Blanca had heard, he'd mapped out a detailed strategy for the—careful, non-exponential—exploration of the entire universe. Local wormholes probably didn't lead everywhere, since the mouths could only have traveled a certain distance since the time they were formed, but the closed, finite universe ought further than a few hundred million light years, there'd he wormholes in the galaxies at that distance which would reach as far again.
Gabriel's mildly preoccupied expression changed to one of satisfaction, though nothing as dramatic as relief. 'The other ring's confirmed. We've grabbed both ends.'
Blanca swung his arm, dislodging a flurry of blue crystals from his fur. 'Congratulations.' If the second neutralized positron had slipped out into space, it would have been impossible to find. With luck, they'd soon confirm that photons could pass through the wormhole, but a bombardment of either tiny mouth would only produce a trickle from the other.
Gabriel mused, 'I keep wondering if we could have failed. I mean… we made a few mistakes in the design that we only discovered centuries later. And we hit those chaotic modes in the electron beams where the simulations broke down, so we had to map the whole state space empirically and find a way through by trial-and- error. We did a hundred thousand small things wrong, wasting time, making it harder. But could we ever have failed completely, beyond recovery? Beyond repair?'
'Isn't that question slightly premature?' Blanca inclined vis head skeptically. 'Assuming this isn't a false alarm, you've just linked the two ends of the Forge. That's a start, but you're not quite staring down the runnel to Procyon yet.'
Gabriel smiled airily. 'We've proved the basic principle; the rest is just a matter of persistence. Until the neutralization of those positrons, Kozuch-Wheeler wormholes might have turned out to be nothing but a useful fiction: just another metaphor that gave the right predictions at low energies, but fell apart under closer scrutiny.' He paused for a moment, looking slightly scandalized by his own words; it was a risk that the Forge group had rarely mentioned. 'But now we've shown that they're real, and that we understand how to manipulate them. So what can go wrong from here?'
'I don't know. When it comes to interstellar wormholes, it might take longer than you think to find one that doesn't lead straight into the heart of a star, or the core of a planet.'
'That's true. But a certain amount of matter in every system has to he in the form of small asteroids, or interplanetary dust—somewhere we can burrow out from easily. And even if our estimates are wrong by a factor of a thousand, it would still only take a year or two to find and enlarge each new usable wormhole. Would you call that failure? When the gleisners are exploring a new system every century and calling it success?'
'No.' Blanca tried harder. 'Okay, what about this? You've just proved that you can splice two identical, electron-positron wormholes together, at the electron ends. What if it doesn't work when you substitute a proton for one of the positrons?' Only primordial electron-proton wormholes offered the chance of an instant short-cut to the stars; the current experiment was using freshly created electron-positron pairs merely for the sake of having both ends of each wormhole accessible. Working exclusively with electron-proton wormholes might have been simpler in theory, but new ones with known endpoints couldn't be created at useful rate under anything less than Big Bang conditions. Gabriel hesitated, and for a moment Blanca wondered if he'd taken the scenario to heart.
'That would be a setback,' he conceded. 'But Kozuch Theory clearly predicts that when you hit an electron linked to a proton with another one linked to a positron, the proton will decay into a neutron, the positron will neutralize… and the final wormhole will be even wider than the one we've just made. And there's no room left, now, for idle speculation about Kozuch Theory being wrong. So—' He thumbed his nose at ver, then jumped to the Forge scape.
Blanca followed. The schematic ahead of them showed a wire-thin cylinder; the thickness was not remotely to scale, but the length was correctly portrayed, stretching more than ten times wider than Pluto's orbit. All the planetary orbits were drawn in, but the inner four, Mercury to Mars, were lost in the glare of the tiny sun.
The Forge was a giant particle accelerator, consisting of over fourteen trillion free-flying components. Each one used a small light-sail to balance the sun's slight gravitational pull and keep itself locked onto a rigid straight line 140 billion kilometers long. The sails worked off beams sent fanning out from a network of solar-powered UV lasers, orbiting the sun closer than Mercury; they also extracted the energy needed to power the accelerator.
Most of the components were individual PASER units, lined up one after the other at ten-meter intervals. They re-focused the electron beams, then boosted the energy of each particle passing through them by about 140 microjoules. That didn't sound like much, but for one electron it was equivalent to 900 trillion volts. PASERs used the Schachter effect: a suitable material was bathed in laser light, raising its atoms into high-energy states, and when a charged particle passed along a narrow channel drilled through the material, its electric field triggered the surrounding atoms into giving up their energy. It was as if the laser primed countless tiny electronic catapults, and then the particle came along and sprung them all, one after the other, getting a small kick forward from each one.
The energy density maintained within each PASER was enormous, and Blanca had seen a recording of an early test model bursting from radiation pressure. There hadn't been much of an explosion, though; the PASERs were tiny garnet-like crystals, each one massing less than a gram. Substantial asteroids, hundreds of meters wide, had been mined for the tens of millions of tons of raw materials needed to make the Forge, but even Carter- Zimmerman's most gung-ho astrophysical engineers would have vetoed any design that required gutting Ceres or Vesta or Pallas.
Blanca jumped to one end of the Forge, where the scape showed a 'live' image of the real equipment, albeit delayed by the 65 hours it took for the signal to reach Earth. At both ends of the linear accelerator, electron-positron pairs were created in small cyclotrons; the positrons were retained in storage rings, while the electrons were fed straight into the main accelerator. The opposing beams met in the center of the Forge, and if two electrons collided head-on, fast enough to overcome electrostatic repulsion, Kozuch Theory predicted that they'd splice wormholes. The electrons themselves would disappear without a trace—locally violating conservation of both charge and energy—but the negative charge lost would be balanced by the neutralization of the positrons at the new wormhole's far ends, and the energy of the missing electrons would manifest itself as the mass of the two neutral particles which the positrons had become, dubbed 'femtomouths' or 'FMs' by the Forge group's theorists, since they were expected to be about a femtometer wide.
Blanca was remaining cautiously skeptical, but it seemed that the predicted sequence of events had finally taken place. No instruments had witnessed the vanishing act at the center of the Forge; tracking the torrent of electrons and looking for one perfect collision among all the near misses would have been impossible. But neutral particles of exactly the right mass, heavy as specks of dust but smaller than atomic nuclei, had been caught in the laser traps surrounding both storage rings at exactly the same time.
Gabriel had followed ver, and now they moved together through the hull of the storage ring facility and hovered above the laser trap. The scape merged a camera-based view of the equipment with schematics generated from instrument readings; most unrealistically, they could see the putative FM—a black dot radiating self-important tags—being gently shuffled through the trap by the shifting gradients of luminosity, scattering UV photons just enough to let the lasers nudge it along.
It would take over an hour for the FM to be delivered from the trap into the next stage. They rushed, though not as quickly as before.
'Aren't the rest of the Forge group watching this?' They'd entered the scape privately, invisible and oblivious to any other users; Gabriel had inflected the address that way.
'Probably.'
'Don't you want to be with them at the moment of proof?'
'Apparently not.' Gabriel pressed his hand inside ver again, deeper this time; pulses of warmth spread our from the center of vis torso. Blanca turned toward him and stroked his back, reaching for the place where the fur became, if he chose, almost unbearably sensitive. C-Z culture had its problems, but in Konishi a simple exchange of pleasure phrased in this manner would have been unthinkable. The two of them were not slavishly embodied; harm remained impossible, coercion remained impossible. But Konishi had sanctified autonomy in the same absurd fashion as the statics had sanctified the pitfalls of the flesh.
The FM arrived in the gamma-ray chamber, and a series of intense pulsed bombardments began. The gamma-ray photons had wavelengths of around ten-to-the-minus-fifteen meters, roughly the same as the FM's diameter. A photon's wavelength had nothing to do with the size of its wormhole mouth, but it did measure how precisely you could constrain its location and aim it at a chosen target.
