Eater Read online

  She leaned toward Benjamin. “So the culture vulture theory of the Sagan crowd looks right.”

  He said, “It still isn’t headed for Earth, either.”

  Arno was going on about ramifications. “An international committee can assemble a compendium of our greatest works, the arts and mathematics, perhaps even science—though there may be a security issue there.”

  “Let us offer whatever data it wants,” a voice from in front said.

  The final decision would come from on high, of course, and that lent an air of liberation to what followed. The discussion went quickly, specialists vying to spell out how to do all this.

  The battalions of data managers, as they were termed, had already erected an elaborate architecture to deal with speaking to the Eater. What was not so obvious, but now clear, was that in transferring information—say, the Library of Congress—the Eater would learn a good deal more about how our computers thought. It was astoundingly swift at learning our computer languages. Some of its remarks in passing implied that all this was rather primitive stuff—to it.

  She and Benjamin stayed for hours, following the discussion, volunteering nothing. This was not their province. Toward the end, though, Benjamin made a remark she would remember later. “It’s getting close to Jupiter. Let’s see what we learn there.”

  “You’re not so sure this cultural shotgun is what it wants?”

  “Thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”

  “Ummm. I remember an old movie about an art collector who went around buying up living artists’ work, and then killing them, to increase resale value.”

  “Good grief, you’re in a great mood.”

  “Just the old mind wandering. I suppose everyone’s taking comfort in the fact that once it’s at Jupiter, it’s in close range of our Searchers. We’ll learn more.”

  He gave her his angular grin. “Old Army saying. ‘If the enemy is in range, so are you.’”

  6

  Benjamin clasped her to him with a trembling energy. She kissed him with an equal fervor and then, without a word or the need of any, he left for the Center.

  She had agreed to rest a good part of each day, but insisted on being at the Center for a few hours, at least. Each day he hoped she would just plain rest, and each day he was disappointed. She came up around noon to catch the day’s energy at its full swell. Benjamin was pleased that even in the hubbub, people looked after her, included her in the flow of work. There was quite enough of it to share.

  They had both been surprised at how quickly the U.S. government had gotten in line on the cultural transfer process. The usual cautionary voices had loudly complained about giving away secrets that could be used against all humanity, but the sheer strangeness of the Eater made it hard to see how a digitized image of the Parthenon could be a defense secret. “Good ol’ Carl Sagan,” Channing had remarked. “Who would’ve guessed that his view of aliens would have infiltrated the Congress?”

  Indeed, they needed a figure like Sagan, dead now for decades, who could command the confidence of the greater public. Like all good popularizers in science, he had been roundly punished for it by his colleagues, denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the subject of tsk-tsk gossip by many who were not his equals as scientist or educator. No such astronomer had arisen since Sagan’s time, and the best the profession could muster were various pale figures from the usual scientific bureaucracy. Compared with them, Kingsley did quite well, and so had undertaken a lot of the Center’s public relations work—when not shouldered aside by Arno.

  Both Benjamin and Kingsley suspected that the political leadership was mounting precautionary measures, but there was no insider word of such plans. At the Center all policy matters, and even the different spectral bands of the observing teams, had become more and more boxed into neat little compartments.

  The Center was preoccupied with shepherding the data flow to the Eater. Channing had become edgy and preoccupied, following the Eater news obsessively, making fun of Arno. (“Maybe his major purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.”) Sometimes she seemed to surprise even herself with her brittle humor, as if she did not fully know how black a mood lay beneath it.

  Benjamin thought about her, fruitlessly as usual, as he came into the new wing of the Center. It had been thrown up in a day by teams who descended in massive helicopters. The big new office complex was a rectangular intrusion into a hillside carved unceremoniously for it. Each floor was one big room, the nondenominational Office: a three-dimensional grid bounded below by a plane of thin nylon carpet, two meters above by a parallel plane of pale acoustical tile. This space suffered punctuation by vertical Sheetrock planes that came to shoulder height, barely enough to give the illusion of partial privacy and damp conversations. Squares of recessed fluorescent lighting beamed down on the symbolic Euclidean realization of pragmatic idealism, a space of unimpeded flows. Spherical immersion tanks dotted the space between the rectangular sheets that stretched to infinity, and around them technicians moved with insect energies. In these the cyber-link specialists kept in close touch with the array of satellites and sensors they now had spying on the interloper.

  A cube farm: big rooms clogged with cubicles for the drones. When something loud happened, the prairie-dog heads would pop up over the half-height walls.

  As the Eater plunged closer to Jupiter, it had rhapsodized about alien cultures it had visited, sending samples of outré art via the microwave high-bandwidth links. Some were released to the public, particularly if they seemed innocuous. Predictably, distinctions between “photographs” and “art” were difficult to make. There were apparently straightforward views of landscapes, odd life-forms, stars, and planets, even some “cities” that might just as well have been regularly arranged hills. With thousands of such images to chew upon, the public seemed satisfied.

  Carefully the government figures charged with filtering the information did not give away the true vast size of the galleys it sent. Nor did they release unsettling images of grotesque scenes, hideous aliens, and unaccounted-for devastation. The Eater provided little or no commentary, so battalions of assembled art critics, photo experts, and other sorts labored to interpret these.

  So far the world reaction had been varied—there were always alarmists—but comparatively mild. The sense of wonder was working overtime among the world media, though that would undoubtedly give way in time, Benjamin thought.

  The more advanced works were another matter. These the computers had assembled into holographic forms and an entire yawning gallery displayed them. Benjamin stopped there to see what was new. Even knowing how much effort was being marshalled worldwide on deciphering the Eater’s transmission load, he was daily astonished at how much new work appeared.

  It was eerie work, subtly ominous. Portraits of creatures and places in twisted perspectives, 3D manifestations of objects that appeared impossible, color schemes that plainly operated beyond the visible range.

  He went into the Big Screen Room. The ranging grid showed the orange profile of the Eater at the very edge of Jupiter’s moon system. There was a crowd and he found a seat at the back only because a new staffer gave up his, leaping to his feet when he saw Benjamin’s ID badge.

  A murmur. Benjamin watched as one of the Searcher ’scopes came online. Its high-resolution image flickered through several spectral ranges, settled on the best. Kingsley materialized in the seat beside him; a staffer had given up his for the Astronomer Royal. The incoming image sharpened at the hands of the specialists. “It’s veered in the last hour,” Kingsley whispered, “and appears headed for an outer moon of the system.”

  “Couldn’t we have predicted that?”

  “Some did.” Kingsley shrugged. “It does not respond to questions about its plans.”

  “Still? I thought it was talking more now.”

  “The linguists have given up trying to render its little parables in literal ways.”

  “They seem more lik
e puzzles to me.”

  “That, too. ‘Cultural dissonance,’ as one of them termed it.”

  “I’ll have to remember that one.” Benjamin grinned dryly. “Sounds almost like it means something.”

  Suddenly the screen brightened. In a spectacular few seconds, the orange profile warped into a slender funnel, blazing brightly.

  “It’s ingesting,” Kingsley said matter-of-factly. “I suppose it met a tasty rock.”

  “We knew it had some motivation.”

  “Note how no one seems very worried? I believe we are all simply too tired for that.”

  “I wondered if it was just me. I figured I was beyond being surprised anymore.”

  “I rather hope so.”

  Benjamin had stacks of work waiting in his office, but once again he gave way to the temptation of just watching. The Eater was moving at nearly a hundredth the speed of light, an incredible velocity. The plasma types had given up hope of explaining how its magnetic fields could withstand the sheer friction of encountering solid matter and ionizing it.

  “Something beyond our present understanding is happening right before our eyes,” Kingsley murmured. “I have almost gotten used to these routine miracles it performs.”

  The images coiled into a complex conduit of magnetic fields, etched out in the brilliant radiance of superheated matter. In a few moments, it had destroyed a moon, grazing it just right, so that some matter was sucked in while the majority was thrown away, adding thrust.

  A keening note sounded in the room. A fresh signal, high and sharp. “It now sends us codes earmarked for audio playing, once it worked out how our hearing functions,” Kingsley whispered.

  “It’s…weird. Ugly,” Benjamin said.

  “I believe a proper translation is that it is singing to ‘all humanity’ as part of its payment for our cultural legacy.”

  Benjamin studied Kingsley’s lean profile in the shadows. “It’s like some…”

  “We should not impose our categories upon it,” Kingsley said crisply.

  “Sounds like you’ve been listening to the semiotics people again.”

  “Just trying to keep an open mind.”

  “Damn it, to me that stuff sounds like, like…”

  “A deranged god, yes.”

  “Maybe in all that time between the stars, it’s gotten crazy.”

  “By its own account—one we have received, but it is so complex the specialists still can’t find human referents—it has endured such passages many millions of times.”

  “So it says.”

  Kingsley nodded, a sour sigh of fatigue escaping. “And we have come to accept what it says.”

  The semiotics teams had been feeding it vast stores of cultural information, with some commentary to help it fathom the masses of it. Most texts, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica—still the best all-round summary of knowledge—were already available in highly compressed styles. These flowed out and were duly digested.

  Material from the sciences encountered no trouble; the intruder hardly commented upon them, except to remark obliquely on their “engaging simplicity.” Benjamin took this to be an attempt at a compliment, while others seemed to see it as an insult.

  The social sciences came next. These confused the Eater considerably. It asked many questions that led them back to the vocabulary lessons. The Eater did not have categories that translated readily into ethics, aesthetics, or philosophy.

  The arts were even harder. It seemed unable to get beyond pictorial methods that were not nearly photographic; abstractions it either asked many puzzled questions about or ignored. In this the Eater seemed to ally with the majority of current popular taste.

  “I wonder if it is telling us the truth about anything.” Benjamin mused.

  Kingsley’s mouth tipped up on one end. “Why would it lie? It can stamp upon us as if we were insects.”

  Benjamin nodded and suddenly felt Kingsley as a fellow soldier in arms, worn by the same incessant pressures.

  “Crazy, you said?” Kingsley said distantly. “From the long times it has spent between the stars? Remember, it has been alone all its life. Do not think of it as a social being.”

  “But it asks for social things, our culture.”

  Kingsley mused silently, watching the orange signature on the screen creep toward the rim of the gas giant planet, and then said suddenly, “Crazy? I would rather use an Americanism, spooky.”

  Benjamin wondered if their speculations had any less foundation than what the semiotics and social science teams said. “I heard a biologist talking at the coffee machine the other day. He pointed out that it may be the only member of its species.”

  “That makes no sense. We still have no idea how it came to be.”

  “Something tells me we’re going to find out.”

  “From it?”

  “It may not even know.”

  “Find out from experience, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  The next several hours were as unsettling as anything Benjamin had ever encountered.

  The black hole and its attendant blossom of magnetic flux swooped in toward the banded crescent. An air of anxious foreboding settled over the viewers at this meeting between Jupiter—the solar system’s great gas giant, a world that had claimed the bulk of all the mass that orbited its star—and a hole in space-time that had the mass of a moon packed into a core the size of a table.

  Its trajectory arced down into the vast atmosphere. And in a long, luminous moment, the Eater drank in a thick slice of the upper layers, gulping in hydrogen with glowing magnetic talons.

  The audience around Benjamin came to life. Gasps and murmurs filled the room. There were few words and he caught an undertone of uneasy dread.

  The image shifted as the bristling glow followed a long, looping flyby. To study life-forms that do exist there, it said. It even sent short spurts of lectures on the forms it found. One of Kingsley’s new aides brought word of these messages, printed out from the translators, as they came in.

  “Look at the detail,” Benjamin read at Kingsley’s shoulder. “Balloon life, a thousand kilometers deep into the cloud deck.”

  “It is teaching us about our own neighborhood,” Kingsley said.

  “Yeah, along with a few remarks about our being unable to do it.”

  “Well, that is one rather human trait,” Kingsley remarked sardonically. “Plainly it loves having an audience.”

  “It’s been alone for longer than we’ve had a civilization.”

  In the next hour, it compared its findings with similar dives into other massive worlds it had known.

  Data swarmed in. Sliding sheets of information filled screens throughout the Center. Sighing, Kingsley remarked, “Data is not knowledge, and certainly it is not wisdom. What does this mean?”

  As they watched through a long, laboring afternoon, the swelling magnetic blossom dove and gained mass—three times. An enormous, luminous accretion disk spread out like a circle around it.

  Arno appeared before them, gray and shaken. “We have just registered fresh jets of high-energy emission from it. The atmospheric entries are over. We have a preliminary determination of its trajectory.”

  They all waited through a confused silence. Arno did not seem able to speak. Then he said, “The…intruder…it has again picked up speed—and is headed for Earth.”

  Benjamin bowed his head and realized he had known it all along. He turned toward Kingsley and in narrowed, apprehensive eyes he saw the same knowledge.

  PART FOUR

  THE MAGNETIC HOURGLASS

  MAY

  1

  She had hoped it was Benjamin, home early with the latest news, but instead the thrumming in the driveway was a package delivery woman. She opened the package to discover—oh, joy!—that the Right to Die Society had targeted her with an offer of a do-it-yourself home suicide kit. The four-color glossy foldout was lovingly detailed.

  Their primary product was the Exit Bag, with its “st
urdy clear plastic sack the size of a garbage bag, a soft elastic neckband, and Velcro fasteners to ensure a snug fit, plus detailed instructions for use.” Quite a well-done brochure, especially when one realized that they were not expecting a lot of repeat business.

  She made a special trip out through the garden to throw this into the trash, heaving it with a grunt of relish. Somehow, in this age of zero privacy, her illness had become a marketable trait. Sickies were usually stuck at home, so they could be targeted. She had hung a chalkboard next to the telephone for messages and when salesmen called she would run her fingernails across it until they hung up. Somehow the sound never had irritated her, so she might as well use the fact to advantage.

  She paused in the garden, drawing in the sweet tropical air with real relish, and just for fun punched Benjamin’s dartboard backing. The slam of her fists into it was no doubt deplorable, primitive, pointless—and oddly satisfying. The exertion left her panting, head swimming.

  As her reward, the world gave her the growl of a car as it spat gravel coming down their driveway. She angled over to greet Benjamin and again it wasn’t him. Kingsley unlimbered from his small sports car, one of the tiny jobs that flaunted its fuel economy. His frame was slimly elegant in gray slacks with a flowery Hawaiian shirt.

  “I was going by—”

  “Never mind, I haven’t seen enough of you for days and days,” she said with a quick fervor that surprised her. Where’s that from?

  “I had hoped to catch Benjamin. I’m coming back from an emergency meeting in Hilo, held in a massive airplane standing on the runway. It would seem that is the new technique for being security conscious, control all access.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Good to see you.”

  “It was more Washington people?”

  “And U.N., yes. Lots of frowns, shows of concern, brave speeches. No ideas, of course.”

  “Any concrete help?”

  “They are hopelessly behind the curve. When confronted with something genuinely new, the bulk of the U.N. responds on time scales of years, not hours.”