, “and this move allows them to appear as benefactors of humanity while consolidating internal power. Rather neat, overall.”

Another news flash, this time yet another intercepted Eater message. “Not from here,” Benjamin said. “Some dish grabbed it.”

The Eater encouraged this latest development from the dictators. It wanted a large, functioning “eternal society” to join it, addressing humanity as though it were a unity.

Benjamin did not want to go for even a short walk on the beach, but she insisted. The day’s events had been unsettling, as usual, and he felt the old island softness creep into him as they made their way through palms and onto the broad, warm sand. The sunset was a spectacular streaked composition in purple and orange. She could barely manage making her way in the white sand.

“When will we be able to see it as a naked eye object?” she asked, gazing up.

“Inside a week, I believe, if its deceleration continues as is.”

“Should be pretty.”

He turned to her suddenly, back to the sunset. “Look, I can step down from running things, spend these days together. Here on the beach, as much as we can.”

“Your heart wins out over your head,” she said abstractly, gazing at the fading fingers of deepening red that arced over them.

“Sure, sure, for you.” They embraced and he felt a warm wave of relief. “I’ll see Arno tomorrow, quit—”

“No, I need you to talk to him, but not about that.”

He blinked, seeing something strange come into her face. “But…”

Fervently she grasped his arms, hugged him, stepped back. “I want to go.”

“‘Go’? Where? What—” Then he saw it.

“Upload me.”

“That’s…that’s—” His throat tightened painfully.

“Crazy, as crazy as what’s already happening.”

He scrambled for rational reasons. “It’s untried, chancy—”

“It’s not to evade death,” she said in a straightforward, businesslike voice. “I know that a copy is not the original. I’ll be gone, as far as the little ‘me’ that rides around behind my eyes. And I’m not going to discuss whether an uploaded ‘person’ has free will, either—philosophy doesn’t ring my chimes, not now. I’ve got another reason, one you can argue for with Arno and the others.”

“If you think I’ll—”

“Hear me out, lover. I want to control a Searcher spacecraft, fly it into the Eater. They need onboard guidance to do that. I can be uploaded into a control module.”

“Not like those bastards in the tropics.” He was trying to see what drove her to this, but his mind didn’t seem to be working very well. Did she think some digital replica was like becoming one of those sculptures, the alien ones?

She abandoned the business voice and pleaded nakedly. “I can help, even after I’m gone.”

“And you are an astronaut,” he said lamely. “You’ll get back into space, sort of.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” She hugged him.

He recoiled from her grasp, confused. “You’re saying, ‘Kill me early’? No.”

“It
is
my life.”

“No!”

She reached out with a soft, tentative hand. “Something of me will come through. Maybe.”

He looked at her trembling lips and kissed them. It was wrenchingly hard to resist her. “But I want every remaining moment with the
real
you, damn it.”

Channing picked up a handful of sand and let it run through her hands, trickling into the passing breeze like an
hourglass. “Time runs out for all of us. I just want to control my end.”

“But this method, it’s bound to wear you down. You could easily die sooner.”

“Saving what, a few weeks of wasting away? No—I want win-win, remember? This way, we get the Searcher swarm to work better. And I get…something nobody’s done.”

“They don’t know what the hell they’re doing with this stuff, it’s just parts of technology slammed together, it’s…” He ground down into silence.

“I’ve read the reports, preliminary and sketchy but promising.” Back to the business voice, crisp and NASA all the way. “They get lots out of the cerebral cortex. Trouble is, reading the deeper parts of the brain.”

“But they won’t capture
you
.”

“The body won’t be worth much. I’m a walking ruin already.”

He had never liked her talking about herself this way, especially not the body he had learned to worship in so many ways. “I can’t believe they can read you like some neuronal book.”

“All of me is beautiful and valuable,” she said, tone now light and brittle. “Even the ugly, stupid, and disgusting parts.”

Was part of him drawn to the idea of giving her some form of digital immortality? A last flight?

Confused, his mouth working with unrelieved strain, he turned and walked on. Without them noticing, the sun had glimmered away and the sky slid into purple darkness.