An idea tickled 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 after it sped away, gaining momentum from Fraq’s entry. Both mass and momentum are conveyed by the wormhole Mouth, and there is a reaction force—as decreed by Newton, I gather. That drove it into this magnetic loop, because the Mouth was orbiting nearby.

“So the worm won’t gobble up the sun’s core. Uh… you’re speaking for the scientists, aren’t you? From a pre-briefing?”

True, both—which makes our results all the more important.

Claire laughed. “More important, but not more valuable—unless we don’t grab that grav gizmo.”

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. This refraction effect—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. But yes, did not estimate properly.

“That is,” Rachel said, “before the theory folk came rushing in. 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—

“Can it,” Claire said. “In we go—”

Rachel saw Claire adjusting her control board, consulting screens, biting her lip in concentration. Then she barked to Erma, “Speed up our water boil-off.”

I do not so advise. Thermal loading would rise rapidly—

“You’re a program, not an officer. Do it.”

3.

Claire acted on impulse, Rachel saw. Raw intuition, born of experience.

Very non-Librarian instincts.

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 in the running moment. Rachel was getting the feel of what skills it took to do real, adventurous things in real, marvelous places. That’s the sun out there! To fly over it, not sweating the—oh yes—

Sweat. Rachel tried not to smell herself. The eerie howl of plasma rushing by their insulated hull, deep inside its water reservoir, reminded her of hurricanes in her girlhood. It was gusty, Gulf coast warm then, too…. So… think of cooler things. Theory.

Lounging on a leather couch when I heard all this, Rachel recalled, trying to figure out Fraq, the Ythri, why they withheld info… like this wormhole.

She had been tired from the high-acceleration voyage from Mars, plunging down into the inner solar system at a full-g, constant acceleration.

New astro-search data was coming in, so they all got properly interested.

The ship around them rumbled like a giant clearing its throat.

The Library’s Scientific Officer’s briefing had been a jargon and graphics dance, squiggly equations, the works. Wormholes as fossils of the Big Blossoming—the new hip name for the Big Bang. Wormholes as ducts to the whole rest of the universe. Wormholes as potentially devastating, if they got into a star and ate it up, casting its fusing plasma to another place in spacetime.