Eater. Part 8

"Kingsley handled the public announcement very well, but it's a stopgap."

"He can keep on handling it, for all I care." Benjamin had found the whole press conference an anxiety squeeze from start to finish. He had not mastered the art of saying only enough to cover the subject, avoiding any speculation even when badgered.

So it had been no surprise when Martinez gave Kingsley the spokesman job. He had downplayed any danger, though of course the mainstream reporters leaped on that immediately, implying with sneers and eyebrows yet another "cover-up." Yet somehow, with a few quiet prebriefings and some postbriefing hospitality to various opinion-setters, Kingsley had managed to get just the right media angle: huge global interest, but so far, just curiosity.

"It helps that there's this new water war between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Plenty of juicy footage," Channing said.

"Oh, I hadn't noticed."

"That's why he's Astronomer Royal. He timed the press conference in late afternoon, when the global news coverage was already locked up, plenty of shooting scenes ready to go."

"I hope that explains why some of the U Agency's hired-gun astronomers have been arranging to get their own private channels of information."

"How?" She had been serenely distant so far, picking at her fish, but now frowned.

"Getting their own simultaneous feeds on the Long Arm data, among others."

"A precaution?"

"Against who? Me? I can't see them worried about that."

"How can we be sure the data stays in-house?"

"We can't, not now."

"They want to have somebody on the outside checking us?"

He felt pleased that she had arrived at his conclusion. Her instincts were good for this kind of infighting, a legacy of her NASA days, whereas his had been dulled by years of routine administration.

"So what can I do?"

"Nothing. It's probably a Kingsley maneuver we don't understand yet."

"I hope so."

There had been several such. As Kingsley had warned, there were "side effects" of working with the U Agency umbrella over them. Their home and his apartment had been carefully invaded, searched, a.n.a.lyzed-purely pro forma, of course-and then just as carefully put back as they were. Their electronic records had yielded e-mail addresses, and most valuably, the system still carried the signatures of recent use. This gave the e-mail paths of Kingsley's recent messages, though even to the best of agents the system could not divulge their content; that was erased. The Agency and those over it did not realize that his leaving the e-mail tags in place was a neat way of ensuring that his correspondents would be rounded up and brought to him, to keep the lid on word of the intruder.

In this manner, he gained a few people he had not asked for, explaining that some nuance was a good idea in these matters. Kingsley also hoped that they did not catch on when, earlier, he had deliberately been rude to several bureaucratic figures, precisely to provoke this measure. Of this last touch he was openly proud; "actually Machiavellian," he termed it.

But the next day, when the two of them caught Kingsley alone for a moment and pressed him on the issue of the U Agency having separate access to incoming data, he denied any involvement. "Arno is the best of that lot, believe me," Kingsley explained, spreading his palms, face up in a gesture of openness-a little defensively, Benjamin thought.

Channing looked worried. "Then we go to Theory B."

"Which is?" Kingsley asked, sitting on the edge of his new polished teak desk. The U Agency had offered it when he decided to stay indefinitely. Not that he had any real choice, he had noted to Benjamin, and one might as well take the good with the bad in such matters.

"That they want a backup team to check us."

Kingsley nodded and Benjamin felt compelled to say, "And in case we can't do the job anymore."

Both Channing and Kingsley shot questioning looks at him. "In case we're put out of action."

"How?" Kingsley asked.

"Politically, suppose the United Nations decides to make this their party?"

"We're on American soil."

"But the United States is pretty unpopular in the Security Council over this war business," Benjamin said.

"It couldn't go that that far," Channing said. far," Channing said.

"Just a thought," Benjamin said lightly. Then, jibing, "I'm sure Kingsley has a better Theory B."

But he did not, and their conversation broke off. There were more concrete issues to think about. It was by now clear that magnetic nozzles, like those of rockets but immensely larger, had begun to flare behind the intruder. A plume jet many thousands of kilometers long now twisted and flared. Each step of their understanding was being revealed by incremental observations, science as detective work, and the entire Center staff was fitting together more parts to the puzzle daily. The Long Arm got better close-ups of the Eater as it sped inward, still slamming into more iceteroids daily. It had been barely six weeks since the first detection.

They met with Martinez and Arno later that same day to discuss moving several existing deep s.p.a.ce probes to rendezvous with the Eater for close-up study. They had at their command advanced light, unmanned s.p.a.cecraft-descendants of NASA's faster-cheaper-smaller doctrine of the 1990s, developed for computer-enhanced exploration of the solar system. a.s.sisted by ion rockets, these were the Searcher Cla.s.s s.p.a.cecraft, and to Benjamin's astonishment, Kingsley casually called up the right people at NASA and began moving them into position to intercept and study the Eater. The smell of unalloyed power was heavy in the room, though unremarked.

The afternoon waxed on. Benjamin keenly sensed the rising tension in the Center, a kind of electrical energy that he felt as he walked the corridors, listening to detailed technical conversations. A compressed tautness laced through the conversations about Janskys of measurement and arc-seconds of resolution, technical terms freighted with a gathering sense of storm.

Arno casually waved away worries that they could muster resources quickly. Channing obliquely brought up the U.N. possibility and Arno looked grim for only a fraction of a second before returning to his patented ceramic smile. "No chance," he said. Benjamin had noticed that at points of tension Arno seemed to revert to a Clint Eastwood-Gary Cooper imitation.

Still, Arno's certainty was rea.s.suring, for so little else was. Within an hour they received a gusher of data from the Arecibo radio dish, still the largest in the world. This huge array of metal held its cupped ear to the cosmos in Puerto Rico, in a high mountain bowl that swept across the sky, listening intently. Only at certain hours did its sweep include the Eater's trajectory, and so far they had heard little more than the electromagnetic hiss of the intruder's flailing jet tail. Now, though, the radio telescope picked up an intense, high-definition pulse of emission. An hour later the Eater fell below Arecibo's horizon and the Very Large Array spread across New Mexico's high plateau took up the task.

They had tracked the Eater now in great detail, adding images to the Long Arm's pictures of the Eater's inner core. Now the point was not mapping, but rather signal reception. Something highly detailed was coming from the very core of the intruder, and it made no sense.

Benjamin watched all this with a growing sense of urgency. He could scarcely ignore the obvious fact that Channing was fading as the afternoon waxed on, her eyes hollowing out and mouth seeming to grow thinner, hands trembling under the strain of work. But she refused to go home. Upon her sallow skin there came an expression of adamant energy, and she said, "I'll stay. I'll stay."

This carried a hard existential weight and he was cowed by the hard certainty in her voice. He loved this woman and sometimes he understood her in a way he could not express-to her or to himself-and he did as she wanted. He helped her settle into one of the rather luxurious new leather form-fitting chairs before the big-screen display and they watched the sliding columns of compressed data. The entire processing capability of the Center bore down on what Arecibo and the VLA had found.

"Unmistakably artificial," Kingsley was the first to say.

"A message?" Channing said with her wan yet edgy energy.

A staff specialist came in and displayed the enormous broadband complexity of the transmission and the Gang of Four plus some U Agency astrophysicists went through the data stream with him. "It's digital, encoded in a fas.h.i.+on we haven't cracked yet," the specialist said.

While they puzzled over what this might mean, Arno drew Benjamin and Kingsley aside. "Thought you might use the services of a bright cryptographer I had brought in."

"He's here?" Benjamin asked to cover his surprise.

"She, yes."

"That slim woman I asked about?" Kingsley pressed him.

"That's the one." Arno's smile had a touch of preening in it.

"You suspected we would need one, from the very first." Kingsley nodded his head ever so slightly in respect.

"Just covering all the bases."

Benjamin could see why the woman had caught Kingsley's interest, for she was quite attractive. Conversely, he wondered why he had not noticed her himself, even among the confusing crowd of new people in the Center. When distracted, one did not notice being distracted.

In short order, she broke the code; it proved to be deceptively simple. "It's frame-compressed at high speed," she announced to the jammed room. As word spread, people slipped in. Arno and his aides were so drawn into the suspense that they were not even policing the "information boundaries," as they put it.

Benjamin asked, "How about slowing the signal?"

The cryptographer looked a little irked. "We are. Here, the run is nearly finished-"

Onto the screen leaped a string of break-down interpretations. Plainly the sender had meant this to be easily read. In short order, everyone in the room saw that it was a very short message in over a hundred languages. Each language carried the same terse message. Chinese, Spanish, then third in the string was English: I DESIRE CONVERSE.

PART THREE.

A DERANGED G.o.d.

APRIL.

1.

In the moments after the revelation, Benjamin noted that scientists and U Agency types alike looked the same: jaws agape, eyes blinking in wonder, disbelief wrenching mouths askew, nostrils flared. And for once, n.o.body had anything coherent to say.

Consternation is a term far too abstract to describe the next twenty-four hours at the High Energy Astrophysics Center. The simple three words-though there were more in other languages, with many different shadings of meaning-immediately split the staff at the Center into factions.

For decades a small band of astronomers, princ.i.p.ally at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Inst.i.tute, had listened in the radio bands for signals from other civilizations. They and many others had debated the abstract principles involved in answering a message-should one be received. Most favored not answering immediately. There seemed no rush to reply, considering the huge travel times of light between stars. But with the Eater less than an hour's time delay away, that argument slid into an ethical debate. Who should speak for Earth?

Arno made no secret of his view. "We do. The whole world has fed its astronomical data here, we have the best people in the field right down the hall, and the White House has given us freedom of movement-so we do it."

Most astronomers did not feel that way. Anxiety beset them, knots meeting around the coffee urns in tight-lipped arguments. Channing stayed away from these. "The U Agency will call the shots here," she said to Benjamin in his office. "Notice that they're all behind Arno? No brooders there."

"They're hired guns," Benjamin said. He gazed at his desktop screen, where the long strings of the message glowed. "I desire converse, too, but how?"

"You're the scientific head here," Channing said softly. She felt the familiar old fatigue gliding up through her bones but pushed it down, her heart tripping with a quick, high rhythm. "Do it."

Benjamin jerked his eyes away from the screen, startled. "Me?"

"You discovered it."

"Amy did."

"Okay, bring in Amy. The discoverers get to name the object, that's standard-"

"You named it."

"-so we extend that right, say that the discoverers get to talk to it."

He chuckled, clasping his long, bony hands behind his neck and leaning back. "Don't take up a legal career. Too big a leap."

"I'm serious. That thing is moving fast and obviously it can think fast. Learning a hundred languages, just from eavesdropping?"

"An old cliche of B movies-"

"But probably right. Not answering right away, that sends it a message, too."

Benjamin looked startled again. "I suppose so, but..."

"Look, the halls are packed outside with astronomers making guesses. Suddenly n.o.body's an expert. I heard some guy floating a theory that some undetected planet is...o...b..ting the black hole, and the message is from there."

"Nonsense."

"Of course, and there'll be more like it. How could anything like a zone livable for life-forms like us survive pa.s.sage between the stars?" She snorted derisively. "No, it'll take a while to face the fact-that this is something utterly strange."

"What did its three little words mean, exactly? Converse as in conversation? Or as in the contrary?"

"It's a stilted diction, but I'll bet on conversation. It's bound to get context and syntax a little confused. Languages are species-specific, but this thing managed to make sense and even construct a simple sentence that meant something. Give it a break."

"Fine-so how do we talk to it?"

"Simply," she said simply.

"What should all of humanity say?"

"Keep it easy, just as the Eater did."

He brightened. "Maybe just 'We desire converse, too.'?"

"Who could blame you for that? It's the truth, and it gives nothing away."

"I don't know. It's an overwhelming responsibility."

She watched him work it out on his own. She felt lazy and weirdly relaxed, despite her hammering heart. There had been another appointment with Dr. Mendenham early this morning, which she had dearly wanted to skip but didn't. She had gotten up at dawn and made herself one of her crazy breakfasts to boost her spirits, fish and eggs with paprika. A treatment course of mahi-mahi should be added to the therapy regimen, she had decided. Trouble was, you thudded back down under the bland gray reality of modern medicine and all of its grisly matter-of-fact manner.

Without her noticing it, Benjamin had gotten on the phone, talking to somebody at Arecibo, his sentences sliding by her like glazed word nuggets-side lobes, milliarc-seconds, sampling time, rep rate.

She had other concerns, minor itches. The morning's treatments now irked her in myriad ways, especially her skin. Nowadays her fas.h.i.+on taste boiled down to whatever didn't itch, period. She wore hats to cover her patchy induced baldness, not caring that in some she looked like a lampshade in a brothel. She also discovered that an older woman could wear bright lipstick during the day without looking like she just had a binge with a jam jar. Or maybe everybody was just too polite to notice.

Now Benjamin was mustering people into the room and here was Kingsley, squatting down next to her, his slender face lined with concern. She put him off with a wavering sentence and shushed him into silence so that she could hear. Arno sat on a corner of Benjamin's desk, in his standard maneuver to dominate the room, straightening the seams in his standard Mancetti suit, charcoal-black today, all the while arguing quietly but intensely with one of his aides.

The meeting began. All good scientists had big egos, and the high nervousness of the room brought that out. While young, they had been outstanding at something widely admired. Brightest in their cla.s.s, smarter than anybody they knew, it was bound to go to their heads. The wiser ones outgrew it, some becoming even mildly humble before the immensity of unanswered questions facing them. Some-alas, even some of the best-never did.