Part 26 (1/2)

”I rather admire its choice of quotations.” Kingsley spoke to cover his own sensation of a rigid chill that swept up from his belly. ”It may have a sense of something we could call irony.”

Amy said, ”More like Zeus than Jehovah.”

”Gentlemen,” Arno said in a wobbly voice, ”we have to tell them something. You saw the crowd outside this office. Good scientists, technical people, sure. That's what they are. But they couldn't come up with anything in their present state of mind.”

”Fear paralyzes,” Kingsley observed to gain time.

”Anywhere it wants, it can do that-any time it likes,” Arno went on.

Kingsley realized that Benjamin had begun to weep, quite quietly. ”I advise preoccupying it with fresh input. Give it what we have.”

”Then what?”

”Understand it further, certainly. Then kill it, as I said.”

”We have nukes, plenty of them-”

”Pointless.”

”Probably so. But it's what we've got.”

”Not entirely.”

They waited for him to complete his thought, and for a moment, something caught in his throat and he could not go on.

Kingsley thought swiftly yet carefully about the properties of magnetic jets. For Benjamin and himself, long ago, the subject had been a suitable battleground for polite academic dispute, arcane calculations, airy and fun. Now he contemplated with cold fear the same images, now augmented with horror. A black hole spinning in its high vault of utter darkness, rotation warping s.p.a.ce around it. That distortion, in turn, twisted the a.s.sembly of minds that thronged outside the hole, intelligences caught in a magnetic prison older than the sun. The entire grotesque a.s.sembly was now impregnable, had proved immune to the defenses of the thousands of civilizations it had consumed like a majestic, marauding appet.i.te- ”We have Channing.”

1.

She popped popped- -flowed- -expanded- -out into the flexing s.p.a.ce before her.

Plunging. Riding translucent highways along parabolic lines, she felt unfamiliar muscles work with red heat down her spine, up her legs, skating across a velvet skin she could not see.

She seemed to fill the fat balloon of soft blackness around her. Yet in an eye flick she could be anywhere in that geometry, one of myriad tiny glowing flecks.

Points of view. Searchers. All coasting in a beehive swarm above the great slow-spinning sphere of Earth, itself a mottled infrared mosaic.

So she was a central point in a rotating coordinate frame. And simultaneously the skeletal ivory frame itself. Diffuse, like a fog. Yet if she chose to be, she could anchor herself at a joint.

Cartesian questions, she thought with icy shock. Baby, I got dem mind-body duality blues. To be a box and know it, yet wonder what it means Baby, I got dem mind-body duality blues. To be a box and know it, yet wonder what it means.

If she thought thought about herself, a whole interior world welled up. Teeth sang in their sockets. The calcium rods that framed her chest were chromed ribs, slick and sliding in swift metallic grace, about herself, a whole interior world welled up. Teeth sang in their sockets. The calcium rods that framed her chest were chromed ribs, slick and sliding in swift metallic grace, Ah, so clean Ah, so clean! Purpling storms raced down squeezed veins, up shuddering ligaments. Her toes rattled, strumming, talking to the ground she could never again tread. Her ankles were dancing on their own, her bald head thrown back, neck stretched into spaghetti by a halo of polarized light. Now her spine turned parabolic and crackling as she banked banked on jets that were her feet, running in sheer weightless abandon. Hurricane hallways yawned in her. on jets that were her feet, running in sheer weightless abandon. Hurricane hallways yawned in her.

What is this thing I am?-and from her a lockjawed agony-song screeched. It reverberated in hip sockets polished by blue-green, hungry worms. They swarmed over bone lattices, eating in rhapsodic hunger.

Pain? Plenty of it.

So stop. Click. Just like that- The torture fingers left her, blew away in the escaping fragile seconds, leaving her cool and smooth and sure. To be a box To be a box Down she went, across and through-all equivalent in this s.p.a.ce of freedom-as-thing. She saw before her, around her, in full three dimensions. The Searcher s.p.a.cecraft, a silvery swarm zooming in toward the graceful arching luminesce of the Eater.

A blink-and the Searchers became her many eyes.

Her point of view shot through the realm of the magnetic strands, high above the disk of hot matter in the black hole's equatorial plane. Beyond rolled the gravid Earth in regal, moist splendor. Around her magnetic palaces made a luminous dominion, a steel-wire spider at the gnawing center of a gigantic web. She swiveled and found the core-geysers and light storms arcing from the utterly black center of it all.

A rattle of human-speak came to her like pebbles on a tin roof. Careful, vector to 0.347 x 1.274 Careful, vector to 0.347 x 1.274.

Yessah, boss. Here there be tygers, galleries of magnetic forces to traverse.

Skating. She eased delicately past white-hot waterfalls, green-rich tornadoes of turbulence. Tock Tock!-a stone-storm of cra.s.s dusty plasma clattered against her carbon carapace. Raw food the Eater had stored. Or a weapon; one could not be sure.

Did it know they were here? Of course, impossible to believe it could not sense along its electromagnetic tendrils these flas.h.i.+ng solid motes. Two Searchers already drifted, charred by discharges.

So it would kill them if it could locate them. Us. Me Us. Me.

More Searchers rose from below to aid her. Abruptly some sparked to burnt cinders at the very rim of magnetic stresses, killed by some edge defense. She had lodged in several knots already, then had to bail out as they arced with huge potentials.

Yet she could not shake the airy feeling of floating suspended above a huge abyss.

Diffuse am I, for I am nothing that has ever existed. Like the Eater-one of a kind.

Getting heady here. Careful. Too easy to get drawn into phony poetic abstraction.

And what else dwelled here? Hesitantly, working as intermediary with Control, she felt her way among ropes of snarled flux. Edgy, tentative, the whispery sounds came-voices, calls, and cries and strange haunting musics, wisps of convex lore, echoes of...what? A mult.i.tude floated in her global, three-dimensional eyes-s.h.i.+ning, ghostlike creatures of strands and velvet, l.u.s.trous lattice.

Creeping among complex innards. Yet again she felt a cool distance from events. She was free to slide in and out of this world.

Only a lack of imagination saves me from immobilizing myself with imaginary fears.

Her eyes were all-seeing, swiveling impossibly, anywhere she wanted. In her other self, the eyes had been where the brain surfaced and supped from the world, taking in light along an optic nerve that both transmitted and filtered, doing the brain's work before the glow even arrived at the cerebrum.

Now she felt a wedge between her and the world she could behold. A chunk of gla.s.sy silence that measured and knew, separately.

Gingerly she burrowed into that watery pane. A dizzy, jolting ascent took her. Suddenly she was hanging above the entire solar system. She glimpsed it as a spheroid cloud of debris, filigreed with bands and sh.e.l.ls of flying shrapnel.

She knew instantly that these fragments could be pumped into long ellipses, into wobbly orbits that could now and then make a sharp hook by skimming near another piece of sc.r.a.p, and slam into a blundering planet.

”What was that?” she asked aloud. (How? Yet they rang like words.) Control's monotone answered, ”You slipped into the overview mode of our entire Searcher system inventory. Don't do that again. Concentrate.”

”Yessah.” Control was, well, controlling. It (he?-yes, it felt like a he) kept missing the point of her experience here.

Instantly, some subself presented a catalog of possible wisecrack material: One sandwich short of a picnic.Elevator doesn't go to the top floor.One brick short of a full load.Couple chapters missing from the book.Half a bubble off plumb.Gears stripped off a few cogs.A beer short of a six-pack.

Now where did that- The enormity of what had happened to her descended.