“Harvested? Why?”
“The matter we collect,” said the Eye, “is cooled to near absolute-zero, quantum entangled into a condensate, and joined with my Great Corpus, thus adding to my total computational power.”
“You’re a computer?”
“The Eye,” the Meeker said, “is the greatest mind the Cosmos has ever known.”
“My sole purpose is knowledge,” said the Eye. “I seek to know all things.”
“So many stars, gone,” the Beth said. “Was there life out there?”
“Oh, yes,” said the Meeker. “There were once so many species they ran out of names!”
“And now?”
“Now they are part of my Great Corpus,” said the Eye.
“By choice?”
The Meeker scratched his belly in confusion. “What does choice have to do with it?”
The Beth pulled her blanket closer. “Everything.”
“What do you remember about your last moments?” the Eye said.
The Beth spoke slowly. “Sloan was whispering to me.”
“And what did she say?”
The Beth looked down at her hands. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You must tell me,” said the Eye.
“Why?” She pursed her lips, and fluid pooled in the corners of her eyes. “So you can harvest me too?”
The Meeker gasped. What offense! He waited for the Eye to punish her, but the Beth coughed up a globule of mucus. This pleased him. She must have realized her offense and offered this up as an apology. But when she vomited all over the console and wailed for a full minute before she fell silent, he realized this had been involuntary.
“She’s dead?” he said. Red fluid dripped from a wound on her head.
“Yes, Meeker.”
“Eye, maybe you should stop making Beths, at least until you find a cure?”
The Beth vaporized and vanished, as if she never was. “Did you not hear the first Beth? The Sloan had a message for the future that she believed would change history. I must know what this message is.”
The next Beth began with the same questions, but the Eye avoided telling her too much. And when the Beth asked about the stars, the Eye replied with a question for her.
“My planet?” the Beth said. “It’s called Dirt. You’ve never heard of it? Where did you find me?” The Beth gazed into the impenetrable black.
The Meeker was envious. He had been born on an airless moon that orbited the Great Corpus every thousand years and spent the rest of his life in this Bulb.
“Are we in space?” the Beth said. “Are we beyond the Moon?”
“You live on the surface of your planet?” asked the Eye.
“Yes, at the foot of the Rockies, in a glass house. Sloan and I moved there because we love the stars. The Lacteal Path shines clear across the sky most nights.” The Beth chewed at a fingertip. “Where are all the stars? Where are you taking me?”
“Did the Sloan whisper something to you before you awoke?” the Eye said.
“How did you know?”
“Tell me, what did she say?”
“I’d found out she was working on top secret projects a few months ago. She swore it wasn’t weapons, but I didn’t believe her. We had a big fight. Is there any way I might call her? She’s probably worried sick.”
“Did the Sloan mention your stillborn child?”
“Excuse me? How do you know about that?”
“You transmitted the virus to your fetus in utero. The Sloan intimated that this fact was related to a very important message for the future. Now tell me—”
“No, that’s not what we spoke about! And how do you know so much about me? What the hell is going on here? I want to go home now!”
She put a hand to her mouth and vomited all over herself, then she spasmed, smacking her limbs into the Meeker. And after a minute of flailing and screaming she collapsed dead.
“Curious,” said the Eye. “Did you notice her story has changed?”
The Beth’s mouth hung open from her scream.
“That’s not what I noticed, Eye, no.”
The Eye asked the next Beth about her family.
“I have two daughters, Bella, ten, and Yrma, twelve. My son Joshua, he’s eighteen, and just left for college in Vermont. Before I got sick, I used to hike up the mountain trails with them at least once a week. Walking with my children under pines covered in snow…” She inhaled through her nose. “I never felt more at peace. Is there a way I might call them?”
“Tell us about the Sloan,” said the Eye. “Did she whisper something to you before you awoke here?”
“Funny you should mention it.”
“What did she say?”
“It was about that day, when I didn’t want to tell the children I was sick. She got angry, but I said she was a hypocrite, because she works in a secret research lab and hides things from us every day.”
“She researches weapons technology?”
“She swears she doesn’t. And how do you know that? Have you spoken to her?”
“Was there anything else the Sloan said before you woke up here?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Are you sure you didn’t speak about your son, who died in utero?”
“What? No! What the hell is going on here?” The Beth stood, shaky on her two legs. “I’m not answering any more of your questions until someone tells me—”
She put a hand to her mouth and vomited. She screamed and spasmed, and when she was dead, the Meeker said, “Eye, why do you keep the truth from her? Shouldn’t she know that her family is dead half a billion years?”
“What purpose would that serve? You saw how agitated she became when she learned the truth. How else will we find this message the Sloan has given her?”
“But she dies in pain each time.”
“Why do you think she’s in pain?”
“Because she screams so terribly.”
“Those aren’t screams of pain, Meeker, but of joy. Her eternal life energy is free at last from her temporal body. It’s the same screams of joy that the civilizations of the Long Gone made when I swallowed their worlds.”
The Meeker had heard her stories a thousand times, he had even told a few back to her. But as he gazed down at the dead Beth and her dripping fluids, he wondered if the Eye was keeping things from him too.
The next Beth said, “Sloan whispered to me about the sunrise we watched that morning in Mexico. We felt as if we were part of the whole Cosmos, not discrete fragments.”
“And nothing more?” asked the Eye.
“Isn’t that enough?”
Then she died, and the next Beth said, “Sloan whispered that she’d miss drinking her morning coffee with me. Are you taking me home?”
The next Beth said, speaking of a stringed contrivance used to make music, “Sloan wished I had played guitar more often for her.”
“And nothing else?” asked the Eye.
“No.”
The Eye questioned the Beths in the same way the Meeker approached the stars, not head on, but from the side. The Eye poked and prodded, but each Beth told a different story of her last moments, and each one died screaming.
“Eye?” the Meeker said, after the fifty-ninth Beth. “What if you never find the Sloan’s message?”
“All problems have solutions, Meeker. All mysteries have answers.”
He wished that were true, because he began to imagine the Beths screaming, even while they were still alive.
“You must have loved your children,” the Meeker said to the next Beth, “the way you talk so tenderly about them.”
“Have I mentioned my children? Of course I love them. What was your name again? This is all so strange.”
And to the twelfth Beth after her he said, “What was it like to walk in the mountains with your children, under pines covered in snow?”