Part 36 (1/2)
”Why? Because we're scared? It's right-most people are terrified.”
”But not the ones who matter-us. Maybe its experience with other aliens leads it to believe that any species will make a rational calculation and give it what it wants.”
He blinked. ”That's why that stuff about 'superrational methods,' then? It thinks we have an amusing, unreasonable side, but-”
”That won't matter in a showdown, right. It's moving fast now. I'm going after it.”
He sensed the surge in her. Not in sight or sound but some other perception, coming somehow through this intense data link.
He was with with her in a way he never could have been before. her in a way he never could have been before.
And she was rus.h.i.+ng into the magnetosphere. The barium cloud was a hovering ma.s.s above, the Eater a rus.h.i.+ng fountain of light below. All against hard blacks and the approaching crescent moon.
Plunge!-he felt her elation. She had once said to him that all astronauts really wanted to be s.p.a.ce birds, and now he caught the texture of that truth.
”I'm being forced by the explosions at the top and bottom of the funnels,” she gasped.
He could see the hourgla.s.s shape. In the fever dream of his perceptual s.p.a.ce, it resembled a dirty Pyrex tube, slowly rotating. Bits of ma.s.s trickled down it. Not much; it was starved. But each funnel ended in the glaring hot washout of the disk.
And her only sliver of refuge lay toward that hard luminosity. Searchers flared like matchheads in the s.h.i.+fting, quilted light of it. They died to erase fractions of the Old One-perhaps. In the hard vibrating seethe, she could not be sure what effect all this was having in the form of the magnetic densities around her. Some, yes-a lessening of pressure skated across her pseudo-skin like a soft easing. Some success, she felt. But how much was enough?
”Thousands,” she answered him without his speaking. ”I can count them now. We're just picking at it. To it, we're-”
”Get out!” he yelled.
”-irritants. It will swat us like flies.”
Suddenly the wall he had built around his inner fears shattered. ”My G.o.d, get out!”
”I'm in a dive, lover. Blissful hard g's.”
”Bail out!”
”Gotta go. The sands are running.”
”Wait, you-”
”Sic transit, Gloria.”
Her dreamy voice alarmed him. Had she wanted this final plunge all along? ”No!”
”Yes.”
Her signal Dopplered away, like water whirling into a drain.
6.
She had studied all the theory and knew that the Searchers were doomed. And so was she.
But the little cylinder of nestled positrons and dutiful, dumb antiprotons, tucked into her tail like an awful egg-that would do nicely.
Diving. Thirty seconds to go. What was that old movie Thirty seconds to go. What was that old movie? Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. And how did it end And how did it end?
She was still close enough to the human sensorium to perceive the onrus.h.i.+ng Eater in terms that made human sense. Her ”eyes” generalized if they could. They tagged an ensemble of incoming elements-textures, lines-by seizing on a fragment, outlining it with a contrast-boundary, and then compressing all that detail into- What was was it? it?
A swollen cathedral of soaring magnetic towers, impossible perspectives, wrenching structures. All seething with detail that ramified as you looked at it, then split again into underworlds of minutia. Such beauty!
And faintly, hymns.
Her Searchers were dying. Amid streaming obelisks of information, they slipped. Currents found them. Electrocuted.
This place was constructed of electrodynamic flows, she sensed, that laced through the steepling rivulets to find their targets.
A Searcher was a new resistance in this whirling circuit. Currents dissipated there in an eye blink. Scorching heat fried the Searcher chips.
Then quick sparks lit the way before her. Plasma blossomed. Something had gotten ahead of her and now pried open the magnetic fortress.
Benjamin-?
She felt a dizzy gush of electric aurorae around her. Dove in a centrifugal gyre. Eluded them for a second or two- Hands. That was what it felt like at first.
Fingers probing, finding, learning. Inside her.
Peeling her into onion-skin layers.
Feeling ornery, she went outside and whistled, which made the neighbor's irritating dog run to the end of its chain and gag itself. It had woken her up with its d.a.m.ned barking last night- Memories. Did it relish her worst character flaws?
They had a convention: either could raise a hand and say, ”Time out,” and the other would have to be quiet for at least a minute. Usually she would be chastened, but not so much that when the ”Time's up” signal came she didn't launch right into nonstop talk again, words jumping out of her mouth to knit up the damage- That one hurt more than the choking dog image. Lost, so much lost Lost, so much lost- This thing knew how to wound.
Searchers dying everywhere. She banked down into the funnel.
At least the magnetic strands did not buffet her here. Still, turbulent knots of magnetic strands slammed into her carapace. Static electricity crawled over her. Fever-itch.
It sought her, poked into her mind. It's seen everything, done all this before It's seen everything, done all this before.
She slammed on her remaining ion reserve. A blur of heady acceleration. Below the bull's-eye disk bristled with eating brilliance. Storms wracked it.
The Eater was all around her now and knew it. Huge hollow cries of G.o.dlike wrath battered her.
Suddenly she sensed them them, too. Shelves of voices. Minds in boxes. A zoo of knowledge/data/selves.