Gregory Benford Read online

“If it wanted,” Benjamin said, “it could plunge straight through the Earth, bore a hole.”

  Kingsley snorted derisively. “And kill itself, by stripping away the magnetic structures that are the intelligence of the thing? No, it will be rather more clever.”

  Channing had her own worse case and decided to venture it. “With those magnetic funnels, it could blowtorch the top of our atmosphere.”

  Kingsley looked delighted at an idea he had not had himself. “Ummm…you’re entirely correct.”

  “That would work?” Amy asked, startled.

  “Absolutely,” Kingsley said with an oblivious authority; he was, after all, the Astronomer Royal. “Sic transit gloria mundi, eh? ‘Thus passeth away the glory of the world,’ if my Latin is still decent.”

  “Is there enough energy density in its system to drill through the atmosphere?” Benjamin asked. Channing knew this well, one of his favorite maneuvers. Deflect the issue into a calculation to get time to think. Even in a potentially mortal crisis, we play games.

  They found a blackboard—white, actually, with those smelly marking pens—and spent half an hour checking Kingsley’s assertion. Finally Benjamin dropped his marker and agreed. “Dead on. It could roast us all, in time.”

  Kingsley said archly, “If it doesn’t get bored first.”

  Channing had been resting in a lounge chair, especially brought in by one of the U Agency gofers—a rather pleasant aspect of the Agency’s otherwise annoying presence. She brightened with a fresh notion. “Then let’s try to keep it amused, why don’t we? I wonder if it likes jokes.”

  4

  Actually, it did—but its own humor was weird, unfunny:

  LIFE HAS CONTRADICTIONS. BUT CONTRADICTIONS KILL LIFE.

  “That’s a joke?” Benjamin asked the room, the first to speak up. After his words were out, he was suddenly embarrassed, wishing he could take them back. Maybe there was some deep semiotic content he had missed? There were hugely powerful people here, able to eject him from the Center forever with the rise of a single eyebrow. But heads nodded in agreement and no one disagreed.

  The Operating Group, as named by Arno, now encompassed twenty-eight members. It met in the colloquium hall, the Center’s largest. Armed guards barred every doorway and three electro-sniffer teams had worked over the room before anyone was allowed to say anything. Having to sit in silence for even ten minutes was difficult, given the air of strain in the room.

  “Plainly, we need to know more,” Kingsley said from the podium, nodding to Benjamin.

  The Eater’s latest transmission hung in glowing letters on a large flat screen that dominated the room. They had just watched several of the Eater’s purported ideas of humor parade across this screen, including some images of things no one could even recognize. The Eater seemed to equate what to humans would be verbal humor with an inexplicable visual humor that looked like tangled threads of corroded surfaces, in virulent colors.

  “Every telescope in the solar system is trained on it. We are learning as quickly as we can.” He paused. “And now, something rather curious.”

  The team from the White House sat in the front row, two seats over from Benjamin, and their faces showed blank incomprehension. They probably had never advanced beyond high school chemistry, he realized, and saw the world as wholly human, filled with the vectors of human power. Technology was to them the product of human labor, no more, and science consisted of stories heard on TV, of no interest to people involved with the Real World.

  “Several astronomers have noticed a similarity between the Eater’s electromagnetic ‘buzz’—-that is, what we believe to be its internal transmissions—and signals already detected years previous, from a star not very far away.” Kingsley paused and looked out over the crowd. “Most curious.”

  Benjamin waited through an odd, hesitant silence. What the hell, got to keep this rolling. And Kingsley looks like he could use some help up there. “Maybe there’s a similar object orbiting—visiting—that star, too?”

  Nods from the astronomical contingent. We’ve got the momentum here, Benjamin realized. The rest are hopelessly far off their turf.

  “If there were,” Kingsley argued, “this intruder would know about it already. It has been everywhere, seen everything, for many billions of years.”

  Why not give the number: seven? Benjamin then realized that every detail had been hastily classified, and Kingsley was playing it safe. The political types might not know the implications of such an immense lifetime and leak it.

  More silence. Well, we might as well turn this into a little colloquium. That’s what the room’s for.

  “Not so,” he said, spreading his arms to both sides of his seat, hooking a hand around Channing’s shoulder. Might as well make a claim on this idea, too. “We have one small advantage over it. Our telescopes are scattered all over the solar system. To pick up this distant source would be impossible with a receiving antenna the size of the Eater. It’s a matter of resolving power. By my calculations”—he let the phrase hang there just an extra second, to establish some authority with this crowd—“it’s blind to faraway objects smaller than stars. That probably includes this thing near another star—whatever it is.”

  This last was pure bluff. He had not kept up with the literature very well, had no clue what Kingsley was referring to.

  Kingsley said crisply, “I suggest we have a special assistant team set about making detailed comparisons. Any and all knowledge may prove useful. I believe, in fact, that should be our general principle. Gather, sift, think, wait.”

  Arno rose—his standard room-ruling maneuver, adapted for an auditorium. His eyes swept the room. “Plainly, ladies and gentlemen, something more is needed. I believe I speak for the entire U Agency when I say that we believe this body, the President’s authorized Operating Group, should take control of the entire deep space network.”

  Some murmurs of assent from the political faction. The astronomers looked sour. Some muttered objections.

  Arno swept this away with a broad gesture. “We must immediately—and secretly—launch the new Searcher craft, using the best, highest-density Deep Link bands. With a connection of such high quality, they can be flown under direction by people on Earth.”

  “An interactive control, close to the source?” a NASA official asked.

  “Exactly. Do we—you, madam—have that capability?”

  “There are Searchers in Jupiter space.” The woman wore one of the new NASA uniforms, introduced a year before, handsome deep blue and gold. “We could begin a few of the micropackages on the way, launching at high velocity, on trajectories to intercept eventually…” Her voice trailed off, plainly not prepared for this possibility.

  “I believe this group should so recommend,” Arno finished and sat down.

  Kingsley said, “I believe that has much to recommend it. We cannot know the intruder’s trajectory, and it plainly has the ability to alter it in a moment. It is nearing Jupiter, and knowledge gained there should prove invaluable.”

  “I think we shouldn’t launch everything now,” Benjamin said, amazed at his continuing audacity. The quiet administrator of only a month ago would have been cowed into utter silence in such a gathering.

  Kingsley’s mouth pursed, startled. “Why?”

  “We may need them closer to home.” This blunt possibility sent a ripple of concern through the auditorium.

  “The intruder has not announced any plans to come closer. Its present trajectory shall carry it through the Jovian system. Amy?”

  Perhaps emboldened by Benjamin, she had held up her hand. “Well, it only said this once, in the middle of another subject entirely, but…” Benjamin could see a sudden bout of stage fright seize her, a mere postdoc in such company, but then she plunged ahead. “It said it was going to ‘acquire mass and momentum’ at Jupiter.”

  “Quite possibly to gain the velocity it needs to escape the solar system,” Kingsley said with a confidence Benjamin found unsettling. “
It is a rover among the stars, after all.”

  “That’s an assumption,” Benjamin shot back.

  “Of course, of course.” Kingsley gave him an odd look, as though asking him to go along.

  The hell with that. “We lack any understanding of what it wants to do.”

  Kingsley said sternly, “But lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.”

  Arno said, “I believe our business here is finished.”

  On this awkward note, the meeting broke up. Benjamin cornered Kingsley backstage and demanded, “Why’d you do that?”

  The angular face clouded. “They are rattled enough already, damn it.”

  “They need to be prepared for the possibility that it’s not an innocent explorer.”

  “We cannot prepare for everything.”

  “We can at least think—”

  “You think for a moment. Do you seriously believe that what we say doesn’t go outside the room?”

  “No, of course not.” Here Benjamin knew he was on shaky ground. “The White House hears, plus no doubt Congress and various allies. Not my turf, but—”

  “Decidedly not. I do not have the luxury of merely keeping my nose buried in the astrophysics.”

  “It doesn’t do this discussion any good for you to keep referring to your mysterious higher knowledge. I know you move in bigger circles, sure, but—”

  “Being aware of the problem on different levels is precisely what’s needed, I should think.” Kingsley bristled, his shoulders squaring off in a gesture Benjamin remembered seeing long ago, back in that seminar where they met. Not much has changed.

  “Look, I don’t want you throwing your weight around with my people—”

  “I don’t delve into any such matters,” Kingsley shot back, eyes narrowing.

  “I see you in there talking to Amy a lot.”

  “We enjoy working together. There is a lot of interesting astro—”

  “Just remember you’re a guest here.”

  “I should think such distinctions are largely moot by now.”

  “Not to me.”

  “If you believe you can keep the usual methods of working, you are being naïve.”

  Bristling at “naïve,” Benjamin jutted his chin forward. “There’s got to be a role for the science in this thing, not just politics.”

  To Benjamin’s surprise, Kingsley nodded and gave him a tilted look of newfound respect. “I fear, old friend, that the two are now quite inseparable.”

  5

  In the press of events, she was getting so disorganized that she ended up using an ancient panty hose as a coffee filter when she couldn’t find towel paper. As her energy had ebbed, she had adopted rougher rules: if you need to vacuum the bed, it’s time to change the sheets. Rugs did have to be beaten now and then, not just threatened. Finally she gave up and found a cleaning lady.

  Still, sloppiness seemed within the broad parameters allowed on the Big Island, where salty beach types rubbed shoulders with anal-retentive “cybrarians” at the Data Retention Center just over the hill. For the last year of gathering illness, she had tended more toward the style of her neighbors in the opposite direction, people just down the road whose car had a rag as a gas cap.

  Channing had hidden her gathering fatigue as well as possible. Her years at NASA had taught her to give no sign of weakness, or else lose your spot in the mission rotation. After the space station and the Mars adventure, there were plenty of surplus astronauts, each a model of competitive connivance.

  Even in crisis, the Center was not nearly so bad, and having a husband who just happened to run its scientific wing helped, but still—best to look vigorous. Falling asleep in a crucial discussion, then fainting—not good, girl. So she planned her forays to work carefully, not letting the dark-rimmed eyes show, sipping coffee to stay up. She had learned to let Benjamin drive her home when she started to ebb; he was getting good at spotting the cusp, down to the exact moment.

  But she had to admit that probably most people just weren’t paying attention, thank God. Benjamin had persuaded her to sit in on a panel reviewing “Semiotics of Contact,” a topic that swiftly came to cover a hodgepodge of issues—but mostly, anything the astronomers didn’t want to deal with.

  She went in late in the morning and today saw a van with a HONK IF YOU LOVE PEACE AND QUIET bumper sticker. So she honked; she loved paradoxes. Such as her gathering feeling for Kingsley. Who would have thought that still smoldered? A smelly bone, best buried in the backyard of her life. She had written him off to his wife, a classic type: big eyes, big hips, dark curly hair you could bury your hand in up to the wrist. How pleasant, to know that even such a goddess could lose out in the romance wars!

  She arrived at the Center after threading the multilayered checkpoints. The TV platform set up in the foreyard had guards around it, big-shouldered types carrying automatic weapons. A bit overdone, she thought, then realized that the weaponry was not for real use, but display. Arno’s way of saying, We’re being serious here.

  Already the media mavens had taken off from the news, CNN with twenty-four-hour coverage. Within months there would be spinoff movies, no doubt, thoughtful magazine pieces and books, the Eater finally entering the media hereafter as videos or the inspiration for toys.

  She came late into the Semiotics Working Group, as Arno had labeled it, hoping nobody noticed, so of course it was at a pause in speakers and everyone looked her way. Still, it was fun to just sit and listen to the flood of informed speculation that poured from the visiting experts.

  The astronomers had quickly been revealed as the Peter Pans of humanity. They never truly grew up and kept their curiosity like a membership card. Most believed the Saganesque doctrine that aliens would be peaceful, ruled by curiosity, eager for high-minded discourse. Carl Sagan had been a conventional antimilitary liberal, and so assumed that a radio message from space would shock humanity, damping down wars and ushering in a cosmic sense of cooperation between nations.

  Humanists were made of tougher stuff. Nonsense, they said, but more politely. Why hadn’t the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas halted warfare in Europe? Instead, they fought over the spoils. Would the Eater somehow become fodder for our ancient primate aggressions?

  Another Saganesque doctrine was that contact with aliens would yield a bounty of science and technology. Half credit on this one: plenty of science, so far only astronomy, but no technology. The Eater had none. It seemed to be a magnetic construction, first made by some ancient alien race. Its origins were still blurry because of its coyly obtuse phrasing. It had said:

  I CAME INTO BEING BY ARTIFICE OF ANCIENT BIOLOGICAL BEINGS. AFTER THAT I VOYAGED AND BECAME LARGER IN SELF AND IN PURPOSE.

  Whole squads of semioticists and linguists now labored over such sentences, mining with their contextual and semantic matrices, but little glittering ore appeared beyond the obvious. The extreme humanists argued instead that, beyond the pretty pictures it seemed so eager to send, we probably could learn little from the Eater of All Things. Science simply gave us the very best chimpanzee view of the universe. Our vision was shaped by evolution, sharpened to find edible roots or tasty, easy prey on a flat plain. Our sense of beauty came from throwing honed rocks along the beautifully simple arc of a parabola to strike herbivores with cutting edges.

  The Eater’s technology used magnetic induction, control of hot plasmas, advanced electromagnetics, and probably much else we could not guess. “Face it,” one panelist said, “unless an alien is a lot like us, we can’t learn much from it. Even with goodwill—and we don’t have really good evidence of that, so far—we can’t harvest technology from a creature so different.”

  This deflated Arno’s adjutants. They were easy to pick out, because in the status-shuffling of personnel here a person’s authority was inversely proportional to the number of pens in their shirt pocket.

  Her pager beeped her. Reluctantly she left the room as a decoding expert began drawing conclusions about the Eater’s
habits in encoding information. It had been steadily getting better at understanding human computers and methods, so the bit stream coming down from it carried an ever-higher density content—mostly astronomical pictures in wavelengths ranging from the low radio to the high gamma ray. One of the tidbits that intrigued her was that the Eater had spent much time between the stars, taking centuries to cross those abysses. Very low frequency electromagnetic waves were reflected by the higher density in the solar system, so could never penetrate. The Eater had pictures of the galaxy made by receiving these waves, a whole field of astronomy impossible from Earth.

  The call was from Benjamin and she found him in the Big Screen Room. “How’s the semiotics?” he whispered.

  “They’re impressive, I suppose, in their way.” She studied the screen, which showed a beautiful view of the solar system seen from the Eater’s present location.

  “They seemed to be talking gibberish jargon when I looked in.”

  “Well, maybe my inferiority complex isn’t as good as yours.”

  He got the small joke, one of the traits that had endeared him to her long ago. Kingsley had, too, but in a subtly different way, more as a conspirator than as a simple act of merriment. She wondered for a moment about that and then Arno came striding in, exuding grim confidence.

  At first she thought he was going to give an aria in the key of “I,” taking credit for the “great advances” they had all made, but then he unveiled an extended message from the Eater. It had “a supplication”: it wanted humanity, which it seemed to regard as a single entity, to transmit a store of its art, music, and “prevalent enrichment.”

  “Does that mean our culture?” a leading member of the humanist team asked.

  “I trust the deciphering team can tell us that soon.”

  “Seems probable,” Channing said. She had always felt that the humanities were too important to be left to the humanists. And now, apparently, the field might come to include the nonhuman. For the Eater proposed a trade.