(urth) What's So Great About Ushas?

[Jeff Wilson]

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Jeffrey Brent McBeth quoted and wrote:
>> I have always thought that the Ship really was there to stage the eclipse
>> that saved Sev's bacon. The eclipse was not a coincidence. Obviously, it
> is
>> a physical impossibility for any vessel to transport or even come near a
>> black hole, so if the Hierogrammates are the ones who put it in the sun,
> and
>> regardless of when it happened, how was the deed done?
>>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Err, not impossible at all.  The easiest way to transport a black hole would
> be to dump a bunch of electrons into it and then use an electrical field to
> move it around.  If you had a big enough mass and enough time, you could
> also just use gravity to move one around.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------<<
> 
> Neat trick, that, if the Ship can hold it below or above its decks without
> getting sucked in. Stipulating such a fantastic container for a baby black
> hole, then what? How does it get from the Ship to the center of the sun? Or
> failing that, if a fly-by is made and the black hole jettisoned to the
> surface of the sun, then what? How long does it take to eat up enough of the
> sun to make the textually specified difference in the temperature on Urth?

Er, wasn't it one of Typhon's children who threw "black beans on the 
grave of the sun"?  They would have had access to several ships who 
could have been used to as magnetic tongs to move a small hole in, and 
if Wolfe is using the then-plausible Einstein-Rosen bridge idea, they 
could use the smaller hole to gate in a larger one from elsewhere in the 
galaxy, and thus leapfrog up to whatever size was necessary.

This churning of multiple black holes inside the sun (the largest being 
  presumably the worm said to gnaw at its heart) could lead to a 
compacting of the interior layers, which would have a more immediate 
effect on the surface, letting it also shrink and thus reduce its 
output, since there's less surface to give off light.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >