PART 13 A WORM IN THE WELL

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

—MULLAH NASRUDIN, 1200s AD

1.

The cabin reeked of heat and sweat and nerves.

“Trim spectrum. Optical only, Erma,” the pilot called, sharp and sure.

Reassuringly so. Rachel watched carefully as Claire Raeburn piloted them in closer to the giant fluorescent tower. Or at least that’s what it looked like in the optical spectrum, meaning what humans and Ythri alike could see. Apparently there were spectra lines that revealed even more terrifying aspects, though Rachel found that hard to believe. She mopped her brow.

Erma, the Craft Artilect, obliged.

Done. Adjusting for optmal human viewing. The Ythri passenger may find yellows too intense.

Piloting this ship came from the close horse-and-rider connecton between Claire and Erma. They rode the sun’s wild winds and horrible heat. Plasma-wave riders, surfing on the sun. Few could try it. Fewer still survived.

Glowering Sol spread below them, a bubbling plain. She had notched the air-conditioning cooler, but it didn’t help much. Claire was calm, sure, but sweating, too.

Geysers burst in gaudy reds and actinic violets from the yellow-white froth below. The solar coronal arch was just peeking over the horizon, like a wedding ring stuck halfway into boiling, white mud. A monster, over two thousand kilometers long, swelling, sleek and slender and angry crimson. Claire glanced over at the passengers behind her pilot chair as she turned down the cabin lights. “I heard somewhere that people feel cooler in the dark. The temperature in here is normal for me. But you people have started sweating, my nose says.”

Tuning the yellows and reds dimmer on the big screen before her made the white-hot storms look more blue. Maybe that’ll trick our subconscious, Rachel thought, unzipping her sealsuit.

Claire swung her cameras to see the full blare of the solar coronal arch. The long. seething, curving image got refracted around the rim of the sun, so she was getting a preview of trouble to come. Coming fast now.

Their orbit was on the descending slope of a long ellipse, its lowest point calculated to just touch the peak of the arch. So far, the overlay orbit trajectory was exactly on target. They would come in at forty-two kilometers a second to make a grab. Trapeze circus work.

Software didn’t mind the heat, of course; gravitation was mere cool, serene calculation. Heat was for engineers. Plus solar wind turbulence like the big waves in Hawaii. And Rachel was just a Librarian trusting a pilot she barely knew, but liked a lot.

In her immersion-work environment, touch controls gave her an abstract distance from the real physical surroundings—the plumes of virulent gas, the hammer of wild photons. She wasn’t handling the mirror, of course, but it felt that way. A light, feathery brush, at an ever-warmer room temperature. She had trained enough for this, at least.