Part 12 (1/2)
Suddenly the screen brightened. In a spectacular few seconds, the orange profile warped into a slender funnel, blazing brightly.
”It's ingesting,” Kingsley said matter-of-factly. ”I suppose it met a tasty rock.”
”We knew it had some motivation.”
”Note how no one seems very worried? I believe we are all simply too tired for that.”
”I wondered if it was just me. I figured I was beyond being surprised anymore.”
”I rather hope so.”
Benjamin had stacks of work waiting in his office, but once again he gave way to the temptation of just watching. The Eater was moving at nearly a hundredth the speed of light, an incredible velocity. The plasma types had given up hope of explaining how its magnetic fields could withstand the sheer friction of encountering solid matter and ionizing it.
”Something beyond our present understanding is happening right before our eyes,” Kingsley murmured. ”I have almost gotten used to these routine miracles it performs.”
The images coiled into a complex conduit of magnetic fields, etched out in the brilliant radiance of superheated matter. In a few moments, it had destroyed a moon, grazing it just right, so that some matter was sucked in while the majority was thrown away, adding thrust.
A keening note sounded in the room. A fresh signal, high and sharp. ”It now sends us codes earmarked for audio playing, once it worked out how our hearing functions,” Kingsley whispered.
”It's...weird. Ugly,” Benjamin said.
”I believe a proper translation is that it is singing to 'all humanity' as part of its payment for our cultural legacy.”
Benjamin studied Kingsley's lean profile in the shadows. ”It's like some...”
”We should not impose our categories upon it,” Kingsley said crisply.
”Sounds like you've been listening to the semiotics people again.”
”Just trying to keep an open mind.”
”d.a.m.n it, to me that stuff sounds like, like...”
”A deranged G.o.d, yes.”
”Maybe in all that time between the stars, it's gotten crazy.”
”By its own account-one we have received, but it is so complex the specialists still can't find human referents-it has endured such pa.s.sages many millions of times.”
”So it says.”
Kingsley nodded, a sour sigh of fatigue escaping. ”And we have come to accept what it says.”
The semiotics teams had been feeding it vast stores of cultural information, with some commentary to help it fathom the ma.s.ses of it. Most texts, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica-still the best all-round summary of knowledge-were already available in highly compressed styles. These flowed out and were duly digested.
Material from the sciences encountered no trouble; the intruder hardly commented upon them, except to remark obliquely on their ”engaging simplicity.” Benjamin took this to be an attempt at a compliment, while others seemed to see it as an insult.
The social sciences came next. These confused the Eater considerably. It asked many questions that led them back to the vocabulary lessons. The Eater did not have categories that translated readily into ethics, aesthetics, or philosophy.
The arts were even harder. It seemed unable to get beyond pictorial methods that were not nearly photographic; abstractions it either asked many puzzled questions about or ignored. In this the Eater seemed to ally with the majority of current popular taste.
”I wonder if it is telling us the truth about anything.” Benjamin mused.
Kingsley's mouth tipped up on one end. ”Why would it lie? It can stamp upon us as if we were insects.”
Benjamin nodded and suddenly felt Kingsley as a fellow soldier in arms, worn by the same incessant pressures.
”Crazy, you said?” Kingsley said distantly. ”From the long times it has spent between the stars? Remember, it has been alone all its life. Do not think of it as a social being.”
”But it asks for social things, our culture.”
Kingsley mused silently, watching the orange signature on the screen creep toward the rim of the gas giant planet, and then said suddenly, ”Crazy? I would rather use an Americanism, spooky. spooky.”
Benjamin wondered if their speculations had any less foundation than what the semiotics and social science teams said. ”I heard a biologist talking at the coffee machine the other day. He pointed out that it may be the only member of its species.”
”That makes no sense. We still have no idea how it came to be.”
”Something tells me we're going to find out.”
”From it?”
”It may not even know.”
”Find out from experience, then?”
”Yeah.”
The next several hours were as unsettling as anything Benjamin had ever encountered.
The black hole and its attendant blossom of magnetic flux swooped in toward the banded crescent. An air of anxious foreboding settled over the viewers at this meeting between Jupiter-the solar system's great gas giant, a world that had claimed the bulk of all the ma.s.s that orbited its star-and a hole in s.p.a.ce-time that had the ma.s.s of a moon packed into a core the size of a table.
Its trajectory arced down into the vast atmosphere. And in a long, luminous moment, the Eater drank in a thick slice of the upper layers, gulping in hydrogen with glowing magnetic talons.
The audience around Benjamin came to life. Gasps and murmurs filled the room. There were few words and he caught an undertone of uneasy dread.
The image s.h.i.+fted as the bristling glow followed a long, looping flyby. To study life-forms that do exist there, it said. It even sent short spurts of lectures on the forms it found. One of Kingsley's new aides brought word of these messages, printed out from the translators, as they came in.
”Look at the detail,” Benjamin read at Kingsley's shoulder. ”Balloon life, a thousand kilometers deep into the cloud deck.”
”It is teaching us about our own neighborhood,” Kingsley said.
”Yeah, along with a few remarks about our being unable to do it.”
”Well, that is one rather human trait,” Kingsley remarked sardonically. ”Plainly it loves having an audience.”