Eater

by Gregory Benford

  Channing said doubtfully, “To edge it around the moon.”

  “I’ll admit, this is wholly conjectural,” Kingsley said.

  “Like me and my life,” she said.

  Benjamin asked, “We’re sure it can’t decode these transmissions?”

  “They are going under a screen signal. Even if it can penetrate that, we have already laid down a pattern strongly suggesting that you are a feint. So it may very well discount what it can decipher.”

  “More Waterloo thinking,” Benjamin said cryptically. “I still—”

  “I SHOULD THINK YOU SHOULD START YOUR DIVE!” Kingsley suddenly bellowed. “Oh, sorry, having transfer problems again. I—”

  And he was gone. “Damn, this setup is rickety,” Benjamin said.

  “He was right, though. I’m starting.”

  Red muscle-clenchings down her spine. Quickenings. Abstractions rendered into a cool sort of body language. She sensed one hundred and thirty-four Searchers start their programmed accelerations. Her subsystems updated them every few moments. Furious work seethed just below her conscious perception, a strumming insect-hive frenzy.

  Into the whirlpool.

  Her astronaut training took over. She quick-checked twenty things in the time it took to breathe out. (Thinking that, the breathing sensation came back on, full.)

  She wasn’t going to survive this, but training is training.

  “I love you,” Benjamin said.

  “Ummm. I love you, too, but, well, love the mind, miss the body.”

  He chuckled in that old way of his.

  The webbed intricacy of the magnetosphere rushed at her. “Here goes.”

  “Good—”

  He had started to say goodbye. There had been altogether too much of that lately. More than enough for a lifetime, and here she was into her second one. She was damned if she was going through this all sober and noble.

  “Got a puzzle for you, lover. Why did kamikaze pilots bother to wear helmets?”

  4

  Weirdly colored lightning snarled through the thick air. Kingsley helped some men carry gear out of the collapsed shell of the main building. Through the patter of the unending rain, he heard distant shouts. More bodies were recovered from the adjacent wings.

  A bolt came slamming down and narrowly missed—crack! The impact staggered him and shattered a guard station a hundred meters down slope. The shock wave hit like a cuff to the body by a giant hand. He dropped his burden in, of course, the largest puddle within view. The box held ferrex computer memories, delicate stuff probably not aided by immersion. He levered the box up again, getting mud over his jacket. Clothes had long since ceased to matter—he had been living in this suit for two days—but the warning twinge in his back said he was getting close to collapse. Fatigue blurred the mind quite enough, thank you, without the piercing pains to which his rebellious spine was prone.

  A communications building upslope disappeared in fire as they loaded the 4X truck. Arno came limping out from the smoking ruins carrying his own two overnight cases with large red DEFENSE GRADE 10 labels. From the look on the man’s face, Kingsley decided it was best not to refer to the last-ditch lightning rod screen the teams had run up the night before. Their puny defense had withered beneath the incessant voltages the Eater had somehow concocted above the island.

  Kingsley decided that reference to any of Arno’s decisions was not on for now. Pointless, anyway. Probably nothing could have aided the situation. Stick to the practical, then, with a straightforward “Where shall we go?”

  For the first time, Arno showed both confusion and alarm—in approximately equal proportions. An aide ran up and held an umbrella over Arno, allowing the man time to recoup. After an awkward moment, the aide produced an umbrella and handed it to Kingsley, who gave a polite nod. He was already hopelessly drenched, but the thought was the important thing, Kingsley supposed.

  Arno managed, “I’d…I’d say we spread out.”

  “How can we continue working, then?”

  “‘Working’?”

  “Yes, regain contact with Benjamin.”

  “Working.” The concept seemed to need tossing over in his mind.

  “We have to get a new base of operations. Plainly the Eater has targeted us quite well here.”

  “Working.”

  “Reaching Benjamin. That is our proper job.”

  “Washington…”

  “Forget Washington. It might not even exist any longer.”

  This jab made Arno blink, startling him from his daze. “The comm unit’s gone. Totalled. No way we can get an uplink.”

  “Probably so, but there remain the big dishes up at the top.”

  Someone shouted at them and then ran off. “‘Top’?”

  “The observatory complex at the peak of Mauna Kea.”

  “Hell, higher up, it’ll get even more lightning, won’t it?”

  “We can’t be sure. The Eater must have targeted us very specifically. This isn’t happening over at Kona, for example.”

  “Yeah, the tech boys figure it backtracked on our narrow-beam transmissions. Wish they’d thought of that before.”

  He spotted Amy working with a medical team. Kingsley called to her and she looked around as if she could not tell where the voice came from. Probably stunned from the thunderclaps and lightning strikes, ears humming. His were ringing as well, but that did not prevent him from hearing the cries of the injured as they were loaded into whatever vehicles could serve. Kingsley waved, did a dance, and she picked him out. Arno was engaged with two of his staff and this gave Kingsley time to embrace her, then just stand together silently beneath the umbrella. He wanted to stay like that, not move an inch, but finally he asked her about the observatories. As always, she knew far more than he expected.

  When he got Arno’s attention back, he said, “The last anyone heard, the system up top was working.”

  “It’s damned vulnerable up there,” Arno said, blinking rapidly. Was the man faltering? Not surprising, really.

  “Benjamin’s going to have no backup,” Amy said flatly.

  “I can’t think what we could do…” Arno’s voice trailed off and he stared through the rain at the milling personnel and wrecked buildings, his empire flattened.

  Amy said crisply, “If we can get some of this gear up to the data processing facility at the peak, we can use the bands above 100 gigs.”

  Arno shook his head slowly. “I still don’t see—”

  “The Eater’s holding a plasma discharge over our heads here. We go up to fourteen thousand feet, we’re above that.”

  Arno rallied enough to jut his chin out. “Until it finds us there.”

  “Until then, we can still talk to Benjamin,” Amy said.

  Kingsley found interesting how Amy and Arno had interchanged roles. She always saw problems, but now proposed solutions; he, the reverse. Even now Arno stood in the softly pelting rain and just stared at them. No doubt the man would come back to himself, but when?

  Moments moved by. Nothing. “I’ll help organize some of the specialists,” he said to move matters along.

  “Ah, okay.” Arno did not move.

  “I should think you would need to instruct your lieutenants.”

  “Right.”

  “Quite soon.”

  “Right.”

  With Amy, he found Arno’s bevy of next-in-command types and got them at least moving in roughly the same direction. Arno slowly came to resemble himself again. Within an hour, something like a convoy departed to wind its way up the Saddle Road. At the last moment, Arno summoned up with his bureaucratic magic wand a fleet of limousines. Into these sleek black Lincoln Continentals they wedged, not wanting to ride in the backs of trucks. Prudently Arno had kept the limos on the island since the threat of a presidential visit had loomed, then receded, weeks before. Amid slashing lightning, they wallowed off into gray, thick rain.

  Arno insisted that Kingsley and Amy ride with him, and though Kingsley wanted
nothing more than to lean back and nod off, Arno chose this moment to demand a summary of the “scientific situation.”

  “What do you think the Eater will do next?”

  Kingsley was tempted to retreat to his now-standard aliens-are-alien argument, but this newly revived Arno did not seem in the mood to accept that and let him sleep. He leaned forward, summoning up energies he did not until a moment before know that he had. An aide handed him a gin and tonic with crackling cold ice, fresh from the limo bar. This incongruity disarmed him momentarily and he took a sip. What the hell, it was calories. At least Amy was beside him. He needed her much more than the drink, but it, too, was comforting. He dimly noted that his drink hand was trembling and wondered abstractly why.

  “It’s concerned. Not perhaps desperate; we can’t flatter ourselves with entertaining that notion. But concerned, since it is wasting its most vital resource—the hot, fluid, ionized mass that is compressed by gravitational gradients into the disk that orbits it.”

  Arno was a difficult audience because he knew just enough to ask questions. “It didn’t use that to burn Washington. Or to shotgun that ship.”

  “In a way it did,” Kingsley said. “The jets it creates, the gravel it used to poke holes in that ship—they come ultimately from the infalling energy and mass in its disk.”

  Arno frowned. “It’s got a lot in that disk. Hell, I could see it glowing in the sky. Back when I could see the sky, I mean.”

  “Indeed. Yet mass is a scarce resource for it now, as it has expended a great deal decelerating on its approach to us. To be sure, it retrieved some in our upper atmosphere. Amy has estimated that it could catch in the range of several tens of tons per minute with the expanded field region it has flowered forth. Integrating that over its cruise around the Earth in several shallow orbits, one gets a substantial mass. But still a good deal less than it needs. And therefore desires, for I suspect it experiences its most basic needs as a hunger. Desire is a more rarefied way to put it. This thing is best regarded as an extremely sophisticated, moving appetite with more experience than any civilization could possibly have. And of a different kind, as well, one we can explore only by working out the most basic constraints upon it.”

  This extended blurt Arno greeted with his patented skeptical gaze. He took so long to say anything that Kingsley wondered whether the man was slipping back into his earlier semicatatonia. Then he looked at one of his lieutenants, wedged into the far end of the limo with a security type, and said, “We got any new intelligence on this?”

  “Nosir. Nothing works.”

  “No lines to DoD?”

  “Nosir.”

  “The airborne White House?”

  “Nosir, it hit us pretty bad.”

  “Well then.” Arno seemed to have decided something, for he now gazed stolidly at Kingsley across the short separation of the limousine’s center well. “What you got?”

  “Our strategy, if it deserves such a name, is simple. The one thing it must have to move on with is matter. Our first maneuver is to explode canisters of barium near it. Barium ionizes easily in the solar ultraviolet. The plasma is disagreeable to the Eater, so it will move away.”

  “Herding it, I remember that.”

  “But it needs mass, so we suspect—”

  “Hope,” Amy put in. “A more honest word.”

  “Quite. We hope that it will move toward the most readily available, substantial mass in its vicinity.”

  “Right, the moon.”

  “Yet by the logic we settled upon long ago, when we first understood its nature, the Eater cannot simply plunge into the moon. That would strip it of its magnetic fields—and thus its mind. Suicide.”

  “So it grazes the moon. Orbits in, real close.” Arno nodded. Kingsley could see he was reconstructing this, as if his memory were disarranged.

  “And that is where we use matter again—the key to destroying it, as well.”

  “Antimatter,” Arno said. He clung to the word.

  “The antimatter Channing carries is lodged in cylindrical, highly magnetic traps. If she can eject the contents at the innermost edge of the Eater’s own mass deposit—the accreting mass in its disk—that will disrupt the magnetic fields that are anchored there.”

  “So?”

  “Its greatest energy density lies there.”

  “So annihilating the mass that ties those fields,” Amy put in, “might give the Eater a lobotomy.”

  Arno’s mouth sketched a skeptical curve. “But not kill it.”

  “There is a possibility,” she went on, balancing an orange juice on her knee. “She could drop some antimatter—positrons and antiprotons—into the rim of the black hole itself. There are huge magnetic fields moored there.”

  “And that would kill it?” Arno asked.

  “It would allow the two poles, north and south, of the black hole itself to unite.” She grinned triumphantly.

  Arno frowned. “They would then, well, what?”

  “Annihilate. North and south are opposite poles, and they would cancel each other out. Poof!—all the energy in the hole’s magnetic storage turns to free energy.” Amy beamed.

  He felt a rush of emotion, mostly pride. This was her idea and she was justly proud. Kingsley had not even suspected such a thing could occur, but she had shown it in several detailed calculations.

  “And what happens to this Channing simulation?” Arno asked.

  Amy sobered. “The tidal forces, the torques—this close to the hole, they’re tremendous.”

  Trying to be helpful, Kingsley added, “The trick for it, for her, is to angle in so that the whirlpool of space-time can pick her up. That centrifugal action can counter the inward stresses. It’s the only way she could get close enough to carry this out.”

  Amy went on as Arno struggled to understand. It would all be much easier if they had the vast graphic displays of the Center, of course. Science was now mostly a matter of understanding the pictures shown, not the principles underlying them.

  Kingsley sat back and reflected, the gin and tonic helping nicely. The great trouble with understanding this black hole lay in a simple fact: calculations were nearly all about the equilibrium. Average properties, energy theorems and the like. So what did one really know? He had watched a generation of theorists wrestle with the same problems.

  Take what happened when matter fell in—did it go all the way to the frightful singularity that lay at the “bottom” of the hole, and so get chewed up? We thought so, but were not sure.

  Could the twisted space-time around a spinning hole, and inside it, lead to fundamental new properties—say, worm-holes? Not sure.

  At the core, physics smeared into topology, the study of surfaces, shapes. Geometry ruled.

  Near the innermost regions of a rotating hole, snug up against the singularity, the laws of quantum mechanics object quite profoundly to infinities. Physics had for decades posted a want ad at this boundary: NEW THEORY NEEDED. APPLY WITHIN. But to properly describe this realm demanded a deep view of quantum gravity, which still—despite much work and false prophets—eluded them all.

  Amy had hit a conceptual wall with Arno. Talk between them dwindled and they stared out at the pelting fat dollops of rain. A somber mood descended.

  “Perhaps the primary point,” Kingsley said, “is that this simulation of Channing is flying into the utterly unknown. The only evidence of her deeds will be what happens to the Eater.”

  “She’ll die,” Amy said.

  “She knew that going in,” Arno said flatly, apparently glad to find a tough-guy line he could use.

  “It may be easier for us, when we speak to Benjamin—if we can even do that—to use ‘it’ rather than ‘her,’” Kingsley said.

  “Good psychology,” Amy said. “Prepare him for it.”

  The limousine stopped. They had finally growled up the rocky, narrow road to the observatory complex. To Kingsley’s surprise, the rain clouds now hung below them. The sky above was not clear, bu
t at least there were no glowering dark clouds and crackling lightning. The telescopes here had long taken advantage of this property, the extraordinary stability of the air above the dead volcano.

  “Let us hope the bastard cannot find us here,” Kingsley said. He got out of the car and stretched. A dizzying lack of air made him totter. How could he think up here? Back to work, one last, desperate time.

  5

  Benjamin felt her fully now. The old question about whether a simulation had an internal experience—well, all those abstract bull sessions dwindled to scraps. Here was her self, coming through in her voice, her vision, the sensory smorgasbord of a lived interior.

  “The sand is running, lover,” she said.

  “Not yet!” he called.

  She coasted in a strange Valhalla of cathedral light and glowing electromagnetic majesty. He floated in his harness, immersed in her world. Through a small port, he could watch the crescent wonder of the great water world below, but his eyes did not stray from the spectacle before him.

  Three dots scorched her vision with momentary pinpoint explosions. “Gotcha!” she cried.

  He flinched. “What was that?”

  “I nailed three of the nodules where the Old One is stored.”

  “With Searchers?”

  “It killed them, sure. But not fast enough.”

  “More barium?”

  “Yeah, giving the beast an enema.”

  “The big cloud, it’s expanding pretty fast.”

  He sent her his extra data sources on a tightbeam, high-bit squirt. A blooming ivory barium cloud licked at the Eater’s magnetic rim.

  “Ride ’em, cowboy,” she gloated.

  “It’s heading away, around the moon.”

  “Hungry, that misbegotten—”

  She had stopped abruptly. Benjamin frowned. “What’s—”

  “It’s talking to me.”

  “About what?”

  “Music. Listen.”