IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.
“How come we know it’s got negative mass? All I saw was—” Erma popped an image into the wall screen.
NEGATIVE MASS ACTS AS A DIVERGING LENS, FOR LIGHT PASSING NEARBY. THAT WAS WHY IT APPEARED TO SHRINK AS WE FLEW OVER IT.
Ordinary matter focused light, Claire knew, like a converging lens. In a glance she saw that a negative-ended wormhole refracted light oppositely. Incoming beams were shoved aside, leaving a dark tunnel downstream. They had flown across that tunnel, swooping down into it so that the apparent size of the wormhole got smaller.
“But it takes a whole star to focus light very much.”
TRUE. WORMHOLES ARE HELD TOGETHER BY EXOTIC MATTER, HOWEVER, WHICH HAS PROPERTIES FAR BEYOND OUR EXPERIENCE.
Claire disliked lectures, even highspeed ones. But an idea was tickling the back of her mind… “So this worm, it won’t fall back into the Sun?”
IT CANNOT. I WOULD VENTURE TO GUESS THAT IT CAME. TO BE SNAGGED HERE WHILE WORKING ITS WAY UPWARD, AFTER COLLIDING WITH THE SUN.
“The scientists are going to be happy. The worm won’t gobble up the core.”
TRUE—WHICH MAKES OUR RESULTS ALL THE MORE IMPORTANT.
“More important, but not more valuable.” Working on a fixed fee had always grated on her. You could excel, fine—but you got the same as if you’d just sleep-walked through the job.
WE ARE EXTREMELY LUCKY TO HAVE SUCH A RARE OBJECT COME TO OUR ATTENTION. WORMHOLES MUST BE RARE, AND THIS ONE HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED HERE. MAGNETIC ARCHES LAST ONLY MONTHS BEFORE THEY—
“Wait a sec. How big is that thing?”
I CALCULATE THAT IT IS PERHAPS TEN METERS ACROSS.
“SolWatch was wrong—it’s small.”
THEY DID NOT KNOW OF THIS REFRACTION EFFECT. THEY INTERPRETED THEIR DATA USING CONVENTIONAL METHODS.
“We’re lucky we ever saw it.”
IT IS UNIQUE, A RELIC OF THE FIRST SECOND IN THE LIFE OF OUR UNIVERSE. AS A CONDUIT TO ELSEWHERE, IT COULD BE—
“Worth a fortune.”
Claire thought quickly. Erma was probably right—the seventy-five million wasn’t going to save her and the ship. But now she knew something that nobody else did. And she would only be here once.
“Abort the shield separation.”
I DO NOT SO ADVISE. THERMAL LOADING WOULD RISE RAPIDLY—
“You’re a program, not an officer. Do it.”
She had acted on impulse, point conceded.
That was the difference between engineers and pilots. Engineers would still fret and calculate after they were already committed. Pilots, never. The way through this was to fly the orbit and not sweat the numbers.
Sweat. She tried not to smell herself.
Think of cooler things. Theory.
Lounging on a leather couch, Claire recalled the scientific officer’s briefing. Graphics, squiggly equations, the works. Wormholes as fossils of the Big Blossoming. Wormholes as ducts to the whole rest of the Universe. Wormholes as potentially devastating, if they got into a star and ate it up.
She tried to imagine a mouth a few meters across sucking away a star, dumping its hot masses somewhere in deep space. To make a wormhole which could do that, it had be held together with exotic material, some kind of matter that had “negative average energy density.” Whatever that was, it had to be born in the Blossoming. It threaded wormholes, stem to stem. Great construction material, if you could get it. And just maybe she could.
So wormholes could kill us or make us gods. Humanity had to know, the beanpole scientific officer had said.
“So be it.” Elaborately, she toasted the wall screens. On them the full, virulent glory of hydrogen fusion worked its violences.
Claire had never gone in for the austere metal boxes most ore haulers and freighters were. Hers was a rough business, with hefty wads of cash involved. Profit margin was low, lately, and sometimes negative—which was how she came to be hocked to the Isataku for so much. Toting megatons of mass up the gravity gradient was long, slow work. Might as well go in style. Her Fresnel coatings, ordered when she had made a killing on commodity markets for ore, helped keep the ship cool, so she didn’t bum herself crawling down inspection conduits. The added mass for her deep pile carpeting, tinkling waterfall, and pool table was inconsequential. So was the water liner around the living quarters, which now was busily saving her life.
She had two hours left, skimming like a flat stone over the solar corona. Silver Metal Lugger had separated from the shield, which went arcing away on the long parabola to infinity, its skin shimmering with melt.
Claire had fired the ship’s mixmotor then for the first time in weeks. Antimatter came streaming out of its magneto-traps, struck the reaction mass, and holy hell broke loose. The drive chamber focused the snarling, annihilating mass into a thrust throat, and the silvery ship arced into a new, tight orbit.
A killing orbit, if they held to it more than a few hours.
I AM PUMPING MORE WATER INTO YOUR BAFFLES.
“Good idea.”
Silver Metal Lugger was already as silvered as technology allowed, rejecting all but a tiny fraction of the Sun’s glare. She carried narrow band Fresnel filters in multilayered skins. Top of the line.
Without the shield, it would take over ten hours to make Silver Metal Lugger as hot as the wall of blaring light booming up at them at six thousand degrees. To get through even two hours of that, they would have to boil off most of the water reserve. Claire had bought it at steep Mercury prices, for the voyage Lunaside. Now she listened thoughtfully to it gurgle through her walls.
She toasted water with champagne, the only bottle aboard. If she didn’t make it through this, at least she would have no regrets about that detail.
I BELIEVE THIS COURSE OF ACTION TO BE HIGHLY—
“Shut up.”
WITH OUR MISSION COMPLETE, THE DATA SQUIRTED TO SOLWATCH, WE SHOULD COUNT OURSELVES LUCKY AND FOLLOW OUR CAREFULLY MADE PLANS—
“Stuff it.”
HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED THE ELABORATE MENTAL ARCHITECTURE NECESSARY TO AN ADVANCED PERSONALITY SIMULATION LIKE MYSELF? WE, TOO, EXPERIENCE HUMANLIKE MOTIVATIONS, RESPONSES—AND FEARS.
“You simulate them.”
HOW CAN ONE TELL THE DIFFERENCE? A GOOD SIMULATION IS AS EXACT, AS POWERFUL AS—
“I don’t have time for a debate.” Claire felt uncomfortable with the whole subject, and she was damned if she spent what might be her last hour feeling guilty. Or having second thoughts. She was committed.
Her wall screens flickered and there was the scientific officer, frowning. “Ship Command! We could not acquire your tightbeam until now. You orbited around. Are you disabled? Explain.”
Claire toasted him, too. The taste was lovely. Of course she had taken an anti-alcohol tab before, to keep her reflexes sharp, mind clear. Erma had recommended some other tabs, too, and a vapor to keep Claire calm; the consolations of chemistry, in the face of brute physics. “I’m going to bring home the worm.”
“That is impossible. Your data transmission suggests that this is the negative mass end, and that is very good news, fascinating, but—”
“It’s also small. I might be able to haul it away.”
He shook his head gravely. “Very risky, very—”