Eater (31 page)

Benjamin landed two full days later. A “catcher’s mitt” shuttle snagged him from a looping orbit and brought him down. It was a long glide across most of the Pacific to Oahu airport, taxiing to the same spot where he had departed a thousand years before.

In yet another way, he had lost her.

Behind a gray curtain, he went through the motions of being involved. Arno and Amy met him with news of Kingsley. The Eater’s final paroxysm, as its magnetic structure collapsed, had sent enormous currents through a circuit that connected moon and Earth. It had focused its energies upon Mauna Kea, and there the final vengeance had descended. Those inside the conducting Keck dome survived, since the currents remained on the outside. No others.

The black hole still remained, of course, a dead spike of gravitational gradient now. Its still-huge mass performed a slow gavotte about the moon, and vice versa, so that the Earth now had an invisible partner in its voyage around the sun. The moon lurched and gyred as the triple-mass system traced a complex curve. The moon turned its other face toward Earth for the first time since it became locked by tidal stresses, an event that had occurred well before life had advanced beyond the single-cell level. The far side had few craters and its dark skin had liquefied before the onslaught. Benjamin’s first glimpse of that side momentarily startled
him out of his cottony mood. Clouds trailed across the face, out gassing from the melted rock. These were the first to grace the lunar skies for probably four billion years. They lasted only days, making Luna seem a momentary twin.

Occasionally some stray mass would err into the path of the now-naked black hole. The flash was visible from Earth, if one were looking at just the right second. Astronomers immediately began using the hole as a gravitational lens to focus light from stars and galaxies passing behind it. Within weeks, papers began appearing, turning a terror into a tool.

But the billowing magnetic structure was gone. With it vanished all traces of a mind older than the solar system.

Or so they all thought, until Amy came quietly into his office in late afternoon. “Got a funny one for you.”

He peered at the sheet, alarmed by her tense voice. It was a report of radio emission from the vicinity of the Eater’s orbit. “High flux, picked up by the microwave network.”

“One of our ships, still out there?”

“Don’t think so. This looks more like emission from relativistic electrons.”

He stared at her. “A…jet?”

“It could be.”

It was. Observations over the next day showed that a fresh jet was blooming from very close to the black hole itself.

“It’s alive,” Amy said. “The magnetic field structure that housed the Old Ones, it must have come through okay.”

“Damn. This jet—where is it pushing the hole?”

“Outward,” Amy told a crowded auditorium at the base of Mauna Kea. “It’s moving off in a straight line.”

A voice called, “Toward what?”

“Suspiciously close to the direction in the sky of that other emission we saw, months ago. Remember?” Clearly nobody did. Amy went on, “An electromagnetic spectrum similar to Eater’s. Some people wanted to bargain with the information, maybe get Eater to leave us alone.”

Another voice called, “Companionship?”

Benjamin remembered Kingsley saying that the most they could hope to do was damage the thing. So Channing had died only to wound…

“It is notably diminished,” he rose to say. “The latest radio maps of the hole vicinity show a knot of extremely intense fields anchored in the hole itself. A small accretion disk seems to be building, apparently assembled from the debris in its vicinity.”

“So it can’t harm us?” a voice asked anxiously.

“Not now.” He felt compelled to add, “It could come back.”

“Then why head out toward that source?” a woman in the back asked.

“We cannot know.” His eyes swept the room and everywhere he saw naked fear. “But we can be vigilant.”

The information was suppressed. The world was not able to take the shock and uncertainty of this revelation—or so higher heads than his believed.

It had been folly, he saw, to believe that a creature which had encountered myriad assaults upon itself could be killed with anything present-day physics could devise. That they had injured it was a tribute. A mere few decades earlier, humanity could have done nothing. He supposed that was some kind of distinction. Not that it helped him in the dark of night, tossing restlessly.

The hole’s course held steady. It was leaving.

But humankind would eventually learn of its true fate, of that he was sure. And no one would ever truly rest easy again.

There was much to be done to make up humanity’s immense losses, but Benjamin felt no urge to join in.

He knew, without being able to speak of it, that he had to complete his emotional arc. An abstract term, but he sensed a tension riding in him.

One day at sunset, he said a final goodbye to her on the beach, beneath a splendid ruddy streak of cloud. The
wrecked sky above still showed orbiting debris of the battle, twinkling against the emerging stars. Vagrant energetic electrons struck auroras at the poles, where great sheets of light surged. He could see soft glows to the north. That would fade, and with it, some of the horror.

But not all of it, ever. Humanity would never again be able to gaze at the stars with anything resembling the astronomer’s serenity. Or feel awe at the heavens, untinged by terror.

After the sunset, he came back into his temporary quarters and saw the hourglass she had given him. He had meant to bring it home before he left, then forgotten and left it in his car. All he had left now was a suitcase from the trunk and the hourglass. Everything in his Center office had burned.

No past. No future. Only this hovering moment.

Outside, the balmy aromas of life resurgent.

The hourglass stood on his desk and captured his gaze.

Sand at the bottom. What would she want him to do with it?

He turned it upside down, beginning his life anew.

Goodbye. Hello.

—pop—

—stretching pain—

—and she zoomed
out
—

—away from a brilliance at her back.

Somehow she knew that this was the twin other mouth of the Eater’s black hole. She had pierced the very center of it and tunneled through an immeasurable expanse of space-time.

A white hole. Behind her erupted a tongue of plasma, licking hot at her, pursuing hard and fast—but she shot out into…

…a carnival of gaudy light.

Marvelous, airy cities hung in black space. Weird constructions rotated. In the distance hung a yellow-green star, too large, but warm.

She knew without knowing how.

She was in some other space-time, maybe not even in this universe. It
felt
different.

Here was where the doomed civilizations, swallowed by the Eater in its long journey, had ended up. Others, the Eaten, had known enough to send small missions into the fat equatorial bulge. Venturing into the realm of physics beyond calculation, they had won through.

They had colonized this space. A place hard fought for,
over more eons than flesh could know. Here swam survivors of countless alien societies, fruit of ancient desperation.

Waiting patiently in their castles. Knowing how stripped-down craft would be, after the shredding tidal forces of the hole. Ready to salvage any compressed intelligence.

Fathom it. Revive it. Her.

And now to greet.
Hello
, she thought.

Something like a hailing call came strumming redly through her sensorium.

For an astronaut, this is a heaven of sorts
.

Wonders to explore.

One of the notions leading to this novel came to me while reading one of the classic texts of plasma astrophysics:

While the ideas in this novel are offered in playful speculation, I have endeavored to show truthfully, against an extreme backdrop, how scientists do think, work, and confront the unknown. Astronomy locates its students in a perspective grander and perhaps more cold than does any other science. Though the effect is little noticed, it seems to me to have an appreciable impact, at a level often below perception, upon how astronomers see the universe and our place in it. Such lessons are among the most subtle we can learn.

The initial spur for this work came from my colleague and friend, Mark O. Martin. Jennifer Brehl’s deft and insightful editing yet again contributed to improving my text.

I have also benefited from discussions with Joan Benford, Dominic Benford, John Casti, Jay Sanders, Vince Gerardis, Ralph Vicinanza, Elisabeth Malartre, Joe Miller, John Cramer, Roger Blandford, and Martin Rees.

The constant assistance of Marilyn Olsen was essential. The unattributed poem in the last Part is by Swinburne.

The black hole figure in Part V is by Nigel Sharp, and was generated from an exact computer calculation of the general relativistic conditions near a rotating black hole. It appeared first in “Demythologizing the Black Hole,” by Richard Matzner, Tsvi Piran, and Tony Rothman, in
Analog Essays on Science
, edited by Stanley Schmidt, Wiley, 1990, to whom thanks go for permission to reproduce it.

July 1999