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"Pain, fine," Benjamin said. "But we have to kill it."
Kingsley glanced at the hand-lettered sign he kept on his wall. His first act
upon moving into any workplace was to visibly resurrect the advice he had
received the first year he had come up to Oxford:
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SATURATION
INCUBATION
ILLUMINATION
The great nineteenth-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had argued that
these were the steps in having a new idea. You had to immerse yourself in the
problem, concentrating, and then let the mass of thoughts simmer. Maybe all
that happened during such incubation was the withering away of whatever bad
ideas were blocking you. Then, often when you were doing something else, the
answer would ap-
pear, as if delivered by some other agency of yourself.
For the scientist, there was necessarily another stage: verification. You had
to see if the bright idea actually worked.
But with the Eater there would be only one chance.
"I propose we try to use a one-two punch, then,"
Kingsley said slowly. "Use its dislike of plasmas to move it, and then deliver
a blow it cannot counter."
"Where? If nuclear weapons don't work& " Amy shrugged.
"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
space-time?"
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"The extreme curvature arises from the matter that once passed through the
event horizon," Kingsley said. "The steep gradient in gravitation is a ghost
of mass that died there, passing who knows where. I
propose that we consider giving the bastard not mass but its opposite."
433
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
space 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
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pseudo-nervous system, make it think she was breathing. In fact, was
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breathing it her
.
She took a deep nonbreath and fell into a shadowy space 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 space 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 God 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
then a calculated swerve
.
If at first you don't succeed, kiddo, skydiving is not your sport.
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She had lost a dozen Searchers finding out scraps of largely incoherent
information. The labyrinths of fields confined dense thickets of Alfven waves,
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