Eater. Part 32

8.

Into the living tree of event-s.p.a.ce.

At the ragged red rim of the magnetosphere, she felt the first crackling electrical discharges, alive with writhing forks. With her all-eyed view, she could see the fretful working of the magnetic intelligence. It reminded her of many natural patterns: pale blue frost flowers of growing crystals. The oxygen-rich red in bronchi of lungs. Whorls of streams, plunging ever forward into fractal turbulence.

Pretty-and quite deadly. With an agonized shriek, one of her leading Searchers flared into a cinder.

Ripples of intense Alfven waves told her that the Eater was sensing/thinking/moving. All those functions were linked in its world. The cybertechs had explained all this in their arcane lingo. To her it was not dry theory but experience experience-the restless slither of magnetic fields around her like a supple fluid.

She was gaining a sense of it, an intuition fed by her swimming through the invisible thing-that-thought. How strange her former brain now seemed! She had caught portions of the Eater's thought and now could see human intelligence anew. Compress a life onto a sheet, paper-thin. Crumple it. Stuff it into a bony carrying case. With that, primates had evolved to store a hundred billion neurons, all firing like matchheads in a webbed array still only poorly understood.

No more, for her. Now she was a slab of silicon, being mated to-thunk-a cylinder of death.

The attachment complete, she dove.

She vectored a swarm of missiles into the outer swelling of the magnetosphere. To her, the Eater was an enormous blue blossom of spiderweb-fine lines, each snarled with innumerable knots.

Time to go to work. She began the attack upon the magnetic equilibrium. Deftly she guided nuclear-tipped plasma bursts to the spot where the fields could be forced to reconnect.

Behind her, an enormous cloud of bright barium exploded into billows. The solar wind blew around the Eater, fended off by its magnetic pressure. The beast was like a small planet, defending itself against the solar bath. But the barium was far denser than the thin wind. She watched the Eater retract field lines, avoiding the p.r.i.c.kly energy of the high plasma flux.

"You're on it!" Benjamin's excited voice came.

"I always wanted to fly a fighter against the fearsome enemy," she said. "This is better." To show him, she did a tight turn, airy and graceful on her ion plumes.

"The package made it?"

"It's riding on my right."

"Try the other methods first. That's only a last-chance backup."

He was trying to keep his voice level, businesslike, but it wouldn't work with her. She could read him. That was the downside of using Benjamin as intermediary, but Arno probably hadn't thought of that. Benjamin was supposed to steady her up here, and he did. And it worked both ways, thank goodness. She wondered if she had ever loved him more, back when she had a real body to express it.

"Things tough down there?"

"It got the house."

"What?!"

"The electromagnetic induction from that field loop slamming into the island. It blew the transformer at the end of our street. The fire spread all the way to Hakahulua Street. When I got there, the house was just smoldering black stuff."

Her heart sank. All gone All gone-"d.a.m.n!"

"It's killed a lot of people, some in our neighborhood. Pacemakers went out. There were a lot of effects n.o.body can explain."

She started to cry and the wrenching sobs were utterly real, coming up from her nonexistent lungs and through a clenched throat. She let the spasms run. Part of her agonized. The other basked in the fleshy feel of living. Mind-body again.

"I...G.o.d. I guess I was never going to go there again...but..."

"Yeah. I'll miss it, too."

"Everything we had..."

"Not quite. After you...left...I took all the photo alb.u.ms, our wedding stuff, and put it in a safe deposit box."

A gale of joy blew through her. "Wonderful!"-and she was back aloft again, bird swooping, spirit rising.

"Whoa, girl, tune it."

"Oops, my mood swings are going over the top."

"You have reason to."

She made herself slow down. No fighting the body, no intellect arm wrestling with hormones. She simply concentrated and the gusty spirit blew away, leaving a precise, a.n.a.lytical glaze over her mind. Not that it would hold for long, she wagered.

"Ah!" A sharp crack in his background sounds. "We're getting heavy weather here on top of all that. I-"

"The Eater's sending that."

"What? How?"

"I can sense it from here. It's acting like a voltage source, driving the global electrical circuit. Currents running everywhere up here."

"Why's it after us?"

"It must've figured out where our command centers are."

"That fits." He grimaced. "We just lost even the supposedly secure links with Washington."

Alarm resounded in her like a hollow gong. "You're getting cut off?"

"Every other channel died hours ago. We've got only the antennae here, that's it."

"They're locked on the satellites below me?"

"Those few are our only targets now. It's eaten everything else in the sky."

"If you get blanked out-"

"Yeah." A strumming, pregnant silence hung between them. "It seems to be making a big ionized layer right over the island."

"Putting a conducting plate between me and you."

"So far, it's failing. Feels like Zeus throwing thunderbolts down here."

"I've got to do something."

"Operations says they don't have all the Searchers within range yet."

She fumed. "I'll go with what I have."

"No, don't. Look, the black hole theorists, they've got some new input for you. I'm sending it on a sidebar channel-"

And here it blossomed in her spherical view: a 3-D color computer simulation of the black hole itself. An orange oblate spheroid, spinning h.e.l.lishly fast. A sedate sphere, fattened by its own rotation until it grew an ocean-blue bloat at the equator.

Benjamin said, "Point is, the ergosphere-that's the midrift bulge, in blue-has zones with so much rotational energy, you can fly through them safely."

"Oh sure."

"Do I detect sarcasm?"

"No, realism."

"They're saying you could bank in over the accretion disk, drop your donation, and then veer in. That'll give you the energy to escape."

"All this at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light."

"You don't sound convinced."

"Do you?"

"They say it's your only chance."

"And what order of magnitude would those odds be?"

"Not great, right."

"Well, send up the trajectory, anyway. I'll log it in."

"Remember, there are relativistic effects this close in-"

"Yeah, so I'll have slowed time to deal with."

"And it'll help you a little. Give you more time to execute the maneuver."

"And catch up on my reading. Did you know they stored the whole G.o.dd.a.m.ned text of War and Peace War and Peace in my buffer?" in my buffer?"

"Huh? Why in the world?"

"Something to do with b.u.t.tressing my long term memory."

His face clouded and he obviously struggled for words. "Look, this is the only way, they say..."

"I register. I'm not really what I once was to you. I can't be."

"You are are."

"I'm as much as I can be, that's all."

"Enough for me."

"I'll try to make it back out."

"I...guess that's all I can ask for."

His face broke into rasters, lost color. "I'm having trouble with the link here-"

"The lightning, it's-" His lips moved, but no sound came through.

"Benjamin, don't-"

A spray of gray static showered across his image. Then that froze...stuttered...and was gone.

"Benjamin!"

She coasted alone in a suddenly eerie silence. Alone.

She close-upped the globe below. Hawaii lay in view, just emerging from the dawn line. Angry blue-gray clouds shrouded the Big Island. She could make out the forks of descending electricity. Not just local lightning, but the larger discharges as well: sprites, the vast thin glowing sheets that climbed down from the ionosphere.

Alone. Shepherd to several hundred Searchers. Mother hen to an egg that rode in its cylindrical majesty beneath her tail.

She had not thought she could carry out the complexity of all this by herself. Operations had agreed.

Now she would have to try. Preparation would-here her subself, full of calculation, provided a fast estimate-take at least another day. Then she could begin.

Without Benjamin. The leaden realization dragged at her. At the back of her mind, something else was vying for her attention. Presiding over her inner self was like keeping an unruly grammar school cla.s.s in order...

A quick blip of information squirted through her filters.

A message, digitized Eater-style, but riding to her on the magnetosonic waves she had slowly learned to decipher.

FROM YOUR EXODUS 23:19:"NO MAN SHALL SEE ME AND LIVE."

"Oh yeah?" she muttered to herself. But it chilled her all the same.

PART EIGHT.

A HEAVEN OF SORTS.