Gregory Benford Read online

  “I should get you home,” he whispered.

  “No. I want to be here.” She did not even glance at him, keeping her eyes on the big screen’s image as fresh data filled in slight details.

  “One cannot but note that the justly termed ‘Eater’—or more generally, ‘intruder’—answered only one of the questions we put to it,” Kingsley said at a pause in the discussion.

  Channing’s voice filled the silence of the room as all looked at her. “We asked where it’s from, what it is, what it wants.”

  Benjamin said, “And it answered the middle question.”

  “Maybe it’s being coy?” Amy ventured. She spoke confidently now, her hesitancy in such powerful company now evaporated in the heat of the hunt.

  “Try again. One at a time,” Channing said.

  Arno authorized sending a further message: “Where are you from?”

  The reply came with the same speed, arriving three hours later. They had arranged its sentences with proper typography now. The simple code it sent did not carry a distinction between capitals and lowercase, so they left it in caps. For the Eater the implied huge voice seemed natural.

  THE GALAXY. I HAVE JOURNEYED THROUGH IT SINCE THREE BILLION OF YOUR YEARS BEFORE YOUR STAR EXISTED.

  “It’s been wandering for 7.5 billion years?” an astronomer asked in a hollow, awed whisper.

  The room was silent for a long time.

  Channing had refused to go home, and instead had fallen asleep in a lounge chair in Benjamin’s office. Benjamin had noticed that even when awake her right foot sloped off to the floor, as if she had forgotten she had one. She roused for the reply and came into the Big Screen Room to see the message glowing alone on the screen. “Hmmm, it seems rather cagey about its origins.”

  The Center was by now getting crowded as more people poured in under the general U Agency umbrella. Some were directly from the White House, which apparently was confused about how involved it should get. The Gang of Four met with Arno and Martinez to plan.

  “This is uncharted political territory,” Kingsley observed. “A politician’s first instinct is to clamp down upon that which he or she does not understand.”

  “I’d like it to stay that way,” Channing said.

  “I think we all would,” Martinez said, “but this is going to be far larger than we can manage.”

  Arno looked unsure of himself, and Benjamin realized that events were spinning out of his control, an anxiety-producing turn for such a personality. It was hard to exude confidence, the crucial executive signature, when you did not feel it. He mentioned this to Kingsley at the coffee urn, and Kingsley chuckled. “Unless one is a practiced politician, and thus an actor.”

  “I’m not so impressed with his methods,” Benjamin said. “His people are rubbing mine the wrong way.”

  “I fear that was inevitable,” Kingsley said. “In my prior experience, science is packed solid with specialists, unused to working with others.”

  Channing said wryly, “Look, for guys like Arno, the first rule of action is if at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”

  “He seems pretty agreeable so far,” Benjamin said cautiously. He had respect for her political intuition; what was she seeing that he missed?

  Channing’s energy had abruptly returned, probably fed by old-fashioned adrenaline. She summoned more by tossing a sugar packet into her coffee. “There’s no hiding from this, though—the White House has cut him enough slack to mess up.”

  Kingsley nodded. “Quite astute. He’s got to work with such uncertain materials as ourselves. And clever we may be, but this problem is incredibly broad. I’ve already recommended that we fly out experts in semiotics, the language of signs, in case we are using too narrow a channel of conversation with this thing. They may have ideas we can use.”

  Benjamin had to agree. These days, there were cell biologists unable to discuss evolutionary theory, physicists who couldn’t tell a protein from a nucleic acid, chemists who did not know an ellipse from a hyperbola, geologists who could not say why the sky was blue. Worse, they didn’t care. Generalized curiosity was rare and getting rarer and now they needed a lot of people who could bring in a broad range of angles of attack.

  “I think you’re giving Arno too much credit,” Channing insisted. “He’s been behind the curve since the Eater began talking. In situations like this, conventional wisdom won’t work. He’s so dense, light bends around him.”

  Benjamin laid a restraining hand on her arm. “I think you’re overtired.”

  The rawboned, ravaged look she gave him had a silent desperation. He did not know where her sudden moods came from, but resolved to weather them. Trying to toss off the matter lightly, she said, “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. We shouldn’t be surprised to see it show up a lot in the next few days…that’s all.”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “Good idea, best of the day.” Then she fainted.

  3

  Living in a female body—Channing mused, lying in the cool, slanted light of early morning—was different. She rustled in the damp sheets, cat-lazy, and watched Benjamin get ready to go back to the Center after having had less sleep than he should.

  Males had low-maintenance bodies; shave, trim fingernails, haircut whenever it got too obviously long—that was it. They were so pointed in their desire to have women, a desire she remembered from adolescence as both frightening and complimentary at once. The sense of the chase lived in them, made them feel their bodies as jackets carrying their imperatives—sperm, armies, ideas, civilization—on its perilous journey. They relished their recklessness, and she had come to understand that it was not an embracing of death, as some feminists insisted, but a zesty drive to slam up against the walls of the world, test the limits.

  Even Benjamin’s casual moves showed how his sense of space differed, as if this crisis brought out deep responses. Men’s world fixed on fly balls in a summer sky, the target at the edge of reach of arrow or gun, the bowl of sky lit by beckoning pinwheel stars, the far horizon as a target. Men felt their bodies, she suspected, as taut with lines of potential. Women revolved around a more inner space, orbiting their more complex innards.

  And the penis: willful, answering only to the unconscious. In the small hours of this morning, she had proved this theorem by explicit example, getting him erect as he slept, with artful fingers and lips in a swampy, eager mood that came over her suddenly. In their verbal love play his got a name, whereas somehow her vagina never did—until this moment, the idea had never occurred. He could not lie, erotically; erections spoke truly of what the libido willed.

  “Hey, sailor, new in town?” she murmured in her cat voice.

  He came rushing over. “Thought you were asleep. Wow, you were great.”

  “For a kiss you get breakfast.”

  “Sure. Where?”

  “On the deck?”

  “No, the kiss.”

  That led to an extended seminar on several ready reaches of her body and delayed his departure by another half hour. In payment she demanded to go with him, and predictably he said no, she was too tired, and just as predictably, she won.

  On the drive up, they had their first private conversation about the Eater since the first message had come in. “You’re more afraid than you’re letting on, aren’t you?” she asked quietly.

  “You bet.” He drove with his usual concentration, quick and able, tires howling on the curves. Well, maybe today it was justified. Life seemed to be moving faster.

  “It’s packing a lot of power.”

  “And with seven billion years of experience, knows how to use it.”

  “If it cares to.”

  “That’s just what the politicians will soon realize.” He shot her a glance, his hands tight on the wheel as the road roar grew under his foot’s pressure.

  “Why would it be any danger to us?”

  “The thing about aliens is,
they’re alien.”

  “You think the government will take that attitude?”

  “They’d be irresponsible if they didn’t.”

  “Maybe they’ll be as out of it as Arno.”

  “He’s doing his best. You really dislike him, don’t you?”

  “I don’t trust him,” she said.

  “He’s secretive, all right,” Benjamin allowed. “That makes me suspicious. We’re used to open discussion in the sciences and he doesn’t even pretend to follow that practice. And his people follow his lead—ask plenty of questions, give damned little back.”

  “That, and it’s hard to believe that he beat 100,000 other sperm.”

  “Not up to the job?”

  “Nobody is, granted.” She tried to imagine who would be able to manage a crisis like this and came up empty. “It demands too much knowledge in one head.”

  “So use more heads.”

  This turned out to be the solution the White House had settled upon, visible as they pulled up to the Center. Or rather, to a guard post and heavily armed Marines who peered intently at their freshly made IDs, issued only the day before. The hillside was now, overnight, festooned with prefab buildings lifted in by helicopter. Communications cables flowered in great knotted blossoms on standing pads, attended by squads of blue-overalled workers.

  Inside the Center, the foyer had a security team checking IDs again and a metal detector. This made Benjamin angry, which proved to be “unproductive,” as Kingsley termed it when he had to rescue them from the Operations Officer’s office. They stopped at a brand-new phalanx of buffet tables, well stocked, and got coffee.

  “Is this backed by the CIA?” Benjamin asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Kingsley said judiciously. “The food is quite poor.”

  They plunged into work. Channing had to allow that Arno’s U Agency had brought a brisk efficiency to the usual meandering corridor conversations. In this taut atmosphere, there were no academic locutions: no in terms of or as it were or if you will. This Channing fully approved. Leaving NASA, she had found from a series of visits to the campuses that much of academic life had come to seem either boring or crazy.

  No rival for the craziness of the situation she was in, of course. Nothing could match the whirl of speculation around her.

  It was remarkable that this magnetic creature had been able to produce even broken, coherent English simply by listening to radio and TV. A century of fiction had assumed any approaching alien would be able to do so, to simplify their story lines, without for a moment considering how prodigious a task it was. The Eater had no common experience, knew little of the Earth’s surface, and was dealing with a species unknown anywhere else in the galaxy. It did have vastly more experience dealing with planetary life, though, and this was apparently what made its work successful.

  But with their help it could become much more able, the Eater said. So there was a team of linguists working with it.

  They started with vocabulary. Children learned language beginning with nouns and built up to abstractions, so the first volley of signals was an assembly of pictures showing common objects, along with the nouns for them. Verbs were a little more trouble. Cartoons proved useful here, showing “throw” and making distinctions like the difference between “rain” and “to rain.” Here the American Hopi Indian language would have been useful, since in that tongue English’s “it is raining”—with the implied it quite invisible, yet a solid noun—was smoothly rendered simply as “rain.” The Eater pointed out such subtleties as quickly as they arose, making its teachers feel that English was a patchwork of knocked-together solutions—which, of course, it was.

  They quickly got through a basic five thousand words. Then faster transmission of whole texts, with illustrations, proceeded with blinding speed. Kingsley, wearing yesterday’s shirt and tie, related this to her in his clipped mode, teetering on the verge of irony.

  “What do you think will happen next?” she asked him. He had apparently been here all night, or at least he looked it.

  “Depends upon the world reaction, of course,” Kingsley said with surprising crispness. “And how fast we can move before the heavy hand of ‘responsibility’ descends, to make us overcautious.”

  She blinked. His face was a mask, but she could read a jittery stress in him, especially in the overcontrolled way he spoke and moved. “Why do you stress speed?”

  “The Eater—your choice of name has stuck, and perhaps was a bit infelicitous.”

  “Gee, I love it when you use such fancy terms. How infelicitous?”

  “It’s more the title of a horror film, isn’t it?”

  “Or a bad sci-fi flick,” Benjamin said, munching a donut. He knew well the distinction between true science fiction and the media dross pumped out in vast, glittery quantities, “sci-fi.”

  “So you think that’ll worsen the first impression, once this breaks?” Channing asked.

  “It’s starting to break,” Kingsley said with abstract fatigue. “Impossible to contain, really.”

  “What really matters here,” Benjamin said, “is how the governments react.”

  Kingsley managed a dry chuckle. “I remember some head of state in the TwenCen saying that history teaches us mostly that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all their other alternatives.”

  “I wish I could take the name back,” Channing said.

  While they slept, and Kingsley had not, the fascination of their opportunity had worked upon the astronomers. They had asked the Eater questions about astrophysics, peppering it with a dozen in a single transmission. This apparently broke the tit-for-tat logjam. The “intruder”—a name Kingsley still preferred to use, and thought might work better but had no hope would be taken up—seemed eager to discuss. It had quickly mastered the protocols of our digital image processing and filled its broadband signal with pictures. There were eerie exchanges. It was almost like a proud parent showing around baby pictures.

  WITNESS, THE LATE EVOLUTION OF A STAR, WHICH YOU TERM THE ROSETTE NEBULA, LOOKED LIKE THIS FROM THE SIDE WHEN IT WAS YOUNG.

  The display was awesome, close-ups of giant rosy clouds of shimmering molecules, beautiful testaments to the death throes of a star. The Eater had been traveling near it and for the first time Channing appreciated the limitation astronomers seldom remembered: seeing objects from one angle left questions forever unanswerable.

  “This gives us a handle on its trajectory, then,” Benjamin observed swiftly.

  Kingsley nodded. “We can work backward, using these other images—the Magellanic Cloud, the Galactic Center—and determine its past.”

  Some of the images were impossible to match with anything ever seen from Earth. Others almost matter-of-factly revised in an instant their picture of the galaxy’s geography. The view of the Galactic Center showed what generations of artists had imagined, the glowing bulge of billions of stars that shone in all colors, a swollen majesty rent by lanes of ebony dust and amber striations no one could explain.

  It thrilled her, tightened her throat. A bounty now came flooding into the Center as the Eater fed data through Arecibo and Goldstone and the new dish at Neb Attahl, India.

  “My God, it’ll put us all out of work,” she murmured.

  “Astronomers? Quite the opposite, I expect,” Kingsley said.

  “Yeah, we’ll be trying to understand these—and the Eater itself—for a generation at least,” Benjamin said, biting into his second donut, balancing a plate on his knee in the Big Screen Room.

  “Well,” Channing said ironically, “it’s good to know you won’t be forced into retirement.”

  This pleasant interlude lasted only an hour. Martinez discovered they had come in and held a meeting. Clearly she was struggling to find her role in all this, a small fish caught in a tidal wave. Arno’s men had tried to clamp down on the whole story, but it got out through the porous Washington system. In part, that was because the astronomers did not like the U Agency’s inc
reasingly abrupt manner. Their styles clashed fundamentally, as mirrored in their clothes: government buttoned-up look against tropical techno-hip. Even in Martinez’s oil-upon-the-waters meeting, there were several edgy, sharp-tongued interchanges.

  They watched some television, where the story had broken in more or less the correct essentials only two hours before. At first there was a stunned, worldwide awe. Religious proclamations, stentorian speeches by assorted politicians who could not tell a spiral galaxy from a supernova.

  Astronomers who were called in to consult at first refused to credit the story. Only release of the Rosette Nebula image convinced these. The release itself was a fortunate error. A Center staffer had sent it as a compressed file to a colleague, instead of zipping it to yet another subagency in Washington; they had, weirdly, WebNet addresses near each other in her file directory.

  Within another hour or two, the astronomers outside those in the know fathomed the significance of the Rosette image. Immediately, they raised uncomfortable questions. This was an utterly alien entity, carrying the mass of our entire moon—another factoid which had leaked, this time through Australia. What could it do?

  The Gang of Four sneaked off from the ongoing Martinez meeting to discuss just this. Amy looked as though she had spent the night as Kingsley had, fueled by coffee. “I’ve been trying to figure what it might do.”

  “A more important point is what it wants,” Kingsley observed with a pensive gaze.

  Amy said, “It didn’t answer our third question. Ever.”

  “Exactly.”

  With her advanced computer skills, and the help of a squad of cryptographers from the U Agency, Amy had been in on every exchange in the transcription process. She shook her head. “It doesn’t answer any questions that verge on that, either.”

  “Curious,” Kingsley said mysteriously. Channing could tell that he had his own theories, but was unwilling to share them. He had been wrong quite enough for the last week, thank you.