Kurt nodded. “As Fred said, yes. My point is, the jet gets all that magnetic field strength from the loop structures. So those magnetic fields migrate around to the jet base and get sucked up into it somehow.”

Fred said, “Ah! Then those fields do the crucial job of confining the jet, straightening it out into the lance that spears through the Knothole.”

“Right. Because the star spins, its magnetic field gets twisted and wrinkled, kind of like a ballerina’s skirt. That gets swept into the base of the jet, hangs up in it. The intense pressures at the base throw the jet out. It swells at first. Then the magnetic fields sort themselves out. Because field lines have to eat their tail—they can’t break—they weave themselves. We’ve known a long while that you can twist a magnetic field so it crosses itself—but then it just springs back as two loops, almost like reproduction. So the field self-organizes in the flow and takes the jet through the Knothole.” Karl finished with a flourish, getting the picture of the Bowl to make the threads in the jet fluoresce like neon signs.

Beth caught on to this. “I get it—hell, I experienced it. Waves of hard turbulence, coming at us at speeds SunSeeker was never designed for.”

Karl smiled, happy to see his theory confirmed by raw experience. “You came in on the jet at first in the exhaust, right? Backwash. That’s where the folds of the skirt bunch up—”

Karl went on with some more technical stuff, but Redwing didn’t listen. He watched them all to see how they took it in. Teams had to feel they had some understanding of what they were about to get into. If you were lucky, you even got a dividend, a fresh idea or two.

“It’s self-organizing,” Ayaan Ali said, gazing at the intricate luminous lines that laced through the jet. “That’s why it all works.”

Plainly this surprised everyone. Ayaan Ali’s crew slot was navigator/pilot, not astrophysics.

She paid no attention to their puzzled expressions and went on, “Our fusion drive is the same. It confines plasma long enough to fuse it for energy, heats the incoming plasma that way. Then we blow it out the back. It’s a hot plasma shaped by magnetic fields all along the way. That jet that makes the Bowl work—it’s just like our exhaust jet.”

A few jaws dropped. Redwing had always enjoyed moments like this. Get a smart crew together and let them Ping-Pong ideas back and forth. Add new information. Stir. Turn up the heat a notch. Simmer. Amazing, how often good fresh notions came out.

A rustle of astonishment. “Good point,” Karl said. “The same basic idea in our ship and … theirs.”

“Their shipstar,” Redwing said.

The melody of the conversation had shifted. The immensity of what they faced simmered below everything they said, and their faces showed this. Tight mouths, chins stiff, eyes dancing or else narrowed. Time to get them back into focus.

“Even if it’s technically sound,” Redwing said, leaning forward with hands clamped together on the table. “There’s the big question—is this maneuver understandable enough for the ship Artilects to operate, to troubleshoot, and to extend what they’ve learned?”

Beth said, “Our flight in, up the jet—the Nav Artilect group certainly learned from that.”

Ayaan Ali’s face became veiled, remembering. “You’re right. When I came on duty, I was amazed at how much they could do. Remember when we had trouble with the scoop getting enough mass to fuse it in our core chamber? They adjusted the field structure before I could even grasp what was wrong. They’d never done that in our field trials out in the Oort cloud.”

The talk got technical. They all ran with it. The deep silent secret of SunSeeker was the collaboration between mere mortal humans and the crystal Artilects who knew much that the vagrant human mind could not hold in ready use. The Artilects managed innumerable details at a speed and accuracy far beyond the blunt comprehension of their fragile cargo. They were integrated artificial minds, merged into a collective intellect. A society of minds, furiously engaged. Redwing always thought of them as crew who rarely talked back. They kept track of innumerable daily problems and never complained. The Insys Artilect, especially; he spoke with it several times every watch. On the other hand, they never had really original ideas.

Clare said sternly, “Their attention reservoirs can take only so much—”

“Let’s leave that to experience,” Redwing cut in. “Officer Conway,” with a nod to Clare, “consult the Artilects themselves. Give them your simulations; ask them to appraise their own capabilities. Regard them as crew members who couldn’t make it to this meeting, if you will.” And since the interior systems no doubt can hear us in their acoustic monitors, they actually are here. Not that the Insys Artilect would ever bring it up; strategy was not its province. But he suppressed that thought, for now.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and sipped her coffee. Always the caffeinated, he recalled—she used it to drive herself harder. Several others around the table did the same, an amusing social echo.

“Then we are resolved on this course?” Redwing said with a light and conversational air.

Only Beth failed to get the message. Probably, he thought, because she had been down on the Bowl so long and had forgotten shipboard’s unspoken signals. She said, “I don’t know if we’ve resolved anything, Cap’n.”

“We’re going to give the Folk a nudge,” Redwing said. “Their reply was quite clear—they killed our coin array. They don’t want us knowing the local conditions well, to navigate by. If we were Earthside, that would be an act of war.”

Beth wouldn’t stand down. “A ‘nudge’? Despite all these problems? Unknowns? Risks?”

He leaned forward, extending his clasped hands. “There are always problems. My orders are to get us to Glory and see if we can colonize it. Extracting us from this strange … place … this shipstar … I see as my duty. To do so, I must impress on these aliens that we will not join the—what was their term? The one Beth reported?”

Redwing looked down the table at Beth, whose open O of a mouth told him she had not expected this. Maybe the ground truth of the Bowl had told her something he did not know? “Beth?”

“The … the Adopted.”

“Right. We’re not a damn bunch of orphans from Earth. We’re not going to get Adopted.”

Beth said, “In their eyes…,” and stopped.

“Yes?”

“We’ve been gone from Earth so long, all our relatives dead, who knows what has happened…” She looked forlorn for a moment, grasping for words, head down. “We might as well be orphans.”

He had not expected this. What had the Bowl done to her? “We’re officers of a ship, Science Officer Beth Marble. Humanity’s farthest excursion. We have a goal and we shall reach it. This Bowl interlude, however amazing, will be useful, but we shall go on. Is that understood?”

Long silence. Karl started to say something, his lips half-forming a word, but thought better of it. Fred was quite obviously biting his tongue, eyes studying the table as if it were a brilliant new discovery. Their faces closed up into pale masks with eyes looking everywhere but not at Beth or at him. Very well. “This was an exploratory discussion, folks. I appreciate a free airing of views, as always.”

Fred said, “Outcome pretty obvious. When we came in.”

Redwing let nothing show in his face. “I’m sorry, Officer Ojama? Your special area is geology, as I recall. And ship systems. You said…?”

“It was pretty obvious you had decided to fly into the jet. You wanted to get us used to it.” Only after saying this did Fred’s eyes jerk away from the table’s smooth obsidian finish and dart a look at Redwing.

Redwing did not let his feelings show, much less his surprise at Fred’s suddenly becoming a talker on something other than tech details. Always remember that these people are damned smart. And odd. Not predictable. “Quite so. It’s useful to hear how hard this is going to be. Also to know the purpose.”