"Forget the magnetic structure, which it quite rightly defends as its mind. At the center of its mind lies the hole. Attack that, I'd guess."

Benjamin studied him as though he were quite lunatic. "Attack a singularity in s.p.a.ce-time?"

"The extreme curvature arises from the matter that once pa.s.sed through the event horizon," Kingsley said. "The steep gradient in gravitation is a ghost of ma.s.s that died there, pa.s.sing who knows where. I propose that we consider giving the b.a.s.t.a.r.d not ma.s.s but its opposite."

6.

Blessed are the flexible, for they can tie themselves into knots.

She had thought this state would be sublime, ghostly. Instead, she had hauled along her whole stinky, tangled neuroses-ridden self. Sure, she now flew in s.p.a.ce in a way no astronaut could. But her mind was still tied to her body. Worse, knowing the body was a digital figment did no good.

Tracking the beast demanded fresh navigation skills, fast movement, and her reward was sore "muscles." The programmers, in her opinion, had left entirely too much of her mind-body link. If she overused her gorgeous ion jets, they ached. Turn too fast and the "knees" smarted, sharp and cutting.

Simulation she might be, but why the body's baggage? What next, callused feet?

The illusion was good. Her breath whooshed and wheezed in and out. No oxygen at all here, but they had thought she needed the sensation to quiet her pseudo-nervous system, make it think she was breathing. In fact, it it was breathing was breathing her her.

She took a deep nonbreath and fell into a shadowy s.p.a.ce dotted by orbiting debris. This was a messy Eater, gobbling up satellites and leaving twinkling motes. She shepherded her Searchers through this in pursuit of the glowing archwork ahead. Or below; directions were free of gravity's grip, here.

Far better than being an astronaut in the creaky old s.p.a.ce station. She had watched the dear old patchwork of bad plumbing and congressional nightmares-abandoned, finally-as the Eater dismembered it. Good riddance! It had crippled the pursuit of better goals for decades. They owed the monster for that, at least.

But nothing else. She felt her giddy sense of weightless purpose as her pretty blue ion jets thrummed and spewed, taking her up/down/sidewise. Getting better at this, but still it made her balance whirl. Thank G.o.d they had edited out the entire inner-ear responses.

Now the hard part. She glided into the first filmy tendrils of the beast. Ionized streamers marked the feathery magnetic fields. Their tug she felt as a brushing pressure against her aluminum carapace. Careful, don't alert the misbegotten monster. Down, hard Careful, don't alert the misbegotten monster. Down, hard-then a calculated swerve.

If at first you don't succeed, kiddo, skydiving is not your sport.

She had lost a dozen Searchers finding out sc.r.a.ps of largely incoherent information. The labyrinths of fields confined dense thickets of Alfven waves, forming webbed patterns. It did not seem to mind intrusion, but the rule was, read and be eaten.

"I'm back," Benjamin's wavering tones came. She grasped them like ripe, liquid fruit. The message's cypherdefenses peeled away as she filtered them-their only defense against the Eater eavesdropping. So far it seemed to have worked. Seemed.

"Missed you. It's not so much the dark here, but the cold."

"I thought you couldn't feel temperature."

"Category error, lover. It feels like a chill, so it is. Maybe it's actually the color green in disguise."

"I had to go to a meeting, find out what's happening."

"What's that cliche? About n.o.body on their deathbed regretting time missed at the office?"

"I suppose you'd know." He was too somber, needed some joshing.

"I always kinda missed the ol' office. Remember, though, this is the me of when they recorded. How long has it been?"

He blinked, startled. "Weeks. My G.o.d, you don't know what's happened?"

"Oh sure, I got all the news. A bath of it. But no personal stuff."

He wore his thoughtful distraction expression. It was looking ragged. "Hundreds of thousands have died. And I don't give a d.a.m.n."

"You don't have the room for it."

"That's a good way to put it. I've felt like a monster."

"Caring only about my dying doesn't make you an ogre, not in my book."

"Getting the balance right..."

His voice trailed off and she knew exactly what he was thinking. Well, better face it Well, better face it. "I'm alive this way, and all those people dead, really dead-all because of the Eater."

"Yeah. Life's going too fast for me now, kid."

He was back to putting on a brave face, but it wouldn't work with her. She could feel how close to shattering he was. "Me, too. Just live in it, Benjamin, like a suit of clothes."

He blinked. "That's what it's like for you?"

"Has to be. I don't even sleep anymore."

"My G.o.d, that must be..."

"Refreshing, actually. The thought just doesn't come up."

"You're always wide awake?"

"Yep, and without my old love, caffeine, too."

"What's it like to pilot a rocket?" He was still uncomfortable, but they had always used their love of the technical to get through b.u.mpy spots. Fair enough Fair enough.

"It's made me realize that when we open our eyes each morning, there's waiting a world we've spent a lifetime learning to see. We make it up."

"And you're free of that now?"

"No, just so aware aware of it. When I was living down there, I'd see everything with a filter over it-experience, habit, memory." of it. When I was living down there, I'd see everything with a filter over it-experience, habit, memory."

"Now it's all new."

"Not entirely. I swoop, I dive, but it feels like running, not really flying. My body is always, in a very profound way, telling me a story."

"The body you don't have."

"Right. Weird, huh? So I wonder what the Eater feels. It has no solid body."

"Even the black hole really is a hole. Not a ma.s.s, a thing it can feel."

"I suppose. The magnetic storage of information, I wonder what it feels like?"

"Stay away from that," he said with quick alarm.

"I think I've got to go there."

"Observe. That's all you're supposed to do."

"Y'know, I'm in charge up here." Just to slide the point in Just to slide the point in.

"Don't scare me." His face was naked again and she felt a burst of warmth for him.

"Tell me what you guys know now, then. I need to know."

He was glad to lapse into tech-mode again. The experts thought it was best for her to get her input this way, through Benjamin, and neither of them cared to know why. They liked it; that was all that mattered.

"The way Amy describes it, there are captive-well, 'pa.s.sengers' might be the best word-in the Eater's magnetic 'files.' It keeps records of cultures it has visited."

Channing said, "That's what it calls 'Remnants'?"

"You know about that?"

"They gave me thick files of what it's been saying. I can read it ten thousand times faster than I could with eyes."

"Does that help?"

"Understand it? At least it puts me on a processing level more nearly like its own."

"Ominous stuff it's sending, seems to me," Benjamin said delicately.

"I've picked up waves from the distinctive knots in the magnetic structure. There are tens of thousands of them, at a minimum. They're living ent.i.ties, all right. Somehow they share its general knowledge, so some at least have learned to speak to us. They say they were 'harvested' by the Eater."

"Magnetic ghosts." He shivered; she could feel his inner states by reading the expressions of his pinched mouth.

"There's something else, an 'Old One.' Any idea what that is?"

"Last I heard, the theory people here think it might be the original civilization that uploaded itself into the magnetosphere. Just a guess, really."

"Ask Amy for me? See if there's anything new on this 'Old One'?"

"Sure."

"I suppose you don't have to. This whole conversation, it's monitored, right?"

"I suppose so. Haven't thought."

Dear thing, he wouldn't. "Privacy is not giving a d.a.m.n."

She had not expected this to make him cry, but it did.

7.

Kingsley stood beside Benjamin as they watched the launch on a wall screen. History in the making, if anyone lived to write it down.

He was partly there to see the event, but mostly to steady Benjamin, should he start to fall over. That had happened twice already from apparently random causes. If Benjamin were seen to get visibly worse-distracted, morose, or worse-Arno would see him off the property straightaway. That would depress the man even more. Leaving him alone in their house would invite something far worse still.

"Steady there," he whispered. Benjamin took no notice, just stared.

The view was of a lumbering airframe framed by puffball clouds that could have been anywhere; these were above Arizona. He still had a bit of trouble getting excited about these air carrier, three-stage jobs. Takeoff from any large airport, drop the rocket plane at 60,000 feet, whereupon the sleek silver dart shot to low Earth orbit. This one would in turn deposit its burden, a fat cylinder instructed to find and attach to the Channing-Searcher craft.

The modular stairway to the stars, as the cliche went. Economical, certainly. Without it, they could never have fielded an armada of Searchers and support vessels to meet the Eater. Still, he missed the anachronistic liftoff and rolling thunder.

The dagger-nosed rocket plane fell from the airframe belly and fired its engine. In an eye blink, it was a dwindling dot.

Benjamin murmured stoically. Kingsley wondered what was going through his friend's mind and then, musing, recalled Arno and the Marcus Aurelius reference made by the Eater. Why had the creature dwelled upon Aurelius?

Stoic indeed, that was the smart course in such times. Did the isolation of Aurelius at the top of the Roman Empire correspond remotely to the utter loneliness of the Eater? The paradoxical permanence of change must loom as an immensely larger metaphor for it.

Such a being, though constructed by an ancient intelligence, surely had undergone developments resembling evolution. Parts of so huge an intelligence could compete and mutate as magnetic fluxes carrying the genetic material of whole cultures. There could presumably be selection for what Kingsley supposed could be called "supermemes"-to coin an utterly inadequate term for something that could only be conjectured.

Amy said from Benjamin's other side, "They've set up a bar."

"Capital idea," Kingsley said with utterly false enthusiasm.

"Think that's a good idea?" Benjamin asked mildly.

"I believe it to be a necessity." Kingsley made a beeline for the bar before the crowd noticed it. It was admirably stocked and he complimented Arno on it as the man took a gin and tonic and the barman prepared Kingsley's exact specifications.

Arno seemed pleased and proud. "Great idea, wasn't it?"

Unlikely he was referring to the bar, but what else? Before Kingsley could rummage through a list of suspects, Arno added, "The antimatter thing."

"Quite so." This would not seem immodest because clearly Arno had forgotten who had thought of it.

"My guys are sure it'll work-and they should know."

"Certainly." How to play this How to play this? Arno was not exactly a torrent of information at the best of times. His habits of concealment, well learned in other agencies known chiefly by their initials, still held.

"They've done the simulations, pretty sure it'll work."

"The physics is a bit dicey. I-"