Free Eater by Gregory Benford

more traditional Net temptations no longer carried their zest. No point in doing an Ego Surf on her name; it showed up only on historical mesh sites now. Her Elvis Year, the time of popularity, was now long gone, back when shuttle missions made you a pseudo-celeb among some of the Internet tribes.
    Since then she had been happier, more satisfied, steadily getting more obscure. Funny thing about contentment, some years just got lost. Seen it, done it, can’t recall most of it .
    Through those dimly recalled years, she had been happier with Benjamin than she probably had any right to be, andnow that it was nearly over, to review it all seemed pointless. There were parts of the play she would have rewritten, especially the dialogue. Somehow, despite all her theories and ambitions, she still regretted not having children. The career had seemed more important, and maybe it still was to her, but regrets don’t listen to theories. There were plenty of roads not taken and no maps.
    She finished her e-mail and looked over the work she was doing on spectral analysis. The data pouring into the Center needed careful attention and she had been pitching in, giving the multitude of optical line profiles a thorough scrutiny. She popped the most puzzling ones up on her big screen and ran a whole suite of numerical codes, sniffing around. This took two hours and much intricate tedium. Still, the repetition was soothing, somehow: Zen Astrophysics. She was feeling the slow ebbing fatigue she knew so well when a clear result finally surfaced.
    Three optical lines emitted from the intruder came out looking decidedly odd: each was split into two equal peaks. These were not the Doppler shifts they had spotted earlier. They were much smaller, imposed on the Doppler peaks themselves.
    There are very few ways an atom can emit radiation at two very closely spaced intervals. The most common occurs if the atom is immersed in a magnetic field. Then its energy would depend upon whether its electrons aligned with the field or against it.
    These three splittings she had pulled out of the noise, imposing several different observations from several different ’scopes. And they led to a surprising result: the magnetic field values needed to explain these up-and-down shifts were huge, several thousand times the Earth’s field.
    “Good grief,” she muttered to herself, instantly suspicious.
    Most amazing results were mistakes. She burned another hour making sure this one was not.
    Then she sat and looked at the tiny twin peaks and likedknowing that Benjamin would be thrilled by it. The give-and-take with the others at the Center, especially the Gang of Four, was great fun, but his reaction was still the crucial pleasure for her.
    Abruptly she remembered her first experience of astronomy, as a little girl. Camping out, she had awakened after midnight, faceup. There they were . Even above the summer’s heat, the stars were immensely cold. They glittered in the wheeling crystal dark, at the end of a span she could not imagine without dread. High, hard, hanging above her in a tunnel longer than humans could comprehend.
    When she had first felt them that way, she had dug her fingers into the soft warm grass and held on —above a yawning abyss she felt in her body as both wonderful and terrible. Impossible to ignore.
    She had not realized until years later how that moment had shaped her.
    She took a break, stretched, felt the tiredness fall away a little, and glanced out a window. From the abstract astrophysical to the humid neighborhood, all in one lungful of moist air.
    It was so easy to forget that she dwelled in what most people regarded as the nearest Earthly parallel to heaven. The volcanic soil was rich, lying beneath ample rains and sun. Irrigated paddies gave taro’s starchy roots, which made poi when mashed. There were ginger and berries, mango, guava, Java plum, and of course bananas. The candlenut tree gave oily brown nuts, which, strung together,