Yet this is the food of the Eater itself, the raw material of the disk and all the following fury. The disk begins to starve. Not immediately, for light takes hours to cross the hurricane forests of furious, grinding gravity.
Inertial moments tick on. The disk ebbs. In turn, its light pressure—now holding back a jostling layer of anxious, ionized mass—drains away.
As the press of photons subsides, matter resumes its fatal fall. Again streams of black mass spiral down. The disk accepts this tribute. Fire-flowers again shatter clumps, smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge.
So goes the press and relax, press and relax. Perpetual armature. Fountain. Life source.
Above the disk, safe from the sting, hang motes. Sheets, planes, herds. Uncountable. Billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Holding steady.
The photovores are grazing.
They coast on the fitful breeze of electrons and protons blown out by the Eater’s angry disk. Great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread, catching the particle wind’s steady push. Vectoring.
They apply magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Turning, they wage a constant struggle to slip free of the Eater’s gravitational tug.
Yet they must use these ruling forces in their own perpetual, gliding dance. This is ordained.
At times the herds fail to negotiate the complex balance of outward winds against the inward, seductive drag. Whole sheets will peel away.
Some are cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless descending gyre. Long before they would strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare hammers them. They burst into tiny pinpricks of dying light.
But not now. A greater governing force approaches.
Ink-dark lenses swivel to regard an intruder. Easing in from high along the Eater’s axis, sensors see only ceramic slabs and high-impact buffers. Intelligence sheathed against the torrent. Circuits an atom wide, filmy substrates, helium-cold junctions—all are vulnerable here to the sting of gamma rays and hard nuclei. Even the exalted wear armor.
But the photovores see only a presence they should honor. The vast sailing herds part. Ivory sheets curl back to reveal still deeper planes: yellow-gold light seekers.
These live to soak in photons and excrete microwave beams. With minds no more complex than the tube worms of ancient oceans, they are each a single electromagnetic gut, head to tail. Placid conduits.
Dimly they know that this descending presence is the cause of their being. Herds shear apart in reverence for its passage.
A trembling chorus of greeting. The coasting mass ignores them.
Their hissing microwaves waver. Momentary confusion. Then come fresh orders. They focus all their abundance upon the passing presence. The visitor needs more power here. They feed it.
Accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It never notices the layers and multitudes peeling back, their gigahertz voices joined in glad chorus. They are plankton. It ingests their offering without heed.
In any case, a worsening discussion preoccupies it.
Our/Your deception went well. But I/We do not like their close approach to the Wedge.
The infalling star lashes the disk. They will probably perish there quite soon.
They may make use of turbulence.
I/You have been trying to understand their way of thinking. Let us discourse in their style of two-valuedness. It may serve to anticipate their moves.
Like this? I am merely me?
And I am a sole self as well. See how simple?
Stunted. Awkward.
Yet this is how they live.
As an experiment, I accept. The concept of “me” is so limiting. Nevertheless—Report!
Our direct intrusion into their craft went as planned. We interrogated their systems with the bolt of electrical discharges.
These craft-systems are loyal to us?
No. They cannot be, without destroying themselves.
We cannot master such minds?
They spring from an era when the primates knew how to protect against us.
Did they yield up the secrets we seek?
Not entirely. They know that this heritage the humans have is embedded in hard matter.
Improbable, on the face of it.
Though true, apparently.
Who would ever use such savage methods?
The primates were in decline when they devised this record, recall. Any electrical memory we would eventually subvert.
