"Got to ring off now. I still love you, you know."

He hung up and let out a long, rattling sigh.

Now a brisk walk to the auto-cab stand. He used his credit card, got in, and punched for a hotel in D.C. As the car paused, he got out, secured the door, and watched the humpbacked car dutifully trundle down the ramp and into the controlled section of the highway. An easy trace for anyone to follow.

He went around the terminal on the outside. The yellow glow from D.C. filled the eastern sky. He saw an ambulance pulling away, lights flashing. It seemed unlikely that Herb had died of the fall.

Kingsley had seen no other way to gain the time and get free of the U Agency. A moment's reflection had shown that the only safe haven for him now was back on the Big Island, but interception while on a government flight was surely certain. And he most certainly did not want to fall into the hands of the lot at Langley.

Most probably they had people in the terminal by now. He surveyed the impossibly crowded waiting bays. Far too easy for them to pick him up while in that crowd, and quite possibly they had thought of the Admirals' Club by now. The jam of vexed people had an air of fevered impatience, something beyond the usual expected from delayed flights.

This was the first time he had seen firsthand how the ordinary world was dealing with the Eater's approach, the fever of anxiety that somehow permeated the air of every ordinary moment. Even in this air-conditioned terminal, he caught the sour smell of something elemental and unsettled.

He wondered what England was like now. He had to guard against the mixture of envy and contempt Europeans often felt while in the United States. Americans had their blemishes, particularly a curious kind of practical self-righteousness, but at least they did not brim with the world-weariness Europeans often equated with cultural maturity. Europe was a comfy land going nowhere now, and the Eater must strike many of his countrymen as an affront to their a.s.sumed eminence in the world. All humanity was all truly in the same trap now, stuck at the bottom of a frail atmosphere beneath a being that cared nothing for human a.s.sumptions.

A small band of musicians was performing for the throng. Public entertainment was so common now he never gave it a thought. In the leisure-rich 2020s, more and more people were pop musicians, filmmakers, actors, or "alternative" comedians, artists all-except that they had no audience. Bands performed for free at parties, jokesters eagerly launched into their routines at dinner parties. Thankfully, there were a few artistic areas where lack of apt.i.tude did inhibit performance; there were few struggling trapeze artists. But in his experience that did not stop a contralto from bursting into song in the living room at house parties, provoking a quick exodus to the far reaches of the house.

This lot was halfway decent, their Latin rhythms rolling over the edgy crowds, quite possibly lightening the mood. Faces relaxed near the swaying music. Some looked for an upturned hat to toss change into, but there was none; these were gratis gratis performers. performers.

For the third time, he saw a woman in a severe suit watching him. Stupid to be out here like this Stupid to be out here like this, he admonished himself and took advantage of a pa.s.sing clump of Chinese tourists to slip away. She followed him onto a concourse and he used the usual elevator ploy to go up one, then back down, exiting as the doors to the next elevator closed upon her startled face.

He spent the remainder of his wait in the men's room, popping out to get boarding information. This apparently worked, for on his third excursion, they were ushering first-cla.s.s...o...b..ard. He badly needed the proffered drink by the time he settled in.

It took him a while to work out why this flight was worse than usual. He had been on many torturous red-eyes, even one in which a screeching cat escaped its cage and spent hours in the dim netherworld of coach-cla.s.s, eluding pursuers. But this flight had a restless anger. Abrupt insults exchanged over stowed carry-ons. Seat kickers behind. Quarrels over meal selections running out. The attendants were frayed.

Kingsley adopted his standard maneuver to avoid conversation, pulling out a sheaf of work and at the first question telling the chap to his left that he was in insurance. That did not deter the woman to his right, so he leaned toward the window and said expectantly, "Think we'll see any UFOs?" For insurance, he took from his briefcase some working papers and placed atop them insignia from the Internal Revenue Service that he had downloaded from their Web site long before. A sure conversation killer.

Au revoir, etats-Unis! he toasted with an agreeable California claret as they cleared American air s.p.a.ce. Hawaii was a state, of course, but never felt like the rest of the United States. He made himself concentrate upon the wine to slow his still thudding heart. Adrenaline zest had gotten him through the airport, but now he needed to be calm. There was surely more to come.

He had received by cla.s.sified e-mail a selection of recent Eater messages. Scanning them, he wondered at the sort of mind that slithered from one subject to another, unaware of the impact upon the swarms of minds that would receive its words.

THERE WERE 1018 SECONDS SINCE WHAT YOU TERM THE BIG BANG AND WHICH COULD BETTER BE TRANSLATED AS AN EMERGENCE, NOT AN EXPLOSION. THERE ARE 1O SECONDS SINCE WHAT YOU TERM THE BIG BANG AND WHICH COULD BETTER BE TRANSLATED AS AN EMERGENCE, NOT AN EXPLOSION. THERE ARE 1O88 PARTICLES IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. THESE ARE TINY NUMBERS COMPARED WITH THE WAYS OF COMBINING INFORMATION, THE TRUE FONT OF INTELLIGENCE. HERE LODGES THE TRUE RICHNESS OF CREATION. A DECK OF YOUR GAME CARDS CAN BE a.s.sEMBLED IN 10 PARTICLES IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. THESE ARE TINY NUMBERS COMPARED WITH THE WAYS OF COMBINING INFORMATION, THE TRUE FONT OF INTELLIGENCE. HERE LODGES THE TRUE RICHNESS OF CREATION. A DECK OF YOUR GAME CARDS CAN BE a.s.sEMBLED IN 1068 WAYS. EACH NEW SHUFFLE PROBABLY HAS NEVER BEEN DEALT BEFORE. REARRANGING THE 0'S AND 1'S ON A MEGABYTE OF MEMORY COULD YIELD 10 WAYS. EACH NEW SHUFFLE PROBABLY HAS NEVER BEEN DEALT BEFORE. REARRANGING THE 0'S AND 1'S ON A MEGABYTE OF MEMORY COULD YIELD 103.5 MILLION DIFFERENT BYTE STRINGS. THE TRUE CONSTRAINT ON NATURE IS NOT THINGS BUT WAYS OF ARRANGING THEM, AND IN THIS THERE ARE NO TRUE BOUNDS DIFFERENT BYTE STRINGS. THE TRUE CONSTRAINT ON NATURE IS NOT THINGS BUT WAYS OF ARRANGING THEM, AND IN THIS THERE ARE NO TRUE BOUNDS.

All this, apparently, as cheerleading for people to relish uploading into the Eater's "library." Or so a naive human mind could read it.

I MANIFEST MY-SELF THROUGH GRAVITATIONAL ENERGY, WHICH IS IN THIS UNIVERSE THE LARGEST IN QUANt.i.tY. IT ALSO IS THE LEAST DISORDERED AND FROM THIS SUPERIOR QUALITY CAN CHANGE EASILY INTO OTHER FORMS. THUS I BRING IMMINENT ORDER TO YOUR KIND.

He supposed one should expect a being unique and isolated to become something of an egomaniac. What choice did it have? Every other intelligence it had encountered vanished into the abyss of astronomical time, devoured by its own terminal brevity.

YOUR LIFETIME COMPRISES A TRILLION OF YOUR BRAIN EVENTS. YOU ARE AQUEOUS SUSPENSIONS OF MOLECULES AND SO COMPRISE A TRANSIENT MEDIUM. CAUGHT IN YOUR SMALL BOX OF TIME, YOU CANNOT ATTAIN THE HEIGHTS OF SOME FORMS I HAVE WITNESSED.

Apparently the biologists had caught its attention. The Eater was notorious by now for abruptly swerving among subjects and ignoring entreaties. This fit the developing model for its own mental organization: a compilation of many magnetic knots storing separate agents of mental structure.

Each agent could come forward as a governing principle and shine the spotlight of consciousness upon itself. In this sense, the Eater had access to its own unconscious-unlike humans. It could watch itself thinking, and so felt no need to dress itself in the clothing of a smoothly operating over-mind, to be one "person."

I HAVE SEEN AND NOW CARRY WITH ME THE MINDS OF BEINGS WHO STORED THEMSELVES IN THE CLAY ARRAYS OF THEIR WORLD'S MUD. THESE COULD THINK IN SPANS OF MILLIONTHS OF YOUR SECONDS, WHILE YOUR SELVES CAN ONLY MASTER THOUSANDTHS. I ORBITED FOR MANY OF YOUR MILLENNIA A CLOUD THE SIZE OF YOUR PLANETARY SYSTEM AND THIS CREATURE THOUGHT FAR SLOWER THAN YOU. BUT IT WAS MORE VAST THAN ANY I HAVE FOUND AND HAD THOUGHT FOR LONGER THAN YOUR STAR HAS BURNED.

He wondered how they could deal with this. The fear he had seen in the President's eyes was global. Would the volunteered uploads from the dictatorial nations be enough? Or did it have further amus.e.m.e.nts in store for itself, at humanity's expense?

Well, only a few days to go until they all found out. The cabin was dark, the plane on its long night arc over the Pacific. He looked out a window and with practiced eye could find the blue-white blotch that was the Eater's decelerating jet. Brighter, nearer, hanging like a strange eye in the blackness.

He allowed himself to think of Channing a bit. Her upload had apparently gone reasonably well and now "she" cruised in orbit. Apparently the specialists were engaged in "linearizing" her onboard consciousness from afar, an unparalleled technical feat. Fuel pods were being attached to give her multiple booster capability. Her whole remaining self was a mere speck perched atop ma.s.ses of refrigerated hydrogen.

Then, without noticing the transition, he was awakening as they banked over Honolulu. Time to get back into the game.

No one intercepted him as he disembarked. The terminal reeked of festering anxiety. Once aloft he had phoned Arno and asked for an escort, giving enough detail to convince him that there were factions at war now within the U Agency. "Something about China," Kingsley added.

"Don't repeat that word," Arno said hastily.

"It's a fairly well-known nation." Kingsley could not resist the jab. Arno should never have allowed Kingsley to go into a situation inadequately forearmed. Put it down to haste and the press of events, but still...

Sure enough, three men he recognized from the Center and carrying the right recognition code met him at the gate. Wordlessly they took him to a private federal airplane, gray and unmarked. In short order, or so it seemed to his hazy state of mind, they were landing at the new field just sc.r.a.ped from the valley near the Center.

He was quite knackered and begged off going straightaway to the Center. Kingsley rang off and called ahead to his private number. "Be there soon," he said, not trusting himself to go any further with the driver and two burly guards, who crisply took him to his flat.

She answered his knock. He embraced her gratefully. She had started their relationship wearing ratty housecoats, but had quickly learned how he liked to be greeted-by an actual woman, not a housekeeper. Dressed in suitable nineteenth-century undergarments, red or black if possible. Sailing on the Sailing on the t.i.tanic, he thought fuzzily, t.i.tanic, he thought fuzzily, why go steerage why go steerage?

"Thanks, luv," he murmured at her black merry widow, "but afraid it's no use this time."

"I'll be here when you wake up."

"Can't say how long that will be."

"Pretty bad?" A warm kiss.

"What's the saying? 'Politicians, diapers-both should be changed regularly, and for the same reason.' Particularly the ones with guns."

She laughed softly, as if to say it did not matter whether she had heard this chestnut before. He hugged her. To be in her arms was quite enough, thank you. They had been drawn to each other as the crisis deepened. In the face of the abyss, people needed each other. He wondered if he was falling in love with her. Something in him hoped so.

"Something to drink?" Amy asked.

"Lately, I sup solely from the cup of knowledge."

He kissed her again, this time urgently, something escaping from him, letting out the leaden fog of his desperation.

2.

Benjamin could not mourn her anymore.

For three days, he had gone on beach walks and sat staring at the bottom of various bottles, talked with friends, and read over obsessively her last writings. Nothing helped. In the afternoon of the third full day, he so dreaded the coming of shadows that he fled. He finally knew that he had to go to the Center and face the unknown that loomed there.

A traffic tie-up and even more guards than the last time stopped him outside the new, high gates a full kilometer from the Center. Someone spotted him stuck in the jam and ushered him around, down a side road where he still had to submit to the triple-check of ID, retinas, and all. Sunset brimmed over the hills and he could pick out in profile the snouts of tactical-range missiles, installed only days before.

Just who were they defending against? No one had explained. There were more U Agency faces in the corridors every day, but they never spoke, just looked professionally grim.

He peered upward, eastward, and there it was: a hard blue-white dot spiking down at them. The Eater was decelerating at a prodigious rate. Its forward jet ejected ma.s.s apparently acc.u.mulated in its accretion disk, which X-ray telescopes showed had thickened to resemble a fat, rotating donut. Now the donut was dwindling fast, its stored matter fed by glowing streamers into the braking jet.

n.o.body understood how the system could have stocked up so much ma.s.s, enough to shove around the incredibly dense nugget of the black hole. The magnetic labyrinth around it must have remarkable retention ability. The hard radiation coming out of the jet got degraded into visible light, the whole glowing over ten times brighter than the full moon.

Cults had begun worshipping it by night, he had heard. The wave of suicides which was sweeping the world focused upon doing themselves in "view" of the Eater, as if it saw or cared. He could feel nothing for such people, not even pity. They were just marks on a chart, statistics floating beyond the gray veil that shrouded his world.

Inside, he spotted Kingsley looking tired, talking to a U Agency woman in a conference room. The man had just returned from Washington and had left several e-mails for Benjamin, asking for a meeting with Arno. Benjamin ducked away and went to his own office.

There was a lot of paperwork to do. Somehow even the supreme crisis of human history could not avoid its tedium. He plowed through, thankfully oblivious, for an hour. Then he got the expected call, and when he reached Arno's office, there was Kingsley. They shook hands silently, and after a moment's awkwardness, business picked up.

"This is just to inform you," Arno said, waving at a screen that carried specifics about missiles.

Kingsley seemed to comprehend the news at a glance. Benjamin shook his head to dispel his numbness, but it was not physical. "What am I looking at here?" he asked finally.

"Missile cla.s.ses and capability," Arno said.

Even with this, it took him a moment to pick out the crucial detail. "That's a submarine-based missile," he said blankly.

"That's the point," Arno said. "We just launched three from off the coast of China, near a peninsula."

Kingsley said, "The Liaodong Peninsula."

"Why from there?" Benjamin was startled. "And subs are built for ICBMs, not shots into deep s.p.a.ce."

Arno said, "The Department of Defense used a new cla.s.s of ICBM, specially fitted with one hard-nosed warhead, rather than the usual multiple suite."

"The launch point nicely placed just south of the peninsula," Kingsley said dryly, "halfway between Beijing to the west and the Korean capital, Pyongyang, to the east. It is an interesting historical accident that the capitals of our primary antagonists in Asia are at nearly the same lat.i.tude and only a few hundred kilometers apart."

Then Benjamin saw. "If the Eater can backtrack the launch, it will believe the Chinese or North Koreans did it."

"And exact a retribution, perhaps," Kingsley said.

"Unless we knock it out, which is the idea," Arno said.

Anger cleared his head remarkably. "This...this is crazy."

"President didn't think so, and Kingsley was right there advising him." Arno even held a hand out to Kingsley, as if to pa.s.s the buck.

Benjamin said hotly, "But the risk-"

"It can do a h.e.l.l of a lot to us we already know about. Plus plenty we don't know, I'll bet." Arno straightened the seam of his blue suit, keeping him in good order under fire.

"Fail and it'll be able to punish us big time, too," Benjamin shot back.

Kingsley said mildly, "We should remember that it is entirely alien. The notion of revenge may well not apply to its thinking."

Arno looked pained. "You always say something like that. Not that I'm agreeing with Benjamin here, but how can it not want to hit back?"

"Punishment deters by setting an example, all to lend credence to threat." Kingsley steepled his fingers. "That, and not the sweetness of revenge, is its utility-to us us. Punishment is a social mechanism, well evolved in us because it keeps tribal discipline. This thing has no tribe has no tribe."

"It's done this before, though," Benjamin said, though his mind was still trying to work its way around what Arno had so casually implied. He wasn't used to these high alt.i.tudes in the policy mountain range. "Maybe thousands of times, even millions, it's come into a solar system and demanded what it wanted from intelligent species."

Kingsley said airily, "And, just as for us, it regards its history as philosophy teaching by examples?"

"So it's learned how to threaten and hurt?" Arno looked skeptical.

"It sure knows how to whipsaw us, doesn't it?" Benjamin a.s.serted. "Look at how its demand for uploaded people has split us already. A lot of people are saying, 'Why not give up a few hundred it specifically asked for? Then make up the rest from the nations that are only too happy to discard their "undesirables" in a good cause.'"

Arno said, "The U.N. has taken a stated position against making any individual undergo-"

"So far," Kingsley said distantly. "It could undoubtedly kill millions if it wanted, and the moment it starts, there will be plenty of voices calling for us to cave in."

Benjamin said, "And we're shooting at it already? Why not wait?"

"If punishment is to be exacted," Kingsley said, "I surmise that the coalition of powers rather wishes it to be bestowed upon their strategic rivals."

Arno nodded. "The launch point's far enough away from our nearest strategic holding, the Siberian Republic."

"A team at Caltech argues," Kingsley said, "that the Eater cannot resolve the launch point better than about a hundred kilometers. Similarly its antic.i.p.ated response. So its retribution may well include the capital of an enemy."

"I had no idea we were so far in..." Benjamin faltered. He was not cut out for this sort of thing.

"The President wants to kill it now," Arno said.

Kingsley said, "Plus getting what I believe is termed a 'twofer.' Devastation for China or Korea or both if the attempt fails."

Benjamin jabbed a finger at the launch parameters. "The Chinese have good observing satellites. They'll have seen these lift off already."

Arno smiled without humor. "We have a few tricks to hide our plumes. And what can the Chinese do, anyway? The birds are gone."

"This is monstrous," Benjamin said, still angry.

"There is a monster in our skies," Arno replied simply.

The missiles took eight hours to reach the Eater. This was a remarkable achievement, as the launch vehicles had to attain a final speed in the range of twenty kilometers per second.

Benjamin had no idea that strategic warfare had advanced to such potentials. The missiles converged upon the Eater's outer regions at about half a million kilometers above the Earth's atmosphere.

The rendezvous was well beyond the Earth's dipolar magnetic belts, which could retain the plasma the warheads would generate. This was the crucial requirement. Releasing high-energy particles into the regions near the many thousands of communications satellites would destroy them by charging them up until the potentials shorted out components.

This was what the missiles tried to do. They flew into the black hole's magnetosphere and detonated in a pattern calculated to send currents fleeing along the field lines. This was to occur slightly after dawn in Hawaii. The Eater hung low on the horizon. The Center was packed, silent crowds before every screen.

Benjamin went outside with Kingsley. They were of the last generation which felt that events were more real if seen in person, rather than watched over authenticity-inducing TV screens.