Part 16 (1/2)
”One we must obey,” Channing said. They both turned in surprise. She had slipped through the door without their noticing.
”What?” Benjamin demanded. ”Why?”
”Something I can't explain, but from what I just saw...” Her voice drained away and she seemed lost in thought.
”I cannot imagine that we would subject people to such a thing,” Kingsley said with crisp dignity.
”I can't imagine we won't,” Channing said, her voice so serene and mild and certain that it sent a chill through Benjamin.
PART FIVE.
A THINKING THING.
JUNE.
1.
In her purse lurked her neuroses writ small. Survivalist provisions like chocolate bars and breath mints, nail polish and Kleenexes, Chap Sticks and thread and a palm computer and a wrinkled notebook and a.s.sorted pens: yellow, blue, black. She also had taken lately to h.o.a.rding: unpaired gloves, broken eyegla.s.s frames, bits of tape and twine. Peering in, she felt as if she gazed into her unconscious, where dark objects conspired with painful memories. She had retreated to ever-larger purses roughly at the time she was diagnosed. Before she had used briefcases or book bags, the businesslike approach of a woman who no longer announced that she carried her house on her back. Yet she still a.s.sociated purses with her mother's generation: solid, sure, but also awkwardly dressed and uptight, clunky and a bit out of it. The purse's shadowy collective unconscious now prompted her with fragments of her past selves. It reeked of pruderies and fears, anxieties hidden from the world but carried everywhere, like a Freudian f.a.n.n.y-pack.
She used this bulky brown satchel to keep herself afloat at the Center. She could hide her medication and carry it with her, and when a nurse came to administer the more difficult injections, she could use Benjamin's s.p.a.cious office, with its little ”executive alcoves” for deal-making away from the main room of walnut desk and Big Screen Comm Center. When Benjamin or Kingsley-the only people who took much notice of her, luckily, in the hubbub-protested that she should be home working, she quoted Einstein: ”Only a monomaniac gets anything done.”
”All too true,” Kingsley said somberly, his luminous eyes looming over his slender, lined face. ”You're...looking well.”
She had an urge to laugh at his obvious struggle to find a remotely plausible compliment, but suppressed it. ”You're a dear, dear liar.” She kissed him lightly, a satisfying soft smack.
To her surprise, this fl.u.s.tered him. To smooth matters over, she went with him for a coffee and deliberately chose one of the high-octane variety named Kaff. He looked troubled most of the time now, but her choice made him frown further. ”Should you be, well-”
”Taking in caffeine? Mendenham says not to, but my body says, 'Either gimme some or lie down.'”
”A demanding body.”
”You should know.”
Again he startled her by blus.h.i.+ng. ”I believe I can recall,” he managed.
”As the prospect of having much more of it fades, I live in my sensual past.” Teasing him was unfair, but the world was not exactly packed full of fun lately, and she needed the ego boost. So she rationalized as she watched him put his composure back on. She could even see it happening in his face, mouth getting resolute again. Under the pressure here, maybe his barrier against facial giveaways was falling.
”You have every right to,” came out judiciously phrased. ”If there's anything-”
”A lot, but it's probably immoral or something. Content me by telling me the gossip.”
This put him on his favorite ground, the slightly disguised lecture. The great game now was not astrophysics but amateur alien psychology. ”The creature going on obliviously, chattering about all sorts of things, as if we are all waiting here for its orders.”
”And we aren't?”
”The leaders.h.i.+p is saying and doing nothing.”
”They've had two days to think it over-”
”My dear, this is a matter for the entire world. In two days, they cannot agree on the color of blue.”
”They'd better hurry.”
”There's mildly good news there. It's braking.”
”Ah, good. How?”
”Only an astronomer would make that her first question.” He grinned and for a quick moment some of the old joy brimmed between them. ”Most would want to know how many more days that gives us, which is perhaps now fifteen in all. To answer how how-through a forward-pointing jet, quite powerful. Apparently it found fresh quarry and has extended this jet, anchoring it firmly with magnetic flux ropes in a helical pattern. That funnels and ejects hot matter from its accretion disk.”
The coffee had given her enough energy to be incredulous. ”That's slowing it enough?”
”I know, a simple calculation shows that slowing a ma.s.s exceeding our moon's, down from a velocity of hundreds of kilometers a second is, well, an incredible demand.”
”It's an incredible creature. What's it say say about this?” about this?”
”Its deceleration? Nothing. Not one to give way to Proustian introspection, it seems.”
”Skip the literature. I'll settle for hearing how it does the jet trick.”
”Understanding how it thinks is now critical, I gather.”
”Sure, right after we understand how we think.”
”Touche. It did refer to Proust the other day, I saw. Something about his understanding of time being what one would expect of 'doomed intelligences,' I believe the phrase was.”
”Well, as a fellow doomed intelligence, I agree. Never could abide Proust, anyway.”
”Nor I. Its transmissions are fascinating stuff and I look in on them when I can.”
”I should, too,” she said distantly.
”It's sending ma.s.ses of stuff, a million words a day.” Too casually he looked at her hands, which were fidgeting-and not due to the Kaff. ”I gather you have been looking at its own inventory of art.”
”Ummm, yes. It appended a note saying that these were representative works from other members of our cla.s.s.”
He frowned. ”'Cla.s.s'? As technological civilizations?”
”No, as what it called 'dreaming vertebrates.' With the implication that our cla.s.s is fairly common.”
”Good Lord. I wonder if those working out its orders know that. I'll have to tell them.”
”Orders?”
”Oh yes, it has a menu and proceeds to order up whatever it fancies.”