Part 26 (2/2)
Benjamin, forever gone from her.
The world-swallowed in abstraction.
No salty tang of sandy beach. Just a bunch of digits Just a bunch of digits.
So when she wanted to speak, an inventory of retorts had duly shuffled into her mind, read off like a computer file. Not invention, but a handy list of stock phrases. Because it was waiting for just that use-somewhere.
No, not somewhere. Here Here. Blackboxville.
Had her mind had those lists in it all her life? She could understand why the brain researchers wanted to use simulations such as herself. Here, a mind could sometimes watch itself.
”Try to focus all the Searchers onto the core.” Control's voice now was smoother, warm, and soothing. A response to her irked state? ”Channing, we have got to get better resolution.”
She felt her eyes seem to cross cross and then rush outward. and then rush outward.
Suddenly she sensed the hourgla.s.s magnetic funnels, alive in their luminous ivory, as ma.s.s flowed down them. Fitfully the aching matter lit the turning, narrowing pipes. Each headed toward doom.
The fields were firmly anch.o.r.ed in a bright, glowing disk at the center of the hourgla.s.s neck. The Eater's intelligence, she knew, resided in these magnetic structures she could make out-knotted and furled, like l.u.s.trous ribbons surrounding the slowly rotating hourgla.s.s.
Zoom, she moved. At her finest viewing scale she could make out the magnetic intricacy-whorls and helices as complex as the mapping of a brain. Here the legacy of a thousand alien races rested, she knew (but how?).
All this stood upon the brilliant disk at the neck. Glowing ma.s.s flowed down the hourgla.s.s neck, heading toward the glare.
The inner realm of the Eater was its foundation, the turning accretion disk. She blinked, recalibrated specter. It brimmed red-hot at its rim, a kilometer from the dark center. The disk was thickest at its edge, a hundred meters tall a hundred meters tall some part of her crisply told her. some part of her crisply told her.
As the infalling, gyrating ma.s.s moved inward to its fate, it heated further by friction. Inward it seethed with luminosity, shading in from red to amber to yellow to white, and then to a final, virulent blue. The red rim was already 3,000 degrees (a subself informed her). Abstractly she knew that in the slide inward the doomed ma.s.s exceeded the temperature of the surface of the sun, greater than 5,000 degrees.
”Look closer,” Control said in the comforting tones of...who? Memory would not fetch this forth...
Closer. There at the very center-nothing, a blank blackness. Like a hallucinogenic record turning to its own furious music, faster and faster toward the center, where the spindle hole was a nothing.
But not quite nothing. At higher resolution-and blinded against the glare-she could see a fat weight that warped light around it. At its very edge, red refractions and darting rainbow sparklers marked the s.p.a.ce. She saw that an ellipsoid spun there, furiously laced by crimson arcs. As she watched, fiery matter traced its last trajectory inward, skating along the rim of the whirling dark. These paths swerved inward, and a very few skipped through the wrenching blackness to emerge again.
”Unstable orbits, I see,” Control said.
She felt a wave of immense dread. Yet she headed down there.
2.
Benjamin drove stolidly toward the Center. His arms were of lead, his head swiveled on scratchy ratchets.
That morning a poll had reported that the world was praying more since news had come of the Eater. There was even a statistical breakdown, showing what were the hot topics on the prayer circuit: 1. Family's health and happiness 83%.
2. Salvation from black hole 81%.
3. Personal spiritual salvation 78%.
4. Return of Jesus Christ 55%.
5. Good grades 43%.
6. End of an addiction 30%.
7. Victory in sports 23%.
8. Material possessions 18%.
9. Bad tidings for someone else 5%.
”Good to know the species hasn't lost its b.l.o.o.d.y-mindedness,” Kingsley remarked from the seat next to him.
”'Bad tidings for someone else,'” Benjamin said sourly. ”As if there weren't enough.”
”Um. You mean this news of the Eater's course correction?”
”Yeah. What's it moving to higher alt.i.tude for?”
”It won't say, as usual.”
On the drive, he saw yet another church going up, this time in a converted gas station. Stumps of pump stands extruded from the concrete islands in front. Churches were thronged every day now. New ones jutted their flick-knife spires above the palms.
He had gotten better and could now go for maybe a whole hour without thinking of her. He had found himself reviewing their life together to get himself ready for what was to come this morning. They had followed what he supposed to be a predictable arc. Pa.s.sion had settled down into possession, courts.h.i.+p into partners.h.i.+p, acute pleasure into pleasant habit. For both of them, lives that once had seemed to spread infinitely before them had narrowed to one mortal career. To accomplish anything definite, they had given up everything else, sailing for one point of the compa.s.s. Yet he had the hollow feeling of missed opportunities. Could something be made good through what he had to do next?
”It shouldn't be too demanding,” Kingsley said out of the silence.
”I'm that easy to read?”
”Old friend, depression is simple to diagnose. You are acting under intolerable pressures.”
He slammed a fist into the steering wheel. ”I have to keep working.”
”Of course. And you're vital.”
”If only I could sleep.”
”Haven't been getting a lot of that myself, either.”
”At least-”
”What? Ah, you were going to say, at least I have Amy.”
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