Eater. Part 5

2.

She could remember drinking coffee to stay awake and keep working; now she needed it to wake up at all.

Running mostly on caffeine, Channing puttered around in her home office, immersed in cyberspatial bliss: sleek modern desk the size of a tennis court; ergonomic chair that was better than a shiatsu ma.s.sage-and cheaper; picture window on the Pacific (today looking anything but); overstuffed leather chaise where she spent far too much time recouping; big tunnel skylight leading up to a turquoise tropical sky.

Self-respect demanded that she not work in pajamas. That left a lot of room in a vast sartorial wasteland, from T-shirts and khaki to turtlenecks down to jeans, running shorts, and tanks. All those were off the menu if she was going to do a visual conference with anybody, in which case she needed at least a decent frilly blouse, say, or even a full dress suit-top only needed, of course, since her camera had a carefully controlled field of view. She had heard of the new image managers that touched up your face as you spoke, smoothing out lines and wrinkles and even black eyes if you wanted. To order up one on the Net would be quick, easy to install...and the vanity of it would pester her inner schoolmarm for weeks. Nope, let 'em see the truth. That's what science is about, right? Why not treat scientists the same way Nope, let 'em see the truth. That's what science is about, right? Why not treat scientists the same way?

Today something clingy, island-soft, and cool. In blue, it cheered her.

She had liked working at home the first month, despised it thereafter. After all, "I work at home" carried the delicate hint that you were in fact just about unemployed, or downsized out of the action, at the fringe of the Real World.

So she tried to be systematic. No distractions, that was the trouble. After years working at the Center, it was hard to get by with no coffee break, water cooler chat, endless meetings with clandestine notes pa.s.sed ridiculing the speaker, business lunches, the sheer simple humanity of primates making a go of it together.

Work at home and you could never quite leave it. Slump onto the couch at nine at night when Benjamin was on a trip, all ready to kick back and veg out like any deserving, stressed adult...and down there at the end of the hall lurked the reproachful glimmer of the desk lamp. It was hard to walk down there and turn it off and walk back to a sitcom without checking the e-mail or looking at tomorrow's calendar, especially since its first screen was the latest selection from Studm.u.f.fins of Science Studm.u.f.fins of Science.

She suspected her social skills, honed in the labyrinths of NASA and the NSF, were atrophying. So she did the next best thing, first off in the morning: answer vital e-mail, delete most without answering, and look over her notes. This kept her in a sort of abstract cyber-society.

The more traditional Net temptations no longer carried their zest. No point in doing an Ego Surf on her name; it showed up only on historical mesh sites now. Her Elvis Year, the time of popularity, was now long gone, back when shuttle missions made you a pseudo-celeb among some of the Internet tribes.

Since then she had been happier, more satisfied, steadily getting more obscure. Funny thing about contentment, some years just got lost. Seen it, done it, can't recall most of it Seen it, done it, can't recall most of it.

Through those dimly recalled years, she had been happier with Benjamin than she probably had any right to be, and now that it was nearly over, to review it all seemed pointless. There were parts of the play she would have rewritten, especially the dialogue. Somehow, despite all her theories and ambitions, she still regretted not having children. The career had seemed more important, and maybe it still was to her, but regrets don't listen to theories. There were plenty of roads not taken and no maps.

She finished her e-mail and looked over the work she was doing on spectral a.n.a.lysis. The data pouring into the Center needed careful attention and she had been pitching in, giving the mult.i.tude of optical line profiles a thorough scrutiny. She popped the most puzzling ones up on her big screen and ran a whole suite of numerical codes, sniffing around. This took two hours and much intricate tedium. Still, the repet.i.tion was soothing, somehow: Zen Astrophysics. She was feeling the slow ebbing fatigue she knew so well when a clear result finally surfaced.

Three optical lines emitted from the intruder came out looking decidedly odd: each was split into two equal peaks. These were not the Doppler shifts they had spotted earlier. They were much smaller, imposed on the Doppler peaks themselves.

There are very few ways an atom can emit radiation at two very closely s.p.a.ced intervals. The most common occurs if the atom is immersed in a magnetic field. Then its energy would depend upon whether its electrons aligned with the field or against it.

These three splittings she had pulled out of the noise, imposing several different observations from several different 'scopes. And they led to a surprising result: the magnetic field values needed to explain these up-and-down shifts were huge, several thousand times the Earth's field.

"Good grief," she muttered to herself, instantly suspicious.

Most amazing results were mistakes. She burned another hour making sure this one was not.

Then she sat and looked at the tiny twin peaks and liked knowing that Benjamin would be thrilled by it. The give-and-take with the others at the Center, especially the Gang of Four, was great fun, but his reaction was still the crucial pleasure for her.

Abruptly she remembered her first experience of astronomy, as a little girl. Camping out, she had awakened after midnight, faceup. There they were There they were. Even above the summer's heat, the stars were immensely cold. They glittered in the wheeling crystal dark, at the end of a span she could not imagine without dread. High, hard, hanging above her in a tunnel longer than humans could comprehend.

When she had first felt them that way, she had dug her fingers into the soft warm gra.s.s and held on held on-above a yawning abyss she felt in her body as both wonderful and terrible. Impossible to ignore.

She had not realized until years later how that moment had shaped her.

She took a break, stretched, felt the tiredness fall away a little, and glanced out a window. From the abstract astrophysical to the humid neighborhood, all in one lungful of moist air.

It was so easy to forget that she dwelled in what most people regarded as the nearest Earthly parallel to heaven. The volcanic soil was rich, lying beneath ample rains and sun. Irrigated paddies gave taro's starchy roots, which made poi poi when mashed. There were ginger and berries, mango, guava, Java plum, and of course bananas. The candlenut tree gave oily brown nuts, which, strung together, burned to give hours of flickering light. The sheer usefulness of candlenuts to humans seemed like an argument from design for a G.o.d-made world, customized to smart primates. But it was also a paradise with mosquitoes and lava flows-counterarguments. Well, she could settle the argument about G.o.d and paradise within a year. Probably less, the doctors said in their cagey way. when mashed. There were ginger and berries, mango, guava, Java plum, and of course bananas. The candlenut tree gave oily brown nuts, which, strung together, burned to give hours of flickering light. The sheer usefulness of candlenuts to humans seemed like an argument from design for a G.o.d-made world, customized to smart primates. But it was also a paradise with mosquitoes and lava flows-counterarguments. Well, she could settle the argument about G.o.d and paradise within a year. Probably less, the doctors said in their cagey way.

Her fatigue evaporated. The man she had been thinking of now for days was coming up the path.

There were Englishmen and then there were quintessential Englishmen, the types everyone expected to meet and never did. All had their points, in her experience, except maybe the ones whose accents were pasted on and covered over sentiments as soft as sidewalk. There was the jolly fellow who had many friends who would surely stand him a drink, all unfortunately out of the room just now. There was the erudite type who knew more about Shakespeare than anybody and so never went to see anything modern. He was better than the lit'ry one who kept rubbing his foot against your calf under the table while he wondered very earnestly what you did think of that recent novel, really? She liked the slim, athletic engineery types who were modest about their feats and never spoke of them but could fix a balky engine or conjugate a French verb, often simultaneously. They were even good in bed, though she got tired of the modesty because in the end it was fake, a social mannerism, a cla.s.s signature.

The Englishman coming up the path from the driveway was none of these, but he did have that Brit habit of knowing an awful lot about the right subjects. He had known a lot about politics when people thought it mattered, was by his own description "infrared" until it became clear that the left was truly dead, and even recently could tell you the names of which ministers voted for what measure. He applied the same acuity to the currents of astronomy. Now he was just as sure of himself as ever, his instincts having carried him quite handily to the top. She felt that she should see him as something more than a somewhat scrawny man in a green suit badly wrinkled by the tropical damp.

She greeted him at the door with "Kingsley, what a surprise," though she had been half-expecting him and they both seemed to know that.

"Thought I'd drop by, was on my way to look at a flat."

They went into the s.p.a.cious, sunlit living room and she sank a little too quickly onto a rattan couch. The trades stirred the wind chimes and she remembered to offer iced tea, which he gratefully accepted, drinking half of the gla.s.s straight off. She was infinitely glad that she had chosen the clingy blue dress, though did not let herself dwell on why. Best to keep things on a conversational level, certainly. He was being unusually quiet, getting by with a few compliments about the house, so- "You're planning on staying for a while, then?" she prodded.

"I can put aside the Astronomer Royal business for a bit. If I am to be something of a scientific shepherd, I should be where things happen. I think it inevitable, given our experience of the last few days."

"Ummm. Lately, experience is something I never seem to get until just after I need it."

His face clouded and she could see he had been trying to keep this a strictly professional discussion. Well, too bad; she was feeling fragile and human now, and not very astrophysical after a morning of it.

After a pause, he said, "I'm so sorry about your condition."

"Oh Lord, Kingsley, I wasn't fishing for sympathy. I just meant that this intruder has taken me by surprise in a way I did not think possible anymore. I like like it. Keeps me guessing." it. Keeps me guessing."

She half-opened her mouth to bring up the magnetic field splittings, then decided to let Benjamin be the first. After all, she thought with a sudden wry turn of mind, Kingsley had been the first in an earlier, important way that Benjamin had probably always suspected.

"Sorry, um, again," he said lamely.

She felt a burst of warmth at this c.h.i.n.k in the Astronomer Royal's armor. "You can just move here immediately?"

He smiled grimly. "My home situation is not the best. Angelica and I are separated, so I might just as well be here."

"Now it's my turn to be sorry."

"It's been coming for some time, years really."

"She's a brilliant woman," Channing said guardedly. Friends with marital strife were tricky; some wanted you to slander their mates, like a weird sort of cheerleader.

A wobbly smile. "You've forgotten her mean side, I fear."

"Funny, I don't remember being absentminded," she said, hoping the weak joke would get him off the subject. He plainly did not want to go there, yet some portion of him did; a familiar pattern with divorces, she had found.

He laughed dutifully. "Tell me about your condition. I truly want to know."

"Bad, getting worse. A cancer they barely have the name for."

"I thought we had cracked the problem down at the cellular level by using an entire array of treatments."

"Oh, drugs help. I do well with what they call 'selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.' I take a whole alphabet's worth of them. Endless chemical adjustments known only by their acronyms, since no human could remember their true names-or want to."

He was regaining some of his composure, sitting on a stool and sipping. His voice recovered some of the High Oxbridge tones as he said, "Recalls, from my random reading, a line from Chekhov. 'If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.' As true in the twenty-first century as the nineteenth."

She shrugged. "I muddle through, to use a Brit expression."

"What was that old saying of yours? 'Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts.' Quite so." He actually chuckled at this obscure mathematical pun, or else was a far better actor than he had been.

"Lately, the imaginary has been more fun."

"That reminds me of one of your sayings. 'I don't get even, I get odder.' Quite Channing Channing, I used to think. Good to know you're still that way, that this d.a.m.ned thing hasn't..."

"Snuffed out one part of me at a time?" She might as well be up front about it. "That is the way it feels sometimes."

A sudden stark expression came onto his face and he said nothing. She said soothingly, "I plan on living forever, Kingsley. So far, so good."

"I wish I had your, well, calm."

"It may be plain old exhaustion."

"No, you had it the other day, leading us all by our noses on that deceleration calculation. Energetic calm."

She could see that he meant it and thanked him warmly. "You've changed some, too."

He shrugged. "It is famously easier to get older than wiser."

"I have a lot of trust in your judgment."

He grinned. "You showed good judgment two decades ago, dumping me for Benjamin."

"I did not not 'dump' you. I got the distinct impression that you were more interested in astronomy than in me.' 'dump' you. I got the distinct impression that you were more interested in astronomy than in me.'

"Well, of course," he said quite innocently, then laughed at the baldness of the truth. "That is, I was a monomaniac then."

"Would Angelica say anything has changed?"

"Good point. Probably not."

"You weren't going to change, and Benjamin was what I wanted, anyway. Not that it wasn't fun..." She put a lot into the drawn-out last word.

He said seriously, "Yes, it certainly was."

They sat for a long, silent moment. The wind chimes sang merrily and the soft air caressed them both, a tangy sea scent filling the room as the trade winds built. She let the moment run, something she would not have done until recently. She relaxed into the sweet odors of plumeria and frangipani, both lush now in her garden. A few years before, she had not even known their names. The garden itself was a recent hobby, all due to the d.a.m.ned disease, which she fought by concentrating upon the present. Zen Dying.

Then Kingsley began taking his tie off, fingers prying the tight little knot loose. "I must remember where I am. Going to be here awhile, perhaps should buy one of those loud flowery shirts."

"And shorts."

"The world is not ready for the sight of my knees."

"Or mine anymore."

"Not so, they were and remain one of your best features."

"Say things like that a dozen more times and I'll get bored."

"I'd love the opportunity," he said brightly and then stopped, as if he saw which way this was headed. Visibly he sobered. A pause. Then he spoke carefully, so that she could hear all the commas in his sentences.

"I wanted to come here, in part, because I don't want to be overheard."

"That I can guarantee." She wondered at his sudden mood shift. "Prettier here than in that office the Center gave you, even if it is nice and big."

"I fear that the Center is not secure. Or at least, as I understand people like Victoria Martinez, I cannot be absolutely sure that my office is not eavesdropped upon." He looked at her edgily, as if this were being impolite. She liked his English delicate hesitation. "Already. But within a few days, almost certainly."

"That's also why you're looking for an apartment."

"Precisely. This is going to be ever so much larger and it is going to last quite a while."

"Once we've identified this new object-oh, I see." He made a tent of his hands and peered through them at the languid paradise out the window, like a prisoner contemplating an impossible escape. "I was shaken by Benjamin's calculation. His implication was clear."

"Martinez spoke of danger-"

"Only the obvious deduction."

Channing realized she had nowhere to go in this conversation without betraying Benjamin's own ideas. She stalled with "But no one in the room mentioned..."

"That obviously there are only two ways to reconcile his numbers."

He looked at her searchingly and she had to suppress a smile at this coy game. Might as well play, though; he still had the old sly charm, d.a.m.n him. "Either the thing's pa.s.sing through a region of the outer solar system where the number of iceteroids is very high for some reason, or..." He let it hang there for a long moment and then gave up. "Or the thing is somehow seeking out lumps of ice and rock and processing them."

"Like a starship decelerating."

He slapped his knees, the sound scaring off a mynah bird from the windowsill, its quick white flash of wings a blur. "But my own point, that the gamma rays would kill anything-"

"A solid argument. So there's that pesky third choice."

"Third?"

She had to admit, he looked genuinely puzzled. "None of the above."

"But when you say 'starship,' you mean-"

"Something that flies between stars, period."

"Something crewed, even by silicon chip minds, would quite clearly still be vulnerable to-"

"Give it up, Kingsley. It's in a category we haven't thought of yet."

He fretted for a moment, his hatchet face with its large eyes drawing her gaze downward to a mouth that stirred restlessly, yet would not shape words. The default style in astronomy was to explain a new observation by a.s.sembling a brew of known ingredients-types of stars, orbiting or colliding in various ways, and emitting radiation in known channels, using familiar mechanisms. This worked nearly all the time. Kingsley had used it with speed and ingenuity decades before, explaining gamma-ray bursters quite handily with a little imagination and detailed calculations. Kingsley habitually worked in this mode, his papers couched in a style whose unstated message was to show, not just an interesting application of impressive techniques to a known problem, but also that he was a good deal better at doing this than his readers. Now his mouth worked and twisted with his dislike of working outside this lifelong mode.

"Then you two are thinking along the same lines as I."