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  “That’s how it should work. But this buttoned-up security posture is a mistake. You can’t keep this under wraps—particularly if it’s wrapped in the U.S. flag.”

  This line seemed to tell. The President blinked and said with calculated shrewdness, “You have a bargain in mind?”

  “Just an idea. How to work it out I leave”—he could not resist—“to Mr. Kingsley. I believe we should have shared control of the Mauna Kea facility and the world network of astronomers. Full disclosure at dedicated Mesh sites. Nothing held back.”

  “Nothing?” Plainly the President had never heard of the idea from any of his staff.

  “For the moment, nothing.”

  “I hear it’s not telling us much about what it plans,” the President said.

  “Precisely why it should be safe to reveal it,” Kingsley came in smoothly. “I endorse Dr. Knowlton’s proposal.”

  The President blinked again. “I’ll have to think about this. How come that Arno fellow didn’t say anything about it?”

  “He thought it best if I—we—proposed it directly,” Benjamin said, looking straight into the camera in the way he had gathered conveyed sincerity. Very useful, especially when lying.

  “Well, I appreciate your views.” The President looked ready to sign off, in fact raised eyebrows toward someone off camera, but then said, “Say, you really think they’d do that? The other astronomers? Cut us off from their data and so on?”

  “I do, sir,” Benjamin said, and in another second the President’s image dwindled away, like water down a drain.

  3

  Channing heard about the fracas on the way back from lunch. She had wondered why Benjamin did not join her, but she was grateful for the chance to just sit by herself, eat quickly, and leave. The others in the Semiotics Group knew enough to leave her alone, so she got to simply lie down on a convenient bed in the infirmary to snag an hour’s delicious nap. When she woke up, he was there.

  “I hear you made a name for yourself today,” she murmured sleepily.

  He grinned, obviously on a high. “Ah, but what name’s that?”

  “‘Bastard,’ I overheard that. Also ‘maniac’ and ‘amateur.’”

  “You’ve been listening to U Agency types.”

  “Not entirely, but yes—they talk more than astronomers.”

  “Kingsley was frosty after we went off the air. I was amazed that he recovered fast enough not to appear provoked, to just stand there while I went on.”

  “His job—and yours—depends on Washington’s confidence in him.”

  “Sure, but then to endorse my idea—that was amazing.”

  “We talked about these issues only last night.”

  “Sure, but that was dinner conversation.”

  “Kingsley wasn’t saying anything like that to the President, then?”

  “Not at all. I’m afraid he’ll try to get even now.”

  “Kingsley? Not his style.”

  “He’s not a saint. Look, in your NASA days, you’d have done the same.”

  “I don’t get even, I get odder.” She liked the small smile he gave her at the joke, an old one but serviceable enough to break the tension she felt in him.

  “Come on. Arno called me in, and I’d like you there.”

  “Sure, I’m all slept out,” though she wasn’t.

  The virtue of scientists lay principally in their curiosity. It could overcome hastily imposed U Agency management structures with ease. Fresh data trumped or bypassed the arteriosclerotic pyramids of power and information flow the Agency had erected, all quite automatically, following its standard crisis-management directives. Kingsley understood quite well the habits of mind that advanced, classified research followed, though he had given few hints about how he had acquired the knowledge.

  Standard security regulation used strict separation of functions, at times keeping the right hand from even knowing there was a left hand. The Manhattan Project had been the historically honored example of this approach, dividing each element of the A-bomb problem from the other, with transmission only on a Need to Know basis.

  Historians of science now believed that bomb production had been delayed about a year by this method. Under a more open strategy, the United States could have used bombs against Berlin, perhaps destroying the German regime from the air rather than on the ground. This might have kept the U.S.S.R. out of Europe altogether, vastly altering the Cold War that followed. Bureaucracy mattered. It irked scientists, but it shaped history.

  Astronomy defeated even this outdated compartmenting method. The entire science depended upon telescopes that could peer at vastly different wavelengths, spread over a spectrum from the low radio to gamma rays, a factor in wavelength of a million billion. Seldom could an astronomical object be understood without seeing it throughout much of this huge range.

  As well, the habits of mind that astronomers brought to the Eater would not stop at a wavelength barrier. To understand the steadily deepening radio maps, for example, demanded spectra in the optical or X-ray ranges. Astronomy was integrative and could not be atomized. This fact—as much as Benjamin’s walking into “a presidential conversation that took me days to organize!”—brought Arno to a rare fit of anger.

  The first part of the meeting was predictable, and Channing found herself nodding off. She reprimanded herself, whispering to a concerned Kingsley that it was like dozing at a bullfight, but in fact Arno could do nothing but bluster about Benjamin’s intervention. The President was considering his proposal, and that was that. No amount of U Agency tweaking could put the horse back in the barn. Still, Benjamin had been doing more—sending needed information to groups outside the Center.

  “I hold you responsible for these leaks, Knowlton,” Arno finished his military-style dressing-down, smacking a palm onto the desk he sat upon.

  “‘Leaks’? My people are merging their different views to make sense out of them,” Benjamin said, looking rather surprised at how calm he had remained in the face of a five-minute monologue.

  “We can’t have it.”

  Kingsley at last said something, waiting until the right moment. “I believe we have a fundamental misunderstanding here, friends. The Eater is perhaps a week or two away. No one with the slightest sense of proportion will sequester data that might help us deal with it, once it has arrived.”

  “That’s not the way we work here,” Arno said, pausing between each word.

  “Then it must become so,” Kingsley said amiably.

  “I’m going farther up the chain on this,” Arno said darkly.

  “I’m afraid we have already done that,” Kingsley said.

  She saw suddenly that Kingsley had played this exactly right, yet again maneuvering with an intuitive skill that could not be conscious. Benjamin’s move, which he obviously had been pondering for days and yet had not revealed to her, was deliberate and risky. But Benjamin was like Salieri playing alongside Kingsley’s Mozart. Already Kingsley had co-opted Benjamin’s point and used it against Arno, a triumph that would undoubtedly echo in the echelons back in Washington.

  She returned to the Semiotics Group meeting and Benjamin came along. “Done enough for today,” he said affably. “You guys are having better ideas. I might as well hear them.”

  Perhaps so, she told him, though some people, even in NASA, were showing the strain, carried away by the majesty of the Eater and its beautiful disk. “A higher form of life, virtually a god,” one of them had said at a coffee break.

  “I hope that doesn’t catch on,” Benjamin said.

  On their way, they passed through the main foyer. At its new high speed, the Eater would reach Earth within an estimated time that kept changing as it encountered fresh mass to ingest. Tracking its velocity, a digital clock now loomed over the tallest wall of the foyer. It had begun ticking down the time remaining. One of the media sorts had already dubbed it the Doomsday Clock. Benjamin grimaced. Beside it, feeds from observatories gave views of the magnetic labyrinth
and its plasma clouds.

  They settled into seats in the back row and listened to arguments about how to best communicate, negotiate, and placate the Eater. She was still impressed by the fact that any understanding could pass between entities of such different basic substrata: a magnetically shaped plasma talking to walking packets of water. The specialists argued that this was possible because there were general templates for organizing intelligence.

  This must be true in a very sweeping way, a woman from Stanford argued. Scientists often congratulated themselves on having figured out how the universe worked, as if it were following our logic. But in fact humans had evolved out of the universe, and so fit it well. Our minds had been conditioned by brutal evolution to methods of understanding that worked finely enough to keep us alive, at least long enough to reproduce. Some ancient ancestor had found the supposedly simple things of life—how to move, find food, evade predators—enormously complicated and hard to remember. Such an ancestor faded from the gene pool, selected against by the rough rub of chance. We had descended from ancestors who found beauty in nature, a sense of the inevitable logic and purity in its design.

  Intelligence reflected the universe’s own designs, and so had similar patterns, even though arising in very different physical forms. This view emerged as she and Benjamin watched, until one grizzled type from the University of California at Irvine remarked, “Yeah, but the animals are a lot like us, too, and look at how we treat them.”

  Benjamin asked ironically, “You mean we should not expect it to share our view of our own importance?”

  The gray-bearded man nodded. “Or our morality. That’s an evolved system of ideas, and this thing is utterly asocial. It’s a loner.”

  Benjamin seemed commendably unembarrassed to speak among specialists in a field he did not know. She admired his courage, then realized that if the detailed talk she had heard here before could not be translated into something others could comprehend, it would be useless in the days ahead.

  Benjamin asked, “Cooperation with others of its kind never happened, as far as we can tell. The latest transmissions from it say that it was made by a very early, intelligent civilization whose planet was being chewed up by the black hole. They managed to download their own culture into it, translating into magnetic information stored in waves.”

  This sent a rustle through the room. Benjamin leaned toward her and whispered, “Just as I thought. This firewall security system has kept a lot away from the guys who actually need it.”

  His revelation provoked quick reactions, which Benjamin fielded easily. It was very big news and he enjoyed delivering it in an offhand way.

  Now she understood why he had come here. He was still on the move, steering through treacherous waters nobody knew. She felt a burst of love for him, and to her surprise, fresh respect. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

  “What else can you tell us?” the graybeard asked.

  Benjamin plunged in. Sure enough, some important Eater messages had either not gotten through, or were distorted. “Experts with an axe to grind, putting their own spin in.” Benjamin summed it up.

  The discussion turned into just the sort of free-for-all she had missed so far among the rather stiff semiotics gang. She turned over the issues as others with more energy attacked them, and somehow the ideas mingled with a vaguely forming plan of her own.

  This being had lived longer than the Earth had existed. To it, a million years would be like a day in a human life. She tried to think how it would view life-forms anchored on planets. Mayflies. Whole generations would pass as flashes of lightning, momentarily illuminating their tiny landscapes. Eons would stream by, civilizations on the march like characters in some larger drama witnessed only by the truly long-lived. Birth, death, and all agonies in between—these would merge into a simultaneous whole. Rather than a static snapshot, such a being could see a smear of lives as a canvas backdrop to the stately pace of a galaxy on the move, turning like a pinwheel in the great night. Whole species would be the players then, blossoming momentarily for the delectation of vast, slow entities beyond understanding.

  Compared to it, humans were passing ephemerals. To a baby, a year was like a lifetime because it was his lifetime, so far. By age ten, the next year was only a 10 percent increase in his store of years. At a hundred, time ticked ten times faster still. She tried to imagine living to a thousand, when a year would have the impact of a few hours in such a roomy life. Now multiply this effect by another factor of a million, she mused.

  She wondered if anyone was paying attention to the Eater’s own artworks, beamed down in compressed digital packets. It had remarked,

  THE TRUE STATE OF SUCH RESULTANTS RESIDES IN MY FIELD STRUCTURES. I SEND ONLY NUMERICAL ANALOGS.

  What would its creations say to them if they could be seen in their natural form?

  4

  He got used to the media onslaught within a day or two, then irritated, then bored.

  Not that he was, as one reporter archly termed it, “seriously famous,” but he did have his head bashed by swinging TV cameras, got chased down an alley, backed into a corner, all with the sound effects: questions barked, name called, bystanders’ applause and boos—all got to be like the weather whenever he left a building. “Over here, Dr. Knowlton, look this way!”

  Dimly he realized what was so fundamentally misguided about liking that sort of attention. He was allowing them to define who he was, whether he was worthwhile. The media meat grinder ate and also excreted.

  When public pronouncements shifted to the ever-adept Kingsley and to other, more distant members of the Executive Committee, some of the zip went out of it. There were still big crowds at the fences and gates when he went to an ExComm meeting, but it was oddly irksome when he got out of a limousine to hear the paparazzi shout, “Who is it? Who’s that? Oh, it’s nobody. Only Knowlton.”

  He had gotten lulled into the feeling that somehow he controlled the lurching beast, just with the sound of his voice. He tried to speak clearly, exactly at first, then found that the hectoring pundits wanted answers to sensational questions, and were miffed if they didn’t get an emotional expressiveness.

  When he saw the sound snippets they cut his remarks into, he wondered if perhaps there was indeed some truth to the old superstition that having your picture taken let the camera rob a piece of your soul.

  “Pity the people who are looking at this story through such distorting lenses,” Channing had said. The Center personnel, sheltered behind regiments of security, barely got a glimpse of the chaos pervading the planet.

  What Benjamin did see revealed the unreality of the experience for others. The world was so media-saturated, so shaped toward capturing eyeballs rather than merely carrying information, that the unfolding events were experienced as theater, a show. Politics had long ago become primarily performance, and now even the supposed elite—ministers and professors, pundits and prophets—alike wanted the same commodity: audience, attention.

  DANGER FROM SPACE! SEE IT ALL RIGHT HERE MILLIONS DIE?—AND YOU’LL KNOW WHY.

  He grudgingly appeared on a panel discussion for World Tonight, featuring supposedly learned commentary. One part of the show was called “The Cultural Critic Corner.” “The Eater has become not so much a thing to think of, but to think with,” the fabulous-looking woman said. “A figure in constant symbolic motion, shuttling in our collective unconscious between science and fantasy, nature and culture, the image of the other and a mirror of the self.” He shook his head and without warning found himself in an argument using terms he did not know. By the end of it, he was determined that he would never do that again.

  Kingsley had a far better on-camera presence. He remarked to Channing and Benjamin, over lunch at the Center cafeteria, “Governments always wish to be reassuring. We have to tell the truth while suppressing panic, and I do what I can.”

  “A stylish Brit accent helps,” Channing said, poking at a salad. “Evokes authority.”

  “Su
re,” Benjamin said. “Look at our own Beltway Empire. The Department of Health and Human Services deals more with sickness than health. The Department of Energy spends more on nuclear weapons than on energy. The Department of Defense was meant to wage war.”

  Kingsley said, “If necessary, DoD will always add. And your classic American strategy was to defend itself in somebody else’s country.”

  “Only here, it’s the whole planet,” Channing added. “You think it’s going to come close?”

  “To Earth, you mean?” She knew Kingsley disliked being put on the spot so plainly, but he fielded it nicely, looking unworried. “It caught another asteroid early this morning. Latest orbitals say it will be here within fifteen days.”

  “The Searchers got anything new?” Benjamin asked, his high, raw voice giving away his uneasiness.

  “Better interior definition, some spectra.”

  “Any chance we could talk it into stopping at, say, the moon?” Channing asked.

  “It fails to respond to all such discussions.”

  “Ummm. God doesn’t answer His mail.”

  But then abruptly it did.

  An hour later Kingsley sought out Benjamin and Channing and hurried them to his office. “It’s readily responding to a whole class of questions. More about where it came from originally, for one.”

  They stared at the message on his screen.

  ONCE LONG AGO IT WAS A MERE NATURAL SINGULARITY. A MINOR REMNANT OF SOME EARLY ASTROPHYSICAL EVENT. PERHAPS A FRACTIONAL REMNANT OF A SUPERNOVA. THEN BY ACCIDENT THIS OBJECT, WHICH IS NOW MY PRESENT CORE, TUNNELED THROUGH THE PLANET OF AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION.

  Amy had come in while they talked. She had been away for days, working with specialists elsewhere in integrating the tight, highly secure communications network the U Agency was putting in place among astronomers around the world. Kingsley was effusively glad to see her back. She studied the message and said, “It could then orbit in and out of the planet. Along its path some rock would fall into the hole, releasing explosive energy.”