"Greg Egan - Glory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

First neutrons, then antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters were
ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering their constitu-ents and preventing
them from annihilating their counterparts. The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of
compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.

The gamma ray lasers shut down, the Zeno effect withdrew its prohibi-tions. For the time it took a beam
of light to cross a neutron, the needle sat motionless in space. Then it began to burn, and it began to
move.

The needle was structured like a meticulously crafted firework, and its outer layers ignited first. No
external casing could have channeled this blast, but the pattern of tensions woven into the needleтАЩs
construction favored one direction for the debris to be expelled. Particles streamed backward; the needle
moved forward. The shock of acceleration could not have been borne by anything built from
atomic-scale matter, but the pressure bearing down on the core of the needle prolonged its life, delaying
the inevitable.

Layer after layer burned itself away, blasting the dwindling remnant for-ward ever faster. By the time the
needle had shrunk to a tenth of its original size it was moving at ninety-eight percent of light-speed; to a
bystander this could scarcely have been improved upon, but from the needleтАЩs perspective there was still
room to slash its journeyтАЩs duration by orders of magnitude.

When just one thousandth of the needle remained, its time, compared to the neighboring stars, was
passing two thousand times more slowly. Still the layers kept burning, the protective clusters unraveling as
the pressure on them was released. The needle could only reach close enough to light-speed to slow
down time as much as it required if it could sacrifice a large enough proportion of its remaining mass. The
core of the needle could survive only for a few trillionths of a second, while its journey would take two
hundred million seconds as judged by the stars. The proportions had been carefully matched, though: out
of the two kilograms of matter and antimatter that had been woven together at the launch, only a few
million neutrons were needed as the final payload.

By one measure, seven years passed. For the needle, its last trillionths of a second unwound, its final
layers of fuel blew away, and at the moment its core was ready to explode it reached its destination,
plunging from the near-vacuum of space straight into the heart of a star.

Even here, the density of matter was insufficient to stabilize the core, yet far too high to allow it to pass
unhindered. The core was torn apart. But it did not go quietly, and the shock waves it carved through the
fusing plasma endured for a million kilometers: all the way through to the cooler outer layers on the
opposite side of the star. These shock waves were shaped by the payload that had formed them, and
though the initial pattern imprinted on them by the disintegrating cluster of neutrons was enlarged and
blurred by its journey, on an atomic scale it remained sharply defined. Like a mold stamped into the
seething plasma it encouraged ionized molecular fragments to slip into the troughs and furrows that
matched their shape, and then brought them together to react in ways that the plasmaтАЩs random collisions
would never have allowed. In effect, the shock waves formed a web of catalysts, carefully laid out in
both time and space, briefly transforming a small corner of the star into a chemical factory operating on a
nanometer scale.

The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding the last traces of the shock waveтАЩs momentum:
a few nanograms of elaborate, carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave. Traveling
at seven hun-dred kilometers per second, a fraction below the velocity needed to escape from the star
completely, they climbed out of its gravity well, slowing as they ascended.