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  “Is the United States doing any better—really?”

  “A bit, but only by standing aside and letting the U Agency operate. You may recall I had something like that in mind.”

  “Ah, that Brit modesty again. Most becoming.”

  During the worldwide panic of the last few days, she had been more happy than ever to be on the most isolated island chain in the world. The U Agency had seized access to the Big Island and was buttoning up the place. The Agency remained mysterious even in action, which kept the media mavens abuzz but information-starved. As nearly as she could judge, with some cryptic remarks from Kingsley, it had emerged as the can-do element in the U.S. government, in collaboration with various allies. Bureaucratic style favored setting up a new agency to actually do things, while the older agencies spent time in turf wars. This stood in the long tradition of the CIA, which begat the NSA, and onward during the late TwenCen into a plethora of acronymed “black technology infrastructure” groups, which then eventually demanded consolidation into the U Agency, with its larger than purely national agenda. Or so she gathered.

  “How’s the news?” she said with an attempt at lightness, ushering him with body language into the garden.

  “We made an enormous public relations error in announcing the time of the Eater’s Jupiter rendezvous. I see that now.”

  “Did we have a choice? Any competent astronomer could calculate it.”

  “True, but we could have controlled admittance to the large telescopes’ images. Perhaps even prevented the visual media from getting close-ups of what it did to Jupiter.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. It would come out—hell, every amateur with a ten-inch telescope could see the flares.”

  The later stages of the Eater’s devouring had been heralded by the bright jet behind it, lancing forth like a spear pointed backward at the troubled crescent of Jupiter.

  Kingsley sighed, collapsing into a lounge chair. “And now everyone wants to know what can it do to Earth.”

  “And the answer is?”

  “As I recall, you first pointed out its ability to scorch our upper atmosphere. I opened with that and it seemed quite sufficient to induce panic among the ‘advisers’ on that airplane.”

  “Good to know I’m still useful,” she said archly.

  “They concluded—big surprise here—that we need to know much more about its thinking and purpose.”

  “How insightful.”

  “So the figures from the Air Force and NASA came forward with a new crash program to integrate the classified technology with NASA’s near-Earth craft.”

  “Anticipating that it will come that close? I suppose we could field some potent ships within, say, the distance to the moon.”

  Kingsley nodded pensively and she could see him thinking, so she went inside and got some drinks together, including one for Benjamin when he showed up. When she returned, he was still staring into space but stirred at her approach. He gulped the wine cooler gratefully and said, “After some years at this, I’ve learned that ‘pilot’ is a bureaucrat’s way of saying two things at once: ‘This is but the first,’ plus ‘we believe it will work, but…’ Still, they committed themselves to outfitting new ships, both manned and not, ready within weeks.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t need them.”

  “I suspect we all are suffering from an unconscious fatalism, brought on by weariness—at least on my part. The policy people, as well.”

  “They aren’t used to confronting something this strange?”

  “That may be it. In astronomy, the new is delightful, a revelation.”

  “In politics, it’s a problem. Makes me wonder what the next revelation will be.”

  “I don’t think you should be bothering yourself with this, truly.” Kingsley’s gaze came back from abstract distance to a worried focus on her.

  “I like it. And what should I be doing, fretting over my rickety body?”

  “It’s a fine one, quite worth the attention.”

  He stood and she turned away toward the flowers, their heady fragrance. “Don’t start.”

  “I’m only expressing what we both feel.”

  “No, what you feel. I’m…” She could not think of the right word.

  “Troubled, I know. But I feel radiating from you a need, and something in me wants to answer it.”

  His long hands clasped her arms from behind and she bowed her head, the honeyed air swarming in her nostrils. His hands were strong, certain, deliberate, and she was the opposite. “How…how much of this is unfinished business?”

  “From decades ago?”

  His voice came softly through the layered air and it helped a great deal that she could not see him. But the hands remained on her upper arms, calm and reassuring and altogether welcome.

  “Somehow it’s not over,” she managed to get out.

  “When I saw you again, after so long…”

  “Me, too.”

  “I don’t believe we’re being altogether rotten about this.”

  She laughed silently, head hanging. “Not so far.”

  “I didn’t mean that. Only that you need support and—”

  “And if Benjamin’s too busy to give it, you will.”

  “Someone must.”

  “Support, that’s all?”

  He turned her gently with the long, big hands and she tilted her head up to look into his eyes. They were unreadable. “Maybe that was one thing I always liked about you, that I couldn’t tell what you were going to say or do.”

  “And with Benjamin you could.”

  “Something like that. The lure of the unknown.”

  “I don’t mean anything wholly sexual in this,” he said with an almost schoolboy earnestness.

  “I know. I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “I’m quite certain not, yes.”

  She wished she were half as sure as he seemed. She could not predict what she was going to do these days, or understand why. “It’s emotions here, not actions.”

  “Yes, yes.” He seemed suddenly embarrassed.

  “New territory. I’ve never died before.”

  “It’s…the physicians…they—”

  “Pretty damned sure. I’ve got maybe a few weeks.”

  “Benjamin knows.”

  “Some of it. The technical stuff is pretty boring.”

  “Shouldn’t you be under more care?”

  “I hate hospitals, and the hospice I stopped by gave me the creeps.”

  “But surely—”

  “I’m giving in to my personality flaws. Without them I’d have no personality at all, most days.”

  He smiled wanly. “Your tongue is as fine as ever.”

  She kissed him suddenly and just as suddenly broke it off.

  He blinked, engagingly flustered. “I scarcely expected…it would not have been…”

  “Appropriate? Right.”

  “There are levels here…” He was appealingly awkward.

  “Yeah, and me, I’m at one with my duality.”

  This provoked a grin from him, dispelling his mood. “You’re amazing.”

  “Just improbable. Side effect of the chem supporters they’ve shot me full of.”

  “Medication?” His eyes widened in alarm.

  “A new line of delights. Keeps your metabolism running pretty flat and steady, just ducky until the whole system crashes. I’ve got some embedded chips just below the skin, tasting my blood and titrating into it some little bags of wonder-drug stuff.”

  “I think I read something about those.”

  “The bags they tipped into my upper thighs. They don’t even itch or anything.” This was too much detail, she saw.

  His hands had lessened their hold and she could sense him wondering how to get out of this moment. Very delicately, taking all the time in the world, she kissed him lightly on his uncertain lips. “Thanks. A gal needs some appreciation.”

  “More than that.”

  “Love, if you wa
nt. I still love you, in a way I haven’t got the language for. Just having you here is fine, nothing more expected.”

  “I knew when I saw you again, knew it instantly.”

  “So did I.”

  She leaned down and kissed his right hand. It seemed an infinitely precious movement, living in a moment carved in the elastic, fragrant air, as if all life should be fashioned from such passing, exquisite gestures. An hypnotic illusion, of course, quite possibly the outcome of titrated solutions doing their chemical work, but absolutely right at this time, this place.

  He dropped his hands and they stood in a quiet glade of the garden, silent and warm. Then came the spitting of gravel and Benjamin’s car rumbled to a stop in the driveway.

  She hung in the long easeful glide away from that jeweled moment, passing as they all do, clinging to it while Benjamin arrived and she kissed him. So soon after Kingsley, it felt awkward. Kingsley retreated to his silent reserve. In the first moments, she felt a tension between the two men, as though Benjamin sensed something and did not know how to deal with it. Then he visibly shrugged and accepted a drink with a wobbly smile.

  Benjamin cracked whatever remained of her crystal serenity with news. The updated determination of the Eater’s trajectory confirmed that it was bound on an accelerating orbit for Earth. “Unmistakable,” Benjamin said firmly as they moved indoors.

  “How much time do we have?” Kingsley asked, his voice full of caution, as though he was still prying himself out of the last half hour.

  “A few weeks, if it continues at its present acceleration.”

  “Surely it must run out of fuel.”

  “There are several asteroids it could snag on the way.”

  “Ah, a chance to learn something more of its processes,” Kingsley said judiciously.

  “Digestion, you mean,” Channing said, handing Benjamin a dark wine cooler.

  “Quite so.”

  “Wish we hadn’t named it Eater. The media’s, well, eating it up. Scaring the whole damn world.”

  Benjamin seemed to come out of some other place, eyes taking in the garden at last, then her. “How are you?” He put down the drink and embraced her, his hands on her arms in an eerie echo of Kingsley’s.

  “Glad to have my two favorite men here. I needn’t suffer in silence while I can still moan, whimper, and complain.”

  “Which she never does,” Kingsley said gallantly.

  “Better living through chemistry,” she said lightly, feeling light in the head as well. “Come, fair swains, ply me with technobabble.”

  Which they did.

  2

  He opened his front door to get the newspaper, gummy-mouthed and rumpled, and found a camera snout eyeing him from two feet away. “Just a word, sir, Doctor, about—”

  Thus did he discover that he was the target of what he would later hear termed a “celeb stakeout.” He slammed the door hard and several thoughts rushed by in parallel. Sure, they were just doing their jobs, all for a public that Really Wanted To Know. But this was their house. He felt invaded. How was he going to fetch his newspaper?

  He felt a spike of swirling anxiety, his trajectory out of control. And then a third sensation: a spurt of excitement. People, millions of them, wanted to know about him. There was a primitive primate pleasure in being paid attention to. He was interesting. Tomorrow maybe a hurricane in Florida or a babe in a scandal would be better, but for today, it was Dr. Benjamin Knowlton.

  This diffuse delight lasted until he and Channing got into the Center, past a gauntlet of security and media that lengthened by the day. Only weeks ago the Center had been a comfortable two-story complex with broad swaths of grass and tropical plants setting it off. The only visible sign of its purpose had been the large microwave dishes on nearby hills. Now bare tilt-up walls framed the buildings, windowless and gray slabs forking into wings. Not a blade of grass remained anywhere; all was mud or “fastcrete,” the new wonder material.

  “Wow.” Channing pointed. “They’re putting up another new building.”

  “One of those prefab jobs, chopper them in and lower the walls into that fast-dry concrete.” Benjamin wondered what fresh echelon of overseers this heralded.

  “We could use more thinking, less managing,” Channing said.

  “That Semiotics Group, can I sit in?”

  “I think they’re inside an ‘information firewall,’ as the jargon puts it.”

  “But how are we going to link the maps of the Eater, which are sharpening as it approaches, with how it actually works?”

  She shook her head wordlessly in the calm way that had come over her in the last few days. They had given up their daily battle over her coming into the Center. She would, and that was that. When he went in alone, she followed in her car. He had toyed with disabling it and realized that she would simply get a ride some other, more tiring way.

  They went through the newly expanded main foyer. News items shimmered on big screens, where a crowd of media people watched. Arno was giving a briefing elsewhere in the complex, his head looming on a screen here like a luminous world with hyperactive mountain chains working on it. “Not again,” Channing said. “He’s up there every day.”

  “I think he has to be. The Story of the Millennium, they’re calling it.”

  She scoffed. “Barely started on the millennium and we’re laying claim to it. And Arno, his talks are like a minibikini, touching on the essentials but not really covering much.”

  “That’s a talent now, not a lack.”

  She went into the Semiotics Division hallway and he entered his new office suite. He had his own foyer—like this morning, a spurt of delight; he was being paid attention to—from which radiated prefab, bone white, fluorescent-lit hallways and byways where hundreds of astronomers and data analysts labored.

  Within half an hour, the high had dissipated in the usual swamp of memos, Alert Notices, data dumps, and plain old institutional noise. These absorbed his morning, but not his attention, which kept veering off. He suppressed the urge to sit in on the meetings Channing attended, with her instinct for ferreting out the most interesting work. He wanted to be in those sessions, both to be with her and to hear about something other than optical resolution, luminosities, report summaries, spectra, and fights over ’scope time. Thus were his days whittled away, with precious few moments to actually think.

  Just before noon he had to take an important issue “up top,” as the U Agency termed it, and so walked into Kingsley as he stood before a TV camera, while on a huge wall screen the President of the United States lounged in a terrycloth robe, hair wet, with an indoor swimming pool behind him. A glass of orange juice, half-empty, stood on a small table and the President’s legs were thick with black hair.

  Kingsley stood at attention, addressing his remarks to a pointer mike, his face concentrated. Kingsley’s secretary left Benjamin standing in shadows and he stayed there, suspecting something afoot. Kingsley had not noticed him, blinded by a brilliant pool of light with the emblem of the Center behind him. The man knew how to play to the dramatic. His small staff sat farther away, people new to the Center who ignored Benjamin. A technician gave the start sign.

  The President’s warm drawl described how “a swarm of Searchers is damn near ready to go, so you’ve got no worry there.” The man was obviously speaking from prepared notes, eyes tracking left and right as he spoke, but it came over as utterly offhand and sincere. He deplored the “spreading panic” and was sorry “that this makes you astronomers’ job even harder,” though—with a chuckle—“now you know what it’s like being in the media fishbowl.”

  Kingsley said, “Sir, we have doom criers surrounding the observatories farther up the mountain.”

  “I thought the island was sealed.” A puzzled frown, a glance off camera.

  “These are locals, I fear.”

  “Then we’ll just have ’em rounded up.”

  “I would appreciate that.”

  “Want and expect the bes
t of you, Mr. Kingsley.” A flicker of the eyelids. Someone had told him of the slip, but the President saw no way to correct easily, so just glided on. “You’ve been doin’ great.”

  Benjamin had to admit as the conversation went on that Kingsley was adroit, slick, even amusing. Though British, he easily rode over the issue of nationality, getting the President and the Pentagon to promote him as controller of Earth’s response to the Eater’s approach. Benjamin stood undetected by Kingsley’s staff, who were all watching the President as though hypnotized. Well, the man did have a presence, a quality Benjamin knew he would never acquire. That was why, in a way, he chose a slight pause in the talk to walk straight onstage, taking a spot next to Kingsley.

  “Mr. President—” and he was into a quick introduction, as though this had all been planned. “Sir, I’m Benjamin Knowlton, head of Astronomy Division. This is a world problem, and you can’t let it seem as if you’re ignoring the rest of the planet.”

  A curious glance to the side. “Well, I never intended—”

  “No doubt, sir, but that is how it’s playing out here. I’m more in touch with the international astronomical community than anyone else here, even Kingsley. I know how this is playing among those we must rely upon for full-sky coverage of the Eater, continuous contact, and the use of many dozens of telescopes on Earth and off.”

  His pulse thumped, he could not quite get enough breath, but he held his place. One of Kingsley’s aides gestured from off camera, someone whispered, “Get security,” but Benjamin knew—or hoped he did—that Kingsley would not permit the appearance of disorder here. Pure luck walking in on this, and he had to go with it.

  “I haven’t heard anything from State about such trouble.”

  “This isn’t about diplomats, it’s about keeping ourselves in an alliance with others. I had trouble with a German satellite manager just this morning, demanding that we forward data and images that they don’t have. I receive similar demands every day, and the voices are getting more strident.”

  “I’d think, this being science, that you all would share.” The President appeared genuinely puzzled.