"You bet." He drove with his usual concentration, quick and able, tires howling on the curves. Well, maybe today it was justified. Life seemed to be moving faster.

"It's packing a lot of power."

"And with seven billion years of experience, knows how to use it."

"If it cares to."

"That's just what the politicians will soon realize." He shot her a glance, his hands tight on the wheel as the road roar grew under his foot's pressure.

"Why would it be any danger to us?"

"The thing about aliens is, they're alien."

"You think the government will take that att.i.tude?"

"They'd be irresponsible if they didn't."

"Maybe they'll be as out of it as Arno."

"He's doing his best. You really dislike him, don't you?"

"I don't trust him," she said.

"He's secretive, all right," Benjamin allowed. "That makes me suspicious. We're used to open discussion in the sciences and he doesn't even pretend to follow that practice. And his people follow his lead-ask plenty of questions, give d.a.m.ned little back."

"That, and it's hard to believe that he beat 100,000 other sperm."

"Not up to the job?"

"n.o.body is, granted." She tried to imagine who would be able to manage a crisis like this and came up empty. "It demands too much knowledge in one head."

"So use more heads."

This turned out to be the solution the White House had settled upon, visible as they pulled up to the Center. Or rather, to a guard post and heavily armed Marines who peered intently at their freshly made IDs, issued only the day before. The hillside was now, overnight, festooned with prefab buildings lifted in by helicopter. Communications cables flowered in great knotted blossoms on standing pads, attended by squads of blue-overalled workers.

Inside the Center, the foyer had a security team checking IDs again and a metal detector. This made Benjamin angry, which proved to be "unproductive," as Kingsley termed it when he had to rescue them from the Operations Officer's office. They stopped at a brand-new phalanx of buffet tables, well stocked, and got coffee.

"Is this backed by the CIA?" Benjamin asked.

"I don't think so," Kingsley said judiciously. "The food is quite poor."

They plunged into work. Channing had to allow that Arno's U Agency had brought a brisk efficiency to the usual meandering corridor conversations. In this taut atmosphere, there were no academic locutions: no in terms of in terms of or or as it as it were were or or if you will if you will. This Channing fully approved. Leaving NASA, she had found from a series of visits to the campuses that much of academic life had come to seem either boring or crazy.

No rival for the craziness of the situation she was in, of course. Nothing could match the whirl of speculation around her.

It was remarkable that this magnetic creature had been able to produce even broken, coherent English simply by listening to radio and TV. A century of fiction had a.s.sumed any approaching alien would be able to do so, to simplify their story lines, without for a moment considering how prodigious a task it was. The Eater had no common experience, knew little of the Earth's surface, and was dealing with a species unknown anywhere else in the galaxy. It did have vastly more experience dealing with planetary life, though, and this was apparently what made its work successful.

But with their help it could become much more able, the Eater said. So there was a team of linguists working with it.

They started with vocabulary. Children learned language beginning with nouns and built up to abstractions, so the first volley of signals was an a.s.sembly of pictures showing common objects, along with the nouns for them. Verbs were a little more trouble. Cartoons proved useful here, showing "throw" and making distinctions like the difference between "rain" and "to rain." Here the American Hopi Indian language would have been useful, since in that tongue English's "it is raining"-with the implied it it quite invisible, yet a solid noun-was smoothly rendered simply as "rain." The Eater pointed out such subtleties as quickly as they arose, making its teachers feel that English was a patchwork of knocked-together solutions-which, of course, it was. quite invisible, yet a solid noun-was smoothly rendered simply as "rain." The Eater pointed out such subtleties as quickly as they arose, making its teachers feel that English was a patchwork of knocked-together solutions-which, of course, it was.

They quickly got through a basic five thousand words. Then faster transmission of whole texts, with ill.u.s.trations, proceeded with blinding speed. Kingsley, wearing yesterday's shirt and tie, related this to her in his clipped mode, teetering on the verge of irony.

"What do you think will happen next?" she asked him. He had apparently been here all night, or at least he looked it.

"Depends upon the world reaction, of course," Kingsley said with surprising crispness. "And how fast we can move before the heavy hand of 'responsibility' descends, to make us overcautious."

She blinked. His face was a mask, but she could read a jittery stress in him, especially in the overcontrolled way he spoke and moved. "Why do you stress speed?"

"The Eater-your choice of name has stuck, and perhaps was a bit infelicitous."

"Gee, I love it when you use such fancy terms. How infelicitous?"

"It's more the t.i.tle of a horror film, isn't it?"

"Or a bad sci-fi flick," Benjamin said, munching a donut. He knew well the distinction between true science fiction and the media dross pumped out in vast, glittery quant.i.ties, "sci-fi."

"So you think that'll worsen the first impression, once this breaks?" Channing asked.

"It's starting to break," Kingsley said with abstract fatigue. "Impossible to contain, really."

"What really matters here," Benjamin said, "is how the governments react."

Kingsley managed a dry chuckle. "I remember some head of state in the TwenCen saying that history teaches us mostly that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all their other alternatives."

"I wish I could take the name back," Channing said.

While they slept, and Kingsley had not, the fascination of their opportunity had worked upon the astronomers. They had asked the Eater questions about astrophysics, peppering it with a dozen in a single transmission. This apparently broke the t.i.t-for-tat logjam. The "intruder"-a name Kingsley still preferred to use, and thought might work better but had no hope would be taken up-seemed eager to discuss. It had quickly mastered the protocols of our digital image processing and filled its broadband signal with pictures. There were eerie exchanges. It was almost like a proud parent showing around baby pictures.

WITNESS, THE LATE EVOLUTION OF A STAR, WHICH YOU TERM THE ROSETTE NEBULA, LOOKED LIKE THIS FROM THE SIDE WHEN IT WAS YOUNG.

The display was awesome, close-ups of giant rosy clouds of shimmering molecules, beautiful testaments to the death throes of a star. The Eater had been traveling near it and for the first time Channing appreciated the limitation astronomers seldom remembered: seeing objects from one angle left questions forever unanswerable.

"This gives us a handle on its trajectory, then," Benjamin observed swiftly.

Kingsley nodded. "We can work backward, using these other images-the Magellanic Cloud, the Galactic Center-and determine its past."

Some of the images were impossible to match with anything ever seen from Earth. Others almost matter-of-factly revised in an instant their picture of the galaxy's geography. The view of the Galactic Center showed what generations of artists had imagined, the glowing bulge of billions of stars that shone in all colors, a swollen majesty rent by lanes of ebony dust and amber striations no one could explain.

It thrilled her, tightened her throat. A bounty now came flooding into the Center as the Eater fed data through Arecibo and Goldstone and the new dish at Neb Attahl, India.

"My G.o.d, it'll put us all out of work," she murmured.

"Astronomers? Quite the opposite, I expect," Kingsley said.

"Yeah, we'll be trying to understand these-and the Eater itself-for a generation at least," Benjamin said, biting into his second donut, balancing a plate on his knee in the Big Screen Room.

"Well," Channing said ironically, "it's good to know you won't be forced into retirement."

This pleasant interlude lasted only an hour. Martinez discovered they had come in and held a meeting. Clearly she was struggling to find her role in all this, a small fish caught in a tidal wave. Arno's men had tried to clamp down on the whole story, but it got out through the porous Washington system. In part, that was because the astronomers did not like the U Agency's increasingly abrupt manner. Their styles clashed fundamentally, as mirrored in their clothes: government b.u.t.toned-up look against tropical techno-hip. Even in Martinez's oil-upon-the-waters meeting, there were several edgy, sharp-tongued interchanges.

They watched some television, where the story had broken in more or less the correct essentials only two hours before. At first there was a stunned, worldwide awe. Religious proclamations, stentorian speeches by a.s.sorted politicians who could not tell a spiral galaxy from a supernova.

Astronomers who were called in to consult at first refused to credit the story. Only release of the Rosette Nebula image convinced these. The release itself was a fortunate error. A Center staffer had sent it as a compressed file to a colleague, instead of zipping it to yet another subagency in Washington; they had, weirdly, WebNet addresses near each other in her file directory.

Within another hour or two, the astronomers outside those in the know fathomed the significance of the Rosette image. Immediately, they raised uncomfortable questions. This was an utterly alien ent.i.ty, carrying the ma.s.s of our entire moon-another factoid which had leaked, this time through Australia. What could it do?

The Gang of Four sneaked off from the ongoing Martinez meeting to discuss just this. Amy looked as though she had spent the night as Kingsley had, fueled by coffee. "I've been trying to figure what it might do."

"A more important point is what it wants," Kingsley observed with a pensive gaze.

Amy said, "It didn't answer our third question. Ever."

"Exactly."

With her advanced computer skills, and the help of a squad of cryptographers from the U Agency, Amy had been in on every exchange in the transcription process. She shook her head. "It doesn't answer any questions that verge on that, either."

"Curious," Kingsley said mysteriously. Channing could tell that he had his own theories, but was unwilling to share them. He had been wrong quite enough for the last week, thank you.

"If it wanted," Benjamin said, "it could plunge straight through the Earth, bore a hole."

Kingsley snorted derisively. "And kill itself, by stripping away the magnetic structures that are are the intelligence of the thing? No, it will be rather more clever." the intelligence of the thing? No, it will be rather more clever."

Channing had her own worse case and decided to venture it. "With those magnetic funnels, it could blowtorch the top of our atmosphere."

Kingsley looked delighted at an idea he had not had himself. "Ummm...you're entirely correct."

"That would work?" Amy asked, startled.

"Absolutely," Kingsley said with an oblivious authority; he was, after all, the Astronomer Royal. "Sic transit gloria mundi, eh? 'Thus pa.s.seth away the glory of the world,' if my Latin is still decent."

"Is there enough energy density in its system to drill through the atmosphere?" Benjamin asked. Channing knew this well, one of his favorite maneuvers. Deflect the issue into a calculation to get time to think. Even in a potentially mortal crisis, we play games Even in a potentially mortal crisis, we play games.

They found a blackboard-white, actually, with those smelly marking pens-and spent half an hour checking Kingsley's a.s.sertion. Finally Benjamin dropped his marker and agreed. "Dead on. It could roast us all, in time."

Kingsley said archly, "If it doesn't get bored first."

Channing had been resting in a lounge chair, especially brought in by one of the U Agency gofers-a rather pleasant aspect of the Agency's otherwise annoying presence. She brightened with a fresh notion. "Then let's try to keep it amused, why don't we? I wonder if it likes jokes."

4.

Actually, it did-but its own humor was weird, unfunny: LIFE HAS CONTRADICTIONS. BUT CONTRADICTIONS KILL LIFE.

"That's a joke?" Benjamin asked the room, the first to speak up. After his words were out, he was suddenly embarra.s.sed, wishing he could take them back. Maybe there was some deep semiotic content he had missed? There were hugely powerful people here, able to eject him from the Center forever with the rise of a single eyebrow. But heads nodded in agreement and no one disagreed.

The Operating Group, as named by Arno, now encompa.s.sed twenty-eight members. It met in the colloquium hall, the Center's largest. Armed guards barred every doorway and three electro-sniffer teams had worked over the room before anyone was allowed to say anything. Having to sit in silence for even ten minutes was difficult, given the air of strain in the room.

"Plainly, we need to know more," Kingsley said from the podium, nodding to Benjamin.

The Eater's latest transmission hung in glowing letters on a large flat screen that dominated the room. They had just watched several of the Eater's purported ideas of humor parade across this screen, including some images of things no one could even recognize. The Eater seemed to equate what to humans would be verbal humor with an inexplicable visual humor that looked like tangled threads of corroded surfaces, in virulent colors.

"Every telescope in the solar system is trained on it. We are learning as quickly as we can." He paused. "And now, something rather curious."

The team from the White House sat in the front row, two seats over from Benjamin, and their faces showed blank incomprehension. They probably had never advanced beyond high school chemistry, he realized, and saw the world as wholly human, filled with the vectors of human power. Technology was to them the product of human labor, no more, and science consisted of stories heard on TV, of no interest to people involved with the Real World.

"Several astronomers have noticed a similarity between the Eater's electromagnetic 'buzz'--that is, what we believe to be its internal transmissions-and signals already detected years previous, from a star not very far away." Kingsley paused and looked out over the crowd. "Most curious."

Benjamin waited through an odd, hesitant silence. What the h.e.l.l, got to keep this rolling. And Kingsley looks like he could use some help up there What the h.e.l.l, got to keep this rolling. And Kingsley looks like he could use some help up there. "Maybe there's a similar object orbiting-visiting-that star, too?"

Nods from the astronomical contingent. We've got the momentum here We've got the momentum here, Benjamin realized. The rest are hopelessly far off their turf The rest are hopelessly far off their turf.

"If there were," Kingsley argued, "this intruder would know about it already. It has been everywhere, seen everything, for many billions of years."

Why not give the number: seven? Benjamin then realized that every detail had been hastily cla.s.sified, and Kingsley was playing it safe. The political types might not know the implications of such an immense lifetime and leak it.

More silence. Well, we might as well turn this into a little colloquium. That's what the room's for Well, we might as well turn this into a little colloquium. That's what the room's for.

"Not so," he said, spreading his arms to both sides of his seat, hooking a hand around Channing's shoulder. Might as well make a claim on this idea, too Might as well make a claim on this idea, too. "We have one small advantage over it. Our telescopes are scattered all over the solar system. To pick up this distant source would be impossible with a receiving antenna the size of the Eater. It's a matter of resolving power. By my calculations"-he let the phrase hang there just an extra second, to establish some authority with this crowd-"it's blind to faraway objects smaller than stars. That probably includes this thing near another star-whatever it is."

This last was pure bluff. He had not kept up with the literature very well, had no clue what Kingsley was referring to.

Kingsley said crisply, "I suggest we have a special a.s.sistant team set about making detailed comparisons. Any and all knowledge may prove useful. I believe, in fact, that should be our general principle. Gather, sift, think, wait."

Arno rose-his standard room-ruling maneuver, adapted for an auditorium. His eyes swept the room. "Plainly, ladies and gentlemen, something more is needed. I believe I speak for the entire U Agency when I say that we believe this body, the President's authorized Operating Group, should take control of the entire deep s.p.a.ce network."

Some murmurs of a.s.sent from the political faction. The astronomers looked sour. Some muttered objections.

Arno swept this away with a broad gesture. "We must immediately-and secretly-launch the new Searcher craft, using the best, highest-density Deep Link bands. With a connection of such high quality, they can be flown under direction by people on Earth."

"An interactive control, close to the source?" a NASA official asked.

"Exactly. Do we-you, madam-have that capability?"

"There are Searchers in Jupiter s.p.a.ce." The woman wore one of the new NASA uniforms, introduced a year before, handsome deep blue and gold. "We could begin a few of the micropackages on the way, launching at high velocity, on trajectories to intercept eventually..." Her voice trailed off, plainly not prepared for this possibility.

"I believe this group should so recommend," Arno finished and sat down.

Kingsley said, "I believe that has much to recommend it. We cannot know the intruder's trajectory, and it plainly has the ability to alter it in a moment. It is nearing Jupiter, and knowledge gained there should prove invaluable."

"I think we shouldn't launch everything now," Benjamin said, amazed at his continuing audacity. The quiet administrator of only a month ago would have been cowed into utter silence in such a gathering.

Kingsley's mouth pursed, startled. "Why?"