Eater. Part 20

"Quite right. This is experimental."

"Always happy to be at the cutting edge. When do they do that?"

"Cut? Not at all, I gather."

"I wonder. After I'm dead, wouldn't they recover more if they could use invasive surgery?"

"a la the dictators?"

"I'm willing to give this the best effort."

"Heroic, but I think unnecessary."

"I just want the best copy, is all." To her mind, this wasn't remotely valorous. In her pantheon, science had few heroes. Most good science came from bright minds at play, like Benjamin and Kingsley. Able to turn an elegant insight, to find beguiling tricks in arcane matters-pretty, amusing, a frolic. Play, even intellectual play, was fun, good in its own right.

"You are going to fly into the mouth of the monster. Cla.s.sic Beowulf-style hero, by my measure."

He was being charming, hardly able to keep his feelings from flooding out, but she disagreed profoundly. Her heroes stuck it out against hard opposition, drove toward daunting goals, accepting pain and failure and keeping on, anyway. All the way through astronaut training, those had been her ideals. This making a Xerox of herself was a last gesture, not bravery. Maybe just foolishness.

"No, I I won't. My copy will." He sat gazing down at his hands and she wondered how to get him out of his funk. Be bright, cheery. Men were so grateful for that. "Continuity, that's really it, right?" won't. My copy will." He sat gazing down at his hands and she wondered how to get him out of his funk. Be bright, cheery. Men were so grateful for that. "Continuity, that's really it, right?"

"How so?" Head up, plainly happier to be off on abstractions.

"That's the essence of it, of the ident.i.ty problem. We do it all the time, really. When we sleep, the unconscious remains active, so we get continuity at a broad level."

"Ah. Your point is that no one wakes up and thinks they are a new person."

"Yeah, only lately, I feel a thousand years old."

"Patients brain-cooled until their brain waves lapse can later revive with their sense of self intact." His brow furrowed, then relaxed. "I see-how will we know it's truly 'you,' eh?"

"I suppose you could just log on to the computer aboard the Searcher, my ship, and read me out."

"But I don't know you like that. I know you-love you-this ordinary old, human way."

"Inside I'm a mess, lemme tell you."

"You look orderly and understandable from a distance."

"And only that way. Close up, inside, I'm ugly."

"All of us live inside, always close up. Other people look methodical and tidy only because they're at long range."

"That's comforting."

He pressed her hand into his. "I'll know you."

"How?"

"You'll think of something, m'love." He grinned, but there was no elation behind it. "I know you."

8.

A few more days had crept by, and now that they were at the nexus of it all, he felt only a yawning vacancy.

"This must be the strangest thing anyone has ever done," Benjamin said to her. The specialists' army had withdrawn, leaving them in an enclosed s.p.a.ce, almost comforting in its intimacy. They were surrounded by advanced magnetic reading gear and diagnostics.

She smiled. "Yeah, and out of love, at that."

"To...leave me something?"

"That's part of it, for me. But love is a big, cheesy word, able to cover a lot of things."

Channing was fully uploaded now. The last few hours had been pretty painful for her and she had stood up well, sweat popping out on her brow. He had wiped it away carefully. She had kept waving away even the light painkillers they had offered. "Don't wanna cloud the picture," she had kept repeating earlier. As though she were an artist at work on her last oil painting.

The offhand weirdness of the scene kept throwing him. They had come to him with a proposal about the use of her brain afterward. He had listened and gone through confusion to anger to swirling doubt and then he had made them go away. Their idea was to slice her dead brain layer by layer, so that scanning machines could read the deep detail digitally, getting better resolution to sharpen the simulation.

This had sent a cold horror running through him. They had put it as nicely as they could, but still it meant slowly planing away her brain. In the end, her entire cranium would be excavated, leaving half a skull. He could not bear the picture.

She struggled up out of her fog and managed a wrecked smile. "You have to die to be resurrected."

"I'll..." The words stuck in his throat.

"You'll see me again." She gave him a blissful look. "Goodbye, lover."

It was the last thing she said.

After a night of no sleep and a lot of sour drinking with Kingsley, he met with the specialists again. They showed him the long black box housing Channing's uploaded mind. "Reduced to a featureless..." he began, but could not finish the sentence.

"We'll be processing, compiling, and organizing," a woman in a smart executive suit said.

"Fine."

"In a few days-"

"Fine. Just shut up."

He understood all the parts of the arguments. Magnetic induction loops, tiny and superconducting, could map individual neurons. Laying bare the intricacies of the visual cortex, or evolution's kludgy tangle in the limbic system, had already unleashed new definitions of Genus h.o.m.o. Still, n.o.body considered h.o.m.o Digital to be an equal manifestation. Parts were not the whole.

They played a voicebox rendering, a voice repeating, sounding exactly like her. He saw them looking hopefully at him and he didn't give a d.a.m.n about their marvelous trick. Numbly he pulled from his coat pocket the hourgla.s.s she had given him. He set it atop the box-her, now-and watched until its sand had run down.

He wondered what it might mean to upend it, to start the cycle again. He struggled with the thought.

No.

The decision came as a release.

It was a slow day for the Neptune Society, so theirs was the sole party when he went out with a few friends from the Center. The captain wondered if he wanted the champagne before or after. After, he said. There were little printed cards set out next to the champagne with some doggerel t.i.tled LET ME GO inside and the data: ENTERED INTO LIFE OCTOBER 15, 1978, and ENTERED INTO REST, but he could not read the date through some blurring that had gotten into his eyes.

He gazed up into a sullen cloud cover, a pearly gray plane halfway up Mauna Kea. This pathetic fallacy still quite accurately mirrored his curiously displaced mood. The sea was flat and gla.s.sy and he said little on the way out. They gathered at the bow and the captain gave him the urn, blue with odd markings. Not his to keep, as if he would want to. Off came the lid and inside were gritty gray ashes, the color of the sky. He poured the powdery stream and bits of bone into dark blue water. Some of it spread on the surface, some blowing away on a mild wind, but most of it plunged deeply, an inverse plume that seemed like transposed smoke rising to the depths. He had not expected that. His intellect, spinning endlessly in its own high vacuum, told him immediately that it must be the heavier parts sinking, but that did not explain why a bubble burst in his chest and his throat closed and the world seemed to whirl away for a long moment, suspending him over an aching void.

Someone murmured something of farewell and he could not echo it, getting only partway through some words before his voice became a whistle through a crack in the world. He had wanted to say simply goodbye goodbye, but it came out why why? and he did not know why at all. Then the captain pressed a bunch of flowers into his hand and he tossed them after the ashes. The boat slowly circled the floating flowers and he could not take his eyes off them and that was all there was.

The next day on the big screen he watched the black box being inserted into a Searcher craft.

Some commentator spoke with grave excitement. Arno made a little speech. It launched and he felt a pang at the brave plume of rocket exhaust. Cheering. At least n.o.body pounded him on the back.

What had she said in that last hour? First, a pained I can't go on like this I can't go on like this.

Before he could speak, she had provided her own jibe.

That's what you think.

PART SIX.

ULTIMATA.

JULY.

1.

Like bad breath, Kingsley had often noted, ideology was something noticed only in others.

Even at this supreme crisis, nattering concerns of infinitesimal weight furrowed the brows of supposedly wise leaders. Here at power's proud pinnacle, the politician's aversion to risk reared above all else.

"Dr. Dart," the President said, "how can we be sure sure this will work? I have a grave responsibility here, ordering the use of nuclear warheads." this will work? I have a grave responsibility here, ordering the use of nuclear warheads."

"I should think, sir, that nothing is certain here."

"But using these weapons so near Earth, I...well..." The President let his voice trail off into the air-conditioned, enameled silence, as if to do so allowed someone to come in with a quick solution to his grave dilemma.

Sorry, not getting off so easily this go. Kingsley smiled slightly as the occasion seemed to demand. "We hope to short out some of the flowing currents in the vicinity of the black hole. The thing's a giant circuit, really-a 'h.o.m.opolar generator,' in the physics jargon."

A German general from European Unified Command said sternly, "These are the very best warheads, Mr. President."

"Ah, I'm sure," the worried politician said, his eyes moving from side to side as if seeking a way out. The idea of having all allies present-to spread the responsibility and thus risk, Kingsley supposed-gummed up matters nicely.

"Surely, the quality of arms is not the issue," Kingsley said.

The general said smoothly, absolutely right on cue, "We have every a.s.surance of success."

"The Eater comprises an immensely complex balance of forces, utilizing gravitational, magnetic, and kinetic energy stores. It vaguely resembles the region near a pulsar-a rotating, highly magnetized neutron star, that is."

"It's like a star?" the President asked, as if this would simplify his problem. He had seen stars, after all.

"The region around it is. The Russian term for a black hole once was"-a nod at the New Russian Premier-"'frozen star,' because seen from outside, a collapsing ma.s.s appears to stop imploding at a certain point. It hangs up, its infall seeming to halt. The star fades from our view like a reddening Cheshire cat, leaving only its grin-that is, its gravitational attraction."

"No light, just gravity?" the President asked. He was a bright man, but he had lived in a world in which only what other people thought mattered. The physical world was just a bare stage. Techno-goodies and a.s.sorted abstract wonders came occasionally in from stage left, altering the action mostly by adding prizes to the unending human compet.i.tion that was really the point of it all.

"In France, the equivalent phrase trou noir trou noir has obscene connotations, so 'frozen star' would be better," a woman from the State Department added unhelpfully. has obscene connotations, so 'frozen star' would be better," a woman from the State Department added unhelpfully.

The President was a practiced ignorer; while nodding, he did not take his eyes from Kingsley. "These maps of it, it looks like a kind of interstellar octopus with magnetic arms."

"Not a bad description," Kingsley allowed.

"I can't see how we can kill an octopus without having to chop off its legs," the President said.

"Kill the head," Kingsley said. "The legs are secured by the accretion disk, plus those anch.o.r.ed directly in the black hole itself."

"I see," the President said. "We try to get at this little disk it carries around."

"More that the disk carries the hole, sir. The hole is just a singularity, a gravitational sink, nothing more. The essence of the Eater lies in the magnetic structures erected using the accretion disk as a foundation. If we can shake that foundation, we can damage the great house the Eater has built upon it."

"I understand," the President said in a tone conveying admirably that he did not.

"More precisely, my point is that we cannot solve the pulsar problem, even after half a century of trying. On the face of it, a reliable model of the black hole's inner regions-and their functions-is impossible."

"Then I don't think I can authorize-"

"But you must!" the Secretary of State broke in. "The consequences of not following through-"

"These are our our weapons and delivery systems," the President shot back, showing why he was President. weapons and delivery systems," the President shot back, showing why he was President.