"I rather admire its choice of quotations." Kingsley spoke to cover his own sensation of a rigid chill that swept up from his belly. "It may have a sense of something we could call irony."

Amy said, "More like Zeus than Jehovah."

"Gentlemen," Arno said in a wobbly voice, "we have to tell them something. You saw the crowd outside this office. Good scientists, technical people, sure. That's what they are. But they couldn't come up with anything in their present state of mind."

"Fear paralyzes," Kingsley observed to gain time.

"Anywhere it wants, it can do that-any time it likes," Arno went on.

Kingsley realized that Benjamin had begun to weep, quite quietly. "I advise preoccupying it with fresh input. Give it what we have."

"Then what?"

"Understand it further, certainly. Then kill it, as I said."

"We have nukes, plenty of them-"

"Pointless."

"Probably so. But it's what we've got."

"Not entirely."

They waited for him to complete his thought, and for a moment, something caught in his throat and he could not go on.

Kingsley thought swiftly yet carefully about the properties of magnetic jets. For Benjamin and himself, long ago, the subject had been a suitable battleground for polite academic dispute, arcane calculations, airy and fun. Now he contemplated with cold fear the same images, now augmented with horror. A black hole spinning in its high vault of utter darkness, rotation warping s.p.a.ce around it. That distortion, in turn, twisted the a.s.sembly of minds that thronged outside the hole, intelligences caught in a magnetic prison older than the sun. The entire grotesque a.s.sembly was now impregnable, had proved immune to the defenses of the thousands of civilizations it had consumed like a majestic, marauding appet.i.te- "We have Channing."

1.

She popped popped- -flowed- -expanded- -out into the flexing s.p.a.ce before her.

Plunging. Riding translucent highways along parabolic lines, she felt unfamiliar muscles work with red heat down her spine, up her legs, skating across a velvet skin she could not see.

She seemed to fill the fat balloon of soft blackness around her. Yet in an eye flick she could be anywhere in that geometry, one of myriad tiny glowing flecks.

Points of view. Searchers. All coasting in a beehive swarm above the great slow-spinning sphere of Earth, itself a mottled infrared mosaic.

So she was a central point in a rotating coordinate frame. And simultaneously the skeletal ivory frame itself. Diffuse, like a fog. Yet if she chose to be, she could anchor herself at a joint.

Cartesian questions, she thought with icy shock. Baby, I got dem mind-body duality blues. To be a box and know it, yet wonder what it means Baby, I got dem mind-body duality blues. To be a box and know it, yet wonder what it means.

If she thought thought about herself, a whole interior world welled up. Teeth sang in their sockets. The calcium rods that framed her chest were chromed ribs, slick and sliding in swift metallic grace, about herself, a whole interior world welled up. Teeth sang in their sockets. The calcium rods that framed her chest were chromed ribs, slick and sliding in swift metallic grace, Ah, so clean Ah, so clean! Purpling storms raced down squeezed veins, up shuddering ligaments. Her toes rattled, strumming, talking to the ground she could never again tread. Her ankles were dancing on their own, her bald head thrown back, neck stretched into spaghetti by a halo of polarized light. Now her spine turned parabolic and crackling as she banked banked on jets that were her feet, running in sheer weightless abandon. Hurricane hallways yawned in her. on jets that were her feet, running in sheer weightless abandon. Hurricane hallways yawned in her.

What is this thing I am?-and from her a lockjawed agony-song screeched. It reverberated in hip sockets polished by blue-green, hungry worms. They swarmed over bone lattices, eating in rhapsodic hunger.

Pain? Plenty of it.

So stop. Click. Just like that- The torture fingers left her, blew away in the escaping fragile seconds, leaving her cool and smooth and sure. To be a box To be a box Down she went, across and through-all equivalent in this s.p.a.ce of freedom-as-thing. She saw before her, around her, in full three dimensions. The Searcher s.p.a.cecraft, a silvery swarm zooming in toward the graceful arching luminesce of the Eater.

A blink-and the Searchers became her many eyes.

Her point of view shot through the realm of the magnetic strands, high above the disk of hot matter in the black hole's equatorial plane. Beyond rolled the gravid Earth in regal, moist splendor. Around her magnetic palaces made a luminous dominion, a steel-wire spider at the gnawing center of a gigantic web. She swiveled and found the core-geysers and light storms arcing from the utterly black center of it all.

A rattle of human-speak came to her like pebbles on a tin roof. Careful, vector to 0.347 x 1.274 Careful, vector to 0.347 x 1.274.

Yessah, boss. Here there be tygers, galleries of magnetic forces to traverse.

Skating. She eased delicately past white-hot waterfalls, green-rich tornadoes of turbulence. Tock Tock!-a stone-storm of cra.s.s dusty plasma clattered against her carbon carapace. Raw food the Eater had stored. Or a weapon; one could not be sure.

Did it know they were here? Of course, impossible to believe it could not sense along its electromagnetic tendrils these flashing solid motes. Two Searchers already drifted, charred by discharges.

So it would kill them if it could locate them. Us. Me Us. Me.

More Searchers rose from below to aid her. Abruptly some sparked to burnt cinders at the very rim of magnetic stresses, killed by some edge defense. She had lodged in several knots already, then had to bail out as they arced with huge potentials.

Yet she could not shake the airy feeling of floating suspended above a huge abyss.

Diffuse am I, for I am nothing that has ever existed. Like the Eater-one of a kind.

Getting heady here. Careful. Too easy to get drawn into phony poetic abstraction.

And what else dwelled here? Hesitantly, working as intermediary with Control, she felt her way among ropes of snarled flux. Edgy, tentative, the whispery sounds came-voices, calls, and cries and strange haunting musics, wisps of convex lore, echoes of...what? A mult.i.tude floated in her global, three-dimensional eyes-shining, ghostlike creatures of strands and velvet, l.u.s.trous lattice.

Creeping among complex innards. Yet again she felt a cool distance from events. She was free to slide in and out of this world.

Only a lack of imagination saves me from immobilizing myself with imaginary fears.

Her eyes were all-seeing, swiveling impossibly, anywhere she wanted. In her other self, the eyes had been where the brain surfaced and supped from the world, taking in light along an optic nerve that both transmitted and filtered, doing the brain's work before the glow even arrived at the cerebrum.

Now she felt a wedge between her and the world she could behold. A chunk of gla.s.sy silence that measured and knew, separately.

Gingerly she burrowed into that watery pane. A dizzy, jolting ascent took her. Suddenly she was hanging above the entire solar system. She glimpsed it as a spheroid cloud of debris, filigreed with bands and sh.e.l.ls of flying shrapnel.

She knew instantly that these fragments could be pumped into long ellipses, into wobbly orbits that could now and then make a sharp hook by skimming near another piece of sc.r.a.p, and slam into a blundering planet.

"What was that?" she asked aloud. (How? Yet they rang like words.) Control's monotone answered, "You slipped into the overview mode of our entire Searcher system inventory. Don't do that again. Concentrate."

"Yessah." Control was, well, controlling. It (he?-yes, it felt like a he) kept missing the point of her experience here.

Instantly, some subself presented a catalog of possible wisecrack material: One sandwich short of a picnic.Elevator doesn't go to the top floor.One brick short of a full load.Couple chapters missing from the book.Half a bubble off plumb.Gears stripped off a few cogs.A beer short of a six-pack.

Now where did that- The enormity of what had happened to her descended.

Benjamin, forever gone from her.

The world-swallowed in abstraction.

No salty tang of sandy beach. Just a bunch of digits Just a bunch of digits.

So when she wanted to speak, an inventory of retorts had duly shuffled into her mind, read off like a computer file. Not invention, but a handy list of stock phrases. Because it was waiting for just that use-somewhere.

No, not somewhere. Here Here. Blackboxville.

Had her mind had those lists in it all her life? She could understand why the brain researchers wanted to use simulations such as herself. Here, a mind could sometimes watch itself.

"Try to focus all the Searchers onto the core." Control's voice now was smoother, warm, and soothing. A response to her irked state? "Channing, we have got to get better resolution."

She felt her eyes seem to cross cross and then rush outward. and then rush outward.

Suddenly she sensed the hourgla.s.s magnetic funnels, alive in their luminous ivory, as ma.s.s flowed down them. Fitfully the aching matter lit the turning, narrowing pipes. Each headed toward doom.

The fields were firmly anch.o.r.ed in a bright, glowing disk at the center of the hourgla.s.s neck. The Eater's intelligence, she knew, resided in these magnetic structures she could make out-knotted and furled, like l.u.s.trous ribbons surrounding the slowly rotating hourgla.s.s.

Zoom, she moved. At her finest viewing scale she could make out the magnetic intricacy-whorls and helices as complex as the mapping of a brain. Here the legacy of a thousand alien races rested, she knew (but how?).

All this stood upon the brilliant disk at the neck. Glowing ma.s.s flowed down the hourgla.s.s neck, heading toward the glare.

The inner realm of the Eater was its foundation, the turning accretion disk. She blinked, recalibrated specter. It brimmed red-hot at its rim, a kilometer from the dark center. The disk was thickest at its edge, a hundred meters tall a hundred meters tall some part of her crisply told her. some part of her crisply told her.

As the infalling, gyrating ma.s.s moved inward to its fate, it heated further by friction. Inward it seethed with luminosity, shading in from red to amber to yellow to white, and then to a final, virulent blue. The red rim was already 3,000 degrees (a subself informed her). Abstractly she knew that in the slide inward the doomed ma.s.s exceeded the temperature of the surface of the sun, greater than 5,000 degrees.

"Look closer," Control said in the comforting tones of...who? Memory would not fetch this forth...

Closer. There at the very center-nothing, a blank blackness. Like a hallucinogenic record turning to its own furious music, faster and faster toward the center, where the spindle hole was a nothing.

But not quite nothing. At higher resolution-and blinded against the glare-she could see a fat weight that warped light around it. At its very edge, red refractions and darting rainbow sparklers marked the s.p.a.ce. She saw that an ellipsoid spun there, furiously laced by crimson arcs. As she watched, fiery matter traced its last trajectory inward, skating along the rim of the whirling dark. These paths swerved inward, and a very few skipped through the wrenching blackness to emerge again.

"Unstable orbits, I see," Control said.

She felt a wave of immense dread. Yet she headed down there.

2.

Benjamin drove stolidly toward the Center. His arms were of lead, his head swiveled on scratchy ratchets.

That morning a poll had reported that the world was praying more since news had come of the Eater. There was even a statistical breakdown, showing what were the hot topics on the prayer circuit: 1. Family's health and happiness 83%.

2. Salvation from black hole 81%.

3. Personal spiritual salvation 78%.

4. Return of Jesus Christ 55%.

5. Good grades 43%.

6. End of an addiction 30%.

7. Victory in sports 23%.

8. Material possessions 18%.

9. Bad tidings for someone else 5%.

"Good to know the species hasn't lost its b.l.o.o.d.y-mindedness," Kingsley remarked from the seat next to him.

"'Bad tidings for someone else,'" Benjamin said sourly. "As if there weren't enough."

"Um. You mean this news of the Eater's course correction?"

"Yeah. What's it moving to higher alt.i.tude for?"

"It won't say, as usual."

On the drive, he saw yet another church going up, this time in a converted gas station. Stumps of pump stands extruded from the concrete islands in front. Churches were thronged every day now. New ones jutted their flick-knife spires above the palms.

He had gotten better and could now go for maybe a whole hour without thinking of her. He had found himself reviewing their life together to get himself ready for what was to come this morning. They had followed what he supposed to be a predictable arc. Pa.s.sion had settled down into possession, courtship into partnership, acute pleasure into pleasant habit. For both of them, lives that once had seemed to spread infinitely before them had narrowed to one mortal career. To accomplish anything definite, they had given up everything else, sailing for one point of the compa.s.s. Yet he had the hollow feeling of missed opportunities. Could something be made good through what he had to do next?

"It shouldn't be too demanding," Kingsley said out of the silence.

"I'm that easy to read?"

"Old friend, depression is simple to diagnose. You are acting under intolerable pressures."

He slammed a fist into the steering wheel. "I have to keep working."

"Of course. And you're vital."

"If only I could sleep."

"Haven't been getting a lot of that myself, either."

"At least-"

"What? Ah, you were going to say, at least I have Amy."