Eater (30 page)

Benjamin felt her fully now. The old question about whether a simulation had an internal experience—well, all those abstract bull sessions dwindled to scraps. Here was her
self
, coming through in her voice, her vision, the sensory smorgasbord of a lived interior.

“The sand is running, lover,” she said.

“Not yet!” he called.

She coasted in a strange Valhalla of cathedral light and glowing electromagnetic majesty. He floated in his harness, immersed in her world. Through a small port, he could watch the crescent wonder of the great water world below, but his eyes did not stray from the spectacle before him.

Three dots scorched her vision with momentary pinpoint explosions. “Gotcha!” she cried.

He flinched. “What was that?”

“I nailed three of the nodules where the Old One is stored.”

“With Searchers?”

“It killed them, sure. But not fast enough.”

“More barium?”

“Yeah, giving the beast an enema.”

“The big cloud, it’s expanding pretty fast.”

He sent her his extra data sources on a tightbeam, high-bit squirt. A blooming ivory barium cloud licked at the Eater’s magnetic rim.

“Ride ’em, cowboy,” she gloated.

“It’s heading away, around the moon.”

“Hungry, that misbegotten—”

She had stopped abruptly. Benjamin frowned. “What’s—”

“It’s talking to me.”

“About what?”

“Music. Listen.”

“This is insane,” Benjamin said.

“Aliens are by definition insane.”

Suddenly, on five channels, came a flurry of transmissions, everything from African tribal intonations to Beethoven, from Chuck Berry to Gregorian chants, no technique or style neglected.

“What—?!”

“We’re trying to kill it and it sends us music criticism?”

She said tensely, “Bravado? To distract us?”

Baroque music sounded. “Good God, it’s a sales pitch,” she said.

“What in the world…” Benjamin felt an eerie sense of an intelligence abidingly strange.

“That’s supposed to be enticing? Ha!”

“Must be a poem.”

Wonderingly she said, “I think I understand. It doesn’t actually believe we will strike against it.”

“Why? Because we’re scared? It’s right—most people are terrified.”

“But not the ones who matter—us. Maybe its experience with other aliens leads it to believe that any species will make a rational calculation and give it what it wants.”

He blinked. “That’s why that stuff about ‘superrational methods,’ then? It thinks we have an amusing, unreasonable side, but—”

“That won’t matter in a showdown, right. It’s moving fast now. I’m going after it.”

He sensed the surge in her. Not in sight or sound but some other perception, coming somehow through this intense data link.

He was
with
her in a way he never could have been before.

And she was rushing into the magnetosphere. The barium cloud was a hovering mass above, the Eater a rushing fountain of light below. All against hard blacks and the approaching crescent moon.

Plunge
!—he felt her elation. She had once said to him that all astronauts really wanted to be space birds, and now he caught the texture of that truth.

“I’m being forced by the explosions at the top and bottom of the funnels,” she gasped.

He could see the hourglass shape. In the fever dream of his perceptual space, it resembled a dirty Pyrex tube, slowly rotating. Bits of mass trickled down it. Not much; it was starved. But each funnel ended in the glaring hot washout of the disk.

And her only sliver of refuge lay toward that hard luminosity. Searchers flared like matchheads in the shifting, quilted light of it. They died to erase fractions of the Old One—perhaps. In the hard vibrating seethe, she could not be sure what effect all this was having in the form of the magnetic densities around her. Some, yes—a lessening of pressure skated across her pseudo-skin like a soft easing. Some success, she felt. But how much was enough?

“Thousands,” she answered him without his speaking. “I can count them now. We’re just picking at it. To it, we’re—”

“Get out!” he yelled.

“—irritants. It will swat us like flies.”

Suddenly the wall he had built around his inner fears shattered. “My God, get out!”

“I’m in a dive, lover. Blissful hard g’s.”

“Bail out!”

“Gotta go. The sands are running.”

“Wait, you—”

“
Sic transit
, Gloria.”

Her dreamy voice alarmed him. Had she wanted this final plunge all along? “No!”

“Yes.”

Her signal Dopplered away, like water whirling into a drain.

She had studied all the theory and knew that the Searchers were doomed. And so was she.

But the little cylinder of nestled positrons and dutiful, dumb antiprotons, tucked into her tail like an awful egg—that would do nicely.

Diving.
Thirty seconds to go. What was that old movie
? Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
And how did it end
?

She was still close enough to the human sensorium to perceive the onrushing Eater in terms that made human sense. Her “eyes” generalized if they could. They tagged an ensemble of incoming elements—textures, lines—by seizing on a fragment, outlining it with a contrast-boundary, and then compressing all that detail into—

What
was
it?

A swollen cathedral of soaring magnetic towers, impossible perspectives, wrenching structures. All seething with detail that ramified as you looked at it, then split again into underworlds of minutia. Such beauty!

And faintly, hymns.

Her Searchers were dying. Amid streaming obelisks of information, they slipped. Currents found them. Electrocuted.

This place was constructed of electrodynamic flows, she sensed, that laced through the steepling rivulets to find their targets.

A Searcher was a new resistance in this whirling circuit.
Currents dissipated there in an eye blink. Scorching heat fried the Searcher chips.

Then quick sparks lit the way before her. Plasma blossomed. Something had gotten ahead of her and now pried open the magnetic fortress.

Benjamin
—?

She felt a dizzy gush of electric aurorae around her. Dove in a centrifugal gyre. Eluded them for a second or two—

Hands. That was what it felt like at first.

Fingers probing, finding, learning. Inside her.

Peeling her into onion-skin layers.

Feeling ornery, she went outside and whistled, which made the neighbor’s irritating dog run to the end of its chain and gag itself. It had woken her up with its damned barking last night
—

Memories. Did it relish her worst character flaws?

They had a convention: either could raise a hand and say, “Time out,” and the other would have to be quiet for at least a minute. Usually she would be chastened, but not so much that when the “Time’s up” signal came she didn’t launch right into nonstop talk again, words jumping out of her mouth to knit up the damage
—

That one hurt more than the choking dog image.
Lost, so much lost
—

This thing knew how to wound.

Searchers dying everywhere. She banked down into the funnel.

At least the magnetic strands did not buffet her here. Still, turbulent knots of magnetic strands slammed into her carapace. Static electricity crawled over her. Fever-itch.

It sought her, poked into her mind.
It’s seen everything, done all this before
.

She slammed on her remaining ion reserve. A blur of heady acceleration. Below the bull’s-eye disk bristled with eating brilliance. Storms wracked it.

The Eater was all around her now and knew it. Huge hollow cries of godlike wrath battered her.

Suddenly she sensed
them
, too. Shelves of voices. Minds in boxes. A zoo of knowledge/data/selves.

Greetings. Please may you kill us
?

Blistering speed, now. A plunge into relativistic velocity. She felt the prickly twist of space-time as a play of stresses all through her.

Slamming down into the disk.
Bank. Thirty Seconds Over Topology
—

Into the rim of the black hole, skirting the ergosphere’s bulge. A fat waist at the whirring edge.

Please may you
—

She shat the antimatter. It trailed behind her and down into the edge of the furious disk. Annihilating.

Gamma rays coursed out. The whirl of space-time sucked her in and around. Tidal fingers pulled, stretched, popped seams in her. Pain-fingers, now.

Matter died. Fizzed away into photons.

The magnetic fields in her wake lost their anchor. The field lines shot away at the speed of light, freeing the knots and whirls in a growing cone behind her.

Thanks to you. Pleased that you kill us
.

She saw ahead the darkness beyond all night. At its edge, glimmering hot light. The ergosphere. She fell in a skimming orbit, on the brink of being swallowed.

Another ship, there. In a wash of gossamer light. Slim, scorched, skin dented and alive with spider stresses—

It was herself. Time-twisted, so that she saw for one glimmering instant her own destiny.

Benjamin’s missiles plunged ahead of her, he knew that much. Kingsley’s updated command hierarchy had helped. The reprogramming Benjamin had to do by feel alone.

Only with an artful sequence of thermonuclear explosions could he provide the necessary plasma density. Enough ions could short-circuit the Eater’s equatorial equilibrium. So he had timed it, fired the warheads—

And it had worked. The virulent fireballs had cleared a path for her. Did she know it?

He watched a huge sizzling corona of bristling light erupt from the core of the Eater. Magnetic reconnection of the poles? Spreading—

He sensed her somewhere in there. A sprite, speeding into the maw of certain extinction.

He lost sight then as the Eater’s shimmering ghost-strands fell below the moon’s brimming crescent.

Goodbye
—

One burst, then gone. Her.

Abruptly the moon’s rim blazed with furious radiance. A titanic explosion haloed in vibrant colors. Blocking Earth from the virulence. Kingsley’s plan.

Circling around, Benjamin saw that the other side of the moon was burned brown.

Melted. Peaks slumped. The plains ran with fuming stone.

Kingsley embraced Amy with frail passion. The effort of sending the data, of responding to Benjamin’s demands, of fending off Arno’s undoubtedly well-intentioned but irksome attentions…He was exhausted.

And the Eater had found them again.

Even here inside the soaring vastness of the Keck observatory dome, he could feel the stones shake as lightning struck.

“We’ve done all we can,” Amy murmured into his chest. “You lie down, rest—”

“No, I must see how it comes out. Don’t want to be asleep for this.”

Arno said, from a shadowy corner where he peered at a communications screen, “It’s sending goddamned lightning down a cone. Look at this.”

With an assistant’s help, Arno had patched into one of the emergency DoD miniobservatories, a package launched after the Eater had supped its fill of metals from the weather satellites. One had to admire the Americans, Kingsley thought abstractly. They had backups of everything, straight off the shelf. The view from three hundred kilometers up showed clouds across the Pacific, with a neatly carved hole giving clear skies over Mauna Kea. The Eater was able to tailor the weather of a planet it had freshly encountered, down to a scale of a few hundred kilo
meters, while swimming in its magnetic coils near the moon. In some ways, this was the most impressive of its feats. He peered at the hole in the cirrus sheets. Down a conduit that plunged through the entire atmosphere shot sparkling jabs.

“It knows the global circuitry of planets,” Amy said. “That’s pretty clear. And it found us from the tight-beam to Benjamin.”

Arno nodded firmly. He seemed fully back now, the manager of old, but there was a twitching in his lips that boded ill. “The nukes, they’ll go any minute.”

“Time to discuss our next strategic move,” Kingsley said.

“This flops, we’re finished,” Arno said.

“Funnily enough, no. This is a rational creature. Strange but rational. More so than we, perhaps. We can deal with it even after.”

“Frap we can!”

“Someone must.” Kingsley was having a hard time holding on to his decrepit sense of reality. Amy gave him a sympathetic look, which he answered with a kiss. He put himself on automatic to encourage this new line of discussion. “We’ll do it some damage, that seems clear.”

“And it’ll be mad as hell. It’ll come after us.”

Kingsley deducted several degrees of respect he had harbored for Arno’s hunched-over figure. Earlier the man had rolled up his sleeves, the first time Kingsley could recall him unwinding even a bit. Revealed on his left forearm was a tattoo:
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR
.
Quite so
, he had thought. He gathered this tattoo was a standard one for U.S. Marines, which would explain some of Arno’s comportment. The phrase had set Kingsley to thinking, because behind their antagonism with the Eater was something just so elemental. Small and puny humans might be, but without much actual discussion, the entire vast tribe of it had subscribed to just that emotion. There was something undoubtedly primate-centered and puny and irrational and still glorious in all this, a mark of a young species just learning what it was, march
ing on grim-faced into dark vistas, humbled and loudmouthed and yet still coming.

Amy opened her mouth to enter the discussion, but Kingsley shook his head. Time to calm the waters with a big dollop of snake oil.

He got firmly into Arno’s field of view and said, “Think of it as a wounded god. It might go into orbit around the sun and wait for a more compliant humanity to emerge from its ruins. It has infinite time available, with patience to match.”

“We’re out of ideas,” Arno said with leaden certainty.

“Not at all. You may dimly remember that months ago one of the radio astronomy groups spotted emissions similar to the Eater’s from a nearby star. Perhaps merely accidental, of course. But we should consider selling the Eater on the idea of leaving us in pursuit of some other intelligence, perhaps like itself.”

“That’s crazy,” Arno muttered. He stared at the satellite display before him. Forking stabs of electrical ferocity traced down through clear skies, converging on the mountaintop.

“We have a slight advantage over it. Our radio telescope net is the size of the inner solar system now. That is how we could target these emissions. The Eater is too small to pick up and resolve such transmissions.”

“But it’s been wandering through the galaxy,” Amy said, looking at Arno’s back with a worry clouding her face. “It must know everything in the spiral disk by now.”

“Not so,” Kingsley countered with a tone somewhat approximating optimism. “It does not have the scale or sensitivity of networks created by little beings working together, like us. It is solitary, with all the lacks that implies.”

Amy got the idea and said almost brightly, “What do we offer it?”

“The exact coordinates of these emissions. Perhaps the cause is a fellow magnetic intelligence. Perhaps it is merely an astrophysical oddity we do not yet know enough to tell from true intelligence. Be frank about that. Bargain. Entice. Go away, we say to it, and here’s where.”

Amy said, “It could come back.”

“We can prepare for that. What was that old Daniel Boone expression? ‘Look sharp and keep your powder dry.’”

From Arno he had expected no coruscating shower of wit, nor some chin-wagging soliloquy of desperation, but still less had he anticipated that instead the man would begin to weep.

This was, finally, too much. If masculine toughness meant anything, it surely implied an ability to face uncomfortable truths, even to the point of the death of humanity. Arno’s weakness spread. Kingsley saw the sudden collapse in Amy’s face, a gaping mouth, and utter despair in her eyes.

He felt precariously close to that himself. Yet he dare not abandon the methods he knew. Among reason’s tools, the hammer was evidence, the knife was logic. None would work here. But what could?

Let events cure them
, he thought despairingly. He had no ideas.

In a long, sliding moment, he felt profoundly how inadequate he was, how unsuited were all astronomers, for thinking about a creature like the Eater. Those who studied stars blithely chattered about stellar lifetimes encompassing billions of years, while they saw suns in snapshot, witnessing only a tiny sliver of their grand and gravid lives trapped in telescopes, capturing light emitted before humanity existed. That imbued astronomers with a sense of how like mayflies the human species was, yet it also insulated them. They could not alter suns. Biologists could help or hinder living things. Astronomers had lived blithely in the shadow of immensities without the burden of acting in the glare of such wild perspectives. Astronomy’s coldness carried a foreboding that humans were truly tiny on the scale of such eternities.

Perhaps they all had shattered, finally, in the face of that.

Suddenly, in this dark, cluttered communications room, with staff hovering before their screens like acolytes wor
shipping in a technological shrine—finally it was all too much. The claustrophobia of enclosure strummed in him, tightening his chest.

Suddenly he saw his own life, a mere mote in eternity’s glare, and sensed its rising slope. Quite a heady ascent, indeed, far more than he had ever hoped.

Until here, until now. This was certainly the peak. He would never again act upon so grand a stage, command such resources, confront so colossal an enemy. From now on it would be the long smooth slide down, hearty applause and cushy appointments and modest speeches and the lot. He could dine out on these events until the grave claimed him.

The summit.
Here. Now
. A satisfying grace note, in a way, and yet with the ring of doom to it.

Intensely he wanted to hold on to this moment, the very crown of his life. The Eater might well be dying across the sky outside and he was here, cowering in a shadowy, man-made cave—ironically, an observatory, meant to open onto grandeur.

He had to see the damned creature one last time.

Without a word, he turned away. Amy had begun sobbing, too, and he knew he should comfort her again.

Let it go
, he thought,
and let me go in the bargain
.

He found a corridor leading out. Down the cold concrete passageway, head wobbly with lassitude. Shove on the door.
Out, free
.

Cutting cold embraced him. Cleared his head a trifle, even.

Sharp sunlight. Thin air rasping in his throat.

He walked to the edge of a broad steel parapet. He could see clear up into the deep bowl of sky from here, over the Keck’s brilliant bulge. The moon hung halfway up to the zenith in a troubled blue sky.

Faint twitches of fevered light stirred at the edge of the moon’s crescent. Probably from Benjamin’s final assault. It would all happen quite swiftly now.

Head back, teetering in a whipping wind.

He saw the very moment. A huge burnt yellow corona of virulence lit up the moon’s rim. Light crawled and licked around the clean curve.

She had done it.

He felt a sudden hammering in his chest.
Victory and death
.

How wonderful, to see it here, alone, in the utter silence of a cool clear mountaintop
.

He shouted up at the dying sky, a pure roaring cry of released joy.

Raptly he stood petrified, gazing upward over the eggshell-white observatory dome. Tendrils of ivory light flowed away from the moon, arcing out and then narrowing, coming toward the Earth. To see this demanded substantial ionization of intervening gas, he estimated. Which required enormous energies, the fruit of the final cataclysm mercifully hidden from view. The restless glow came rushing across a quarter of a million miles, reddening as it came.

It fattened. An orange filigree laced the high air. Excited atoms fluoresced in a great green circle.
Probably
, he analyzed,
the electrodynamic effects hitting the upper atmosphere, driving a wave of ionization and charge imbalances. More lightning due, probably
.

Get back inside? No, live at the peak
.

Even in death, the Eater’s work was accurate, its geometry quite precise—a circle that collapsed inward in a spray of brightening yellow-green. Suddenly he realized that this was a descending cone. Energies concentrating. He did not notice his hair standing on end, or the humming air, until it was much too late.