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another piece of scrap, 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.
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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.
Haifa 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
.
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
. 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.
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"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 and then rush outward.
Suddenly she sensed the hourglass magnetic funnels, alive in their luminous
ivory, as mass flowed down them. Fitfully the aching matter lit the turning,
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narrowing pipes. Each headed toward doom.
The fields were firmly anchored in a bright, glowing disk at the center of the
hourglass neck. The
Eater's intelligence, she knew, resided in these magnetic structures she could
make out knotted and furled, like lustrous ribbons surrounding the slowly
rotating hourglass.
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 mass flowed down the hourglass 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
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edge, a hundred meters tall some part of her crisply told her.
As the infalling, gyrating mass 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 mass 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 space. 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.
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She felt a wave of immense dread. Yet she headed down there.
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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
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