Eater (14 page)

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.”

“Sure,” 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.

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.”

“How much?” Kingsley asked.

“Maybe ten percent of the MC
²
, with M the infalling matter at a rate…” She scribbled a moment. “It’s a traveling, continuous hydrogen bomb.”

Channing said with a jerky lightness, “Not in My Backyard with a vengeance. The residents would have very little time to react before the entire planet was a wreck.”

Benjamin said slowly, “At that rate, blowing a huge tunnel through the world, there would be immediate seismic damage all over the globe.”

“Ask it what happened,” Amy said.

Kingsley remarked, “Notice how it sometimes refers to itself in a neutral manner, as ‘it’ and elsewhere, its parts as ‘the disk’ and ‘field repositories,’ whatever they might be—all rather than using a possessive.”

Channing said, “I guess a semiotics type would say that those are too ‘primate-centered constructions’ for it to comfortably use.”

They asked more and with some delay—the Eater was beaming down unintelligible ‘cultural’ data—a later transmission seemed to answer their questions.

“Read it twice,” Kingsley said. “Its linguistic range has grown enormously and there are subtleties here.”

Benjamin did not challenge the implied authority in Kingsley’s voice. These matters were certainly beyond his own range. Nobody was an expert here. In the silence of the office, he said, “And this has been going on for nearly eight billion years.”

Channing said thoughtfully, “Maybe this explains the Fermi Paradox? Why we have had no visiting aliens, and hear none in the radio bands of the galaxy?”

Benjamin nodded. “They’ve been…eaten.”

“That may be an implication, admittedly,” Kingsley allowed. “It does not
say
that it simply swallows civilizations.”

Benjamin said, “It records them.”

“In some sense we cannot imagine right now,” Kingsley said.

“You made the basic point weeks ago,” Benjamin said. “That if it slammed into the Earth the collision with solid matter would strip away the magnetic field structures around it”

“Kill the Eater itself,” Channing said. “That’s reassuring.”

“So how does it ‘gather up’ intelligences?” Benjamin asked.

Kingsley said in measured tones, “I do not believe we wish to discover that.”

Long before now, as her strength had waned, dinner and a movie had become takeout and a video. She had to get away from the Eater for a bit, so she went home early and fell into a familiar crevasse of her own interior. So many different flavors of depression to choose from! Gray existential despair, fruity sorrows of remembered childhood, dimly sensed wrongs done to people now dead, the sobering sadness that made life seem to be mostly burdens: phone calls, chores, tedious newspapers wide-eyed with Eater news and views, mostly the latter by people who knew no astrophysics.

Losing your mind, like losing your car keys, she found to be a hassle. It was also ridiculous.
Why don’t you just get up
? her no-nonsense self would ask and, stupidly, she still just idiotically lay there. She had once done skydiving. It had been easier to crawl along a strut toward a plane’s wingtip against an eighty-mile-an-hour wind at eight thousand feet than to get out of bed
right now
.

Drugs helped. She did well with “selective serotonin-re-uptake inhibitors,” an endless parade of chemical adjustments known only by their acronyms, since no human could remember their true names, or would want to. Handling her “bodily management” was tricky, especially the drains, especially with the cheerleading nurse they sent around: “Serosanguinous fluid, very good!”

So the unholy ghost of depression had come again, turning her into a zombie who could not read or turn on the 3-D or lift the phone to call for help. Benjamin worked late and she drifted. She got angry at him for his absence, even though she understood it. Then she came to appreciate the time to herself. Time to get down to the Self at last.

Some nerves once scraped raw now felt cloaked in lead. She had read up on depression, of course, the eternal student’s conviction that learning would bring wisdom, or a solution. But it was no help to be told that mildly depressed people were actually more realistic than happy people, had a more balanced view. The happy really
were
mindless, believing all sorts of positive, self-enhancing illusions.

So her sense of menacing sadness was at least genuine. How reassuring.

So she lay in the moist, fragrant tropical gloom and listened to the idiot, joyful insects celebrate the coming of night and thought of what she had to celebrate. Not much. Hard to live in the joy of the moment when the moments were getting few.

But she was nurturing an idea and that helped.
So much to do
.

In the end, that made her get up and use the computer in her home office. The sheets of e-mail tags she ignored, hunting down information on cerebral theory, data-stacking technology, and advanced research in recent review papers, their language so tangled that she could scarcely read the abstracts.

She had become fascinated by the “sculptures” the Eater had transmitted. After a hurried glance at them in two-dimensional slices—the Eater’s preferred mode of data packing, for reasons unexplained by it or anyone—the semioticists had rushed on to the more intensive later transmissions. As the night deepened, she used the Executive Committee’s worldwide preemption of computer meshes to make full-scale holograms of the alien art. She had at her
command dozens of cyber-aces and used them ruthlessly. They pressed into service vast complexes of parallel processing arrays. The U Agency certainly knew how to muster the troops, she thought, as enormous data files flickered across her screen. It was hard work, but in the middle of it she suddenly noticed that her depression had evaporated.

Benjamin was preparing to weave his weary way home when Channing came through the door of his section, looking downright brisk. He was so startled that her quick, efficient kiss left him blinking as she swept on. “Got to use the rep chamber,” she called back to him airily.

He finished a small job that had a deadline well past, then hurried after her. The representation chamber was a new cyber-marvel assembled by a U Agency team to give full, all-surround images. They were using it to project images of the Eater from every spectral band, so that one could get the illusion of walking through its magnetic realms.

When he came in, though, Channing was standing at the center and he could not make sense of what surrounded her. Slithering, glistening bodies worked through a soupy air, in pirouettes and glides like dancing, swimming birds.

Then, with no transition he could catch, the shapes changed to craggy wedges of enameled light. These contorted into shapes whose outline he could grasp without comprehending for a moment what they were. He had the distinct sensation of seeing something the wrong way around, like one of those black-and-white optical illusions that can suddenly jump from being an old crone seen in outline to a vase. Here, though, the effect did not snap back and forth between two simple choices. The shapes would jolt into something else, like a miniature misshapen tree sud
denly becoming an animal with two necks, then a machine moving on beams of light, then a wrenched, pale building that extruded layers of rooms, each lit by what seemed like purple fires.

All this happened just fast enough for him to grasp a fleeting feel for what was revealed, and then the shapes would strain and wring into something else, on and on in an endless parade of strangeness. They did not repeat while he watched. Each shape followed its own patterns.

Channing was wandering inside the 3-D representations. Among their uncanny beauties, her face glowed with an expression he could not read. She reached up into the air, alive with holographic color and mass, and caressed the images.

He called to her across the darkened image-pit, but she did not respond. He felt a rising tension in him, something straining, and a blinding headache descended like a veil. He had to leave. Worry creased his face as he wobbled down the corridor outside. The headache settled into his eyes with a piercing pain.

He downed four aspirin as Kingsley came through the door of his office, quickly closed it, and went without a word to Benjamin’s screen console. “What’s up?” Benjamin asked raggedly. This was like no headache he had ever suffered. He could not seem to get his eyes to behave right, as though they were receiving instructions from a different part of his brain.

“In the middle of a rather ordinary transmission, it ceased sending, then sent this.”

Benjamin read as rapidly as his vision would allow. Pages of instructions. With each revelation he gave a grunt of amazement. Kingsley said nothing, pacing back and forth before the desk, looking firmly at the carpet. Kingsley’s blue
shirt and pale brown suit were rumpled and creased, as though he had been sleeping in his clothes.

“It’s all there. Very clear, clear indeed,” Kingsley said abruptly. “It is coming to ‘harvest’ us as a species. It demands a hundred thousand people, sacrificed and uploaded into digital form to transmit by microwave.”

“Good grief. How?”

“It will translate them into ‘magnetic selves’ to form a ‘company of their selfkind,’ it says.”

Benjamin asked hollowly, “
That’s
why it came?”

“Apparently. It has said before that it suffers from something like outright boredom, though it does not use that term.”

“I don’t think we can even do this…”

“It says that since we have the ‘minimum requirement’—computers, digitization—then it can teach us the rest.”

“How convenient for us.” Benjamin tried to get his mind around what the Eater might mean. “All to be part of some kind of…‘company’?”

“For its library, I suspect. Or museum. Or zoo.”

“Someplace it can go and, uh, put up its feet and…”

“Read people like books? As good an analogy as any, I suppose.”

“It doesn’t say?”

There was more from the Eater, sheets of technical description. “It will make of them these ‘remnants,’ I gather.”

“‘Remnants’? Meaning the rest of us will be gone? Dead?”

“I believe it sees us all as ephemeral. A ‘remnant’ would be kept for its own uses for far longer than we would live.”

“Or for as long as it found the remnant interesting,” Benjamin mused.

Kingsley turned suddenly and faced Benjamin across his messy desk. “I haven’t talked to anyone else about this. Arno will get it within minutes and will come running to us in a pure blind panic.”

“And he’ll want to know what to do,” Benjamin said with
a sinking resignation. Though the Center now housed whole battalions of specialists and there was surely no shortage of opinions to be had, the pace of events was too rapid to allow much to filter up from below. He and Kingsley would have to have opinions, plans, and options about this.

Kingsley said in a weary gray voice, “And I have not a clue what to say.”

“This is for the politicos.”

“I do hope so. They are not at their best when required to act quickly.”

“We can’t comply, of course.”

“I wish I understood quite why.” Kingsley frowned. “Muslim, Buddhist…. Completely contrary to my instinct, the world’s religions appear to agree with you. And I do not know why.”

“I believe they’re stunned. Aren’t we?”

“I am, at least. I would think they’d be more concerned for the mass, the flock, than the individual.”

He chuckled. “I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s just that being stunned can bring out deep responses. This feels to me to have come from someplace nobody knew.”

“Because no society has faced anything remotely like this before.”

“Maybe in the Old Testament. I never finished reading it. The size of
War and Peace.
!”

He allowed himself a small grin. “It might fancy a comparison with Jehovah.”

“That stilted tone is its way of imitating our ancient voice of authority?”

“I meant more than it merely using a tactic. Perhaps the way to get a grasp of matters is that it may be playing a role, but primarily for itself. It transcends any notion we might have of being self-involved.”

“Or it could be adopting a mode that worked before. Maybe it thinks of us as a species it knows about. Or a genera. Order. Kingdom—that’s the highest biological class, isn’t it?”

He was lost in thought. “So it may well have a policy, then—based solely upon its classifying of us—regarding what to do if we fail to comply.”

“I hope it won’t come to that.”

Kingsley’s face seemed to sharpen harshly, his chin drawing down in derision. “Note the tone of address it uses.”

“Yeah, that’s an order, all right.”

“One we must obey,” Channing said. They both turned in surprise. She had slipped through the door without their noticing.

“What?” Benjamin demanded. “Why?”

“Something I can’t explain, but from what I just saw…” Her voice drained away and she seemed lost in thought.

“I cannot imagine that we would subject people to such a thing,” Kingsley said with crisp dignity.

“I can’t imagine we won’t,” Channing said, her voice so serene and mild and certain that it sent a chill through Benjamin.