YOUR WORD EXPRESSES ELATION BUT YOUR VOICE DOES NOT.
“I'm jumpy. And the fee for this is going to help, sure, but I still won't get to keep this ship. Or you.”
DO NOT DESPAIR. I CAN LEARN TO WORK WITH ANOTHER CAPTAIN.
“Great interpersonal skills there, Erma old girl. Actually, it wasn't you I was worried about.”
I SURMISED AS MUCH.
“Without this ship, I'll have to get some groundhog job.”
Erma had no ready reply to that. Instead, she changed the subject.
THE WORM IMAGE APPEARS TO BE SHRINKING.
“Huh?” As they wheeled above the arch, the image dwindled. It rippled at its edges, light crushed and crinkled. Claire saw rainbows dancing around the black center.
“What's it doing?” She had the sudden fear that the thing was falling away from them, plunging into the Sun.
I DETECT NO RELATIVE MOTION. THE IMAGE ITSELF IS CONTRACTING AS WE MOVE NEARER TO IT.
“Impossible. Things look bigger when you get close.”
NOT THIS OBJECT.
“Is the wormhole shrinking?”
MARK!—SURVEY RUN HALF COMPLETE.
She was sweating and it wasn't from the heat. “What's going on?”
I HAVEN'T ACCESSED RESERVE THEORY SECTION.
“How comforting. I always feel better after a nice cool theory.”
The wormhole seemed to shrink, and the light arch dwindled behind them now. The curious brilliant rainbows rimmed the dark mote. Soon she lost the image among the intertwining, restless strands. Claire fidgeted.
MARK!—SURVEY RUN COMPLETE.
“Great. Our bots deployed?”
OF COURSE. THERE REMAIN 189 SECONDS UNTIL SEPARATION FROM OUR SHIELD. SHALL I BEGIN SEQUENCE?
“Did we get all the pictures they wanted?”
THE ENTIRE SPECTRUM, PROBABLE YIELD, 75 MILLION.
Claire let out another whoop. “At least it'll pay a good lawyer, maybe cover my fines.”
THAT SEEMS MUCH LESS PROBABLE. MEANWHILE, I HAVE AN EXPLANATION FOR THE ANOMALOUS SHRINKAGE OF THE IMAGE. THE WORMHOLE HAS A NEGATIVE MASS.
“Antimatter?”
NO. IT'S SPACE-TIME CURVATURE IS OPPOSITE TO NORMAL MATTER.
“I don't get it.”
A wormhole connected two regions of space, sometimes points many light-years away—that she knew. They were leftovers from the primordial hot universe, wrinkles that even the universal expansion had not ironed out. Matter could pass through one end of the worm and emerge out the other an apparent instant later. Presto, faster-than-light-travel.
Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since the wormhole was born, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.
But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.
“So it looks like a negative mass?”
IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.
“Why didn't it shoot out from the Sun, then?”
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 down-stream. 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 high-speed 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 stern. 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.
Light deflection by a negative mass object (horizontal scale highly compressed). Light is swept out of the central region, creating an umbra region of zero intensity. At the edges of the umbra the rays accumulate, treating a rainbow-like caustic and enhanced light intensity.
* * *
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 burn 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 quarter
s, 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 HUMAN-LIKE 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—”
“How much will you pay for it?”
“What?” He blinked. It was an interesting effect, with such long eyelids. “You can't sell an astronomical object—”
“Whatever my grapplers hold, that's mine. Law of Space, Code 64.3.”
“You would quote laws to me when a scientific find of such magnitude is—”
“Want it or not?”
He glanced off camera, plainly yearning for somebody to consult. No time to talk to Luna or Isataku, though. He was on his own. “All…all right. You understand that this is a foolish mission? And that we are in no way responsible for—”
“Save the chatter. I need estimates of the field strength down inside that arch. Put your crew to work on that.”
“We will of course provide technical assistance.” He gave her a very thin smile. “I am sure we can negotiate price, too, if you survive.”
At least he had the honesty to say if, not when. Claire poured another pale column into the shapely glass. Best crystal, of course. When you only need one, you can have the best. “Send me—or rather, Erma—the data squirt.”
“We're having trouble transmitting through the dense plasma columns above you—”
“Erma is getting SolWatch. Pipe through them.”
“The problems of doing what you plan are—why, they're enormous.”
“So's my debt to Isataku.”
“This should've been thought through, negotiated—”
“I have to negotiate with some champagne right now.”
YOU HAVE NO PLAN.
Erma's tinkling voice definitely had an accusing edge. A good sim, with a feminine archness to it. Claire ignored that and stripped away the last of her clothes. “It's hot.”
OF COURSE. I CALCULATED THE RISE EARLY IN OUR ORBIT. IT FITS THE STEFAN-BOLTZ-MANN LAW PERFECTLY.
“Bravo.” She shook sweat from her hair. “Stefan-Boltzmann, do yo' stuff.”
WE ARE DECELERATING IN SEQUENCE. ARRIVAL TIME: 4.87 MINUTES. ANTIMATTER RESERVES HOLDING. THERE COULD BE DIFFICULTY WITH THE MAGNETIC BOTTLES.
The ship thrummed as it slowed. Claire had been busy testing her ship inboards, sitting in a cozy recliner. It helped make the minutes crawl by a bit faster. She had kept glancing nervously at the screens, where titanic blazes steepled up from incandescent plains. Flames, licking up at her.
She felt thick, loggy. Her air was getting uncomfortably warm. Her heart was thudding faster, working. She roused herself, spat back at Erma, “And I do have a plan.”
YOU HAVE NOT SEEN FIT TO CONFIDE IN ME?
She rolled her eyes. A personality sim in a snit—just the thing she needed. “I was afraid you'd laugh.”
I HAVE NEVER LAUGHED.
“That's my point.”
She ignored multiple red warnings winking at her. Systems were OK, though stressed by the heat. So why did she feel so slow? You're not up for the game, girl.
She tossed her data board aside. The effort the simple gesture took surprised her. I hope that alcohol tab worked. I'll get another.
She got up to go fetch one—and fell to the floor. She banged her knee. “Uh! Damn.” Erma said nothing.
It was labor getting on hands and knees and she barely managed to struggle back into the recliner. She weighed a ton—and then she understood.
“We're decelerating—so I'm feeling more of local gravity.”
A CRUDE MANNER OF SPEAKING, BUT YET. I AM BRINGING US INTO A SLOPING ORBITAL CHANGE, WHICH SHALL END WITH A HOVERING POSITION ABOVE THE CORONAL ARCH. AS YOU ORDERED.
Claire struggled to her hands and knees. Was that malicious glee in Erma's voice? Did personality sims feel that? “What's local gravity?”
27.6 EARTH GRAVITIES.
“What! Why didn't you tell me?”
I DID NOT THINK OF IT MYSELF UNTIL I BEGAN REGISTERING EFFECTS IN THE SHIP.
Claire thought, Yeah, and decided to teach me a little lesson in humility. It was her own fault, though—the physics was simple enough. Orbiting meant that centrifugal acceleration exactly balanced local gravity. Silver Metal Lugger could take 27.6 gravs. The ship was designed to tow ore masses a thousand times its own mass.
Nothing less than carbon-stressed alloys would, though. Leave orbit, hover—and you got crushed into gooey red paste.
She crawled across her living room carpet. Her joints ached. “Got to be—”
SHALL I ABORT THE FLIGHT PLAN?
“No! There's got to be a way to—”
THREE POINT NINE MINUTES UNTIL ARRIVAL.
The sim's voice radiated malicious glee. Claire grunted, “The water.”
I HAVE DIFFICULTY IN PICKING UP YOUR SIGNAL.
“Because this suit is for space, not diving.”
Claire floated over her leather couch. Too bad about all the expensive interior decoration. The entire living complex was filled with her drinking and maintenance water. It had been either that, fast, or be lumpy tomato paste.
She had crawled through a hatchway and pulled her pressure suit down from its clamp lock. Getting it on was a struggle. Being slick with swea
t helped but not much. Then she snagged her arm in a sleeve and couldn't pull the damned thing off to try again.
She had nearly panicked then. Pilots don't let their fear eat on them, not while there's flying to be done. She made herself get the sleeve off one step at a time, ignoring everything else.
And as soon as Erma pumped the water reserve into the rooms, Archimedes's principle had taken over. With her suit inflated, the water she displaced exactly balanced her own weight. Floating under water was a rare sensation on Mercury or Luna. She had never done it and she had never realized that it was remarkably like being in orbit. Cool, too.
Until you boil like a lobster…she thought uneasily.
Water was a good conductor, four times better than air, you learned that by feel, flying freighters near the Sun. So first she had to let the rest of the ship go to hell, refrigerating just the water. Then Erma had to route some of the water into heat exchangers, letting it boil off to protect the rest. Juggling for time.
PUMPS ARE RUNNING HOT NOW. SOME HAVE BEARING FAILURES.
“Not much we can do, is there?”
She was strangely calm now and that made the plain, hard fear in her belly heavy, like a lump. Too many things to think about, all of them bad. The water could short out circuits. And as it boiled away, she had less shielding from the x-rays lancing up from below. Only a matter of time.…
WE ARE HOVERING. THE MAGNETIC ANTI-MATTER TRAPS ARE SUPERCONDUCTING, AS YOU RECALL. AS TEMPERATURE CONTINUES TO RISE, THEY WILL FAIL.
She could still see the wall screens, blurred from the water. “OK, OK. Extend the magnetic grapplers. Down, into the arch.”
I FAIL TO—
“We're going fishing. Not with a worm—for one.” Tough piloting, though, at the bottom of a swimming pool, Claire thought as she brought the ship down on its roaring pyre.
Even through the water she could feel the vibration. Antimatter annihilated in its reaction chamber at a rate she had never reached before. The ship groaned and strummed. The gravities were bad enough; now thermal expansion of the ship itself was straining every beam and rivet.
She searched downward. Seconds ticked away. Where? Where?
There it was. A dark sphere hung among the magnetic arch strands. Red streamers worked over it. Violet rays fanned out like bizarre hair, twisting, dancing in tufts along the curvature. A hole into another place.
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