Eater

by Gregory Benford

  He allowed himself to think of Channing a bit. Her upload had apparently gone reasonably well and now “she” cruised in orbit. Apparently the specialists were engaged in “linearizing” her onboard consciousness from afar, an unparalleled technical feat. Fuel pods were being attached to give her multiple booster capability. Her whole remaining self was a mere speck perched atop masses of refrigerated hydrogen.

  Then, without noticing the transition, he was awakening as they banked over Honolulu. Time to get back into the game.

  No one intercepted him as he disembarked. The terminal reeked of festering anxiety. Once aloft he had phoned Arno and asked for an escort, giving enough detail to convince him that there were factions at war now within the U Agency. “Something about China,” Kingsley added.

  “Don’t repeat that word,” Arno said hastily.

  “It’s a fairly well-known nation.” Kingsley could not resist the jab. Arno should never have allowed Kingsley to go into a situation inadequately forearmed. Put it down to haste and the press of events, but still…

  Sure enough, three men he recognized from the Center and carrying the right recognition code met him at the gate. Wordlessly they took him to a private federal airplane, gray and unmarked. In short order, or so it seemed to his hazy state of mind, they were landing at the new field just scraped from the valley near the Center.

  He was quite knackered and begged off going straightaway to the Center. Kingsley rang off and called ahead to his private number. “Be there soon,” he said, not trusting himself to go any further with the driver and two burly guards, who crisply took him to his flat.

  She answered his knock. He embraced her gratefully. She had started their relationship wearing ratty housecoats, but had quickly learned how he liked to be greeted—by an actual woman, not a housekeeper. Dressed in suitable nineteenth-century undergarments, red or black if possible. Sailing on the Titanic, he thought fuzzily, why go steerage?

  “Thanks, luv,” he murmured at her black merry widow, “but afraid it’s no use this time.”

  “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  “Can’t say how long that will be.”

  “Pretty bad?” A warm kiss.

  “What’s the saying? ‘Politicians, diapers—both should be changed regularly, and for the same reason.’ Particularly the ones with guns.”

  She laughed softly, as if to say it did not matter whether she had heard this chestnut before. He hugged her. To be in her arms was quite enough, thank you. They had been drawn to each other as the crisis deepened. In the face of the abyss, people needed each other. He wondered if he was falling in love with her. Something in him hoped so.

  “Something to drink?” Amy asked.

  “Lately, I sup solely from the cup of knowledge.”

  He kissed her again, this time urgently, something escaping from him, letting out the leaden fog of his desperation.

  2

  Benjamin could not mourn her anymore.

  For three days, he had gone on beach walks and sat staring at the bottom of various bottles, talked with friends, and read over obsessively her last writings. Nothing helped. In the afternoon of the third full day, he so dreaded the coming of shadows that he fled. He finally knew that he had to go to the Center and face the unknown that loomed there.

  A traffic tie-up and even more guards than the last time stopped him outside the new, high gates a full kilometer from the Center. Someone spotted him stuck in the jam and ushered him around, down a side road where he still had to submit to the triple-check of ID, retinas, and all. Sunset brimmed over the hills and he could pick out in profile the snouts of tactical-range missiles, installed only days before.

  Just who were they defending against? No one had explained. There were more U Agency faces in the corridors every day, but they never spoke, just looked professionally grim.

  He peered upward, eastward, and there it was: a hard blue-white dot spiking down at them. The Eater was decelerating at a prodigious rate. Its forward jet ejected mass apparently accumulated in its accretion disk, which X-ray telescopes showed had thickened to resemble a fat, rotating donut. Now the donut was dwindling fast, its stored matter fed by glowing streamers into the braking jet.

  Nobody understood how the system could have stocked up so much mass, enough to shove around the incredibly dense nugget of the black hole. The magnetic labyrinth around it must have remarkable retention ability. The hard radiation coming out of the jet got degraded into visible light, the whole glowing over ten times brighter than the full moon.

  Cults had begun worshipping it by night, he had heard. The wave of suicides which was sweeping the world focused upon doing themselves in “view” of the Eater, as if it saw or cared. He could feel nothing for such people, not even pity. They were just marks on a chart, statistics floating beyond the gray veil that shrouded his world.

  Inside, he spotted Kingsley looking tired, talking to a U Agency woman in a conference room. The man had just returned from Washington and had left several e-mails for Benjamin, asking for a meeting with Arno. Benjamin ducked away and went to his own office.

  There was a lot of paperwork to do. Somehow even the supreme crisis of human history could not avoid its tedium. He plowed through, thankfully oblivious, for an hour. Then he got the expected call, and when he reached Arno’s office, there was Kingsley. They shook hands silently, and after a moment’s awkwardness, business picked up.

  “This is just to inform you,” Arno said, waving at a screen that carried specifics about missiles.

  Kingsley seemed to comprehend the news at a glance. Benjamin shook his head to dispel his numbness, but it was not physical. “What am I looking at here?” he asked finally.

  “Missile classes and capability,” Arno said.

  Even with this, it took him a moment to pick out the crucial detail. “That’s a submarine-based missile,” he said blankly.

  “That’s the point,” Arno said. “We just launched three from off the coast of China, near a peninsula.”

  Kingsley said, “The Liaodong Peninsula.”

  “Why from there?” Benjamin was startled. “And subs are built for ICBMs, not shots into deep space.”

  Arno said, “The Department of Defense used a new class of ICBM, specially fitted with one hard-nosed warhead, rather than the usual multiple suite.”

  “The launch point nicely placed just south of the peninsula,” Kingsley said dryly, “halfway between Beijing to the west and the Korean capital, Pyongyang, to the east. It is an interesting historical accident that the capitals of our primary antagonists in Asia are at nearly the same latitude and only a few hundred kilometers apart.”

  Then Benjamin saw. “If the Eater can backtrack the launch, it will believe the Chinese or North Koreans did it.”

  “And exact a retribution, perhaps,” Kingsley said.

  “Unless we knock it out, which is the idea,” Arno said.

  Anger cleared his head remarkably. “This…this is crazy.”

  “President didn’t think so, and Kingsley was right there advising him.” Arno even held a hand out to Kingsley, as if to pass the buck.

  Benjamin said hotly, “But the risk—”

  “It can do a hell of a lot to us we already know about. Plus plenty we don’t know, I’ll bet.” Arno straightened the seam of his blue suit, keeping him in good order under fire.

  “Fail and it’ll be able to punish us big time, too,” Benjamin shot back.

  Kingsley said mildly, “We should remember that it is entirely alien. The notion of revenge may well not apply to its thinking.”

  Arno looked pained. “You always say something like that. Not that I’m agreeing with Benjamin here, but how can it not want to hit back?”

  “Punishment deters by setting an example, all to lend credence to threat.” Kingsley steepled his fingers. “That, and not the sweetness of revenge, is its utility—to us. Punishment is a social mechanism, well evolved in us because it keeps tribal discipline. This
thing has no tribe.”

  “It’s done this before, though,” Benjamin said, though his mind was still trying to work its way around what Arno had so casually implied. He wasn’t used to these high altitudes in the policy mountain range. “Maybe thousands of times, even millions, it’s come into a solar system and demanded what it wanted from intelligent species.”

  Kingsley said airily, “And, just as for us, it regards its history as philosophy teaching by examples?”

  “So it’s learned how to threaten and hurt?” Arno looked skeptical.

  “It sure knows how to whipsaw us, doesn’t it?” Benjamin asserted. “Look at how its demand for uploaded people has split us already. A lot of people are saying, ‘Why not give up a few hundred it specifically asked for? Then make up the rest from the nations that are only too happy to discard their “undesirables” in a good cause.’”

  Arno said, “The U.N. has taken a stated position against making any individual undergo—”

  “So far,” Kingsley said distantly. “It could undoubtedly kill millions if it wanted, and the moment it starts, there will be plenty of voices calling for us to cave in.”

  Benjamin said, “And we’re shooting at it already? Why not wait?”

  “If punishment is to be exacted,” Kingsley said, “I surmise that the coalition of powers rather wishes it to be bestowed upon their strategic rivals.”

  Arno nodded. “The launch point’s far enough away from our nearest strategic holding, the Siberian Republic.”

  “A team at Caltech argues,” Kingsley said, “that the Eater cannot resolve the launch point better than about a hundred kilometers. Similarly its anticipated response. So its retribution may well include the capital of an enemy.”

  “I had no idea we were so far in…” Benjamin faltered. He was not cut out for this sort of thing.

  “The President wants to kill it now,” Arno said.

  Kingsley said, “Plus getting what I believe is termed a ‘twofer.’ Devastation for China or Korea or both if the attempt fails.”

  Benjamin jabbed a finger at the launch parameters. “The Chinese have good observing satellites. They’ll have seen these lift off already.”

  Arno smiled without humor. “We have a few tricks to hide our plumes. And what can the Chinese do, anyway? The birds are gone.”

  “This is monstrous,” Benjamin said, still angry.

  “There is a monster in our skies,” Arno replied simply.

  The missiles took eight hours to reach the Eater. This was a remarkable achievement, as the launch vehicles had to attain a final speed in the range of twenty kilometers per second.

  Benjamin had no idea that strategic warfare had advanced to such potentials. The missiles converged upon the Eater’s outer regions at about half a million kilometers above the Earth’s atmosphere.

  The rendezvous was well beyond the Earth’s dipolar magnetic belts, which could retain the plasma the warheads would generate. This was the crucial requirement. Releasing high-energy particles into the regions near the many thousands of communications satellites would destroy them by charging them up until the potentials shorted out components.

  This was what the missiles tried to do. They flew into the black hole’s magnetosphere and detonated in a pattern calculated to send currents fleeing along the field lines. This was to occur slightly after dawn in Hawaii. The Eater hung low on the horizon. The Center was packed, silent crowds before every screen.

  Benjamin went outside with Kingsley. They were of the last generation which felt that events were more real if seen in person, rather than watched over authenticity-inducing TV screens.

  “No trouble spotting the bastard,” Kingsley said, facing into the warm offshore breeze. Solid and moist, the tropical lushness lay beneath the fierce glare of a blue-white dot.

  “How good does the targeting have to be?” Benjamin asked to focus his attention. He was still distracted and foggy and wondered if this internal weather would be permanent.

  “Not terribly, the magnetosphere theorists say. The vital region is about a hundred kilometers across and they are closing at speeds that allow the warhead triggers to go off within a microsecond’s accuracy.”

  “So we can hit it within a few meters’ accuracy? Wow.”

  “These weapons chaps are quite able. Impressive. Unfortunately, our understanding of the underlying magnetic geometry is muddy. I am not optimistic.”

  “Want to lay odds?” Benjamin chided him.

  Kingsley had spilled most of the insider stories from his trip, including the incredible bit about the U Agency guy at Dulles. Benjamin still had trouble believing that things had gotten so extreme. But then, he had told himself, they had spent months holed up here, while the world outside went through a conceptual beating.

  So far this entire thing had been easier for scientists to take because they were used to rubbing against the irreducible reality of a universe that was in a sense even worse than the hostility of the Eater. The TwenCen had cemented a solid belief that the universe was indifferent. For many ordinary people, that view was impossible to accept. Not that the eerie interest of the Eater was much solace.

  “On success? Small, I should think.”

  “Let’s be quantitative.”

  Kingsley smiled. “All right, what odds do you give me?”

  “Three to one for a fizzle.”

  “I’m not quite that large a fool.”

  “You really don’t think we can short it out?”

  “Quite unlikely.”

  “But you helped target them.”

  “Precisely. I am not married to models, particularly those devised by theorists like ourselves.”

  “Okay, ten to one.”

  “That I can accept. Stakes?”

  “I’ll put up a thousand bucks.”

  “So if the Eater dies, your bank account does, too.”

  “Don’t give a damn. I’m betting on American warheads.”

  “Good point. A general treated me to an hour’s lesson on how hardened and compact they are. ‘A megaton inside a suitcase,’ the fellow boasted.”

  “Damn right,” Benjamin said and wondered why he felt called upon to swagger around like this.

  “I shall cheerfully pay up.”

  They waited in silence in the soft, salty wind. The ocean lay like a smooth blanket and the world held its breath.

  The three flashes came as one, a hard white blink and then a fast-fading yellow. A cheer came faintly up the hillside, ragged and angry, from a thousand voices inside the buildings.

  “I’d pray if I believed any of that,” Benjamin said.

  “As would I.”

  “It’ll be a while before we know—”

  “No, we’ve failed.”

  “What?”

  “The color of the jet emission has not even altered. Its ejection is operating normally.”

  “Well, that could—”

  “To succeed, we had to disrupt its control mechanisms. Moving mass into those magnetic funnels is a colossal endeavor. We haven’t a clue how it pulls off the trick. If it can still do that, it has survived.”

  Benjamin had known it, too, but something made him argue with Kingsley. “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In an orbit timed to put her on the other side of the Earth right now.”

  “Good show.”

  “You think she’ll…”

  “Have to be used?” Kingsley gave him a long, sympathetic gaze. “Inevitably.”

  “Damn, damn, I…”

  Kingsley put a hand on his shoulder. “That is, above all, what she wished.”

  PART SEVEN

  NO BODY IN A BOX

  3

  Kingsley quickly realized the next morning that to the bureaucratic mind, the most pressing matter would, of course, be the assigning of blame.

  This fell to an assortment of U Agency types. These in the general Executive Committee meeting used “It is believed” rather than “I t
hink,” theorists who said “It has long been known,” when they meant “I can’t remember who did this,” or stated portentously “It is not unreasonable to assume” instead of “Would you believe?” Those defending their ideas—the imported target specialists, DoD experts and the like, retreated into “It might be argued that,” which was a dead-on clue that it actually meant “I have such a good answer to that objection that I shall now raise it myself…” These were the same sort whose speech included “progressing an action plan” and “calendarizing a project.” Only painfully did it penetrate that the calendar here was set entirely by a being nobody understood.

  Part of the problem in assigning responsibility was the swelling numbers of Center consultants, U Agency staff, assorted specialists, and the like. More moved in as the possibility of communications failure grew. The Eater might chop the human digital networks with a single swipe.

  In the end, there was plenty of blame to go around.

  All Earth’s telescopes and diagnostics, concentrated upon the comparatively tiny region of a few hundred kilometers around the rapidly decelerating Eater’s core, saw much that no one comprehended. The huge energies of the three warheads had sent great plumes of high temperature plasma into the magnetic geometry, all right. But somehow it flowed along the field lines and then into the accretion disk. More fuel for the Eater of All Things.

  “The Eater ate them,” Amy Major observed laconically. “And like us all, eating makes you bigger.”

  It had swelled, become more luminous. In the next few hours, the Eater crossed the remaining half a million kilometers to Earth, bearing in on a spiral orbit.

  Kingsley watched the U Agency break down into factions that fed upon each other. Outside the Center battalions of newsfolk demanded answers. Washington already knew that, fundamentally, there were none. The Eater said nothing about the attack, until two hours later:

  MY-SELVES NOTE THAT YOUR INTERCOMMUNICATIONS REFER TO ME AS A PROCESSOR OF FOOD. THIS IS NOT A SERVICEABLE DISTINCTION. INGESTION IS SHARED BY NEARLY ALL LIFE-FORMS. I WISH YOU TO REFER TO ME BY A TERM MORE NEARLY DESCRIBING MY ESSENTIAL BEING IN YOUR MEASURE. ULTIMATA