Eater

by Gregory Benford

But the eerie tang of the thing, that was the most basic lesson, and the hardest to truly learn.

  She fled from these sessions back to the comforts of home.

  She barely had time to suffer Harriet’s injections when a neighbor knocked: there was a party, and they would like to have her and Benjamin come, though of course they knew how busy…

  It was delightful. Like most hard-driving professionals, she and Benjamin had only a distant connection to their town. Their province was the global world, firmly secured by electronic media and airline tickets.

  But outside their lives, the rhythms of the tropical island culture went on. Natives called the mainlanders haole but welcomed them. The Polynesian blended here with Asian. She liked the rituals of this O Bon Odori, a Japanese dance festival that let her dress up in a blue and white cotton ukata, feast on juicy BBQ squid, gingery pancakes and luscious mango shave ice, fried noodles, and sweetened bean confections. That evening beloved ghosts were supposed to return from the spirit world and briefly visit, as they had been doing for the 1,400-year tradition of the festival. The ghosts got tiny dishes set out for them: roasted eggplant, squash and potatoes cooked in sesame oil. At dusk families gathered at graveyards to burn incense and escort the ghost-souls with flickering paper lanterns. Dried hempseed burned in bowls to guide them to the proper homes, where families could talk to the ghosts and be sure of being heard. At the end of the season, the ghosts got farewell rice dumplings and hypnotic taiko drums.

  No one mentioned the Eater, though some children tried to make out its blue-white glimmer in the sky. Their neighbors kept a sympathetic blanket of nonchalance wrapped around the evening, making small talk.

  She and Benjamin walked home together over the bumpy tar roads. She inhaled the aromatic air and wondered what it would be like to live as digital abstraction, free of body.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

  I will fear no evil;

  for thou art with me;

  thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

  It took everything she had, but they made love in the close, moist night air and it gave her something she could not name.

  6

  He tried to smile with assurance, but his face felt as if it would crack like hard plaster.

  The President was visiting, along with assorted members of the self-luminous set, U.N. and allies. Show of confidence. All hands onboard. Face the approaching crisis with a firm hand.

  None of this was for the Center staff, of course. The media were the whole point. But there had to be something for the President and entourage to actually do, so Arno and Martinez took him on a tour. Plenty of shots of his craggy visage gazing sternly at the latest maps of the Eater interior. Nodding, taking it all in with a concerned yet confident scowl.

  After the well-lighted photo ops, a reception. Maximum attention to Channing, now in a wheelchair to underline the precarious state of her health. She did need it. Benjamin stayed beside her with the nurse and she managed to chatter amiably with the President. Only then did Benjamin have to step forward and shake the presidential hand. Offered with the legendary charm, it was firm. Benjamin joined in the photos with Channing, all smiles but not too joyous, as this was a crisis.

  Then the two of them, plus Kingsley and Arno, sat at the presidential table for a ritual snack. Talk flowed, guided by the President and the Secretary of the United Nations. Kingsley glided gracefully through all this, and from him Benjamin learned an important lesson.

  “Sharp, smart people—we’re all that,” Kingsley said to him and Channing. “And at a do like this, we meet others no less sharp, but also blessed with charm and an easy social facility, a talent that cannot be learned or imitated.”

  Channing watched the President, whose attention illuminated the other half of their circular table, and nodded. “The spotlight of his gaze.”

  Short sentences were all she could manage now, but these words brightened Kingsley. “Yes!—precisely. That charisma conveys to its target a sense that you are indeed special, that the charmer and the charmed form tightly orbiting worlds.”

  Benjamin saw the point now. “So you get caught up.”

  Kingsley seemed unafraid of dissecting a performance going on only a few feet away. Benjamin saw why: nobody was paying the slightest attention to them.

  Kingsley said, “Just so. Basking in this warm glow, imagine that you notice a mediocrity at the edge of your special binary, someone not worth bothering with. But the charmer turns and includes the mediocrity”—he did a perfect mid-American accent—“Hi, gladtaseeya.” Channing laughed and Kingsley beamed. “So then this inferior’s eyes brighten as pleasant small talk and personal tales pass among you, now a party of three. Now, what is passing through your mind?”

  This he addressed to Channing, who came back quickly with, “You listen with a little smile.” A cough. “Hiding your secret.”

  “Exactly!” Kingsley beamed.

  “Because,” she went on, “the poor old mediocrity. Does not know. That this is just social fluff. That the primary relationship here. Is between you. And the charming leader.”

  “As usual,” Kingsley said happily, “quite observant. ‘Poor mediocrity,’ you think! But even laughter and good spirits cannot conceal the dreadful moment when you catch a glance from the mediocrity—”

  “And see that he is thinking. Exactly the same thing. About you,” Channing finished.

  Benjamin laughed, caught up in the sheer headlong joy of it. “And that frozen instant is a glimpse into the social abyss.”

  Kingsley grinned. “Absolutely. The truly genius social creatures, they dwell on levels far above us.”

  Then he saw why the moment was so wonderful. This was the way the three of them had been back at Cambridge, in the years when the world had seemed utterly open, brim-full with promise. And together they had captured it together again, for a glancing moment.

  With the media whisked out of sight, the presidential party got down to business.

  Then when the President spoke, it was less to convey information than to make others react according to his plan. Benjamin watched through the several hours of discussions, trying to see how the master communicators achieved this effect.

  Flattery, subtle bribery, psychology, even flat-out threat—all these came into play, some as difficult to catch as a momentary reflection on an ocean wave. As long as their plan kept working, means did not matter. Usually arguments couched logically but carrying a deep emotional appeal worked best with the U.N. representatives. This was a political culture in which short-term interests always dominated long-term concerns in the minds of virtually everyone, but in this crisis they were out of their depth, facing a hard fact.

  The Eater would not negotiate; it was not remotely political, resembling more the weather than a person. This had barely penetrated to the political elite, Benjamin saw, as various men reported on attempts to cajole, wheedle or threaten the Eater, all total failures. They were unused to the Eater’s pattern of simply ignoring the high and powerful. Instead, it preferred to pursue discussions with members of the Semiotic Group, on topics cultural and biological. The President could not find a way to soften this, finally used his standard approach of following the bald truth with a side of sentiment.

  A specialist enlisted by the White House displayed on a large screen a “typical passage” from the Eater, in response to an attempt to negotiate on the issue of uploading people.

  I HAVE NEED OF THESE MINDS. ONLY BY CLOSE RELATION TO THEM CAN I FURTHER STUDY YOU, AND IN MY SCRUTINY YOU SHALL FIND YOUR ULTIMATE RESIDENCE UPON THE GALACTIC STAGE. YOUR MINDS’ IMPRESSIVE TALENTS AROSE IN PART AS COURTSHIP TOOLS, I CAN SEE ALREADY. YOU EVOLVED THEM TO ATTRACT AND ENTERTAIN SEXUAL PARTNERS FOR THE LONG PERIODS NEEDED TO PRODUCE AND REAR YOUR CHILDREN. YOUR OWN RESEARCH SHOWS THAT THE MOST DESIRED TRAITS BOTH SEXES HAVE IN A MATE ARE KINDNESS AND INTELLIGENCE. YOUR STANDARD ARGUMENT IS THAT WOMEN PREFER POWER AND MONEY, OR THE SIGNS OF THE ABILITY TO
GET THOSE. MEN ARE DRAWN TO SMOOTH SKIN, YOUTH, A PROPORTION OF WAIST TO HIP. ALL TRUE—BUT NOT PRIMARY. KINDNESS AND INTELLIGENCE ARE MORE ABSTRACT QUALITIES, BOTH INFERRED FROM SPEECH. THESE I CAN CONTEMPLATE ONLY BY PROLONGED EXPOSURE.

  Exasperated, the specialist said, “Now, how can we deal with a thing that answers clear, direct questions like this?”

  “Gingerly, I should think,” Kingsley whispered to Benjamin and Channing. They were sitting to the side, near the rear of the big new auditorium, behind a phalanx of military and policy people.

  The unwieldy group then broke into subsections, each in a different room. They finally got to meet with the Action Team—there seemed to be a new term for every feature of the problem now—devoted to Channing’s mission.

  A group Benjamin had not even heard of gave a report on what the intelligence specialists thought was going on in the Eater’s innermost regions. A Defense Department satellite of advanced design had made a map, using X-ray emission. From that, NASA had already sent a Searcher hurtling directly at the Eater’s core. Piecing together the X-ray pictures and the Searcher’s views as it flew in, they produced a processed picture:

  “We see here a cutaway view,” a prominent black hole theorist explained. She was a slender, sharp-faced woman with a ready smile, in her element, playing before the most powerful crowd in the world. “The outer surface is the last point at which an object can orbit the hole. The surface is only about ten meters across.”

  Benjamin asked, “The Searcher tried to orbit it?”

  “‘Tried’ is the word,” the affable woman said. “It failed. Instead, it flew closer in—the ergosphere.”

  Benjamin persisted. “It has a bulge?”

  “Yes, and we’re seeing it here from about twenty-five degrees above the equator. That’s why the inner sphere—the hole itself—looks a little distorted.”

  He barely remembered the term, ergosphere, and did not want to show any ignorance. “The hole is rotating rapidly—that is our principal finding. That is apparently how it manages the enormous magnetic arches and funnels outside. The rotation couples with the accretion disk in a kind of enormous motor.”

  The discussion picked up then and Benjamin could barely follow. The bulge of the outer surface arose from the swirl of space that a black hole’s rotation created. Because that swirl was outside the inner sphere, the hole stored rotational energy in the region between the two surfaces. Thus, erg from the Latin for energy.

  “What happened to the Searcher?” Benjamin asked, feeling awash in the discussion.

  “It was one of the miniaturized models, high velocity, ion propulsion. Small enough to survive the heating from the accretion disk. We flew it in at a thirty-degree angle, a steep dive.”

  A NASA official added proudly, “Miniaturized small enough to get into the hole’s vicinity without being torn apart by tidal forces, either.”

  “It flew into the ergosphere,” the woman said, “on automatic program, of course. It sent one last gasp of data, which gave us this figure. We never heard from it again.”

  “The hole swallowed it,” a man from Caltech said authoritatively.

  “We don’t know that,” the woman countered.

  “The hole would have to grab it,” the man answered testily.

  “It’s a completely warped space-time,” the woman said. “There are other paths available. The Searcher could escape through the outer boundary of the ergosphere—if it had enough energy.”

  “I calculate that it did not,” the Caltech fellow said.

  “So do I, but there are intermediate fates.”

  “Such as?”

  “The Searcher could exit the ergosphere along a path that pops out into another space-time, or another time in our own space.”

  “Like a time machine?” the man asked incredulously.

  “A theoretical possibility, yes,” the woman said.

  “Point is, it’s gone,” Channing whispered.

  The audience overheard this and looked silently at her. She was going into this place, Benjamin read in their eyes, and they half-envied her. She sensed this and said in a croak, “The physics is great, sure. But this isn’t a natural black hole. It’s been built up…by an intelligence.”

  “We must not think of it as being the kind of structure we think of as intelligence at all,” a noted evolutionary biologist remarked. “It is not of a species. It is unique, a construction.”

  “A self-construction,” a voice added, “maybe more like a self-programming computer. Gotta be a way to think about it from a cybernetic angle—”

  Kingsley’s incisive voice broke in. “We fondly imagine that evolution drives toward higher intelligence. But eagles would think evolution favored flight, elephants would naturally prefer the importance of great strength, sharks would feel that swimming was the ultimate desirable trait, and eminent Victorians would be quite convinced that evolution preferred Victorians.”

  Only Channing found this amusing.

  7

  She had learned from the morning paper that when Halley’s Comet filled the skies in 1910, word spread that the Earth would pass through the gases of the tail. There was worldwide panic, directives from the Pope, quite a few suicides.

  She quickly calculated over coffee that the entire tail, compressed to a solid, might have fit into a briefcase. Ignorance could be fatal.

  Benjamin had to go to a seminar by a specialist in “extreme case fear responses,” which someone high up at the U Agency thought would be helpful in the times ahead. He wasn’t inclined to go, but Channing shooed him out of the house before her three-car-plus-ambulance escort arrived. Still, she was so fretful on the drive to the clinic that the driver finally leaned back to where she lay and said very patiently, “Please don’t drive when you’re not driving.”

  She had to go through the preps for her “reading,” as the diffident specialists put it, which meant another day of tedium. Still, while the preps took hold, she had herself wheeled into a room where she could watch the show on a big screen. Just for laughs, she said, and they dared not contradict her. This was a special site just for her, plus a few other people who were very ill and had volunteered to be uploaded. Arno had certainly cleared her way; the screen for her to view was his latest indulgence.

  The speaker was quick, efficient, and despite expectations, interesting. The best way to confront fear in a group was to make the group diverse, she said. Assemblies that were all men or all women fared badly when confronted with danger or merely the unknown. Less obvious, but supported by research, was a finding that mixing age groups was good. One exerted more self-control in front of strangers and dissimilar people.

  The bad news was that preexisting groups did not respond well to fear. Even tests on championship athletic teams showed that they reacted badly to simple dramas like getting stuck in an elevator. Luckily, being “high phobic-tolerant” correlated with being in good physical condition, and most astronomers met at least the minimum standards there. Living in Hawaii had made them more outdoorsy than the usual run of the profession, and astronomers as a whole were more athletic than the norm. But altogether, the Center could expect some fairly large levels of panic in the days to come.

  “How come?” she wondered aloud.

  Nobody watching the screen answered, but her “psych escort” put in helpfully, “They’re planning for it to maybe attack some way.”

  “Huh? Why?” Being at the supposedly center of events and yet quite out of it was not fun.

  The escort was sweet but slow, it seemed. “The Eater…it might get angry.”

  “Anger isn’t a category we can be sure it even possesses.”

  “Well, the governments, they’ve agreed to not let it have all those people.”

  “It wants the complete list?”

  “Every one.”

  “Has it made threats?”

  “It doesn’t say anything about that.”

  “Coy bastard, huh?”

  “The news, i
t says the Eater is giving us the silent treatment.”

  “Actually, it’s gabby. You just have to ask the right question.”

  On her palm computer, she punched up the conversation she had from yesterday, in reply to some demand by the U.N. It was perfectly indirect:

  YOUR DISCOURSE EXPLAINS YOUR PROPENSITY FOR GOSSIP AS A GROOMING SUBSTITUTE. MY-SELF’S ANALYSIS OF YOUR DRAMAS SHOWS YOUR FINEST ARTISTS DEVOTING TWO-THIRDS OF YOUR CONVERSATION TO IT. LABORERS AND LEARNED ALIKE PREFER TO TALK ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT IDEAS OR ISSUES. WITHOUT GOSSIP, YOUR SPECIES MIGHT NEVER HAVE BOTHERED TO LEARN HOW TO TALK. PHYSICAL GROOMING IS STILL MORE SATISFYING TO THE OTHER OF YOUR ORDER, THE PRIMATES. THUS THEY DO NOT SPEAK. CHAT IS UNLIKE HUNTERS CALLING OUT IN A MASTODON HUNT, OR GATHERERS REPORTING WHERE THE HERBS ARE, WHICH CLEARLY HAD USES FOR YOU. THIS TALK OF OTHERS AND FORMING POWER COALITIONS WERE EVEN MORE IMPORTANT. I CAN SEE THAT TALK IS MORE EFFICIENT THAN PHYSICALLY GROOMING EVERY OTHER MEMBER OF A TRIBE, WHEN TRIBES BECOME LARGE. TALK IS EASIER THAN PETTING, FOR YOU CAN DO IT TO SEVERAL AT ONCE, WHILE YOU ARE PERFORMING OTHER TASKS. THIS SUGGESTS A USEFUL RESEARCH PROJECT MIGHT AIM TO MEASURE SEROTONIN PRODUCTION DURING GOSSIPING TO VERIFY THIS VIEW. I COMMEND IT TO YOUR SCIENTISTS.

  So it was advancing theories about humans already. Even suggesting research! Who could have guessed that their first alien contact would be so abstract?

  With more experience of intelligence throughout the galaxy, it could generalize in ways impossible to visualize. What more could it tell us about ourselves? She felt a chill then, the awe and allure of the utterly strange.

  Then she was into the treatment, that flat medicinal smell, the attendants pushing her down the corridors, eyes watching her—the famous astronaut heroine!—from doorways. Into the cool ceramic air of the special clinic, which had been set up on a hillside with the now-routine incredible speed.

  Then the teams around her very attentively got down to the grungy details of how to extract the information in her head. In principle, the experts had explained, they could do this without knowing in detail how the brain worked. Instead, they used the principles of copying software to recognize neurons and then replace all the functions of each neuron with a computer simulation.