Eater (9 page)

APRIL

In the moments after the revelation, Benjamin noted that scientists and U Agency types alike looked the same: jaws agape, eyes blinking in wonder, disbelief wrenching mouths askew, nostrils flared. And for once, nobody had anything coherent to say.

Consternation is a term far too abstract to describe the next twenty-four hours at the High Energy Astrophysics Center. The simple three words—though there were more in other languages, with many different shadings of meaning—immediately split the staff at the Center into factions.

For decades a small band of astronomers, principally at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, had listened in the radio bands for signals from other civilizations. They and many others had debated the abstract principles involved in answering a message—should one be received. Most favored not answering immediately. There seemed no rush to reply, considering the huge travel times of light between stars. But with the Eater less than an hour’s time delay away, that argument slid into an ethical debate. Who should speak for Earth?

Arno made no secret of his view. “We do. The whole world has fed its astronomical data here, we have the best people in the field right down the hall, and the White House has given us freedom of movement—so we do it.”

Most astronomers did not feel that way. Anxiety beset
them, knots meeting around the coffee urns in tight-lipped arguments. Channing stayed away from these. “The U Agency will call the shots here,” she said to Benjamin in his office. “Notice that they’re all behind Arno? No brooders there.”

“They’re hired guns,” Benjamin said. He gazed at his desktop screen, where the long strings of the message glowed. “I desire converse, too, but how?”

“You’re the scientific head here,” Channing said softly. She felt the familiar old fatigue gliding up through her bones but pushed it down, her heart tripping with a quick, high rhythm. “Do it.”

Benjamin jerked his eyes away from the screen, startled. “Me?”

“You discovered it.”

“Amy did.”

“Okay, bring in Amy. The discoverers get to name the object, that’s standard—”

“You named it.”

“—so we extend that right, say that the discoverers get to talk to it.”

He chuckled, clasping his long, bony hands behind his neck and leaning back. “Don’t take up a legal career. Too big a leap.”

“I’m serious. That thing is moving fast and obviously it can think fast. Learning a hundred languages, just from eavesdropping?”

“An old cliché of B movies—”

“But probably right. Not answering right away, that sends it a message, too.”

Benjamin looked startled again. “I suppose so, but…”

“Look, the halls are packed outside with astronomers making guesses. Suddenly nobody’s an expert. I heard some guy floating a theory that some undetected planet is orbiting the black hole, and the message is from there.”

“Nonsense.”

“Of course, and there’ll be more like it. How could any
thing like a zone livable for life-forms like us survive passage between the stars?” She snorted derisively. “No, it’ll take a while to face the fact—that this is something utterly strange.”

“What did its three little words mean, exactly? Converse as in conversation? Or as in the contrary?”

“It’s a stilted diction, but I’ll bet on conversation. It’s bound to get context and syntax a little confused. Languages are species-specific, but this thing managed to make sense and even construct a simple sentence that meant something. Give it a break.”

“Fine—so how do we talk to it?”

“Simply,” she said simply.

“What should all of humanity say?”

“Keep it easy, just as the Eater did.”

He brightened. “Maybe just ‘We desire converse, too.’?”

“Who could blame you for that? It’s the truth, and it gives nothing away.”

“I don’t know. It’s an overwhelming responsibility.”

She watched him work it out on his own. She felt lazy and weirdly relaxed, despite her hammering heart. There had been another appointment with Dr. Mendenham early this morning, which she had dearly wanted to skip but didn’t. She had gotten up at dawn and made herself one of her crazy breakfasts to boost her spirits, fish and eggs with paprika. A treatment course of mahi-mahi should be added to the therapy regimen, she had decided. Trouble was, you thudded back down under the bland gray reality of modern medicine and all of its grisly matter-of-fact manner.

Without her noticing it, Benjamin had gotten on the phone, talking to somebody at Arecibo, his sentences sliding by her like glazed word nuggets—
side lobes, milliarc-seconds, sampling time, rep rate
.

She had other concerns, minor itches. The morning’s treatments now irked her in myriad ways, especially her skin. Nowadays her fashion taste boiled down to whatever didn’t itch, period. She wore hats to cover her patchy in
duced baldness, not caring that in some she looked like a lampshade in a brothel. She also discovered that an older woman could wear bright lipstick during the day without looking like she just had a binge with a jam jar. Or maybe everybody was just too polite to notice.

Now Benjamin was mustering people into the room and here was Kingsley, squatting down next to her, his slender face lined with concern. She put him off with a wavering sentence and shushed him into silence so that she could hear. Arno sat on a corner of Benjamin’s desk, in his standard maneuver to dominate the room, straightening the seams in his standard Mancetti suit, charcoal-black today, all the while arguing quietly but intensely with one of his aides.

The meeting began. All good scientists had big egos, and the high nervousness of the room brought that out. While young, they had been outstanding at something widely admired. Brightest in their class, smarter than anybody they knew, it was bound to go to their heads. The wiser ones outgrew it, some becoming even mildly humble before the immensity of unanswered questions facing them. Some—alas, even some of the best—never did.

A few of the Center astronomers made their cases against any reply right away, in tones of subdued outrage. She wondered why scientists so often couched their views in abstract terms while giving their game away by the tone of voice, seemingly unaware that most people could read their emotions more tellingly than their ideas. It all seemed funny now, as she watched it from the high perch her quirky physiology had cooked up for today. She had told Kingsley that she didn’t do drugs anymore because she could get the same effect by standing up fast, but he had taken the joke completely deadpan. Did she honestly look that frail?

Maybe, but she could still track the labyrinths of the argument as it worked around the room. The same views emerged in different guises, long on logic, brimming with unstated passion.

We have no right to speak for all the human race
.

But only we have a prayer of knowing how to respond
.

How can you? The idea’s outrageous
!

It might be dangerous to answer. The thing could learn how to destroy us
.

It might be dangerous not to answer. And it has huge energies at its command already
.

It’s already taken the giant step of learning our languages. That implies an intelligence far beyond ours. Don’t try to second-guess it
.

But the sheer arrogance
—!

Have you considered that it might be dangerous either way?

Finally Arno spoke. “This is still a matter of some secrecy, though we cannot expect it to remain so for long. It is also a matter under the governance of the United States, occurring on our territory, though in an international facility.”

Protests, exclamations, as everybody in the room saw which way it was going to go. Arno brushed them aside.

“I have gotten a quick okay from the White House. They believe a reply is in order, and soon. I have been authorized to transmit one simple line.”

He looked at Benjamin, and Channing saw that somehow they had planned this, right in front of her, and she had missed it. Maybe she was more feeble than she thought. Here she was at the center of historic events, distracted by her itches and not tracking.

Benjamin said, peeling off the words, “We desire converse also.”

An answer came from the Eater at the minimum possible interval, allowing for the 8.7 Astronomical Units it had to cross—seventy-two minutes.

By this time Arno had told Benjamin and Martinez to keep their staff “in order,” meaning that they were not to leak any whisper of the messages. His U Agency team held a “briefing” for the Center astronomers, rather delicately laying out the security precautions that would henceforth surround the Center’s activities. In the middle of this conference, the reply arrived.

“What in hell does that mean?” Arno asked in a tight tone, the first sign of tension Benjamin had detected in the man.

“I would venture,” Kingsley said in his humble mode, “that it is organizing itself for a high-bit rate transmission.”

Arno looked puzzled, as did most of the rest of those crowded into the Big Screen Room. Kingsley said smoothly, “I noticed that it transmitted when Arecibo could receive—indeed, when it was near the zenith at Arecibo’s longitude.”

Benjamin said, “We’ve been using it a lot to map the ionized regions near the Eater’s core. These last few days the team at Arecibo bounced radar signals off it.”

Kingsley nodded. “So it probably has noticed that half the time our largest receiver is out of view, on the other side of the Earth from the Eater. The Eater wishes to use the biggest dish we have, presumably to transfer a great deal, or else it would simply send messages to every radio telescope we have. I expect, then, that from now on it will use the second-largest facility—Goldstone, in the California desert—when Arecibo is out of its sight. We should find a third dish and send the coordinates in our own next message, so communication is continuous.”

This quick analysis impressed even Benjamin, who reluctantly nodded; he had not thought of the problem, much less solved it.

Arno folded his arms. “Well, looks like we got a dialogue going here. What do we say next?”

Channing’s thin voice began, and one of Arno’s men started to talk over it, only to cut off abruptly when Arno shot him a severe glance, eyebrows clamped down tightly above hard eyes. Channing started again. “Ask the basics. Where it’s from, what it is, what it wants.”

This seemed so sensible to the small group—the Gang of Four plus some U Agency types who seemed spooked by Arno’s authority—that they accepted it, arguing only over the phrasing of the questions.

Again the response came back in only a few seconds more than the computed delay time due to the finite speed of light.

“What fields?” Arno wondered.

Kingsley looked at Benjamin. “I suspect, following on Dr. Knowlton’s discoveries, that the black hole’s magnetic domain itself is talking to us.”

Astonishment met this bold venture. Benjamin saw Kingsley’s thread and said, “If we’re dealing with some…well, magnetic life…here, that would explain a lot.”

Channing said weakly, slowly, “The fields are strong. Maybe they can contain information—say, stored in the form of Alfven waves, the most common form of magnetic waves.”

Benjamin pointed out that Arecibo’s high resolution radar image showed glowing filaments threading around the Eater’s core. “The tightest picture we can get so far comes from the Very Long Baseline Array, though, picking out details a few kilometers in size. There’s a tight knot of structures in the strong field region near the hole.”

Amy Major asked incredulously, “But how did they
get
there?”

Kingsley smiled. “I quite know how you feel. This is more bizarre than anything in our astrophysical zoo. Somehow, something has impressed knowledge and intelligence into a magnetic structure.”

One of the U Agency men said, “Well, a lot of our technology stores data in magnetic cores, but those’re lattices. Iron, say, oriented in well-defined states by the field.
But this
…”

He let his silence speak for him, and judging from the open skepticism on many of the faces in the room, Benjamin could see the idea was not going over well. For reference, Benjamin tapped in a command and summoned forth the latest mapping in the microwave frequencies. At the core, just barely visible as a broad dot in these frequencies, was a disk. He knew that it was dense and hot, the captured mass like a glowing phonograph record, turning around the spindle hole that would eventually swallow it all.

A filmy cloud surrounded this bright core, laced by striations that detailed analysis had already shown to be “magnetic flux tubes,” in the astrophysical jargon. The intricate architecture of these lines suggested an outline. “An hourglass,” Benjamin said abruptly, seeing the structure anew.

Dimly visible, once the eye knew where to look, the symmetric funnel was undeniable.

“The hole is at the center,” Kingsley observed, “that unre
solved dot. It draws matter in along those ducts, into an accretion disk.”

“Can’t see any disk there,” one of the U Agency astronomers put in.

“Hard to see at this angle, I’ll wager,” Kingsley came back smoothly. “And perhaps not luminous at these particular frequencies, compared with the electron emission in the strong fields.”

One of the house theorists already had a mathematical simulation of the inner region, which she presented as a slice diagram. Depending on the weather around the black hole, there could either be
THICK INFLOW
from a wide angle, or
THIN INFLOW
into a disk at the equator of the system. The inflow formed a
THICK DISK
, which could be slowly swallowed as it spiraled into the hole, reaching
MAXIMUM PRESSURE
very near the inner edge. But the energy released by the white-hot mass, just before it dived into the hole, kept open twin funnels.

“In this model,” the theorist said, “the funnels serve to eject mass, like a rocket nozzle. In steady-state, the funnel wall is static.” The hourglass shape of the funnels was striking.

The entire region was only the size of a large building. The larger magnetic realm beyond this could hold enormous stores of mass, organized by the coherent field structure.

“Unbelievable,” Arno whispered.

Still, the room was convinced. Heads nodded and voices called out speculations on what some of the slender pathways might be. Plainly small dots of luminosity were moving, as the map refreshed over the next hour, showing a slow, spiraling inward, down the twin funnels.

The technical discussion went on, ebbing and flowing with restless energy. Benjamin moved over to check on Channing. She barely acknowledged his presence, or much else in the room. Instead, he was puzzled to find her regarding the Eater’s image with an expression that seemed to mingle awe and longing. He reminded himself to check with Dr. Mendenham about her medication.

“I should get you home,” he whispered.

“No. I want to be here.” She did not even glance at him, keeping her eyes on the big screen’s image as fresh data filled in slight details.

“One cannot but note that the justly termed ‘Eater’—or more generally, ‘intruder’—answered only one of the questions we put to it,” Kingsley said at a pause in the discussion.

Channing’s voice filled the silence of the room as all looked at her. “We asked where it’s from, what it is, what it wants.”

Benjamin said, “And it answered the middle question.”

“Maybe it’s being coy?” Amy ventured. She spoke confidently now, her hesitancy in such powerful company now evaporated in the heat of the hunt.

“Try again. One at a time,” Channing said.

Arno authorized sending a further message: “Where are you from?”

The reply came with the same speed, arriving three hours
later. They had arranged its sentences with proper typography now. The simple code it sent did not carry a distinction between capitals and lowercase, so they left it in caps. For the Eater the implied huge voice seemed natural.

“It’s been wandering for 7.5 billion years?” an astronomer asked in a hollow, awed whisper.

The room was silent for a long time.

Channing had refused to go home, and instead had fallen asleep in a lounge chair in Benjamin’s office. Benjamin had noticed that even when awake her right foot sloped off to the floor, as if she had forgotten she had one. She roused for the reply and came into the Big Screen Room to see the message glowing alone on the screen. “Hmmm, it seems rather cagey about its origins.”

The Center was by now getting crowded as more people poured in under the general U Agency umbrella. Some were directly from the White House, which apparently was confused about how involved it should get. The Gang of Four met with Arno and Martinez to plan.

“This is uncharted political territory,” Kingsley observed. “A politician’s first instinct is to clamp down upon that which he or she does not understand.”

“I’d like it to stay that way,” Channing said.

“I think we all would,” Martinez said, “but this is going to be far larger than we can manage.”

Arno looked unsure of himself, and Benjamin realized that events were spinning out of his control, an anxiety-producing turn for such a personality. It was hard to exude confidence, the crucial executive signature, when you did not feel it. He mentioned this to Kingsley at the coffee urn, and Kingsley chuckled. “Unless one is a practiced politician, and thus an actor.”

“I’m not so impressed with his methods,” Benjamin said. “His people are rubbing mine the wrong way.”

“I fear that was inevitable,” Kingsley said. “In my prior experience, science is packed solid with specialists, unused to working with others.”

Channing said wryly, “Look, for guys like Arno, the first rule of action is if at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”

“He seems pretty agreeable so far,” Benjamin said cautiously. He had respect for her political intuition; what was she seeing that he missed?

Channing’s energy had abruptly returned, probably fed by old-fashioned adrenaline. She summoned more by tossing a sugar packet into her coffee. “There’s no hiding from this, though—the White House has cut him enough slack to mess up.”

Kingsley nodded. “Quite astute. He’s got to work with such uncertain materials as ourselves. And clever we may be, but this problem is incredibly broad. I’ve already recommended that we fly out experts in semiotics, the language of signs, in case we are using too narrow a channel of conversation with this thing. They may have ideas we can use.”

Benjamin had to agree. These days, there were cell biologists unable to discuss evolutionary theory, physicists who couldn’t tell a protein from a nucleic acid, chemists who did not know an ellipse from a hyperbola, geologists who could not say why the sky was blue. Worse, they didn’t care. Generalized curiosity was rare and getting rarer and now they needed a lot of people who could bring in a broad range of angles of attack.

“I think you’re giving Arno too much credit,” Channing insisted. “He’s been behind the curve since the Eater began talking. In situations like this, conventional wisdom won’t work. He’s so dense, light bends around him.”

Benjamin laid a restraining hand on her arm. “I think you’re overtired.”

The rawboned, ravaged look she gave him had a silent
desperation. He did not know where her sudden moods came from, but resolved to weather them. Trying to toss off the matter lightly, she said, “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. We shouldn’t be surprised to see it show up a lot in the next few days…that’s all.”

“I’m taking you home.”

“Good idea, best of the day.” Then she fainted.