Poole looked around the cabin, hoping to be offered a drink.

After a minute, Dzik leaned back in his chair and whistled. "Now we really do have trouble."

"What is it?"

Dzik linked his fingers behind his head. "Before lifting from the surface we did a couple of deep core samples. We wanted to figure out the ecosystem." He glanced down at his desk again. "Well, here are the results."

The desktop surface was filled with the blown-up image of a cross-section of ice. Hints of regularity -- artifacts of crystallization -- filled the image with lines and planes. It was hauntingly beautiful, like an abstract design in blue and white stained glass.

And there was something else. Small objects, dense and hard, incongruous in the wispy ice. Poole pulled himself down to the desktop and looked closely.

Here was a rectangle, evidently carved from rock, with twin rows of irregularly shaped holes. And here, something like a picture frame, octagonal, empty. Other objects, more elusive, hard for the mind to categorize.

"Lethe. What a break," Dzik said. "Now we'll never get the ecologists off our backs."

Poole gazed down, entranced. Artifacts, locked into this deep ice. There had been intelligence here.

Another half-day wore away. Two-thirds of his life gone. He felt his joints growing stiff, his face hardening.

He was tall, strong, savage. Retracing the migrants' trail of disrupted ice and failed Consolidations, Sculptor stalked on towards his father's land.

Poole found it impossible to think in the confines of the GUTship. He had Bill Dzik fit out a one-man flitter; he left the GUTship and descended towards the icy carcass of Alaska.

The crude human encampment -- the seed of Port Sol -- was a series of metal boxes dropped into slushy, dirty snow. Poole came down ten miles from the encampment; in Alaska's microgravity the ship settled to the surface like a snowflake.

Movement on the horizon, to his right.

He leaned forward. Perhaps a star had been occluded by Alaska's slow rotation.

Poole sat in silence, the microgravity feather-light on his limbs. In the starlight the ice of Baked Alaska was bone-pale, laced with the rich purples and blues of trace hydrocarbons. The little cabin was silent save for his own breathing, and the occasional creak of cooling contraction.

In truth, the decision about the future of Baked Alaska had been made for him. Poole's consortium had intended to drop a wormhole terminus into the Sun, to drench Port Sol with fusion heat and light. But now the archaeologists and xenobiologists would come and peel the little world open, layer by layer.

Poole knew that was right. But he still didn't understand what had been found here, how this little world worked. Until he'd figured it out he felt reluctant to turn his treasure over to the rest of the System. Partly this was down to the streak of personal responsibility in his makeup; but also he had to think about his consortium, about the future of his other projects, the Cauchy... about the profit to be made out of all this.