Eater (18 page)

A few more days had crept by, and now that they were at the nexus of it all, he felt only a yawning vacancy.

“This must be the strangest thing anyone has ever done,” Benjamin said to her. The specialists’ army had withdrawn, leaving them in an enclosed space, almost comforting in its intimacy. They were surrounded by advanced magnetic reading gear and diagnostics.

She smiled. “Yeah, and out of love, at that.”

“To…leave me something?”

“That’s part of it, for me. But love is a big, cheesy word, able to cover a lot of things.”

Channing was fully uploaded now. The last few hours had been pretty painful for her and she had stood up well, sweat popping out on her brow. He had wiped it away carefully. She had kept waving away even the light painkillers they had offered. “Don’t wanna cloud the picture,” she had kept repeating earlier. As though she were an artist at work on her last oil painting.

The offhand weirdness of the scene kept throwing him. They had come to him with a proposal about the use of her brain afterward. He had listened and gone through confusion to anger to swirling doubt and then he had made them go away. Their idea was to slice her dead brain layer by layer, so that scanning machines could read the deep detail digitally, getting better resolution to sharpen the simulation.

This had sent a cold horror running through him. They had put it as nicely as they could, but still it meant slowly planing away her brain. In the end, her entire cranium would be excavated, leaving half a skull. He could not bear the picture.

She struggled up out of her fog and managed a wrecked smile. “You have to die to be resurrected.”

“I’ll…” The words stuck in his throat.

“You’ll see me again.” She gave him a blissful look. “Goodbye, lover.”

It was the last thing she said.

After a night of no sleep and a lot of sour drinking with Kingsley, he met with the specialists again. They showed him the long black box housing Channing’s uploaded mind. “Reduced to a featureless…” he began, but could not finish the sentence.

“We’ll be processing, compiling, and organizing,” a woman in a smart executive suit said.

“Fine.”

“In a few days—”

“Fine. Just shut up.”

He understood all the parts of the arguments. Magnetic induction loops, tiny and superconducting, could map individual neurons. Laying bare the intricacies of the visual cortex, or evolution’s kludgy tangle in the limbic system, had already unleashed new definitions of Genus Homo. Still, nobody considered Homo Digital to be an equal manifestation. Parts were not the whole.

They played a voicebox rendering, a voice repeating, sounding exactly like her. He saw them looking hopefully at him and he didn’t give a damn about their marvelous trick. Numbly he pulled from his coat pocket the hourglass she had given him. He set it atop the box—
her, now
—and watched until its sand had run down.

He wondered what it might mean to upend it, to start the cycle again. He struggled with the thought.

No
.

The decision came as a release.

It was a slow day for the Neptune Society, so theirs was the sole party when he went out with a few friends from the Center. The captain wondered if he wanted the champagne before or after. After, he said. There were little printed cards set out next to the champagne with some doggerel titled LET ME GO inside and the data: ENTERED INTO LIFE OCTOBER 15, 1978, and ENTERED INTO REST, but he could not read the date through some blurring that had gotten into his eyes.

He gazed up into a sullen cloud cover, a pearly gray plane halfway up Mauna Kea. This pathetic fallacy still quite accurately mirrored his curiously displaced mood. The sea was flat and glassy and he said little on the way out. They gathered at the bow and the captain gave him the urn, blue with odd markings. Not his to keep, as if he would want to. Off came the lid and inside were gritty gray ashes, the color of the sky. He poured the powdery stream and bits of bone into dark blue water. Some of it spread on the surface, some blowing away on a mild wind, but most of it plunged deeply, an inverse plume that seemed like transposed smoke rising to the depths. He had not expected that. His intellect, spinning endlessly in its own high vacuum, told him immediately that it must be the heavier parts sinking, but that did not explain why a bubble burst in his chest and his throat closed and the world seemed to whirl away for a long moment, suspending him over an aching void.

Someone murmured something of farewell and he could not echo it, getting only partway through some words before his voice became a whistle through a crack in the world. He had wanted to say simply
goodbye
, but it came out
why
? and he did not know why at all. Then the captain pressed a bunch of flowers into his hand and he tossed them after the ashes. The boat slowly circled the floating flowers and he could not take his eyes off them and that was all there was.

The next day on the big screen he watched the black box being inserted into a Searcher craft.

Some commentator spoke with grave excitement. Arno made a little speech. It launched and he felt a pang at the brave plume of rocket exhaust. Cheering. At least nobody pounded him on the back.

What had she said in that last hour? First, a pained
I can’t go on like this
.

Before he could speak, she had provided her own jibe.

That’s what you think
.

JULY

Like bad breath, Kingsley had often noted, ideology was something noticed only in others.

Even at this supreme crisis, nattering concerns of infinitesimal weight furrowed the brows of supposedly wise leaders. Here at power’s proud pinnacle, the politician’s aversion to risk reared above all else.

“Dr. Dart,” the President said, “how can we be
sure
this will work? I have a grave responsibility here, ordering the use of nuclear warheads.”

“I should think, sir, that nothing is certain here.”

“But using these weapons so near Earth, I…well…” The President let his voice trail off into the air-conditioned, enameled silence, as if to do so allowed someone to come in with a quick solution to his grave dilemma.

Sorry, not getting off so easily this go
. Kingsley smiled slightly as the occasion seemed to demand. “We hope to short out some of the flowing currents in the vicinity of the black hole. The thing’s a giant circuit, really—a ‘homopolar generator,’ in the physics jargon.”

A German general from European Unified Command said sternly, “These are the very best warheads, Mr. President.”

“Ah, I’m sure,” the worried politician said, his eyes moving from side to side as if seeking a way out. The idea of having all allies present—to spread the responsibility and thus risk, Kingsley supposed—gummed up matters nicely.

“Surely, the quality of arms is not the issue,” Kingsley said.

The general said smoothly, absolutely right on cue, “We have every assurance of success.”

“The Eater comprises an immensely complex balance of forces, utilizing gravitational, magnetic, and kinetic energy stores. It vaguely resembles the region near a pulsar—a rotating, highly magnetized neutron star, that is.”

“It’s like a star?” the President asked, as if this would simplify his problem. He had seen stars, after all.

“The region around it is. The Russian term for a black hole once was”—a nod at the New Russian Premier—“‘frozen star,’ because seen from outside, a collapsing mass appears to stop imploding at a certain point. It hangs up, its infall seeming to halt. The star fades from our view like a reddening Cheshire cat, leaving only its grin—that is, its gravitational attraction.”

“No light, just gravity?” the President asked. He was a bright man, but he had lived in a world in which only what other people thought mattered. The physical world was just a bare stage. Techno-goodies and assorted abstract wonders came occasionally in from stage left, altering the action mostly by adding prizes to the unending human competition that was really the point of it all.

“In France, the equivalent phrase
trou noir
has obscene connotations, so ‘frozen star’ would be better,” a woman from the State Department added unhelpfully.

The President was a practiced ignorer; while nodding, he did not take his eyes from Kingsley. “These maps of it, it looks like a kind of interstellar octopus with magnetic arms.”

“Not a bad description,” Kingsley allowed.

“I can’t see how we can kill an octopus without having to chop off its legs,” the President said.

“Kill the head,” Kingsley said. “The legs are secured by the accretion disk, plus those anchored directly in the black hole itself.”

“I see,” the President said. “We try to get at this little disk it carries around.”

“More that the disk carries the hole, sir. The hole is just a singularity, a gravitational sink, nothing more. The essence of the Eater lies in the magnetic structures erected using the accretion disk as a foundation. If we can shake that foundation, we can damage the great house the Eater has built upon it.”

“I understand,” the President said in a tone conveying admirably that he did not.

“More precisely, my point is that we cannot solve the pulsar problem, even after half a century of trying. On the face of it, a reliable model of the black hole’s inner regions—and their functions—is impossible.”

“Then I don’t think I can authorize—”

“But you must!” the Secretary of State broke in. “The consequences of not following through—”

“These are
our
weapons and delivery systems,” the President shot back, showing why he was President.

“But the world alliance agreed—”

“To leave final judgment, moment by moment, to the nation actually doing the job,” the President finished. “I am keeping my options open.”

“Not attacking this thing—”

“May yet prove to be the best course,” Kingsley felt himself forced to say, before this deteriorated further. The Secretary of State had been rumored to be a highly political appointment from a wheat state, he remembered hearing. Something about shoring up support with a domestic ethnic constituency, which unfortunately appeared to be a major theme of this administration, rather than competence. “Only its response to our counteroffers will tell the tale.”

“But it doesn’t answer,” the Secretary of State said moodily.

“Silences are the most artful phase of diplomacy,” Kingsley said, and instantly saw that this was the wrong tack. The Secretary of State’s eyes widened a millimeter. Plainly he
did not like being reminded, however indirectly, of his lack of background in diplomacy. “A strategy you have employed well in the past, as I recall.”
There. That might put a Band-Aid on the wound
.

The Secretary of State opened his mouth and paused, apparently to let this buildup set the stage for a devastating reply, but the President wasn’t having any. He smacked an open palm on the mahogany table between them and said, “I have to be convinced that using weapons of mass destruction is necessary. I’m authorizing only readiness. No codes are to be passed down the line, as insurance in case we lose communications.”

This was the essential practical point. No one knew what the Eater could do to their web of connections. Yet targeting nuclear-tipped warheads on the beast’s interior demanded timing of fractions of a second, for fast-burn missiles closing at very high speed.

“If I take the Secretary’s point, he is quite right, there is likely to be no time for deliberation.”

Actually, “dithering” would better describe the tortured path whereby they had reached this point. Kingsley had never operated at this level and had always fondly imagined that matters proceeded here with a swift clarity that made lower echelons look like the swamp they so often were, in his experience. It was never pleasant to discover that one was naïve, and in this case it was quietly horrifying.

The Secretary gave Kingsley a quick nod. Fine; with such people the striking of instantaneous alliances was automatic, part of the conversational thrust, encumbering one for no longer than the need demanded. Certainly not grounds to neglect a later opportunity for betrayal, either.

The President mulled this over for some seconds. “That’s a powerful argument for striking early, then, before it reaches inside these belts you mentioned.”

“The Van Allen belts?” Kingsley had been called upon to deliver minilectures with slides the day previous.

“You said it may have trouble moving so fast, once it’s inside the magnet sphere.”

The President was a reasonably quick study and Kingsley would not think for an instant of correcting him on jargon. “Yes, sir, the Earth’s magnetosphere may deform its outer regions. Of course, it may be able to deal with that. It is experienced.”

“Yeah, eight billion years of experience,” the President said with sudden, sour energy.

“Your point is that targeting could be better done before it is that close?” Kingsley prompted. There were only eight people in the room and all seemed to suffer from the fatigue he saw everywhere at this command center outside Washington. Only the guards seemed fresh.

“Is that true?” the President asked the room.

The Secretary of State had been making permission-to-speak noises for some time and now answered, “There are grave consequences if we engage it close to the atmosphere.”

“Don’t want to let it get that close, do we?” the President said. “We’ve got enough chaos to deal with now.”

This summoned forth rather relieved murmurs of agreement. “Got our hands full just dealing with the breakdown in the cities,” a domestic adviser said. More murmurs.

“Any ideas what happens if we fail?” the President asked the room.

“It has announced no purpose here beyond acquiring those uploads,” the Secretary of State said. This he had gotten from Kingsley’s report of the day before.

The President pressed him, something like dread in the overlarge eyes. “What’s the downside?”

The Secretary said, “It could retaliate, I suppose.”

“Of course,” the President said irritably. “Point is, how? Dr. Dart? What’s U think?”

“Its range of response is very large. It could inflict considerable damage.”

“How about what the media are hot on? Flying through the Earth, eating it, all that?”

“To plunge into our surface would strip the hole of its
magnetic fields, essentially killing the intelligence lodged there.”

“Good to hear. It’ll keep its distance?”

“It is entirely composed of plasma and gas managed by fields. To collide directly with a solid object would be fatal.”

A Science Adviser aide asked, “How come it could eat asteroids?”

“A grazing collision, using its jet to pre-ionize much of the asteroid. It collects the debris using its fields.”

“So what can it do to us?” the President insisted.

“I suspect we do not wish to find out,” Kingsley said.

“Let’s hear from DoD,” the President said.

The Defense Secretary was a quiet but inpressive man, exuding a sort of iron conviction Kingsley had seldom seen, for a pointed counterexample, in the English cabinet. But he was obviously starved for material, for his own technical groups had not envisioned many scenarios beyond what the Eater had already displayed. These the President hashed over. Clearly there was danger to all assets in space, national and private alike.

Kingsley kept quiet, a welcome relief. He was there for astrophysical advising, bundled off by Arno, yet to his surprise had been drawn quickly into the very center of decision-making. The intruder’s ability to hand them surprises had shortened the lines of communication inside the administration. By the time the specialists could figure out what was going on, their insights were needed at the very top. No time for the usual opinion-pruning, spin-alignment, and image-laundering of conventional policy.

In turmoil, everyone—even the immensely powerful—turned to authority. Kingsley had inherited the robes of the high scientific priesthood, not by a thorough selection process, but through the offhand accidents with which history crowded its great events.

“We have to be ready to launch against it soon,” the Secretary of Defense came in.

The President raised tired eyebrows. “And?”

Just the soft pitch the Secretary had wanted to coax forth, altogether too obviously. “We’re on top of that, sir. Our people are just about in position.”

“This is for the China option?” the President said vaguely, looking at his leatherbound briefing book. “I’m getting split opinions on that one. U is split.”

A nervous silence. A few heads looked up alertly, others seemed to duck.

The President blinked. “Oh, sorry, that’s another meeting, isn’t it? This damned thing’s got a lot of parts.” He tried a sunny smile beamed around the room. “Don’t seem to fit right.”

The Defense Secretary said hastily, “That’s for the later discussion—”

“And targeting, that’s a big technical problem, right?” the President prompted. Heads nodded. “Got people on that? Good, then.”

The President looked satisfied, a subtle shift apparently signaling the end of the meeting. The man’s time was being sliced thin, a style of governance by crisis the Americans had developed to its frazzling fulfillment. He slipped into mechanically affable, look-confident mode as people left, nodding and smiling broadly as if on the campaign trail.

Blank-faced aides ushered Kingsley out of the central sanctum. This was by far the most heady rubbing up against raw power that he had ever experienced, yet it left him curiously unmoved. No one got to even the relatively minor level of Astronomer Royal without some hunger for power, or at least the look-at-me urge that reached far back into the primate chain of evolution. But the vastly greater authority of this company around him, which he was sure would have left him breathless only months ago, seemed to pale compared with the implications of the bright blue spotlight that now hung in the sky over Earth.

His working group convened again in one of the innumerable conference rooms buried in this mountain retreat. If civilization collapsed, the planners apparently had provided that talking could go on indefinitely.

He paid close attention to the gaggle of theorists who had analyzed the magnetic avenues near the black hole. They had cobbled together ideas from the study of pulsars and quasars and their story fit together reasonably well. Yet the Eater was not a natural system, a crucial distinction. He had not been stretching matters when he had told the President the extent of the uncertainty here.

The working group milled around this central fact and then, given the press of time, ended with a list of targeting options. Luckily, Kingsley had begged off chairmanship of this group, and a bulky French astrophysicist got the job of carrying their conclusions to figures in the Department of Defense and to their parallel figures with the U.N.-based coalition. The political nuances now seemed even more complicated than the physics.

Kingsley got away pretty quickly, dodging the usual pockets of undersecretaries and such who always wanted one’s “angle” on the thinking of the inner circle. The familiar Washington circuitry of instant analysis and jockeying for position ran on at high voltage, blissfully unaware that this was an event unparalleled in the experience of even this remarkable—and remarkably lucky—nation.

Some of the policy mannerisms here were identical to those of London.
Always be clever, but never be certain
. That held for a good 90 percent of the time, for example. It was no good in this crisis, since only firm answers had any chance of being heard over the din.