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developing scenarios. It all depended on critical values of the star's mass. If the mass was low enough the
star could survive, for many millions of years, its diameter oscillating slowly... and rather dully, Lieserl
thought. But a little larger and the star could destroy itself in a supernova explosion or, if massive
enough, collapse into a black hole.
Lieserl studied the data streams trickling into her awareness. She would know soon. She felt a shiver of
excitement. If the star was unstable, the end would come well within a million years. And then
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...Lieserl?
The voice of Louise Ye Armonk broke into her thoughts.Damn. Lieserl lifted her arms over her head
and plunged into a huge convection fountain; the fusing star stuff played over her Virtual body, warming
her to the core.
But she couldn't escape Louise's voice, any more than she'd been able to outrun Kevan Scholes.
Come on, Lieserl. I know you can hear me. I'm monitoring your data feeds, remember
Lieserl sighed. "All right, Louise. Yes, I can hear you."
Lieserl Louise hesitated, uncharacteristically.
"I think I know what you're going to say, Louise."
Yes. I bet you do,Louise growled.Lieserl, we're grateful to you for going into New Sol with the
wormhole Interface. And you're sending us a lot of great data. But...
"Yes, Louise?"
Lieserl, you didn't leave a back-up.
"Ah." Lieserl smiled and closed her eyes. The neutrino flux from the heart of New Sol brushed against
her face, as delicate as a butterfly's wing. "I wondered how long it would take you to notice that."
Damn it, Lieserl, that's the only copy of you in there!
"I know. Isn't it wonderful?"
You don't understand. What if something happened to you?Louise went on heavily,Lieserl, we've never
dropped a wormhole into a VMO before. We're not sure what will happen.
"No. Well, before my day no one had ever dropped a wormhole into Sol. Nothing much changes, does
it?"
Damn it, Lieserl. I'm trying to tell you that you could die.
"Don't you think I know that? Don't you see that's the whole point?"
Louise didn't reply.
"Louise, I'm very old. I'vewatched my birth star grow old and die. I'm grateful to you for retrieving me
from Sol: I wouldn't have missed that ride through the Ring for... for half my memory store. But, Louise, I
don't think I can be a human any more not even a Virtual copy of one. And I don't want to build
worlds... that is for Spinner-of-Rope, and Trapper, and Painter-of-Faces, and the other children from the
forest and the Decks. Not for me."
Lieserl, do you want to die?
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"Oh, Louise. I've already died once or so we think, on the neutron star planet with poor Uvarov and
I never even felt it. I don't want to go through that again.
"This is where I want to be, Louise. Here, inside this new star." She smiled. "It's what I was designed
for, remember."
Louise was silent for a while. Then:Come home, Lieserl.
"Louise dear Louise Iam home."
Lieserl
Wistfully, she shut off the voice link to theNorthern. She'd open it later, she told herself: when Louise
had grown accustomed to the idea that Lieserl washere here and nowhere else and here she was
going to stay.
And in the meantime, she realized with growing excitement, the processors lodged in the refrigerating
wormhole had come to a conclusion about the destiny of her star. New Sol.
She called up a Virtual image of the star; it rotated before her, a crude onion shell.
Already, she knew, oxygen was burning in pockets throughout the star, depositing the more complex
elements carbon, silicon, neon, magnesium for which the wormhole was designed to trawl. With time,
the helium-burning core of the star would contract, leaving a mantle of cooling helium and ash around a
center growing ever hotter.
At length perhaps in half a million years, the processors concurred oxygen burning would start in
earnest in the core...
With growing excitement Lieserl watched the Virtual diorama, ready to learn how she would die.
When oxygen burning started in the core, the star would become immediately unstable.
The mantle would explode. The rotating star would start to collapse, asymmetrically.
Then the core would implode, precipitously.
The giant star's gravitational binding energy would be converted into a flood of neutrinos, billowing
through the collapsing core. Some of the neutrinos would be trapped by the implosion of the core.
Others, in the last few milliseconds before the VMO's final collapse into a black hole, would escape as
an immense neutrino pulse...
She remembered the first seconds of her life: her mother's hands beneath her back, a dazzling light in her
eyes.The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun!
In the last moments of her long life, a neutrino fireball would play across the bones of her face.
Lieserl smiled. It would beglorious.
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35
Time passed.
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