Kingsley said, "Just so. Basking in this warm glow, imagine that you notice a mediocrity at the edge of your special binary, someone not worth bothering with. But the charmer turns and includes the mediocrity"-he did a perfect mid-American accent-"Hi, gladtaseeya." Channing laughed and Kingsley beamed. "So then this inferior's eyes brighten as pleasant small talk and personal tales pa.s.s among you, now a party of three. Now, what is pa.s.sing through your mind?"

This he addressed to Channing, who came back quickly with, "You listen with a little smile." A cough. "Hiding your secret."

"Exactly!" Kingsley beamed.

"Because," she went on, "the poor old mediocrity. Does not know know. That this is just social fluff. That the primary relationship here. Is between you. And the charming leader."

"As usual," Kingsley said happily, "quite observant. 'Poor mediocrity,' you think! But even laughter and good spirits cannot conceal the dreadful moment when you catch a glance from the mediocrity-"

"And see that he is thinking. Exactly the same thing. About you," Channing finished.

Benjamin laughed, caught up in the sheer headlong joy of it. "And that frozen instant is a glimpse into the social abyss."

Kingsley grinned. "Absolutely. The truly genius social creatures, they dwell on levels far above us."

Then he saw why the moment was so wonderful. This was the way the three of them had been back at Cambridge, in the years when the world had seemed utterly open, brim-full with promise. And together they had captured it together again, for a glancing moment.

With the media whisked out of sight, the presidential party got down to business.

Then when the President spoke, it was less to convey information than to make others react according to his plan. Benjamin watched through the several hours of discussions, trying to see how the master communicators achieved this effect.

Flattery, subtle bribery, psychology, even flat-out threat-all these came into play, some as difficult to catch as a momentary reflection on an ocean wave. As long as their plan kept working, means did not matter. Usually arguments couched logically but carrying a deep emotional appeal worked best with the U.N. representatives. This was a political culture in which short-term interests always dominated long-term concerns in the minds of virtually everyone, but in this crisis they were out of their depth, facing a hard fact.

The Eater would not negotiate; it was not remotely political, resembling more the weather than a person. This had barely penetrated to the political elite, Benjamin saw, as various men reported on attempts to cajole, wheedle or threaten the Eater, all total failures. They were unused to the Eater's pattern of simply ignoring the high and powerful. Instead, it preferred to pursue discussions with members of the Semiotic Group, on topics cultural and biological. The President could not find a way to soften this, finally used his standard approach of following the bald truth with a side of sentiment.

A specialist enlisted by the White House displayed on a large screen a "typical pa.s.sage" from the Eater, in response to an attempt to negotiate on the issue of uploading people.

I HAVE NEED OF THESE MINDS. ONLY BY CLOSE RELATION TO THEM CAN I FURTHER STUDY YOU, AND IN MY SCRUTINY YOU SHALL FIND YOUR ULTIMATE RESIDENCE UPON THE GALACTIC STAGE. YOUR MINDS' IMPRESSIVE TALENTS AROSE IN PART AS COURTSHIP TOOLS, I CAN SEE ALREADY. YOU EVOLVED THEM TO ATTRACT AND ENTERTAIN s.e.xUAL PARTNERS FOR THE LONG PERIODS NEEDED TO PRODUCE AND REAR YOUR CHILDREN. YOUR OWN RESEARCH SHOWS THAT THE MOST DESIRED TRAITS BOTH s.e.xES HAVE IN A MATE ARE KINDNESS AND INTELLIGENCE. YOUR STANDARD ARGUMENT IS THAT WOMEN PREFER POWER AND MONEY, OR THE SIGNS OF THE ABILITY TO GET THOSE. MEN ARE DRAWN TO SMOOTH SKIN, YOUTH, A PROPORTION OF WAIST TO HIP. ALL TRUE-BUT NOT PRIMARY. KINDNESS AND INTELLIGENCE ARE MORE ABSTRACT QUALITIES, BOTH INFERRED FROM SPEECH. THESE I CAN CONTEMPLATE ONLY BY PROLONGED EXPOSURE.

Exasperated, the specialist said, "Now, how can we deal with a thing that answers clear, direct questions like this?"

"Gingerly, I should think," Kingsley whispered to Benjamin and Channing. They were sitting to the side, near the rear of the big new auditorium, behind a phalanx of military and policy people.

The unwieldy group then broke into subsections, each in a different room. They finally got to meet with the Action Team-there seemed to be a new term for every feature of the problem now-devoted to Channing's mission.

A group Benjamin had not even heard of gave a report on what the intelligence specialists thought was going on in the Eater's innermost regions. A Defense Department satellite of advanced design had made a map, using X-ray emission. From that, NASA had already sent a Searcher hurtling directly at the Eater's core. Piecing together the X-ray pictures and the Searcher's views as it flew in, they produced a processed picture: [image]

"We see here a cutaway view," a prominent black hole theorist explained. She was a slender, sharp-faced woman with a ready smile, in her element, playing before the most powerful crowd in the world. "The outer surface is the last point at which an object can orbit the hole. The surface is only about ten meters across."

Benjamin asked, "The Searcher tried to orbit it?"

"'Tried' is the word," the affable woman said. "It failed. Instead, it flew closer in-the ergosphere."

Benjamin persisted. "It has a bulge?"

"Yes, and we're seeing it here from about twenty-five degrees above the equator. That's why the inner sphere-the hole itself-looks a little distorted."

He barely remembered the term, ergosphere, and did not want to show any ignorance. "The hole is rotating rapidly-that is our princ.i.p.al finding. That is apparently how it manages the enormous magnetic arches and funnels outside. The rotation couples with the accretion disk in a kind of enormous motor."

The discussion picked up then and Benjamin could barely follow. The bulge of the outer surface arose from the swirl of s.p.a.ce that a black hole's rotation created. Because that swirl was outside the inner sphere, the hole stored rotational energy in the region between the two surfaces. Thus, erg erg from the Latin for energy. from the Latin for energy.

"What happened to the Searcher?" Benjamin asked, feeling awash in the discussion.

"It was one of the miniaturized models, high velocity, ion propulsion. Small enough to survive the heating from the accretion disk. We flew it in at a thirty-degree angle, a steep dive."

A NASA official added proudly, "Miniaturized small enough to get into the hole's vicinity without being torn apart by tidal forces, either."

"It flew into the ergosphere," the woman said, "on automatic program, of course. It sent one last gasp of data, which gave us this figure. We never heard from it again."

"The hole swallowed it," a man from Caltech said authoritatively.

"We don't know that," the woman countered.

"The hole would have have to grab it," the man answered testily. to grab it," the man answered testily.

"It's a completely warped s.p.a.ce-time," the woman said. "There are other paths available. The Searcher could escape through the outer boundary of the ergosphere-if it had enough energy."

"I calculate that it did not," the Caltech fellow said.

"So do I, but there are intermediate fates."

"Such as?"

"The Searcher could exit the ergosphere along a path that pops out into another s.p.a.ce-time, or another time in our own s.p.a.ce."

"Like a time machine?" the man asked incredulously.

"A theoretical possibility, yes," the woman said.

"Point is, it's gone," Channing whispered.

The audience overheard this and looked silently at her. She was going into this place, Benjamin read in their eyes, and they half-envied her. She sensed this and said in a croak, "The physics is great, sure. But this isn't a natural black hole. It's been built up...by an intelligence."

"We must not think of it as being the kind of structure we think of as intelligence at all," a noted evolutionary biologist remarked. "It is not of a species. It is unique, a construction."

"A self-construction," a voice added, "maybe more like a self-programming computer. Gotta be a way to think about it from a cybernetic angle-"

Kingsley's incisive voice broke in. "We fondly imagine that evolution drives toward higher intelligence. But eagles would think evolution favored flight, elephants would naturally prefer the importance of great strength, sharks would feel that swimming was the ultimate desirable trait, and eminent Victorians would be quite convinced that evolution preferred Victorians."

Only Channing found this amusing.

7.

She had learned from the morning paper that when Halley's Comet filled the skies in 1910, word spread that the Earth would pa.s.s through the gases of the tail. There was worldwide panic, directives from the Pope, quite a few suicides.

She quickly calculated over coffee that the entire tail, compressed to a solid, might have fit into a briefcase. Ignorance could be fatal.

Benjamin had to go to a seminar by a specialist in "extreme case fear responses," which someone high up at the U Agency thought would be helpful in the times ahead. He wasn't inclined to go, but Channing shooed him out of the house before her three-car-plus-ambulance escort arrived. Still, she was so fretful on the drive to the clinic that the driver finally leaned back to where she lay and said very patiently, "Please don't drive when you're not driving."

She had to go through the preps for her "reading," as the diffident specialists put it, which meant another day of tedium. Still, while the preps took hold, she had herself wheeled into a room where she could watch the show on a big screen. Just for laughs, she said, and they dared not contradict her. This was a special site just for her, plus a few other people who were very ill and had volunteered to be uploaded. Arno had certainly cleared her way; the screen for her to view was his latest indulgence.

The speaker was quick, efficient, and despite expectations, interesting. The best way to confront fear in a group was to make the group diverse, she said. a.s.semblies that were all men or all women fared badly when confronted with danger or merely the unknown. Less obvious, but supported by research, was a finding that mixing age groups was good. One exerted more self-control in front of strangers and dissimilar people.

The bad news was that preexisting groups did not respond well to fear. Even tests on championship athletic teams showed that they reacted badly to simple dramas like getting stuck in an elevator. Luckily, being "high phobic-tolerant" correlated with being in good physical condition, and most astronomers met at least the minimum standards there. Living in Hawaii had made them more outdoorsy than the usual run of the profession, and astronomers as a whole were more athletic than the norm. But altogether, the Center could expect some fairly large levels of panic in the days to come.

"How come?" she wondered aloud.

n.o.body watching the screen answered, but her "psych escort" put in helpfully, "They're planning for it to maybe attack some way."

"Huh? Why?" Being at the supposedly center of events and yet quite out of it was not fun.

The escort was sweet but slow, it seemed. "The Eater...it might get angry."

"Anger isn't a category we can be sure it even possesses."

"Well, the governments, they've agreed to not let it have all those people."

"It wants the complete list?"

"Every one."

"Has it made threats?"

"It doesn't say anything about that."

"Coy b.a.s.t.a.r.d, huh?"

"The news, it says the Eater is giving us the silent treatment."

"Actually, it's gabby. You just have to ask the right question."

On her palm computer, she punched up the conversation she had from yesterday, in reply to some demand by the U.N. It was perfectly indirect: YOUR DISCOURSE EXPLAINS YOUR PROPENSITY FOR GOSSIP AS A GROOMING SUBSt.i.tUTE. MY-SELF'S a.n.a.lYSIS OF YOUR DRAMAS SHOWS YOUR FINEST ARTISTS DEVOTING TWO-THIRDS OF YOUR CONVERSATION TO IT. LABORERS AND LEARNED ALIKE PREFER TO TALK ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT IDEAS OR ISSUES. WITHOUT GOSSIP, YOUR SPECIES MIGHT NEVER HAVE BOTHERED TO LEARN HOW TO TALK. PHYSICAL GROOMING IS STILL MORE SATISFYING TO THE OTHER OF YOUR ORDER, THE PRIMATES. THUS THEY DO NOT SPEAK. CHAT IS UNLIKE HUNTERS CALLING OUT IN A MASTODON HUNT, OR GATHERERS REPORTING WHERE THE HERBS ARE, WHICH CLEARLY HAD USES FOR YOU. THIS TALK OF OTHERS AND FORMING POWER COALITIONS WERE EVEN MORE IMPORTANT. I CAN SEE THAT TALK IS MORE EFFICIENT THAN PHYSICALLY GROOMING EVERY OTHER MEMBER OF A TRIBE, WHEN TRIBES BECOME LARGE. TALK IS EASIER THAN PETTING, FOR YOU CAN DO IT TO SEVERAL AT ONCE, WHILE YOU ARE PERFORMING OTHER TASKS. THIS SUGGESTS A USEFUL RESEARCH PROJECT MIGHT AIM TO MEASURE SEROTONIN PRODUCTION DURING GOSSIPING TO VERIFY THIS VIEW. I COMMEND IT TO YOUR SCIENTISTS.

So it was advancing theories about humans already. Even suggesting research! Who could have guessed that their first alien contact would be so abstract?

With more experience of intelligence throughout the galaxy, it could generalize in ways impossible to visualize. What more could it tell us about ourselves? She felt a chill then, the awe and allure of the utterly strange.

Then she was into the treatment, that flat medicinal smell, the attendants pushing her down the corridors, eyes watching her-the famous astronaut heroine!-from doorways. Into the cool ceramic air of the special clinic, which had been set up on a hillside with the now-routine incredible speed.

Then the teams around her very attentively got down to the grungy details of how to extract the information in her head. In principle, the experts had explained, they could do this without knowing in detail how the brain worked. Instead, they used the principles of copying software to recognize neurons and then replace all the functions of each neuron with a computer simulation.

Neurons held her ident.i.ty, encoded in myriad connections. It was not enough to know the location and type of neuron, though. They also had to see how each one responded and sent electrical signals, how it was affected by its chemical environment-a swamp of detail. Impossible without the rooms of computers she had glimpsed on the way in.

All for little ol' me. Pleasant, to be the center of attention on your deathbed. Research animal plus world-cla.s.s news object. They informed her early on, days ago, that she thought differently when her adrenal glands had been squirting into her bloodstream. I've known that all my life. Goes with being temperamental I've known that all my life. Goes with being temperamental.

She lay still as a buzzing bank of magnetic readers sat atop her skull, like a mechanical hairdo. These nests of quantum detectors registered her thoughts while she watched videos of sunsets, tiger attacks, pictures of Benjamin and her mother, a steak, flowers, storms, even p.o.r.no--they apologized in advance for that, but it was actually good, the sly devils. Then smells, sounds, touches. She did arithmetic on demand, listened to music, to railroad trains and children laughing. Sheet sensors covering the crown of her brain built a three-dimensional map of each thin layer of her brain cells. Added to a general map of human neural structure, teams of surgeons wrote programs to model the myriad idiosyncratic ways she thought.

This working model then got sharpened. The surgeons compared its output signals to those she emitted when they showed the same pictures, flashed lights, fed her, played music.

Like getting a dress tailored, she thought, only this cost millions of bucks per hour only this cost millions of bucks per hour. Flash by neuronal flash, the computer model came to echo her. But an echo isn't the song But an echo isn't the song.

"It's not you," Kingsley agreed when he came to visit. They gave her breaks to keep her neural tone tip-top, and let him in to recalibrate her sense of being human, she supposed. "Just a simulation."

"It's all there'll be of me, pretty soon."

He gazed at her soulfully, wordlessly. "If it's any consolation, I heard from Arno how they're doing this trick in the dictatorships."

"Pretty rough? Make you watch old black-and-white movies?"

"I think I'd settle for Citizen Kane Citizen Kane happily enough. But no, they haven't these magnetic sheet recorders. To reach the deeper layers, the surgeon's easiest path is simply to shave away your brain." happily enough. But no, they haven't these magnetic sheet recorders. To reach the deeper layers, the surgeon's easiest path is simply to shave away your brain."

"So...their brains, to be fully read, must die?"

"One ends up with an excavated skull. Luckily, the brain has no pain perceptors down there in its spaghetti snarls of nerves."

"Gee, Dr. Science, that's spiffy."

"Not a voyage for the squeamish, no."

"And they don't even want to go, either." She gazed up into the hard fluorescent glow as if an answer lay there. "Makes this seem easy."

He held her hand for a while and they did not speak. She slowly registered that he was crying, and felt bad about that, and then just let it go. That was getting to be automatic: releasing the moment, permitting the pa.s.sing parade to wash over her like the warm waves of the Pacific. With a sudden pang, she realized that she would probably never feel that salty caress again, and then she was crying, too.

Kingsley said quietly, "I've always loved you."

She had dreaded this moment and was tempted to let it drift by. But no, he deserved better than that.

Before she could bring herself to speak, he added, "I simply did not know until recently just how much."

After what seemed like a long time, she mustered some self-respect and made her voice behave. In a faint rasp she said, "I have always loved you. In my way. But this last year has taught me that the man I truly felt the real thing for was Benjamin. Always him."

He nodded. A rueful smile played upon his lips. They looked at each other with an emotion she felt powerfully but could not hope to tell him about.

A long silence tiptoed by. Gratefully, she drifted.

Kingsley worked the conversation around to ground they could both stand on. He was good at doing that, she realized; she had not even noticed the transition. Small talk, reminiscences...Then: "Obviously," he said, "the material self will be gone. Your represented self will remain, in silicon."

"Yeah, it says so, right here in the contract."