"One we must obey," Channing said. They both turned in surprise. She had slipped through the door without their noticing.

"What?" Benjamin demanded. "Why?"

"Something I can't explain, but from what I just saw..." Her voice drained away and she seemed lost in thought.

"I cannot imagine that we would subject people to such a thing," Kingsley said with crisp dignity.

"I can't imagine we won't," Channing said, her voice so serene and mild and certain that it sent a chill through Benjamin.

PART FIVE.

A THINKING THING.

JUNE.

1.

In her purse lurked her neuroses writ small. Survivalist provisions like chocolate bars and breath mints, nail polish and Kleenexes, Chap Sticks and thread and a palm computer and a wrinkled notebook and a.s.sorted pens: yellow, blue, black. She also had taken lately to h.o.a.rding: unpaired gloves, broken eyegla.s.s frames, bits of tape and twine. Peering in, she felt as if she gazed into her unconscious, where dark objects conspired with painful memories. She had retreated to ever-larger purses roughly at the time she was diagnosed. Before she had used briefcases or book bags, the businesslike approach of a woman who no longer announced that she carried her house on her back. Yet she still a.s.sociated purses with her mother's generation: solid, sure, but also awkwardly dressed and uptight, clunky and a bit out of it. The purse's shadowy collective unconscious now prompted her with fragments of her past selves. It reeked of pruderies and fears, anxieties hidden from the world but carried everywhere, like a Freudian f.a.n.n.y-pack.

She used this bulky brown satchel to keep herself afloat at the Center. She could hide her medication and carry it with her, and when a nurse came to administer the more difficult injections, she could use Benjamin's s.p.a.cious office, with its little "executive alcoves" for deal-making away from the main room of walnut desk and Big Screen Comm Center. When Benjamin or Kingsley-the only people who took much notice of her, luckily, in the hubbub-protested that she should be home working, she quoted Einstein: "Only a monomaniac gets anything done."

"All too true," Kingsley said somberly, his luminous eyes looming over his slender, lined face. "You're...looking well."

She had an urge to laugh at his obvious struggle to find a remotely plausible compliment, but suppressed it. "You're a dear, dear liar." She kissed him lightly, a satisfying soft smack.

To her surprise, this fl.u.s.tered him. To smooth matters over, she went with him for a coffee and deliberately chose one of the high-octane variety named Kaff. He looked troubled most of the time now, but her choice made him frown further. "Should you be, well-"

"Taking in caffeine? Mendenham says not to, but my body says, 'Either gimme some or lie down.'"

"A demanding body."

"You should know."

Again he startled her by blushing. "I believe I can recall," he managed.

"As the prospect of having much more of it fades, I live in my sensual past." Teasing him was unfair, but the world was not exactly packed full of fun lately, and she needed the ego boost. So she rationalized as she watched him put his composure back on. She could even see it happening in his face, mouth getting resolute again. Under the pressure here, maybe his barrier against facial giveaways was falling.

"You have every right to," came out judiciously phrased. "If there's anything-"

"A lot, but it's probably immoral or something. Content me by telling me the gossip."

This put him on his favorite ground, the slightly disguised lecture. The great game now was not astrophysics but amateur alien psychology. "The creature going on obliviously, chattering about all sorts of things, as if we are all waiting here for its orders."

"And we aren't?"

"The leadership is saying and doing nothing."

"They've had two days to think it over-"

"My dear, this is a matter for the entire world. In two days, they cannot agree on the color of blue."

"They'd better hurry."

"There's mildly good news there. It's braking."

"Ah, good. How?"

"Only an astronomer would make that her first question." He grinned and for a quick moment some of the old joy brimmed between them. "Most would want to know how many more days that gives us, which is perhaps now fifteen in all. To answer how how-through a forward-pointing jet, quite powerful. Apparently it found fresh quarry and has extended this jet, anchoring it firmly with magnetic flux ropes in a helical pattern. That funnels and ejects hot matter from its accretion disk."

The coffee had given her enough energy to be incredulous. "That's slowing it enough?"

"I know, a simple calculation shows that slowing a ma.s.s exceeding our moon's, down from a velocity of hundreds of kilometers a second is, well, an incredible demand."

"It's an incredible creature. What's it say say about this?" about this?"

"Its deceleration? Nothing. Not one to give way to Proustian introspection, it seems."

"Skip the literature. I'll settle for hearing how it does the jet trick."

"Understanding how it thinks is now critical, I gather."

"Sure, right after we understand how we think."

"Touche. It did refer to Proust the other day, I saw. Something about his understanding of time being what one would expect of 'doomed intelligences,' I believe the phrase was."

"Well, as a fellow doomed intelligence, I agree. Never could abide Proust, anyway."

"Nor I. Its transmissions are fascinating stuff and I look in on them when I can."

"I should, too," she said distantly.

"It's sending ma.s.ses of stuff, a million words a day." Too casually he looked at her hands, which were fidgeting-and not due to the Kaff. "I gather you have been looking at its own inventory of art."

"Ummm, yes. It appended a note saying that these were representative works from other members of our cla.s.s."

He frowned. "'Cla.s.s'? As technological civilizations?"

"No, as what it called 'dreaming vertebrates.' With the implication that our cla.s.s is fairly common."

"Good Lord. I wonder if those working out its orders know that. I'll have to tell them."

"Orders?"

"Oh yes, it has a menu and proceeds to order up whatever it fancies."

"From what? Our broadcast media?"

"And references such as the Encyclopaedia. Still having a bit of trouble keeping straight that people pa.s.s from the scene so quickly. Or else thinks we're somehow hiding them away still."

"Who does it want?"

"Artists, scientists, sports figures. It caught transmissions from decades past as it approached our solar system. It even sends the pictures of those it wants. Lauren Bacall, Einstein, Bob Dylan, Gandhi, Esther Dyson, Jack Nicholson, and Hillary Clinton, as I remember."

She felt a chill then at the reality of what was coming at them across the solar system. "Good...grief."

"Yes, imagine the feelings of those on the list."

"They've been told?"

"It would seem. Of course many are dead, but others are now near death. Arno wondered aloud if any would be willing to, you know, give up the remainder of their lives"-he shrugged, eyes rolling skyward-"for humanity and so on."

"To...copy...them." The word was hard to get out.

"It has already sent 'helpful additions' to our computing and other technologies that it says will permit us to 'read' a good deal of the memory stored in brains. Seems incredible to me."

"It...wants all the person?"

"So I gather." He looked at her quizzically.

"Why should we do it?"

"It does not need to brag about its threatening abilities, of course. Apparently brute intimidation has worked before."

"We all judge from our experience," she said lightly. "What does this tell us about other intelligent life in the galaxy?"

"They must have complied, I suppose, else it would not think this a winning strategy."

"Something about the idea gets me in my, well, my gut."

"Me, too. In terms of game theory, doing a cost-benefit sort of a.n.a.lysis-"

She chuckled loudly. Kingsley stopped, blinked. "You think I'm off the mark."

"'Applying game theory'-that's the kind of idea only an intellectual would believe. This is a gut issue."

Ruefully he tried to share in the humor of it, managing a thin smile. "I suppose I betray my origins."

"You may think that way, but I'll bet ordinary people sure don't."

He nodded energetically. "I think you're dead-on right."

"To deal in people this way is as profound an insult as I can imagine."

"Ummm. Perhaps this hints at what we should call a fate worse than death?"

"How are people reacting?"

He sighed with gray exasperation. "Those above are dithering, terrified. News has gotten out, of course. Arno tried to see that all radio telescopes that could pick up the Eater's transmissions were in our control, but that notion failed immediately."

"Too many?"

"Far too many. A small dish with superior software in Sri Lanka picked up the vital part of the story. The Eater sent it several times in different terminology, apparently to be sure it was understood."

Benjamin came by, saw them, and hurried over. "Been looking for you both. Come on. You can watch in my office."

From his tight-mouthed expression she could read that the morning had not gone well. She labored up from her chair. "More trouble with Arno?"

"He's trying to find scapegoats for the leaks."

"This place is a sieve, in any case," Kingsley said amiably, unconcerned, as they both slowed to her pace.

"The Sri Lanka was bad enough, but somebody's letting other stuff get out," Benjamin said as they entered his office. Two a.s.sistants waved for his attention, but he in turn waved them away. Something had toughened in him in all this and he seemed more a.s.sured than he had ever been. She was proud of him, especially when she saw the strain on the faces of Center personnel. Benjamin's expression was unlined, though intent.

He punched up the international news-not difficult, since channels carried virtually nothing else since the Eater had left Jupiter s.p.a.ce. "What's the reaction?" Channing asked, sinking into a form-fitting chair that clasped her in its leathery embrace.

"Horror," Benjamin said. "Here-"

They watched reaction shots from some of those 'ordered up' on the Eater's menu. After the third one, her attention drifted and she let events slide by for a while. When she came back, there was the news Benjamin had brought them in for.

Some totalitarian governments had started to comply. Footage of people rounded up-criminals, the politically out of favor-and being herded away.

"To have their brains sliced-and-diced and uploaded into computers," Benjamin said. "Incredible."

"And the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in charge are claiming to do it for the benefit of all mankind," Kingsley said.

"Transparent," Benjamin said with disgust.

The twenty-first century had no lack of dictators. In the crush of populations among the tropical nations particularly, the strongman promises of order and equal shares, though seldom fulfilled, found a ready audience.

"They know their unsavory reputations," Kingsley observed, "and this move allows them to appear as benefactors of humanity while consolidating internal power. Rather neat, overall."

Another news flash, this time yet another intercepted Eater message. "Not from here," Benjamin said. "Some dish grabbed it."

The Eater encouraged this latest development from the dictators. It wanted a large, functioning "eternal society" to join it, addressing humanity as though it were a unity.

I DESIRE CONVERSE WITH A TRUE VARIETY OF YOU.