Eater. Part 17

2.

Benjamin did not want to go for even a short walk on the beach, but she insisted. The day's events had been unsettling, as usual, and he felt the old island softness creep into him as they made their way through palms and onto the broad, warm sand. The sunset was a spectacular streaked composition in purple and orange. She could barely manage making her way in the white sand.

"When will we be able to see it as a naked eye object?" she asked, gazing up.

"Inside a week, I believe, if its deceleration continues as is."

"Should be pretty."

He turned to her suddenly, back to the sunset. "Look, I can step down from running things, spend these days together. Here on the beach, as much as we can."

"Your heart wins out over your head," she said abstractly, gazing at the fading fingers of deepening red that arced over them.

"Sure, sure, for you." They embraced and he felt a warm wave of relief. "I'll see Arno tomorrow, quit-"

"No, I need you to talk to him, but not about that."

He blinked, seeing something strange come into her face. "But..."

Fervently she grasped his arms, hugged him, stepped back. "I want to go."

"'Go'? Where? What-" Then he saw it.

"Upload me."

"That's...that's-" His throat tightened painfully.

"Crazy, as crazy as what's already happening."

He scrambled for rational reasons. "It's untried, chancy-"

"It's not to evade death," she said in a straightforward, businesslike voice. "I know that a copy is not the original. I'll be gone, as far as the little 'me' that rides around behind my eyes. And I'm not going to discuss whether an uploaded 'person' has free will, either-philosophy doesn't ring my chimes, not now. I've got another reason, one you can argue for with Arno and the others."

"If you think I'll-"

"Hear me out, lover. I want to control a Searcher s.p.a.cecraft, fly it into the Eater. They need onboard guidance to do that. I can be uploaded into a control module."

"Not like those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in the tropics." He was trying to see what drove her to this, but his mind didn't seem to be working very well. Did she think some digital replica was like becoming one of those sculptures, the alien ones?

She abandoned the business voice and pleaded nakedly. "I can help, even after I'm gone."

"And you are an astronaut," he said lamely. "You'll get back into s.p.a.ce, sort of."

"I hadn't thought of it that way." She hugged him.

He recoiled from her grasp, confused. "You're saying, 'Kill me early'? No."

"It is is my life." my life."

"No!"

She reached out with a soft, tentative hand. "Something of me will come through. Maybe."

He looked at her trembling lips and kissed them. It was wrenchingly hard to resist her. "But I want every remaining moment with the real real you, d.a.m.n it." you, d.a.m.n it."

Channing picked up a handful of sand and let it run through her hands, trickling into the pa.s.sing breeze like an hourgla.s.s. "Time runs out for all of us. I just want to control my end."

"But this method, it's bound to wear you down. You could easily die sooner."

"Saving what, a few weeks of wasting away? No-I want win-win, remember? This way, we get the Searcher swarm to work better. And I get...something n.o.body's done."

"They don't know what the h.e.l.l they're doing with this stuff, it's just parts of technology slammed together, it's..." He ground down into silence.

"I've read the reports, preliminary and sketchy but promising." Back to the business voice, crisp and NASA all the way. "They get lots out of the cerebral cortex. Trouble is, reading the deeper parts of the brain."

"But they won't capture you you."

"The body won't be worth much. I'm a walking ruin already."

He had never liked her talking about herself this way, especially not the body he had learned to wors.h.i.+p in so many ways. "I can't believe they can read you like some neuronal book."

"All of me is beautiful and valuable," she said, tone now light and brittle. "Even the ugly, stupid, and disgusting parts."

Was part of him drawn to the idea of giving her some form of digital immortality? A last flight?

Confused, his mouth working with unrelieved strain, he turned and walked on. Without them noticing, the sun had glimmered away and the sky slid into purple darkness.

3.

At dawn she was weak with a numbing hollowness in her bones that cried out to be left alone. A separate child-self, wanting only the comfort it remembered from an impossibly distant time.

Channing gave it a few minutes to get used to the idea, and then very slowly and silently got out of bed. Going out through the kitchen, she grabbed a banana for energy. Opened slowly enough, the back door did not creak. In shadowy silence, the car started suddenly and she got out of the driveway before he could come running out, in case he woke. She drove up the hill behind one of the behemoth jobs from the cheap-gas decades, its plate proudly announcing VANZILLA. A hastily made sign on it carried the logo of a news network and she tromped down, enjoying the surge of acceleration as she shot around it.

Arno wasn't in yet. Summoning more of what appeared to be her last energies, she snagged a m.u.f.fin and coffee and found Kingsley. He wore the same clothes as yesterday. He even sat and listened to her whole case, his fingers steepled before him as if he were wors.h.i.+pping. Amy Major came in, looking equally bedraggled, touched Kingsley's sleeve, then had the good sense to leave.

At last she was done, her voice trailing away before she could make herself frame a naked plea.

"I guessed yesterday," he said from behind his fingers.

"Then you'll support me?"

"I can't imagine not doing so. But what I feel does not matter, surely, compared to Benjamin."

"He's thinking it over."

"You bring it up before your own husband has-"

"There's no time."

He shook his head. "I cannot manage my personal feelings and give you reliable advice at the same time."

"Look, you've faced my death. I'm going going."

"But certainly you cannot expect me or Benjamin to hasten that."

"Think of it as an a.s.sisted suicide with a big upside."

He finally broke down then, his facade crumbling. He bent slowly over his desk and his head bowed until it rested on a yellow writing pad. She let him sit like that, part of her wanting to comfort him and the other wanting to let the moment work upon him, in a cool and bloodless way that came back to her from somewhere in her years devoted to her own momentum. She had always had this streak, a compact, composed sense of self that let her know when, for example, she could let a man go, send him back for a fluff and fold while she went on with her life. She needed that now, and so she used it, letting the silence run on because it was running her way.

In time it worked. Kingsley had plenty to say, his fine long sentences purling out as she let him work his way to an understanding of what he would have to do to help her. But the cusp moment had pa.s.sed in that silence and now he was the old Kingsley, put back together with hardly any of the cracks showing.

"I am of course aware of your tragic situation," Arno said by way of preamble, "and that knowledge led me to consider the matter in detail."

He was in his familiar perch on the edge of his desk. Here came his patented warm, understanding, yet commanding smile. "I like the idea. As you argue, this will give us a 'digital presence' of higher order than anything available in existing Searcher craft."

Benjamin was there by this time, still early morning. In the caverns of the expanded Center, there were no windows-for security reasons-so she readily lost sense of time. The stretches of memory lapse and simple stupor added to the effect. I'll be timeless pretty soon now, one way or the other I'll be timeless pretty soon now, one way or the other, she mused. Then she snapped awake, aware that she was drifting again, right in the middle of Arno's speech.

He was dwelling on the technical details, on up to the grand questions. Would her simulation be bound by the craft's programming? No, though the philosophical issue of whether a simulation behaved like a person was beyond anybody, at their primitive level of understanding. And so on.

She saw in Benjamin's grim, set jaw his stifled anger at how she had outflanked him, going around to Kingsley. Well, she would make it up to him. Something special, great meal, wine, a Victoria's Secret evening, the works Something special, great meal, wine, a Victoria's Secret evening, the works. Then she blinked and knew she was beyond that, too, thoroughly out of it now, no body worth bothering with anymore. Or mind, either, to judge from her slippery hold on events.

Kingsley was speaking now, and Benjamin was arguing, and it was all under gla.s.s for her. Kingsley arguing that Benjamin was "too close to the issue," then some military types coming into Arno's office, earnest expressions turning to blank-faced when they realized she, the one the one, was there. Kingsley's clashes with Benjamin had been personal, bitter in their tone, and she let all that sweep away from her. Pieces of the discussion came to her from the dozen men in the room.

"...barely technically possible..."

"...research in this area is still crudely developed..."

"...U Agency wishes to sequester her data..."

"...crash basis, can get the black box up to orbital rendezvous within a day..."

One of the Air Force generals she had seen interviewed on 3-D sat nearby and said, looking right at her, "The whole world is on a war footing, after all-the first interstellar war."

She roused herself to quote a famous bureaucratic maxim. "You can get great things done as long as you don't have to get credit for it." Then she sank back and let them try to figure out what it meant.

She saw, from an airy distance, that she had slipped free of ambition, a clean escape. No longer did the fires of desire for fame or success burn in her; they were banked forever. Now much of her earlier striving seemed pointless, even contemptible. She could be a spectator now. But even in the End Game, as chess players called it, the old astronaut ambition governed.

Arno again, speaking to her. "We all respect your contribution. It is a very valiant thing you do, for all humanity."

She gave him a long look that should have struck several centimeters out of his back. "No heroics. I'm doing this to do do it." it."

Then the Air Force and NASA types came in and she tried to hold on to the thread but failed. Keep quiet, so they don't know Keep quiet, so they don't know, her good sense told her. Even that wasn't easy.

Somehow the big stuff went by smoothly, but she snagged on vexing details. One of the NASA astronaut contingent described how the control systems of the Searcher craft would be refitted to accept her commands-or rather, the digital "her." He outlined how this would be the ultimate in compact control systems, "...manned, I mean crewed," with a nervous glance at Channing.

She said slowly and with shaky clarity, even though she was not really sure she was right, "The word 'manned' comes from the Latin for hand, I believe, as in 'manipulate.' Nothing s.e.xist about it."

Everyone smiled and she saw that they were on her side, as much as anyone could be. Comforting. But Benjamin was stern and dire, his big-eyed gaze full of fear and confusion.

4.

"Agencies despise uncertainties, old fellow," Kingsley said, "but we are scientists and know that knowledge is based upon doing experiments that can fail."

Benjamin sensed that this was a set speech, well honed in the corridors of power, but let it do its work on him, anyway. Kingsley had a way of letting you in on the secrets of command. This last sentence filled him with hope. "You're saying they aren't going to go for her idea?"

"No, I am saying that Arno is going against the instincts of those above him. Our only chance lies in how rattled they are up there."

Benjamin's elation fizzled away. He might as well admit how he actually felt, even if it was to Kingsley. He could hardly say this to Channing: "I'm against it, y'know."

Absolutely expressionless: "I suspected as much."

"Yeah?" Somehow Kingsley's razor precision made him use sloppy Americanisms in return. "I...don't want her to suffer any more. This thing..."

"It won't truly be her."

"But it'll be like like her so much." her so much."

"A copy is not the original."

"If they map her, though, there'll be two of her at once." His confusion welled up in him like bile.

"The Air Force types say they cannot realistically fly it, her, before the, ah, original is...gone."

"So there'll be no direct comparison."

Kingsley nodded. "If it works at all."