Eater (23 page)

Kingsley hoped that this remark would not be predictive, but he was proved wrong on this same orbit.

The Eater’s jet rotated further as the Eater arced across the Pacific and the western United States. Its orbit was tilted with respect to the equatorial plane by about forty degrees, so that it rose to high latitudes as it crossed the twilight line.

No one had foreseen what came next.

The jet brimmed with pulsing ruby light at its core. Then a spike of hard blue light shot from it. Satellite spectral analysis showed this to be high-energy plasma, mostly ionized nitrogen.

This fresh jet struck the upper layers of the atmosphere with a splash of fiery virulence, stripping atoms, heating them, depositing a fraction of the converted mc
²
energy harvested from the tenuous reaches above.

Such energy is restless, always moving. The illuminated spot expanded and reradiated in the infrared spectrum. This propagated downward. Within a minute, a tongue of heat radiation licked at the surface. Where it struck, scorching flames rose.

The jet first forked down above the Midwest. Within minutes, it grew a hundredfold in power. The Eater’s central engine was the union of gravity, the fruit of its compacted mass. This coupled with exquisite dexterity to utterly weightless magnetic conduits and accelerators. Watching it function was a rebuke to humanity’s pride. This was engineering of a kind and scale to which not even the mad had aspired.

Within moments, the torch was brighter than an early morning sun. It hung in the night air like a moving, radiant lance.

By Ohio the infrared heating had become fierce. It wandered as the Eater rotated, bringing the focus above West Virginia.

“It’s writing,” Amy whispered. “With a plasma pen.”

Kingsley blinked. “On the forests.”

“In a line miles wide.”

The jet played with skill, tracing out a flowing script. Clearly in the loops and jots there was meaning, but—“No language we know,” an expert said nearby. “Something from its past?”

“Cosmic graffiti,” Amy said.

Benjamin murmured, “Not everything it does is an attempt at communication. Maybe it’s just writing its name.”

A long silence fell over the crowd in the Center. They watched with a cold, gathering dread.

Only when it had left the rugged mountains did the brutal heat begin to rise yet again. The entire Eater surged in brilliance, a cobweb prickly with ominous radiance. Millions watched it swell and blossom, its central, shining shaft now unbearably bright to the eye.

Crowds turned from it in terror, but by then its target had become clear to the defensive forces that watched from myriad artificial eyes in orbit and on the ground.

As the resplendent tongue plunged still farther down, into the moist clouds that shrouded the District of Columbia, steam burst where it licked.

The cloud cover evaporated in seconds. Then the hammer blow of infrared struck the river and instantly vapor began to rise there.

Tar bubbled on the roofs of tenements. Trees steamed, then erupted into flame. Within moments, the entire District smoked, then roared out an answer in flame.

People standing in the streets and parks to watch felt their hair crisp and crackle as they ran for cover. Cloth smoked. Fabrics melted. The air hummed. Their homes followed suit, shake roofs flaming into pyres within seconds.

The Eater pulsed, keeping its jet turned artfully toward the
District even as it passed toward the horizon and out over Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. The jet ebbed. Orange lightning traced along its retreating shaft. Within a few more minutes, it was a mere kindled spire attached to the broadening web of spiderweb brilliance that dominated the black sky.

A helicopter got a shot of the Eater setting on the horizon like a luminous insect scuttling after fresh prey.

Fire alarms wailed in a chorus of thousands below.

Behind it, the thing left a simmering record of ruin.

“It makes its point well,” Kingsley said a while later, when the shock had begun to wear off. The old Gang of Four, minus Channing, found itself in a seminar room, like the meetings they had held what seemed a thousand years before. “It was not fooled for a moment by the launches from China.”

“But
how
?” Arno demanded. “The President—thank God, he was underground in the Catskills—demands to know.”

“I imagine it is quite versed in our politics by this time. It has been freely dipping into our torrent of news for at least months now—and probably much longer.”

“What can we
do
?” Benjamin asked.

“I fear even the generals are stymied. I certainly am.” Kingsley felt he should be with Amy now, but he could not very well leave immediately. Her parents lived in Silver Spring, a suburb of the devastated area, and she had broken down as they viewed the aftermath. City-wide fires still raged.

“Give it what it wants,” Benjamin said.

“We can’t,” Arno said. “To force people, kill them—that violates every moral code.”

Kingsley said, “I very much doubt that our notions of morality figure largely in this thing’s worldview.”

“We have to take a stand,” Arno said, but without much conviction.

“We are all making the same calculations from our own
moral calculus, I suspect,” Kingsley said, “and I do not believe we much like the outcome.”

“Let it
have
them!” Benjamin said wildly.

Arno looked at Benjamin, then at Kingsley, who gave him no sign of help. Benjamin gulped, took a breath, then said in a ragged voice, “Look, the thing’s probably killed a hundred thousand already. What goddamned difference does it make if…if…”

“I suggest we begin sending it what we have,” Kingsley said coolly.

“Why?” Arno asked anxiously. “That’ll take maybe a few days and then it will want more.”

“Right. But we will gain time.”

“To do what? That’s what the President, what the U. goddamned N. wants to know.”

“Kill it, if you want.”

“How?” Arno demanded.

“I do not know.”

Arno’s screen beeped and a fresh message appeared:

A long silence.

“I rather admire its choice of quotations.” Kingsley spoke to cover his own sensation of a rigid chill that swept up from his belly. “It may have a sense of something we could call irony.”

Amy said, “More like Zeus than Jehovah.”

“Gentlemen,” Arno said in a wobbly voice, “we have to tell them something. You saw the crowd outside this office. Good scientists, technical people, sure. That’s what they are. But they couldn’t come up with anything in their present state of mind.”

“Fear paralyzes,” Kingsley observed to gain time.

“Anywhere it wants, it can do that—any time it likes,” Arno went on.

Kingsley realized that Benjamin had begun to weep, quite quietly. “I advise preoccupying it with fresh input. Give it what we have.”

“
Then what
?”

“Understand it further, certainly. Then kill it, as I said.”

“We have nukes, plenty of them—”

“Pointless.”

“Probably so. But it’s what we’ve got.”

“Not entirely.”

They waited for him to complete his thought, and for a moment, something caught in his throat and he could not go on.

Kingsley thought swiftly yet carefully about the properties of magnetic jets. For Benjamin and himself, long ago, the subject had been a suitable battleground for polite academic dispute, arcane calculations, airy and fun. Now he contemplated with cold fear the same images, now augmented with horror. A black hole spinning in its high vault of utter darkness, rotation warping space around it. That distortion, in turn, twisted the assembly of minds that thronged outside the hole, intelligences caught in a magnetic prison older than the sun. The entire grotesque assembly was now impregnable, had proved immune to the defenses of the thousands of civilizations it had consumed like a majestic, marauding appetite—

“We have Channing.”

She
popped
—

—flowed—

—expanded—

—out into the flexing space before her.

Plunging. Riding translucent highways along parabolic lines, she felt unfamiliar muscles work with red heat down her spine, up her legs, skating across a velvet skin she could not see.

She seemed to fill the fat balloon of soft blackness around her. Yet in an eye flick she could be anywhere in that geometry, one of myriad tiny glowing flecks.

Points of view. Searchers. All coasting in a beehive swarm above the great slow-spinning sphere of Earth, itself a mottled infrared mosaic.

So she was a central point in a rotating coordinate frame. And simultaneously the skeletal ivory frame itself. Diffuse, like a fog. Yet if she chose to be, she could anchor herself at a joint.

Cartesian questions
, she thought with icy shock.
Baby, I got dem mind-body duality blues. To be a box and know it, yet wonder what it means
.

If she
thought
about herself, a whole interior world welled up. Teeth sang in their sockets. The calcium rods that framed her chest were chromed ribs, slick and sliding in swift metallic grace,
Ah, so clean
! Purpling storms raced down
squeezed veins, up shuddering ligaments. Her toes rattled, strumming, talking to the ground she could never again tread. Her ankles were dancing on their own, her bald head thrown back, neck stretched into spaghetti by a halo of polarized light. Now her spine turned parabolic and crackling as she
banked
on jets that were her feet, running in sheer weightless abandon. Hurricane hallways yawned in her.

What is this thing I am
?—and from her a lockjawed agony-song screeched. It reverberated in hip sockets polished by blue-green, hungry worms. They swarmed over bone lattices, eating in rhapsodic hunger.

Pain? Plenty of it
.

So stop
. Click. Just like that—

The torture fingers left her, blew away in the escaping fragile seconds, leaving her cool and smooth and sure.
To be a box

Down she went, across and through—all equivalent in this space of freedom-as-thing. She saw before her, around her, in full three dimensions. The Searcher spacecraft, a silvery swarm zooming in toward the graceful arching luminesce of the Eater.

A blink—and the Searchers became her many eyes.

Her point of view shot through the realm of the magnetic strands, high above the disk of hot matter in the black hole’s equatorial plane. Beyond rolled the gravid Earth in regal, moist splendor. Around her magnetic palaces made a luminous dominion, a steel-wire spider at the gnawing center of a gigantic web. She swiveled and found the core—geysers and light storms arcing from the utterly black center of it all.

A rattle of human-speak came to her like pebbles on a tin roof.
Careful, vector to 0.347 x 1.274
.

Yessah, boss. Here there be tygers, galleries of magnetic forces to traverse.

Skating. She eased delicately past white-hot waterfalls, green-rich tornadoes of turbulence.
Tock
!—a stone-storm of crass dusty plasma clattered against her carbon carapace. Raw food the Eater had stored. Or a weapon; one could not be sure.

Did it know they were here? Of course, impossible to believe it could not sense along its electromagnetic tendrils these flashing solid motes. Two Searchers already drifted, charred by discharges.

So it would kill them if it could locate them.
Us. Me
.

More Searchers rose from below to aid her. Abruptly some sparked to burnt cinders at the very rim of magnetic stresses, killed by some edge defense. She had lodged in several knots already, then had to bail out as they arced with huge potentials.

Yet she could not shake the airy feeling of floating suspended above a huge abyss.

Diffuse am I, for I am nothing that has ever existed. Like the Eater
—
one of a kind
.

Getting heady here. Careful. Too easy to get drawn into phony poetic abstraction
.

And what else dwelled here? Hesitantly, working as intermediary with Control, she felt her way among ropes of snarled flux. Edgy, tentative, the whispery sounds came—voices, calls, and cries and strange haunting musics, wisps of convex lore, echoes of…what? A multitude floated in her global, three-dimensional eyes—shining, ghostlike creatures of strands and velvet, lustrous lattice.

Creeping among complex innards. Yet again she felt a cool distance from events. She was free to slide in and out of this world.

Only a lack of imagination saves me from immobilizing myself with imaginary fears
.

Her eyes were all-seeing, swiveling impossibly, anywhere she wanted. In her other self, the eyes had been where the brain surfaced and supped from the world, taking in light along an optic nerve that both transmitted and filtered, doing the brain’s work before the glow even arrived at the cerebrum.

Now she felt a wedge between her and the world she could behold. A chunk of glassy silence that measured and knew, separately.

Gingerly she burrowed into that watery pane. A dizzy, jolting ascent took her. Suddenly she was hanging above the entire solar system. She glimpsed it as a spheroid cloud of debris, filigreed with bands and shells of flying shrapnel.

She knew instantly that these fragments could be pumped into long ellipses, into wobbly orbits that could now and then make a sharp hook by skimming near another piece of scrap, and slam into a blundering planet.

“What was that?” she asked aloud. (How? Yet they rang like words.)

Control’s monotone answered, “You slipped into the overview mode of our entire Searcher system inventory. Don’t do that again. Concentrate.”

“Yessah.” Control was, well, controlling. It (he?—yes, it felt like a he) kept missing the point of her experience here.

Instantly, some subself presented a catalog of possible wisecrack material:

Now where did that—

The enormity of what had happened to her descended.

Benjamin, forever gone from her.

The world
—swallowed in abstraction.

No salty tang of sandy beach.
Just a bunch of digits
.

So when she wanted to speak, an inventory of retorts had duly shuffled into her mind, read off like a computer file. Not invention, but a handy list of stock phrases. Because it was waiting for just that use—somewhere.

No, not somewhere.
Here
. Blackboxville.

Had her mind had those lists in it all her life? She could un
derstand why the brain researchers wanted to use simulations such as herself. Here, a mind could sometimes watch itself.

“Try to focus all the Searchers onto the core.” Control’s voice now was smoother, warm, and soothing. A response to her irked state? “Channing, we have got to get better resolution.”

She felt her eyes seem to
cross
and then rush outward.

Suddenly she sensed the hourglass magnetic funnels, alive in their luminous ivory, as mass flowed down them. Fitfully the aching matter lit the turning, narrowing pipes. Each headed toward doom.

The fields were firmly anchored in a bright, glowing disk at the center of the hourglass neck. The Eater’s intelligence, she knew, resided in these magnetic structures she could make out—knotted and furled, like lustrous ribbons surrounding the slowly rotating hourglass.

Zoom, she moved. At her finest viewing scale she could make out the magnetic intricacy—whorls and helices as complex as the mapping of a brain. Here the legacy of a thousand alien races rested, she knew (but how?).

All this stood upon the brilliant disk at the neck. Glowing mass flowed down the hourglass neck, heading toward the glare.

The inner realm of the Eater was its foundation, the turning accretion disk. She blinked, recalibrated specter. It brimmed red-hot at its rim, a kilometer from the dark center. The disk was thickest at its edge,
a hundred meters tall
some part of her crisply told her.

As the infalling, gyrating mass moved inward to its fate, it heated further by friction. Inward it seethed with luminosity, shading in from red to amber to yellow to white, and then to a final, virulent blue. The red rim was already 3,000 degrees (a subself informed her). Abstractly she knew that in the slide inward the doomed mass exceeded the temperature of the surface of the sun, greater than 5,000 degrees.

“Look closer,” Control said in the comforting tones of…who? Memory would not fetch this forth…

Closer. There at the very center—nothing, a blank blackness. Like a hallucinogenic record turning to its own furious music, faster and faster toward the center, where the spindle hole was a nothing.

But not quite nothing. At higher resolution—and blinded against the glare—she could see a fat weight that warped light around it. At its very edge, red refractions and darting rainbow sparklers marked the space. She saw that an ellipsoid spun there, furiously laced by crimson arcs. As she watched, fiery matter traced its last trajectory inward, skating along the rim of the whirling dark. These paths swerved inward, and a very few skipped through the wrenching blackness to emerge again.

“Unstable orbits, I see,” Control said.

She felt a wave of immense dread. Yet she headed down there.