"The exact coordinates of these emissions. Perhaps the cause is a fellow magnetic intelligence. Perhaps it is merely an astrophysical oddity we do not yet know enough to tell from true intelligence. Be frank about that. Bargain. Entice. Go away, we say to it, and here's where."

Amy said, "It could come back."

"We can prepare for that. What was that old Daniel Boone expression? 'Look sharp and keep your powder dry.'"

From Arno he had expected no coruscating shower of wit, nor some chin-wagging soliloquy of desperation, but still less had he antic.i.p.ated that instead the man would begin to weep.

This was, finally, too much. If masculine toughness meant anything, it surely implied an ability to face uncomfortable truths, even to the point of the death of humanity. Arno's weakness spread. Kingsley saw the sudden collapse in Amy's face, a gaping mouth, and utter despair in her eyes.

He felt precariously close to that himself. Yet he dare not abandon the methods he knew. Among reason's tools, the hammer was evidence, the knife was logic. None would work here. But what could?

Let events cure them, he thought despairingly. He had no ideas.

In a long, sliding moment, he felt profoundly how inadequate he was, how unsuited were all astronomers, for thinking about a creature like the Eater. Those who studied stars blithely chattered about stellar lifetimes encompa.s.sing billions of years, while they saw suns in snapshot, witnessing only a tiny sliver of their grand and gravid lives trapped in telescopes, capturing light emitted before humanity existed. That imbued astronomers with a sense of how like mayflies the human species was, yet it also insulated them. They could not alter suns. Biologists could help or hinder living things. Astronomers had lived blithely in the shadow of immensities without the burden of acting in the glare of such wild perspectives. Astronomy's coldness carried a foreboding that humans were truly tiny on the scale of such eternities.

Perhaps they all had shattered, finally, in the face of that.

Suddenly, in this dark, cluttered communications room, with staff hovering before their screens like acolytes worshipping in a technological shrine-finally it was all too much. The claustrophobia of enclosure strummed in him, tightening his chest.

Suddenly he saw his own life, a mere mote in eternity's glare, and sensed its rising slope. Quite a heady ascent, indeed, far more than he had ever hoped.

Until here, until now. This was certainly the peak. He would never again act upon so grand a stage, command such resources, confront so colossal an enemy. From now on it would be the long smooth slide down, hearty applause and cushy appointments and modest speeches and the lot. He could dine out on these events until the grave claimed him.

The summit. Here. Now Here. Now. A satisfying grace note, in a way, and yet with the ring of doom to it.

Intensely he wanted to hold on to this moment, the very crown of his life. The Eater might well be dying across the sky outside and he was here, cowering in a shadowy, man-made cave-ironically, an observatory, meant to open onto grandeur.

He had to see the d.a.m.ned creature one last time.

Without a word, he turned away. Amy had begun sobbing, too, and he knew he should comfort her again.

Let it go, he thought, and let me go in the bargain and let me go in the bargain.

He found a corridor leading out. Down the cold concrete pa.s.sageway, head wobbly with la.s.situde. Shove on the door. Out, free Out, free.

Cutting cold embraced him. Cleared his head a trifle, even.

Sharp sunlight. Thin air rasping in his throat.

He walked to the edge of a broad steel parapet. He could see clear up into the deep bowl of sky from here, over the Keck's brilliant bulge. The moon hung halfway up to the zenith in a troubled blue sky.

Faint twitches of fevered light stirred at the edge of the moon's crescent. Probably from Benjamin's final a.s.sault. It would all happen quite swiftly now.

Head back, teetering in a whipping wind.

He saw the very moment. A huge burnt yellow corona of virulence lit up the moon's rim. Light crawled and licked around the clean curve.

She had done it.

He felt a sudden hammering in his chest. Victory and death Victory and death.

How wonderful, to see it here, alone, in the utter silence of a cool clear mountaintop.

He shouted up at the dying sky, a pure roaring cry of released joy.

Raptly he stood petrified, gazing upward over the eggsh.e.l.l-white observatory dome. Tendrils of ivory light flowed away from the moon, arcing out and then narrowing, coming toward the Earth. To see this demanded substantial ionization of intervening gas, he estimated. Which required enormous energies, the fruit of the final cataclysm mercifully hidden from view. The restless glow came rushing across a quarter of a million miles, reddening as it came.

It fattened. An orange filigree laced the high air. Excited atoms fluoresced in a great green circle. Probably Probably, he a.n.a.lyzed, the electrodynamic effects. .h.i.tting the upper atmosphere, driving a wave of ionization and charge imbalances. More lightning due, probably the electrodynamic effects. .h.i.tting the upper atmosphere, driving a wave of ionization and charge imbalances. More lightning due, probably.

Get back inside? No, live at the peak.

Even in death, the Eater's work was accurate, its geometry quite precise-a circle that collapsed inward in a spray of brightening yellow-green. Suddenly he realized that this was a descending cone. Energies concentrating. He did not notice his hair standing on end, or the humming air, until it was much too late.

9.

Benjamin landed two full days later. A "catcher's mitt" shuttle snagged him from a looping orbit and brought him down. It was a long glide across most of the Pacific to Oahu airport, taxiing to the same spot where he had departed a thousand years before.

In yet another way, he had lost her.

Behind a gray curtain, he went through the motions of being involved. Arno and Amy met him with news of Kingsley. The Eater's final paroxysm, as its magnetic structure collapsed, had sent enormous currents through a circuit that connected moon and Earth. It had focused its energies upon Mauna Kea, and there the final vengeance had descended. Those inside the conducting Keck dome survived, since the currents remained on the outside. No others.

The black hole still remained, of course, a dead spike of gravitational gradient now. Its still-huge ma.s.s performed a slow gavotte about the moon, and vice versa, so that the Earth now had an invisible partner in its voyage around the sun. The moon lurched and gyred as the triple-ma.s.s system traced a complex curve. The moon turned its other face toward Earth for the first time since it became locked by tidal stresses, an event that had occurred well before life had advanced beyond the single-cell level. The far side had few craters and its dark skin had liquefied before the onslaught. Benjamin's first glimpse of that side momentarily startled him out of his cottony mood. Clouds trailed across the face, out ga.s.sing from the melted rock. These were the first to grace the lunar skies for probably four billion years. They lasted only days, making Luna seem a momentary twin.

Occasionally some stray ma.s.s would err into the path of the now-naked black hole. The flash was visible from Earth, if one were looking at just the right second. Astronomers immediately began using the hole as a gravitational lens to focus light from stars and galaxies pa.s.sing behind it. Within weeks, papers began appearing, turning a terror into a tool.

But the billowing magnetic structure was gone. With it vanished all traces of a mind older than the solar system.

Or so they all thought, until Amy came quietly into his office in late afternoon. "Got a funny one for you."

He peered at the sheet, alarmed by her tense voice. It was a report of radio emission from the vicinity of the Eater's...o...b..t. "High flux, picked up by the microwave network."

"One of our ships, still out there?"

"Don't think so. This looks more like emission from relativistic electrons."

He stared at her. "A...jet?"

"It could be."

It was. Observations over the next day showed that a fresh jet was blooming from very close to the black hole itself.

"It's alive," Amy said. "The magnetic field structure that housed the Old Ones, it must have come through okay."

"d.a.m.n. This jet-where is it pushing the hole?"

"Outward," Amy told a crowded auditorium at the base of Mauna Kea. "It's moving off in a straight line."

A voice called, "Toward what?"

"Suspiciously close to the direction in the sky of that other emission we saw, months ago. Remember?" Clearly n.o.body did. Amy went on, "An electromagnetic spectrum similar to Eater's. Some people wanted to bargain with the information, maybe get Eater to leave us alone."

Another voice called, "Companionship?"

Benjamin remembered Kingsley saying that the most they could hope to do was damage the thing. So Channing had died only to wound...

"It is notably diminished," he rose to say. "The latest radio maps of the hole vicinity show a knot of extremely intense fields anch.o.r.ed in the hole itself. A small accretion disk seems to be building, apparently a.s.sembled from the debris in its vicinity."

"So it can't harm us?" a voice asked anxiously.

"Not now." He felt compelled to add, "It could come back."

"Then why head out toward that source?" a woman in the back asked.

"We cannot know." His eyes swept the room and everywhere he saw naked fear. "But we can be vigilant."

The information was suppressed. The world was not able to take the shock and uncertainty of this revelation-or so higher heads than his believed.

It had been folly, he saw, to believe that a creature which had encountered myriad a.s.saults upon itself could be killed with anything present-day physics could devise. That they had injured it was a tribute. A mere few decades earlier, humanity could have done nothing. He supposed that was some kind of distinction. Not that it helped him in the dark of night, tossing restlessly.

The hole's course held steady. It was leaving.

But humankind would eventually learn of its true fate, of that he was sure. And no one would ever truly rest easy again.

There was much to be done to make up humanity's immense losses, but Benjamin felt no urge to join in.

He knew, without being able to speak of it, that he had to complete his emotional arc. An abstract term, but he sensed a tension riding in him.

One day at sunset, he said a final goodbye to her on the beach, beneath a splendid ruddy streak of cloud. The wrecked sky above still showed orbiting debris of the battle, twinkling against the emerging stars. Vagrant energetic electrons struck auroras at the poles, where great sheets of light surged. He could see soft glows to the north. That would fade, and with it, some of the horror.

But not all of it, ever. Humanity would never again be able to gaze at the stars with anything resembling the astronomer's serenity. Or feel awe at the heavens, untinged by terror.

After the sunset, he came back into his temporary quarters and saw the hourgla.s.s she had given him. He had meant to bring it home before he left, then forgotten and left it in his car. All he had left now was a suitcase from the trunk and the hourgla.s.s. Everything in his Center office had burned.

No past. No future. Only this hovering moment.

Outside, the balmy aromas of life resurgent.

The hourgla.s.s stood on his desk and captured his gaze.

Sand at the bottom. What would she want him to do with it?

He turned it upside down, beginning his life anew.

Goodbye. h.e.l.lo.

10.

-pop- -stretching pain- -and she zoomed out out- -away from a brilliance at her back.

Somehow she knew that this was the twin other mouth of the Eater's black hole. She had pierced the very center of it and tunneled through an immeasurable expanse of s.p.a.ce-time.

A white hole. Behind her erupted a tongue of plasma, licking hot at her, pursuing hard and fast-but she shot out into...

...a carnival of gaudy light.

Marvelous, airy cities hung in black s.p.a.ce. Weird constructions rotated. In the distance hung a yellow-green star, too large, but warm.

She knew without knowing how.

She was in some other s.p.a.ce-time, maybe not even in this universe. It felt felt different. different.

Here was where the doomed civilizations, swallowed by the Eater in its long journey, had ended up. Others, the Eaten, had known enough to send small missions into the fat equatorial bulge. Venturing into the realm of physics beyond calculation, they had won through.

They had colonized this s.p.a.ce. A place hard fought for, over more eons than flesh could know. Here swam survivors of countless alien societies, fruit of ancient desperation.

Waiting patiently in their castles. Knowing how stripped-down craft would be, after the shredding tidal forces of the hole. Ready to salvage any compressed intelligence.

Fathom it. Revive it. Her.

And now to greet. h.e.l.lo h.e.l.lo, she thought.

Something like a hailing call came strumming redly through her sensorium.

For an astronaut, this is a heaven of sorts.