Eater (24 page)

Benjamin drove stolidly toward the Center. His arms were of lead, his head swiveled on scratchy ratchets.

That morning a poll had reported that the world was praying more since news had come of the Eater. There was even a statistical breakdown, showing what were the hot topics on the prayer circuit:

“Good to know the species hasn’t lost its bloody-mindedness,” Kingsley remarked from the seat next to him.

“‘Bad tidings for someone else,’” Benjamin said sourly. “As if there weren’t enough.”

“Um. You mean this news of the Eater’s course correction?”

“Yeah. What’s it moving to higher altitude for?”

“It won’t say, as usual.”

On the drive, he saw yet another church going up, this time in a converted gas station. Stumps of pump stands extruded from the concrete islands in front. Churches were thronged every day now. New ones jutted their flick-knife spires above the palms.

He had gotten better and could now go for maybe a whole hour without thinking of her. He had found himself reviewing their life together to get himself ready for what was to come this morning. They had followed what he supposed to be a predictable arc. Passion had settled down into possession, courtship into partnership, acute pleasure into pleasant habit. For both of them, lives that once had seemed to spread infinitely before them had narrowed to one mortal career. To accomplish anything definite, they had given up everything else, sailing for one point of the compass. Yet he had the hollow feeling of missed opportunities. Could something be made good through what he had to do next?

“It shouldn’t be too demanding,” Kingsley said out of the silence.

“I’m that easy to read?”

“Old friend, depression is simple to diagnose. You are acting under intolerable pressures.”

He slammed a fist into the steering wheel. “I have to keep working.”

“Of course. And you’re vital.”

“If only I could sleep.”

“Haven’t been getting a lot of that myself, either.”

“At least—”

“What? Ah, you were going to say, at least I have Amy.”

“Yeah.”

“And so I do. Not as though it is a betrayal of my dear wife.”

“How is she?”

“Had word just last night. Coded, of course. From a country cottage she arranged through friends. Indeed, the U Agency had conducted an extensive search for her. She barely got away.”

“You’re sure they were going to hold her hostage?”

“One is never certain. I felt that I could not risk it.”

“She might have been safer.”

“With
that
”—a finger poked skyward—“prowling the skies? I expect it can strike any place it likes, to whatever depth.”

“The infrared only bakes the surface.”

“Do we truly wish to learn more of its capabilities?”

“Ummm, good point.”

They let a companionable silence build between them. Benjamin was comfortable this way, just sliding on from moment to moment, trying not to think of what they would ask him to do. As they left their car and passed through the layers of security at the Center, he felt tensions building in him again, but fought them down.

There passed before his eyes procedures and people and none of it left any lasting impression. Amy Major, looking more worn than usual, was there when they got to the Control wing. She came out and greeted them and Kingsley instantly asked, “What signs do we have of its state of mind?”

“Still no mention of the whole Washington burning episode,” Amy said.

“Damn.” Kingsley’s face was knotted with frustration. “How can we conceivably understand it if the thing gives no clue?”

“I suppose that’s the point,” Amy said mildly, putting a hand on his sleeve.

For some reason, that simple gesture brought a tightness welling into Benjamin’s throat. He almost lost his remaining scraps of composure then. It took a moment and a dodge about going for coffee before he could trust himself to speak. “What’s it saying, then?”

Amy called up its latest dispatch to the Semiotics contingent:

“Intriguing miserable little lecture, isn’t it?” Kingsley said. “Makes one wonder if its droll sense of humor extends to making fun of us through acute boredom.”

“Sounds like a curator making up the label it will put on its newest exhibit,” Benjamin said.

“Good analogy,” Amy said. “Now shall we…?”

Here came the part he had been dreading. They marched him through a large bay filled with work stations, people quietly monitoring the intricate tasks of managing the Searcher fleet. They were an exact duplicate of NASA’s operating room at Houston, assembled here at blinding speed
in case communications broke down. Backup was the watchword.

In a separate room, they seated him at the center of a kind of spherical viewscreen. Leads measured his vital signs, a complex head gear descended, much buzzing and clicking began as they got him calibrated. He had given up trying to fathom all the technology. Then—

He was
with
her. No point in wondering how it was done; he felt himself suddenly in a presence he recognized. He had to struggle to not look around and find her. But she was nowhere at all, he reminded himself. Instead, the spherical screens showed him what she saw, a field of dark dominion dotted with Searcher radar images.

“How are you, lover?” she asked.

“I…am doing…okay.” Like molasses, his tongue.

“I am, too.”

He could not help himself. “What does it feel like to be…a mathematical construction?”

“However I want it to feel.”

“You can control…”

“The body simulation? Yes. My feelings, in the old sense? No.”

Her voice had shifted into a cool, analytical mode. But it was hers, all the same. How did they do it? Or was she…it…doing this? “I…see. No pain?”

“Physical, no. I…I miss you so much.”

He could not seem to get his breath. “Well, here I am.”

“With me. Again. Thank you for coming.”

Alarm filled his otherwise empty mind. He could not think of anything to say that did not seem to mean something else. “Do you…like the work?”

“Let us say that I am willing to make the mistakes if someone else is willing to learn from them.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“You are wondering if this is really me.”

“I wonder who you are, yes, but—” He froze. But what?

“Perhaps you are afraid that I am her?”

“Damn, you were always good at reading me.”

“Do not give me that much credit. I made my mistakes.”

“You were smarter than I was.”

“I often proved that high intelligence did not necessarily guarantee fine table manners.”

He tried to laugh and could not. Somehow the remark was amusing, but the delivery was wrong. He tried a gruff, bantering tone. “Yeah, old girl, you did.”

“I would feel better if you did not use the past tense.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean—”

“Just a joke.”

“I always liked your jokes.”

“They were an acquired taste. Remember what my grandfather used to say? ‘Eat a live toad at breakfast and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.’ My jokes played that role for some people.”

“Yeah, I
do
remember your telling me that.” He felt a wash of relief. If this voice knew that much about her past—but then he felt confusions rise again. The specialists had said that they could copy memories without knowing what they were. Like a symphony laid down on a disk, the machine that did it didn’t need to know harmony or structure.

Just a recording
. But she was so real.

Better get back onto something that would let him conceal his tornado of feeling. “How’s the job going?” The words sounded phony, but maybe she wouldn’t notice.

She laughed, surprising him again. “Like being a bird, sometimes.”

“Sounds great.”

“I spent a lot of time just getting used to this body-that-isn’t.”

“Bird body?” He didn’t know where this was going, but at least it wasn’t about how he felt, a subject upon which he was no expert.

“Birdbrain, it feels like sometimes.”

She pinged right back to his pong, but wasn’t giving much
away.
Okay, be direct
. “They moved you around the Earth after it hit Washington?”

“Yes, I got an extra booster attached by a crew that flew up to rendezvous. That got me out here, to keep me away from that damned jet. How many people did it kill?”

“A quarter of a million, the last I heard.” He had stopped listening to the news then.

“It’s moving out now, I heard.” Actually, he had seen the jet flare and drive the thing away from the low orbit. And heard the muted cheering of hundreds around him, outside in the night. The yelling had blended anger and wavering hope.

“Slow but steady. Don’t know—damn, there goes another.”

“Another what?”

A silence. Then: “Another satellite, a communications one this time. It got the Fabricante orbital an hour ago. There were two people aboard.”

“Damn. It’s doing that? I really ought to keep up.”

“You’ve had a lot of grief. Give yourself a rest.”

Suddenly her voice was not the cool, businesslike tone that she had been using. The words resonated with feminine notes he had come to love. He said, “You need me. I hope.”

“Oh yes, I do more than ever.”

“You’ve got it in view?”

“I can see the orange plume of the jet, but I’m staying away. Tracking the satellite damage. It’s eaten hundreds—”

Onto the enveloping spherical screen blossomed a sharp image. Coils of magnetic field tightening around a chunky satellite. Folding it in. Then vaporizing it with a virulent arc of high voltage. The plasma glowed green and violet traceries sucked it along the field lines, bound for the accretion disk.

“Got tired of our atmosphere?” he asked.

“Or bored.”

“Are you getting some feeling for it?”

“It has a lot of parts and they fit together in a way I can’t see yet.”

“Don’t get any closer.”

“I’m thousands of klicks away.”

“Keep it that way.”

“I think it knows I’m here.”

Alarm stuck in his throat. “How?”

“I don’t know, just an intuition.”

“Has it done anything, struck against you?”

“No, and I don’t know why not, either. Probably I’m just not important enough.”

“You are to me. Don’t get closer.”

“Distance didn’t do the President any good, did it?”

“What do you mean?”

“It blasted the terrain around that dugout of his in the Catskills on its next pass over the D.C. area.”

“It did?” He really wasn’t keeping track. Or had he heard and just forgotten? He had to admit he didn’t give a damn about what happened to the President.

“I believe he survived—barely. It doesn’t say a word about any of that, of course.”

“Our spanking administered, it drops the subject?” Benjamin knew his words were coming out jagged.

“Nope, Kingsley was right. Keep away from human analogies.”

He didn’t want to say what immediately came to mind, so sure enough, she did instead: “Speaking as an analogy myself, I think that’s good advice.”

He could not summon even a dutiful chuckle, but she laughed with what seemed to be gusto.

“Nothing is impossible to those who do not have to do it,” Kingsley remarked caustically.

Arno bristled. “I have every assurance from the President that—”

“That he doesn’t know what he is doing,” Kingsley finished. He instantly reprimanded himself for this childish outburst, but Arno’s face already congested with red anger.

“You are not to take this any further—”

“Sorry, but I have to say this is stupid.”

“If it can’t hear our media, it won’t know as much.”

“Yes, but hasn’t a moment’s inspection of its many transmissions told us that it likes listening in?”

“Intelligence has established that leaks onto cable TV led it to deduce that the launches were ours.”

“This thing is not an idiot. It knows quite well the state of international politics. Little children in the street guessed the truth—why shouldn’t the Eater?”

Arno subsided slightly, long enough for Benjamin to say, “I don’t think it’s a good idea, either.”

“Who
cares
?” Arno flared again. “You guys don’t get any say. The White House just wondered what you thought it would do when the President’s—
and
the U.N.’s—shutdown starts.”

“When will it be?” Kingsley asked with what he hoped was a calm, interested expression.
Hard to attain these days, though
.

Arno glanced at his watch. “Two hours.”

“Expect something bad,” Benjamin said, then went back to looking at his shoes.

“I agree,” Kingsley said.

“Why? The whole planet ceases all transmissions, including satellite cable traffic, telephones, radio, TV. So what?”

“It will not like any sign that we’re breaking off contact,” Benjamin said, a lackluster sentence that he tossed off as though he was thinking of something else. Which he probably was. Since leaving the comm apparatus where he had spent several hours with the Channing-craft, he had been distracted. No surprise, but Kingsley needed help and in this climate old allies were the best. At least with Benjamin, he did not have to watch his back.

“I don’t see why that has to be,” Arno said, “It’s been sending lots of chatty stuff, never mentions the D.C. thing or the missiles.”

“Aliens are alien,” Kingsley said, trying not to sound as though he were talking to a child. “Do not misread—which is to say, do not ascribe easy motives to its statements.”

“Look, the Security Council thinks this is the best way to show it that we aren’t giving away any secrets, not anymore.”

“How jolly.”

“Look, it even sent a commentary on Marcus Aurelius to one of the cultural semiotics people. Philosophy—and it seemed to agree with this guy.” Arno mugged a bit and folded his arms, leaning back against his desk in a way that Kingsley had come to know signaled what Arno thought was a put-away shot.

Kingsley disliked obvious displays of erudition, but here was a useful place for it. “Aurelius was a stoic, resigned to the evil of the world, wishing to detach himself from it. Also happened to be an Emperor of Rome, which curiously enough made detachment an easier prospect. Before organized press conferences, as I recall. Not the sort of attitude I would wish of a thing that could incinerate the planet.”

Arno looked wounded, an about-face from his flash of belligerence only moments before. Everyone seemed to be running on fast-forward now. He said gravely, “It’s getting more refined, if that’s the right word.”

“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?” Kingsley asked, crossing his legs wearily.

Benjamin laughed, just the wrong thing to do. Sarcasm was useful only if played deadpan straight. Arno did not take Benjamin’s chuckling well, reddening up in the nose and cheeks again.

“I mean that you cannot mistake a change of style for change of purpose.” Kingsley hoped that stating the obvious would get them back on track. People under strain sometimes had such a reset ability, and perhaps it could get him out of this scrape.

“I understand,” Arno said, “but the President wants an assessment of what to expect
when
”—heavy emphasis here, with eyebrows—”the shutdown starts.”

“Retribution, I should say,” Kingsley said.

Benjamin managed a wan smile, still regarding his shoes with intense interest. “You’re slipping into human thought modes yourself, ol’ King boy. Alien, it might do anything.”

Arno said hotly, “That’s no damn good, tell the White House the sonuvabitch could do any damn thing—”

“Though it has the utility of being true,” Kingsley said.

“I bet it will do both.” Benjamin looked up then and smiled, as if at a joke he alone knew. “Something nasty, and something weird.”

“Good point,” Kingsley said. “No reason it must do only one thing.”

“You guys are no damn use at all.”

“You bet,” Benjamin said with something that resembled happiness. Kingsley studied him, but could make nothing of the expression on his old friend’s face.