Part 10 (1/2)
”You bet.” He drove with his usual concentration, quick and able, tires howling on the curves. Well, maybe today it was justified. Life seemed to be moving faster.
”It's packing a lot of power.”
”And with seven billion years of experience, knows how to use it.”
”If it cares to.”
”That's just what the politicians will soon realize.” He shot her a glance, his hands tight on the wheel as the road roar grew under his foot's pressure.
”Why would it be any danger to us?”
”The thing about aliens is, they're alien.”
”You think the government will take that att.i.tude?”
”They'd be irresponsible if they didn't.”
”Maybe they'll be as out of it as Arno.”
”He's doing his best. You really dislike him, don't you?”
”I don't trust him,” she said.
”He's secretive, all right,” Benjamin allowed. ”That makes me suspicious. We're used to open discussion in the sciences and he doesn't even pretend to follow that practice. And his people follow his lead-ask plenty of questions, give d.a.m.ned little back.”
”That, and it's hard to believe that he beat 100,000 other sperm.”
”Not up to the job?”
”n.o.body is, granted.” She tried to imagine who would be able to manage a crisis like this and came up empty. ”It demands too much knowledge in one head.”
”So use more heads.”
This turned out to be the solution the White House had settled upon, visible as they pulled up to the Center. Or rather, to a guard post and heavily armed Marines who peered intently at their freshly made IDs, issued only the day before. The hillside was now, overnight, festooned with prefab buildings lifted in by helicopter. Communications cables flowered in great knotted blossoms on standing pads, attended by squads of blue-overalled workers.
Inside the Center, the foyer had a security team checking IDs again and a metal detector. This made Benjamin angry, which proved to be ”unproductive,” as Kingsley termed it when he had to rescue them from the Operations Officer's office. They stopped at a brand-new phalanx of buffet tables, well stocked, and got coffee.
”Is this backed by the CIA?” Benjamin asked.
”I don't think so,” Kingsley said judiciously. ”The food is quite poor.”
They plunged into work. Channing had to allow that Arno's U Agency had brought a brisk efficiency to the usual meandering corridor conversations. In this taut atmosphere, there were no academic locutions: no in terms of in terms of or or as it as it were were or or if you will if you will. This Channing fully approved. Leaving NASA, she had found from a series of visits to the campuses that much of academic life had come to seem either boring or crazy.
No rival for the craziness of the situation she was in, of course. Nothing could match the whirl of speculation around her.
It was remarkable that this magnetic creature had been able to produce even broken, coherent English simply by listening to radio and TV. A century of fiction had a.s.sumed any approaching alien would be able to do so, to simplify their story lines, without for a moment considering how prodigious a task it was. The Eater had no common experience, knew little of the Earth's surface, and was dealing with a species unknown anywhere else in the galaxy. It did have vastly more experience dealing with planetary life, though, and this was apparently what made its work successful.
But with their help it could become much more able, the Eater said. So there was a team of linguists working with it.
They started with vocabulary. Children learned language beginning with nouns and built up to abstractions, so the first volley of signals was an a.s.sembly of pictures showing common objects, along with the nouns for them. Verbs were a little more trouble. Cartoons proved useful here, showing ”throw” and making distinctions like the difference between ”rain” and ”to rain.” Here the American Hopi Indian language would have been useful, since in that tongue English's ”it is raining”-with the implied it it quite invisible, yet a solid noun-was smoothly rendered simply as ”rain.” The Eater pointed out such subtleties as quickly as they arose, making its teachers feel that English was a patchwork of knocked-together solutions-which, of course, it was. quite invisible, yet a solid noun-was smoothly rendered simply as ”rain.” The Eater pointed out such subtleties as quickly as they arose, making its teachers feel that English was a patchwork of knocked-together solutions-which, of course, it was.
They quickly got through a basic five thousand words. Then faster transmission of whole texts, with ill.u.s.trations, proceeded with blinding speed. Kingsley, wearing yesterday's s.h.i.+rt and tie, related this to her in his clipped mode, teetering on the verge of irony.
”What do you think will happen next?” she asked him. He had apparently been here all night, or at least he looked it.
”Depends upon the world reaction, of course,” Kingsley said with surprising crispness. ”And how fast we can move before the heavy hand of 'responsibility' descends, to make us overcautious.”
She blinked. His face was a mask, but she could read a jittery stress in him, especially in the overcontrolled way he spoke and moved. ”Why do you stress speed?”
”The Eater-your choice of name has stuck, and perhaps was a bit infelicitous.”
”Gee, I love it when you use such fancy terms. How infelicitous?”
”It's more the t.i.tle of a horror film, isn't it?”
”Or a bad sci-fi flick,” Benjamin said, munching a donut. He knew well the distinction between true science fiction and the media dross pumped out in vast, glittery quant.i.ties, ”sci-fi.”
”So you think that'll worsen the first impression, once this breaks?” Channing asked.
”It's starting to break,” Kingsley said with abstract fatigue. ”Impossible to contain, really.”
”What really matters here,” Benjamin said, ”is how the governments react.”
Kingsley managed a dry chuckle. ”I remember some head of state in the TwenCen saying that history teaches us mostly that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all their other alternatives.”
”I wish I could take the name back,” Channing said.
While they slept, and Kingsley had not, the fascination of their opportunity had worked upon the astronomers. They had asked the Eater questions about astrophysics, peppering it with a dozen in a single transmission. This apparently broke the t.i.t-for-tat logjam. The ”intruder”-a name Kingsley still preferred to use, and thought might work better but had no hope would be taken up-seemed eager to discuss. It had quickly mastered the protocols of our digital image processing and filled its broadband signal with pictures. There were eerie exchanges. It was almost like a proud parent showing around baby pictures.
WITNESS, THE LATE EVOLUTION OF A STAR, WHICH YOU TERM THE ROSETTE NEBULA, LOOKED LIKE THIS FROM THE SIDE WHEN IT WAS YOUNG.
The display was awesome, close-ups of giant rosy clouds of s.h.i.+mmering molecules, beautiful testaments to the death throes of a star. The Eater had been traveling near it and for the first time Channing appreciated the limitation astronomers seldom remembered: seeing objects from one angle left questions forever unanswerable.
”This gives us a handle on its trajectory, then,” Benjamin observed swiftly.
Kingsley nodded. ”We can work backward, using these other images-the Magellanic Cloud, the Galactic Center-and determine its past.”
Some of the images were impossible to match with anything ever seen from Earth. Others almost matter-of-factly revised in an instant their picture of the galaxy's geography. The view of the Galactic Center showed what generations of artists had imagined, the glowing bulge of billions of stars that shone in all colors, a swollen majesty rent by lanes of ebony dust and amber striations no one could explain.
It thrilled her, tightened her throat. A bounty now came flooding into the Center as the Eater fed data through Arecibo and Goldstone and the new dish at Neb Attahl, India.
”My G.o.d, it'll put us all out of work,” she murmured.
”Astronomers? Quite the opposite, I expect,” Kingsley said.
”Yeah, we'll be trying to understand these-and the Eater itself-for a generation at least,” Benjamin said, biting into his second donut, balancing a plate on his knee in the Big Screen Room.