Part 19 (1/2)
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 pa.s.s among you, now a party of three. Now, what is pa.s.sing 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 know. That this is just social fluff. That the primary relations.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sage” 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 COURTs.h.i.+P TOOLS, I CAN SEE ALREADY. YOU EVOLVED THEM TO ATTRACT AND ENTERTAIN s.e.xUAL PARTNERS FOR THE LONG PERIODS NEEDED TO PRODUCE AND REAR YOUR CHILDREN. YOUR OWN RESEARCH SHOWS THAT THE MOST DESIRED TRAITS BOTH s.e.xES 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: [image]
”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 princ.i.p.al 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 s.p.a.ce 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 erg from the Latin for energy. 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 have to grab it,” the man answered testily. to grab it,” the man answered testily.
”It's a completely warped s.p.a.ce-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 s.p.a.ce-time, or another time in our own s.p.a.ce.”
”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 pa.s.s through the gases of the tail. There was worldwide panic, directives from the Pope, quite a few suicides.