"Geoffrey A. Landis - Approaching Perimelasma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

depths of interstellar space eleven hundred years ago, a natural loop of negative
cosmic string as ancient as the Big Bang, invisible to the eyes save for the distortion
of spacetime. That first one led from nowhere interesting to nowhere exciting, but
from that one we bred hundreds, and now we casually move wormhole mouths from
star to star, breeding new wormholes as it suits us, to form an ever-expanding
network of connections.
I should not have been so close. Angry red lights have been flashing in my
peripheral vision, warning blinkers that I have been ignoring. The energy radiated in
the form of gravitational waves had been prodigious, and would have, to a lesser
person, been dangerous. But in my new body, I am nearly invulnerable, and if I canтАЩt
stand a mere wormhole cloning, there is no way I will be able to stand a black hole.
So I ignore the warnings, wave briefly to the engineersтАФthough I doubt that they can
even see me, floating kilometers awayтАФand use my reaction jets to scoot over to my
ship.


The ship I will pilot is docked to the research station, where the scientists have their
instruments and the biological humans have their living quarters. The wormhole
station is huge compared to my ship, which is a tiny ovoid occupying a berth almost
invisible against the hull. There is no hurry for me to get to it.
IтАЩm surprised that any of the technicians can even see me, tiny as I am in the
void, but a few of them apparently do, because in my radio I hear casual greetings
called out: howтАЩs it, ohayo gozaimasu, hey glad you made it, howтАЩs the bod? ItтАЩs
hard to tell from the radio voices which ones are people I know, and which are only
casual acquaintances. I answer back: howтАЩs it, ohayo, yo, surpassing spec. None of
them seem inclined to chat, but then, theyтАЩre busy with their own work.
They are dropping things into the black hole.
Throwing things in, more to say. The wormhole station orbits a tenth of an
astronomical unit from the Virgo black hole, closer to the black hole than Mercury is
to the sun. This is an orbit with a period of a little over two days, but, even so close
to the black hole, there is nothing to see. A rock, released to fall straight downward,
takes almost a day to reach the horizon.
One of the scientists supervising, a biological human named Sue, takes the
time to talk with me a bit, explaining what they are measuring. What interests me
most is that they are measuring whether the fall deviates from a straight line. This will
let them know whether the black hole is rotating. Even a slight rotation would mess
up the intricate dance of the trajectory required for my ship. However, the best
current theories predict that an old black hole will have shed its angular momentum
long ago, and, as far as the technicians can determine, their results show that the
conjecture holds.
The black hole, or the absence in space where it is located, is utterly invisible
from here. I follow the pointing finger of the scientist, but there is nothing to see.
Even if I had a telescope, it is unlikely that I would be able to pick out the tiny region
of utter blackness against the irregular darkness of an unfamiliar sky.
My ship is not so different from the drop probes. The main difference is that I
will be on it.
Before boarding the station, I jet over in close to inspect my ship, a miniature
egg of perfectly reflective material. The hull is made of a single crystal of a syn-thetic
material so strong that no earthly force could even dent it.
A black hole, though, is no earthly force.