He was with her. No point in wondering how it was done; he felt himself suddenly in a presence he recognized. He had to struggle to not look around and find her. But she was nowhere at all, he reminded himself. Instead, the spherical screens showed him what she saw, a field of dark dominion dotted with Searcher radar images.
“How are you, lover?” she asked.
“I…am doing…okay.” Like molasses, his tongue.
“I am, too.”
He could not help himself. “What does it feel like to be…a mathematical construction?”
“However I want it to feel.”
“You can control…”
“The body simulation? Yes. My feelings, in the old sense? No.”
Her voice had shifted into a cool, analytical mode. But it was hers, all the same. How did they do it? Or was she…it…doing this? “I…see. No pain?”
“Physical, no. I…I miss you so much.”
He could not seem to get his breath. “Well, here I am.”
“With me. Again. Thank you for coming.”
Alarm filled his otherwise empty mind. He could not think of anything to say that did not seem to mean something else. “Do you…like the work?”
“Let us say that I am willing to make the mistakes if someone else is willing to learn from them.”
“Ah. Yes.”
“You are wondering if this is really me.”
“I wonder who you are, yes, but—” He froze. But what?
“Perhaps you are afraid that I am her?”
“Damn, you were always good at reading me.”
“Do not give me that much credit. I made my mistakes.”
“You were smarter than I was.”
“I often proved that high intelligence did not necessarily guarantee fine table manners.”
He tried to laugh and could not. Somehow the remark was amusing, but the delivery was wrong. He tried a gruff, bantering tone. “Yeah, old girl, you did.”
“I would feel better if you did not use the past tense.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean—”
“Just a joke.”
“I always liked your jokes.”
“They were an acquired taste. Remember what my grandfather used to say? ‘Eat a live toad at breakfast and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.’ My jokes played that role for some people.”
“Yeah, I do remember your telling me that.” He felt a wash of relief. If this voice knew that much about her past—but then he felt confusions rise again. The specialists had said that they could copy memories without knowing what they were. Like a symphony laid down on a disk, the machine that did it didn’t need to know harmony or structure.
Just a recording. But she was so real.
Better get back onto something that would let him conceal his tornado of feeling. “How’s the job going?” The words sounded phony, but maybe she wouldn’t notice.
She laughed, surprising him again. “Like being a bird, sometimes.”
“Sounds great.”
“I spent a lot of time just getting used to this body-that-isn’t.”
“Bird body?” He didn’t know where this was going, but at least it wasn’t about how he felt, a subject upon which he was no expert.
“Birdbrain, it feels like sometimes.”
She pinged right back to his pong, but wasn’t giving much away. Okay, be direct. “They moved you around the Earth after it hit Washington?”
“Yes, I got an extra booster attached by a crew that flew up to rendezvous. That got me out here, to keep me away from that damned jet. How many people did it kill?”
“A quarter of a million, the last I heard.” He had stopped listening to the news then.
“It’s moving out now, I heard.” Actually, he had seen the jet flare and drive the thing away from the low orbit. And heard the muted cheering of hundreds around him, outside in the night. The yelling had blended anger and wavering hope.
“Slow but steady. Don’t know—damn, there goes another.”
“Another what?”
A silence. Then: “Another satellite, a communications one this time. It got the Fabricante orbital an hour ago. There were two people aboard.”
“Damn. It’s doing that? I really ought to keep up.”
“You’ve had a lot of grief. Give yourself a rest.”
Suddenly her voice was not the cool, businesslike tone that she had been using. The words resonated with feminine notes he had come to love. He said, “You need me. I hope.”
“Oh yes, I do more than ever.”
“You’ve got it in view?”
“I can see the orange plume of the jet, but I’m staying away. Tracking the satellite damage. It’s eaten hundreds—”
Onto the enveloping spherical screen blossomed a sharp image. Coils of magnetic field tightening around a chunky satellite. Folding it in. Then vaporizing it with a virulent arc of high voltage. The plasma glowed green and violet traceries sucked it along the field lines, bound for the accretion disk.
“Got tired of our atmosphere?” he asked.
“Or bored.”
“Are you getting some feeling for it?”
“It has a lot of parts and they fit together in a way I can’t see yet.”
“Don’t get any closer.”
“I’m thousands of klicks away.”
“Keep it that way.”
“I think it knows I’m here.”
Alarm stuck in his throat. “How?”
“I don’t know, just an intuition.”
“Has it done anything, struck against you?”
“No, and I don’t know why not, either. Probably I’m just not important enough.”
“You are to me. Don’t get closer.”
“Distance didn’t do the President any good, did it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It blasted the terrain around that dugout of his in the Catskills on its next pass over the D.C. area.”
“It did?” He really wasn’t keeping track. Or had he heard and just forgotten? He had to admit he didn’t give a damn about what happened to the President.
“I believe he survived—barely. It doesn’t say a word about any of that, of course.”
“Our spanking administered, it drops the subject?” Benjamin knew his words were coming out jagged.
“Nope, Kingsley was right. Keep away from human analogies.”
He didn’t want to say what immediately came to mind, so sure enough, she did instead: “Speaking as an analogy myself, I think that’s good advice.”
He could not summon even a dutiful chuckle, but she laughed with what seemed to be gusto.
3
“Nothing is impossible to those who do not have to do it,” Kingsley remarked caustically.
Arno bristled. “I have every assurance from the President that—”
“That he doesn’t know what he is doing,” Kingsley finished. He instantly reprimanded himself for this childish outburst, but Arno’s face already congested with red anger.
“You are not to take this any further—”
“Sorry, but I have to say this is stupid.”
“If it can’t hear our media, it won’t know as much.”
“Yes, but hasn’t a moment’s inspection of its many transmissions told us that it likes listening in?”
“Intelligence has established that leaks onto cable TV led it to deduce that the launches were ours.”
“This thing is not an idiot. It knows quite well the state of international politics. Little children in the street guessed the truth—why shouldn’t the Eater?”
Arno subsided slightly, long enough for Benjamin to say, “I don’t think it’s a good idea, either.”
“Who cares?” Arno flared again. “You guys don’t get any say. The White House just wondered what you thought it would do when the President’s—and the U.N.’s—shutdown starts.”
“When will it be?” Kingsley asked with what he hoped was a calm, interested ex
pression. Hard to attain these days, though.
Arno glanced at his watch. “Two hours.”
“Expect something bad,” Benjamin said, then went back to looking at his shoes.
“I agree,” Kingsley said.
“Why? The whole planet ceases all transmissions, including satellite cable traffic, telephones, radio, TV. So what?”
“It will not like any sign that we’re breaking off contact,” Benjamin said, a lackluster sentence that he tossed off as though he was thinking of something else. Which he probably was. Since leaving the comm apparatus where he had spent several hours with the Channing-craft, he had been distracted. No surprise, but Kingsley needed help and in this climate old allies were the best. At least with Benjamin, he did not have to watch his back.
“I don’t see why that has to be,” Arno said, “It’s been sending lots of chatty stuff, never mentions the D.C. thing or the missiles.”
“Aliens are alien,” Kingsley said, trying not to sound as though he were talking to a child. “Do not misread—which is to say, do not ascribe easy motives to its statements.”
“Look, the Security Council thinks this is the best way to show it that we aren’t giving away any secrets, not anymore.”
“How jolly.”
“Look, it even sent a commentary on Marcus Aurelius to one of the cultural semiotics people. Philosophy—and it seemed to agree with this guy.” Arno mugged a bit and folded his arms, leaning back against his desk in a way that Kingsley had come to know signaled what Arno thought was a put-away shot.
Kingsley disliked obvious displays of erudition, but here was a useful place for it. “Aurelius was a stoic, resigned to the evil of the world, wishing to detach himself from it. Also happened to be an Emperor of Rome, which curiously enough made detachment an easier prospect. Before organized press conferences, as I recall. Not the sort of attitude I would wish of a thing that could incinerate the planet.”
Arno looked wounded, an about-face from his flash of belligerence only moments before. Everyone seemed to be running on fast-forward now. He said gravely, “It’s getting more refined, if that’s the right word.”
“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?” Kingsley asked, crossing his legs wearily.
Benjamin laughed, just the wrong thing to do. Sarcasm was useful only if played deadpan straight. Arno did not take Benjamin’s chuckling well, reddening up in the nose and cheeks again.
“I mean that you cannot mistake a change of style for change of purpose.” Kingsley hoped that stating the obvious would get them back on track. People under strain sometimes had such a reset ability, and perhaps it could get him out of this scrape.
“I understand,” Arno said, “but the President wants an assessment of what to expect when”—heavy emphasis here, with eyebrows—”the shutdown starts.”
“Retribution, I should say,” Kingsley said.
Benjamin managed a wan smile, still regarding his shoes with intense interest. “You’re slipping into human thought modes yourself, ol’ King boy. Alien, it might do anything.”
Arno said hotly, “That’s no damn good, tell the White House the sonuvabitch could do any damn thing—”
“Though it has the utility of being true,” Kingsley said.
“I bet it will do both.” Benjamin looked up then and smiled, as if at a joke he alone knew. “Something nasty, and something weird.”
“Good point,” Kingsley said. “No reason it must do only one thing.”
“You guys are no damn use at all.”
“You bet,” Benjamin said with something that resembled happiness. Kingsley studied him, but could make nothing of the expression on his old friend’s face.
4
Benjamin wondered when the gray curtains would go away. They hung everywhere, deadening, muffling. Even this latest bad news took place behind the veils. He registered the dispatches, but his pulse did not quicken and the world remained its flat, pallid tone.
“What the hell is it?” Arno asked the assembled mix.
Amy said in a voice obviously kept clear and deliberate, after the panic of the last ten minutes, “A magnetic loop. It’s tight, small, and moving at very high velocity.”
“Headed where?” Arno asked a man in a gray suit whom Benjamin had never seen before.
“Intersecting the Pacific region in about twenty minutes.”
“It’s that fast? The Eater’s a long way out now, nearly geosynchronous.” Arno looked around the room for help.
“The hole ejected it half an hour ago,” Amy said. “We caught it all across the spectrum.”
“What’ll we do?” Arno glanced at his watch, at his U Agency advisers, back to the astronomers.
“No time for a warning,” Benjamin said, just to be saying something.
“Where’ll it hit?” Arno licked his lips.
“Looks like mid-Pacific,” the gray-suited man said.
“Why in hell shoot at that?”
“We are in the mid-Pacific,” Kingsley said quietly.
“At us? It’s shooting at us?”
“A testable hypothesis,” Kingsley said. “I imagine this is intended to establish some principle. Were the Eater human, I would suppose this would be in retaliation for some injury.”
A voice across the room said irritably, “We haven’t done anything.”
Benjamin said, “We cut off all radio and TV. When did that start?”
Arno bit his lip. “About an hour ago.”
“Long enough for the planet to rotate a bit,” Kingsley added. “Enough time to establish that the silence did not arise from a power outage or accident.”
“Why this, then?” a voice called.
Amy said, “It wants electromagnetic transmissions resumed. It launches a magnetic loop, using electromagnetic acceleration. Maybe that’s the connection.”
Arno glowered. “Sounds pretty far-fetched.”
Amy gave him a long, level look and her voice was steady. “It anchors its magnetic fields in the accretion disk and on the hole itself. It managed to disconnect one of its field lines and tie the ends together, then propel it out through the overall magnetic structure. We’ve never seen anything like it, not even in the magnetic arches that grow on the sun, structures thousands of kilometers across.”
“So?” Arno was weighing all this, but saw no way to go.
Kingsley said diplomatically, “I believe Amy’s point is that the Eater knows magnetics the way your tongue knows your teeth.”
Arno grimaced at this as the big screen filled behind him. A view from one of the few surviving satellites, Benjamin saw, looking at a tangent to the Pacific. Sunset was behind the satellite and the image was in the near-infrared. The ocean shimmered dimly and some stars stood out as yellow.
These false colors threw off Benjamin’s judgment for a moment as he studied the vectors of the problem. Against the black sky a luminous blue hoop moved. Its trajectory was simple to estimate. Measured by eye, its distance from the curve of the Earth was closing.
“How big?” Arno’s mouth drew into an alarmed thin line.
“It started out a few kilometers across,” Amy said. “Elementary electrodynamics—once a loop is free, it expands. Or should.”
“What can it do?” Arno pressed.
“Let’s go outside and see.” Benjamin made for the door.
“Huh?” Arno held up a hand. “What’s the deal?”
It proved to be easily visible. The slanted angle cast the perfect circle into an ellipse. It had hit the upper atmosphere and glowed a cherry red. “We’re seeing some molecular line, must be,” a voice commented in the darkness. Benjamin realized that word had spread and now hundreds stood nearby on an open, grassy hill immediately behind the Center. A soft tropical breeze warmed the thick air.
Amy said, “It’s headed this way.”
The crowd rustled anxiously. “They have every reason to worry,” Benjamin said to Kingsley and Amy.
“You think it’s aim
ed at us?” someone nearby whispered.
“What else that’s relevant to the Eater is in the Pacific?” Benjamin whispered back.
“What can it do?” Arno suddenly asked. Benjamin jumped at the rough, distressed voice just over his shoulder. “I mean, this isn’t like that jet.”
“It’s magnetic energy, efficiently stored,” Benjamin answered. “Right now it’s banking to the left—see?” The hoop had slid slightly to the side. “Probably hobnobbing with the Earth’s field, though I guess it’s much bigger than ours.”
“Right,” Amy said. “Imagine, throwing off a loop and aiming it accurately through our dipolar field structure. Got to admire its ability.”
“Best not to stress that particular angle,” Kingsley advised. “Though I concur.”
“What can it do?” Arno insisted.
Nobody spoke, so Benjamin guessed, “The energy density is pretty high, if it had around ten kiloGauss fields where it started, back in the accretion disk. I’d estimate—” He multiplied the energy density, which scaled as the square of the field strength, by a reasonable volume. This he judged by eye as the glowing thing crawled across the blackness. Getting larger, spreading. “Around a hundred kilotons of available energy, if it can annihilate all the field.”
“Everybody inside!” Arno shouted suddenly.
“Why?” someone called.
“Security!” Arno bellowed. “Get them inside—now!”
Benjamin avoided the herd stampeding for the buildings by walking quickly into a stand of eucalyptus nearby. When he turned to watch the sky, he saw figures following him and realized he was an amateur at this, they certainly would use infrared goggles or something to round people up.
“Good idea,” Kingsley whispered. Amy was with him. “I rather figure the buildings are more dangerous, not less.”
“Why?” Benjamin asked.
“I doubt your calculation applies here. No simple way to get more than a small fraction of the field energy to annihilate. How would the hoop twist around to get the fields counteraligned, then rub them together?”
Amy whispered, “I see—so instead, it’ll just produce an electromagnetic sizzle.”
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