Eater. Part 11

"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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sumption," Benjamin shot back.

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

The h.e.l.l 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, d.a.m.n 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?" 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 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 naive."

Bristling at "naive," 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 a.n.a.l-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 s.p.a.ce station and the Mars adventure, there were plenty of surplus astronauts, each a model of compet.i.tive 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 G.o.d. 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 b.u.mper sticker. So she honked; she loved paradoxes. Such as her gathering feeling for Kingsley. Who would have thought that that still smoldered? A smelly bone, best buried in the backyard of her life. She had written him off to his wife, a cla.s.sic 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 G.o.ddess could lose out in the romance wars! still smoldered? A smelly bone, best buried in the backyard of her life. She had written him off to his wife, a cla.s.sic 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 G.o.ddess 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 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 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sumed that a radio message from s.p.a.ce 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 can't harvest technology from a creature so different." 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 ent.i.ty, 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.

"The bounty of other, alien societies," Arno said grandly. "That appears to be what it is promising."

The crowd murmured with a strange tenor she had seldom heard: eagerness and caution sounding in the same anxious key.

Kingsley and many from NASA looked relieved. Unlike Benjamin's suspicions, there seemed no threat here. Arno, their princ.i.p.al conduit to the White House, was plainly out of his depth. He had said his piece and now gazed out over the crowd as if trying to read a script in too tiny a typeface.

She leaned toward Benjamin. "So the culture vulture theory of the Sagan crowd looks right."

He said, "It still isn't headed for Earth, either."

Arno was going on about ramifications. "An international committee can a.s.semble a compendium of our greatest works, the arts and mathematics, perhaps even science-though there may be a security issue there."

"Let us offer whatever data it wants," a voice from in front said.

The final decision would come from on high, of course, and that lent an air of liberation to what followed. The discussion went quickly, specialists vying to spell out how to do all this.

The battalions of data managers, as they were termed, had already erected an elaborate architecture to deal with speaking to the Eater. What was not so obvious, but now clear, was that in transferring information-say, the Library of Congress-the Eater would learn a good deal more about how our computers thought. It was astoundingly swift at learning our computer languages. Some of its remarks in pa.s.sing implied that all this was rather primitive stuff-to it.

She and Benjamin stayed for hours, following the discussion, volunteering nothing. This was not their province. Toward the end, though, Benjamin made a remark she would remember later. "It's getting close to Jupiter. Let's see what we learn there."

"You're not so sure this cultural shotgun is what it wants?"

"Thing about aliens is, they're alien."

"Ummm. I remember an old movie about an art collector who went around buying up living artists' work, and then killing them, to increase resale value."

"Good grief, you're in a great mood."

"Just the old mind wandering. I suppose everyone's taking comfort in the fact that once it's at Jupiter, it's in close range of our Searchers. We'll learn more."

He gave her his angular grin. "Old Army saying. 'If the enemy is in range, so are you.'"

6.

Benjamin clasped her to him with a trembling energy. She kissed him with an equal fervor and then, without a word or the need of any, he left for the Center.

She had agreed to rest a good part of each day, but insisted on being at the Center for a few hours, at least. Each day he hoped she would just plain rest, and each day he was disappointed. She came up around noon to catch the day's energy at its full swell. Benjamin was pleased that even in the hubbub, people looked after her, included her in the flow of work. There was quite enough of it to share.

They had both been surprised at how quickly the U.S. government had gotten in line on the cultural transfer process. The usual cautionary voices had loudly complained about giving away secrets that could be used against all humanity, but the sheer strangeness of the Eater made it hard to see how a digitized image of the Parthenon could be a defense secret. "Good ol' Carl Sagan," Channing had remarked. "Who would've guessed that his view of aliens would have infiltrated the Congress?"

Indeed, they needed a figure like Sagan, dead now for decades, who could command the confidence of the greater public. Like all good popularizers in science, he had been roundly punished for it by his colleagues, denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the subject of tsk-tsk tsk-tsk gossip by many who were not his equals as scientist or educator. No such astronomer had arisen since Sagan's time, and the best the profession could muster were various pale figures from the usual scientific bureaucracy. Compared with them, Kingsley did quite well, and so had undertaken a lot of the Center's public relations work-when not shouldered aside by Arno. gossip by many who were not his equals as scientist or educator. No such astronomer had arisen since Sagan's time, and the best the profession could muster were various pale figures from the usual scientific bureaucracy. Compared with them, Kingsley did quite well, and so had undertaken a lot of the Center's public relations work-when not shouldered aside by Arno.

Both Benjamin and Kingsley suspected that the political leadership was mounting precautionary measures, but there was no insider word of such plans. At the Center all policy matters, and even the different spectral bands of the observing teams, had become more and more boxed into neat little compartments.

The Center was preoccupied with shepherding the data flow to the Eater. Channing had become edgy and preoccupied, following the Eater news obsessively, making fun of Arno. ("Maybe his major purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.") Sometimes she seemed to surprise even herself with her brittle humor, as if she did not fully know how black a mood lay beneath it.

Benjamin thought about her, fruitlessly as usual, as he came into the new wing of the Center. It had been thrown up in a day by teams who descended in ma.s.sive helicopters. The big new office complex was a rectangular intrusion into a hillside carved unceremoniously for it. Each floor was one big room, the nondenominational Office: a three-dimensional grid bounded below by a plane of thin nylon carpet, two meters above by a parallel plane of pale acoustical tile. This s.p.a.ce suffered punctuation by vertical Sheetrock planes that came to shoulder height, barely enough to give the illusion of partial privacy and damp conversations. Squares of recessed fluorescent lighting beamed down on the symbolic Euclidean realization of pragmatic idealism, a s.p.a.ce of unimpeded flows. Spherical immersion tanks dotted the s.p.a.ce between the rectangular sheets that stretched to infinity, and around them technicians moved with insect energies. In these the cyber-link specialists kept in close touch with the array of satellites and sensors they now had spying on the interloper.

A cube farm: big rooms clogged with cubicles for the drones. When something loud happened, the prairie-dog heads would pop up over the half-height walls.

As the Eater plunged closer to Jupiter, it had rhapsodized about alien cultures it had visited, sending samples of outre art via the microwave high-bandwidth links. Some were released to the public, particularly if they seemed innocuous. Predictably, distinctions between "photographs" and "art" were difficult to make. There were apparently straightforward views of landscapes, odd life-forms, stars, and planets, even some "cities" that might just as well have been regularly arranged hills. With thousands of such images to chew upon, the public seemed satisfied.

Carefully the government figures charged with filtering the information did not give away the true vast size of the galleys it sent. Nor did they release unsettling images of grotesque scenes, hideous aliens, and unaccounted-for devastation. The Eater provided little or no commentary, so battalions of a.s.sembled art critics, photo experts, and other sorts labored to interpret these.

So far the world reaction had been varied-there were always alarmists-but comparatively mild. The sense of wonder was working overtime among the world media, though that would undoubtedly give way in time, Benjamin thought.

The more advanced works were another matter. These the computers had a.s.sembled into holographic forms and an entire yawning gallery displayed them. Benjamin stopped there to see what was new. Even knowing how much effort was being marshalled worldwide on deciphering the Eater's transmission load, he was daily astonished at how much new work appeared.

It was eerie work, subtly ominous. Portraits of creatures and places in twisted perspectives, 3D manifestations of objects that appeared impossible, color schemes that plainly operated beyond the visible range.

He went into the Big Screen Room. The ranging grid showed the orange profile of the Eater at the very edge of Jupiter's moon system. There was a crowd and he found a seat at the back only because a new staffer gave up his, leaping to his feet when he saw Benjamin's ID badge.

A murmur. Benjamin watched as one of the Searcher 'scopes came online. Its high-resolution image flickered through several spectral ranges, settled on the best. Kingsley materialized in the seat beside him; a staffer had given up his for the Astronomer Royal. The incoming image sharpened at the hands of the specialists. "It's veered in the last hour," Kingsley whispered, "and appears headed for an outer moon of the system."

"Couldn't we have predicted that?"

"Some did." Kingsley shrugged. "It does not respond to questions about its plans."

"Still? I thought it was talking more now."

"The linguists have given up trying to render its little parables in literal ways."

"They seem more like puzzles to me."

"That, too. 'Cultural dissonance,' as one of them termed it."

"I'll have to remember that one." Benjamin grinned dryly. "Sounds almost like it means something."