Eater

by Gregory Benford

  That was it—a good meal at the Reefman, maybe even some dancing if she was up to it. He had forgotten about Amy’s objects by the time he hit the easier part of the road, the lush tropical plain that ran down to the sea.

  2

  When the radiologist abruptly stopped his mechanically friendly chatter, she knew something was wrong. Again.

  Immediately, Channing remembered when all this had started, back in the rosy dawn of time when she had been brimming with energy and going to live forever. Then she had felt the same reaction in a doctor and, in classic fashion, went through the Virtuous Girl list: Nope, never drank, smoked, didn’t use coffee or even tea, at least not much. Plenty of exercise, low-fat addict, even held her breath while walking by a coughing bus exhaust. Can’t be me, Doc!

  Then why? It’s so unfair! she had thought, then sourly saw that she was buying the Great Statistical Lie, which made you think there were no fluctuations, no mean deviations, no chance happenings in a world which her rational, fine-honed astronaut mind knew was jammed full of haphazard turns.

  So she had heard the leaden words fall from the doctor’s mouth: lumpy tumor plus invaded lymph nodes, bad blood chem, the full-course dinner.

  So okay, I’ll lose my hair. But I like hats, fine. And I can explore my inner drag queen by wearing wigs.

  The chemo doctor had said with complete confidence, “You and I are going to be good friends,” which had immediately put her guard up.

  She had gone through the predictable symptoms, items on her checklist, just like pre-mission planning. Hair loss came right to the day, two weeks after chemo. She had a little party and turned it into a piece of performance art. Atta girl! Fatigue: she was ready, with new pillows and satiny sheets; sensual sleep, the manuals whispered. Nausea was tougher: she had never grown fond of vomiting. Possible infertility?: well past that anyway. Loss of libido: definitely a problem; maybe stock up on porn movies? Weight gain: bad news. She would waddle down the street, bald and unsteady, and instead of onlookers thinking, Must be going through chemo, they’d say, “Wow, she’s really let herself go.”

  Plenty of phone calls: astronaut buddies, friends, college roommate, the support circuit—much-needed strokes. Bought a Vegas showgirl wig, stockpiled it for a late-night turn-on. Cut the hair back to a short, sassy ’do, so there wouldn’t be a total clutter when it fell out. Bought a Bible: she was shocked to find they didn’t have one in the house. Benjamin had never pretended to believe, and she supposed she didn’t either, but what if God favored those who kept up appearances? It had always been one of those things she was going to read when there was time, like Tolstoy. When she had been in orbit for three months, doing tedious experiments, she actually had started in on War and Peace because it was in the tiny station library and she had forgotten to bring anything. She had finished it because it was good, to her surprise. Okay, time for Dostoyevsky.

  Only she hadn’t, of course; too depressing. More gloomy obsessions when she had quite enough already, thank you.

  From the look on this tech’s face, maybe she wasn’t going to get another chance.

  Then, without her noticing the transition, she was with good ole Dr. Mendenham, the tech was gone, and she knew she had passed through another little time jump. She had first noted this quaint little property of her mind when she was in astronaut training. Anxiety erased short-term memory. So to get through the protracted training, she had learned to skate over her anxieties, focus-focus-focus. Only now it didn’t seem to work.

  “Lie down. I need to put my hands on you,” said one of the specialists with Mendenham.

  “You have no idea how often I hear that from men,” she said bravely, but the sally from her tight throat came off as forced. She had gotten used to having these men fondle her breasts but not used to the indifference they conspicuously displayed. A little nervous energy from them would have been appreciated, evidence that she hadn’t entirely lost her attractions.

  Then they were through and she was taking notes, pre-mission checklist style, preparing for a flight plan to a destination she didn’t want to reach. The cancer had advanced in a way they had not expected. Despite the last therapy, which they reminded her was experimental, there were only slight signs of retarded growth.

  Another jump. She was out of the clinic, in the car, rolling around the curves of the road home. Focus-focus-focus, no point in becoming a traffic statistic when you have a classier demise on the way. Hawaii’s damp smells worked into her concentration, pleasant sweet air curling into her lungs and reminding her that the world did have its innocent delights. Even though plants, too, were trying to fend off animals with poisons and carcinogens, one of which had wormed into her.

  Channing swerved a bit too fast into their driveway, spitting gravel, crunching to a stop just short of Copernicus, who was sunning himself. She got out and was suddenly immensely glad that he was there. She hugged him and babbled some as he tried to wag his tail off. With Copernicus she could make a fool of herself playing and he would respond by making an even bigger fool of himself. Still, his admiration was not conclusive evidence of one’s wonderfulness. For that, she needed Benjamin, and where was he?

  On cue, he rolled into the driveway, barely squeezing his sports car into the space. She had kidded him about mid-forties testosterone when he bought it, but he did indeed look great in the eggshell-blue convertible, top down, his concerned frown as he got out breaking over her like butterscotch sunlight, and then she was in his arms and the waterworks came on and she was past being embarrassed about it. She clung to him. He clung back. Chimpanzee nuzzling, maybe, but it worked.

  She was unsteady going into the house with him and let its comfy feel envelop her. He asked about her medical and she told him and it all came in a rush then, all the sloppy emotions spilling out over the astronaut’s shiny exterior. She finished up with some quiet sobs in his arms, feeling much better and also now slightly embarrassed, her usual combo.

  “Sounds like you need some mahi-mahi therapy,” Benjamin murmured into her left ear.

  “I’d prefer some bed right away, thanks sir, but yep, my stomach’s rumbling.”

  “Oh, I thought that was a plane going over.”

  “Maybe my knees knocking.”

  “You’re braver than anyone I have ever known,” in the soft tone he always used to creep up on the worst of it.

  “What happens if you get scared half to death twice?”

  “The blood analysis—”

  “Yeah, worse.” Cryptic, astronaut-casual. “Some physio, too.”

  “You have the printout? I’d—”

  Breaking away, she made the timeout signal. “Lemme slap a flapjack of makeup on my face.”

  She got through the repair work without looking in the mirror much, a trick she had developed since the hair loss. The medical printouts went into her valise, along with the harvest of the fax machine. Brisk and efficient she was, carefully not thinking while she did all these neat little compartmented jobs. She’s steppin’ out, she sang to herself from an old Electric Light Orchestra number, letting the bouncy sound do its work. Steppin’ out. Fake gaiety was better than none.

  He drove them to the Reefman in rather gingerly fashion, not his born-to-the-road style. Hot white clouds hung stranded in a windless sky of shredded silver. The swanky driveway led them to a rambling building that appeared to be made of cinder from the island’s volcano, an effect slightly too studied. Music boomed out from a spacious deck bar, heat shimmered over car hoods, the perpetual hovering presence of eternal summer thickening the air.

  They ambled around the side garden approach to the beach tables. Her floppy hat would look appropriate there. She had two inches of fur now, creeping up on a presentable cut, but not quite there. The grounds were trying to cheer her up with their ambitious topiaries, laughing fountains, a beach below so white it ached to be trampled. They got a table and she remembered that this was one of those newfangled home-style restaurants, with a few of the
Unnoticeables passing appetizers among the tables. She and Benjamin had lived here long enough to see the old Hawaiian informality give way to Advanced Tourism, so that one looked through the help and visitors never thought about who changed the sheets of the Rulers.

  “Glass of wine?” Benjamin nudged her.

  “Really shouldn’t.”

  “I know, which is another reason to do it.”

  “Hey, that’s my kind of line.”

  “I always steal from the best.”

  “I look like I need it pretty bad?”

  “Let’s say I need for you to.”

  She laughed and ordered a glass of fumé blanc, a thumb to the nose for Death, and even in her rickety state not enough to risk a hangover, the Wrath of Grapes.

  “Okay, fill me in on the medical.” Benjamin said this in his clear, official voice, a mannerism from work he used sometimes when the uncomfortable side of life came up. He was completely unaware of this habit, she knew. Rather than feeling affronted, she found it endearing, though she could not say why. When she was through, he said, “Damn,” his voice tightening further. “Going to operate?”

  “No, they want to let this new regime of drugs work on it awhile.”

  “How long?”

  “Didn’t say. I got the impression that they wouldn’t give a solid answer.”

  “Well, it is experimental.” He tried to put a little lilt in his tone to freight some optimism into the conversation, but it did not work because they both knew it.

  “And I’m not up to more cutting anyway.”

  “True,” he said miserably. “Damn, I feel so powerless.”

  An absolutely typical and endearing male trait. They wanted to do, and women supposedly more wanted to be. Well, her astronaut-self wanted to do something, too, but they were both far out of their depth here. Both technically and emotionally.

  She watched him clench his fists for a long moment. They exchanged thin smiles, a long look. Time to move on, her intuition told her.

  She opened her valise. They had always done paperwork at dinner, one of those odd habits couples acquire that seem, in retrospect, defining: workaholics in love. She shuffled the medical printouts to the side; best to get his mind off the subject. “Here, this looks like work.”

  He reached for it almost eagerly. “From Amy, relayed from the VLA.”

  She recognized the Very Large Array standard display, a gridded map made in the microwave spectrum. After tiring of the astronaut horse race, she had thrown herself into becoming a respectable astrophysicist. Mostly a data magician and skeptic, which fit her character fine. She had gotten her job here on her merits, not on glory inherited from being a space jockey; she had made sure of that.

  Benjamin traced a finger along a ridge of dark lines. “Ummm, a linear feature. Must be a mistake.”

  “Why?” He told her quickly about Amy’s supposedly repeating burster. He slid out a cover sheet and scrawled across the top was: I CHECKED—COORDINATES ARE RIGHT. THIS IS REAL. AMY

  “She’s found something?” Channing sipped her wine, liking its bite.

  “Ummm. She wrote that note because she knew I’d doubt this like hell. This long filament is far larger than any burster could be. Must be a chance overlap with something ordinary. Looks like a galactic jet to me.”

  She nodded. In their early eras, galaxies often ejected jets of radiating electrons from their core regions. Channing had never studied galaxies very much—astronauts specialized in solar system objects, or studying the Earth from space—but she recalled that such jets were fairly common, and so one could easily turn up in the box that bounded the burster’s location. Still…“What if it’s not?”

  “Then this is a burster that makes no sense.”

  “But that’s what you’d like—something new.”

  He gazed skeptically at the long filament. “New yes, wrong no.”

  “You don’t know it’s wrong yet.” He had been like this lately, doubting everything. Perhaps it came from her illness; medicine always rewarded a skeptical, informed use of the squeaky-wheel principle. He had loyally squeaked a lot in her defense.

  “I’ll bet it goes away tomorrow.”

  “And I bet not,” she said impetuously.

  “How much?” He gave her his satyr grin.

  “Something kinky, say.”

  “Sounds like we can’t lose.”

  “You bet.” This evening was getting off to a good start, despite earlier signs. Now to glide by the hard part. “I want to go in with you tomorrow, have a look at this burster.”

  Concern flickered in his face, then he suppressed it. He was always urging her to stay home, rest up, but bless him, he didn’t know how maddening that could be. She did still have a job and desk at the Center, even if both were getting covered in cobwebs.

  “I don’t think—”

  “If this is important—and of course, you’re probably right, it’s not—I’d like to be in on it.”

  “As experiences go, it’ll be pretty dull.”

  Lately, experience was something she never seemed to get until just after she needed it. “Better than daytime TV.”

  She let a little too much desperation creep into her voice, which was not fair, but at the moment maybe it was just being honest. She watched him struggle with that for a long moment. Visibly reluctant, he finally said, “Uh, okay.”

  “You always say you want your staff to be ambitious, look for the new.”

  “Well, sure…”

  He was getting a bit too sober, she saw, the weight of her news pressing him down. How to rescue the evening?

  “Standard executive cheerleading. Follow your dream, you say.” She smiled and lowered her eyelids while giving him an up-from-under gaze—a dead-sure attention-getter, she knew, and just the sort of attention she wanted right now. “Unless, of course, it’s that one about giving a speech to the International Astronomical Union dressed in sexy underwear.”

  3

  Astronomy, Benjamin mused, was a lot like a detective story with the clues revealed first, and the actual body only later—if ever. Pulsars and quasars, both brilliant beacons glimpsed across the cosmos, had proved to be powered by small specks of compressed mass, resolved only decades after their emissions made them obvious. The clues were gaudy, the causes obscure. So it went with this latest mystery.

  The next morning Channing was too worn out to come in with him after all. He lingered over breakfast, they talked about the news in ritual fashion, and finally she shooed him out of the house. “My bed beckons,” she said. He was somewhat relieved, then, to get immediately to work with Amy when they got the “cleaned” radio map, chugged out by the ever-laboring computers. It showed the intensity of radio emissions, plotted like a topographical map. A long, spindly feature like a ridge line.

  “A definite tail,” Amy said. “Some kind of guided flow.”

  “A galactic jet?”

  To his surprise, she shook her head. “That’s what I figured. But I checked the old radio maps of this region. This thing wasn’t there five years ago.”

  “What?” He flatly did not believe her, but kept that out of his voice. A mistake, surely. He did a quick calculation and realized that if this thing were a jet in a distant galaxy, it could not possibly have grown so large in a few years. Must be a mistake. “It’s too big—”

  “Yeah, and too luminous. Couldn’t have missed it before. This thing is new.”

  “But…but—” He traced out the size of the straight feature and checked his calculation again. “It would have to be the size of a galaxy, maybe bigger, to look this big.”

  Amy grinned. “Now you know why I only got three hours’ sleep last night.”

  To appear suddenly and be galactic in scale meant that the entire structure had to light up at once, faster than allowed by the speed of light. “Got to be wrong,” he said as amiably as he could.

  So they spent an hour going over every number and map. And Amy was right. “So we’re mak
ing a wrong assumption somewhere,” she said cheerily. “And I bet I know where. Looks like a jet, so it must be extra-galactic, right? Wrong. It’s in our galaxy.”

  He nodded. There were jets of radiant matter streaming out of star systems, all right. This must have just been born. “But why is it a gamma-ray source?”

  “Must be it’s got a black hole down at the base of it, gobbling up mass from a companion star.” She scribbled some numbers. “And a hell of a bright one, too.”

  Benjamin checked her calculation. The radio luminosity was very high, and so was the gamma-ray intensity, if this were a source in the Milky Way galaxy. “Too high,” he said. “This would be the brightest we’ve ever seen.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to be the brightest,” she said so flatly that he knew she implied the double meaning. She was quite bright herself; her intuition about this source had been right all along; it was damned interesting.

  Time to throw a curveball, see how she swung. “I just got this by e-mail.” He showed her a report from the Space Array. They had looked at the source and failed to resolve any feature.

  “This just means it’s tiny,” Amy said. “Fits with the idea that the source is a star—”

  “And here’s the spectrum of the flare.” He plunked it down. A mass of lines, many of them obviously from hydrogen. A joker in the deck for sure; gamma-ray bursters did not look like this at all.

  That much Amy took in at a glance. “Um. I recognize some of these lines, but they’re off…” Quick jottings. “They’re split!”

  “Right.” Each of the major spectral lines had two peaks. “Never saw anything like this from a galactic jet or anything else.”

  “Maybe this will go away.” This was code for a wrong measurement, to be caught when it was checked.