{"id":144,"date":"2020-12-26T13:38:27","date_gmt":"2020-12-26T13:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=144"},"modified":"2021-01-29T13:02:16","modified_gmt":"2021-01-29T13:02:16","slug":"a-worm-in-the-well-by-gregory-benford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=144","title":{"rendered":"A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Worm in the Well <\/em><\/strong>by Gregory Benford (Analog<\/em>, November 1995) starts\u2014not entirely clearly\u2014with a female astronaut1<\/sup> called Claire piloting her spaceship near the Sun\u2019s corona in an attempt to survey a transiting black hole. The story then flashbacks to Mercury where a high-tech bailiff serves her, and we get back story about her debts, the imminent repossession of her specially outfitted ore-carrying spaceship, etc. All of which eventually leads her to accept a contract from SolWatch to undertake the hazardous job outlined in the first section.
This set up forms the first third of the story, and the rest of the piece continues in a similarly plodding vein:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since the wormhole was born, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.
But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.
\u201cSo it looks like a negative mass?\u201d
IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.
\u201cWhy didn\u2019t it shoot out from the Sun, then?\u201d
IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.
\u201cHow come we know it\u2019s got negative mass? All I saw was\u2014\u201d
Erma popped an image into the wall screen.
NEGATIVE MASS ACTS AS A DIVERGING LENS, FOR LIGHT PASSING NEARBY. THAT WAS WHY IT APPEARED TO SHRINK AS WE FLEW OVER IT.
Ordinary matter focused light, Claire knew, like a converging lens. In a glance she saw that a negative ended wormhole refracted light oppositely. Incoming beams were shoved aside, leaving a dark tunnel downstream. They had flown across that tunnel, swooping down into it so that the apparent size of the wormhole got smaller.  p. 150 (Year\u2019s Best SF<\/em>, edited by David Hartwell)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The extensive explanations in this piece (there is an accompanying diagram) caused my eyes to glaze over, and the unengaging dramas that Claire is subjected to did not provide any relief. The ship AI is also mildly irritating, as well as possibly homicidal\u2014at one point Claire asks about the peak gravity on an approach, whereupon the AI tells her \u201c27.6 gravities\u201d\u2014death for a human. You would have thought that it might have said so earlier, or perhaps it takes a relaxed view of Asimov\u2019s First Law (the part about not letting humans come to harm through inaction).
In the final pages of the story (spoiler) she manages to capture the black hole and sell the rights for a huge amount of money, more than enough to clear her debts.
In some respects this is a typical dull Analog<\/em> story, with lots of speculative science substituting for anything of interest.
* (Mediocre). 8,300 words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. The character is supposed to be female but she comes over as a shouty, impulsive man in drag, to be honest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford (Analog, November 1995) starts\u2014not entirely clearly\u2014with a female astronaut1 called Claire piloting her spaceship near the Sun\u2019s corona in an attempt to survey a transiting black hole. The story then flashbacks to Mercury where a high-tech bailiff serves her, and we get back story about her debts, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[21,5,33,34,7],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gregory-benford","tag-21","tag-5","tag-analog","tag-gregory-benford","tag-novelette"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}