Kapur shrugged, in the small space he occupied. "What do you expect me to think?"

Mace peered at Kapur, then frowned. "Maybe if you Opened your Eyes you could form an opinion."

Kapur, reluctant, complied.

His Eyes' response spectrum broadened away from the narrow human band; his retinae stung under a sleet of photons of all wavelengths.

The Galaxy dazzled, its core shrieking X-rays. The Snowflake emerged from the darkness like frost crystallizing on a windowpane.

"Let's get to work," Mace said. "We'll review the gross features first. OK?"

Kapur, his Eyes full of the infinite recesses of the Snowflake, did not reply.

"The 'Flake is a regular tetrahedron," Mace said. "It's built around the remains of a black dwarf; the ancient star is at the tetrahedron's centroid. The Snowflake measures over ten million miles along its edges. We don't know how it maintains its structure in the gravity well of the star." Mace's voice was bright, clear, interested, and entirely lacking in awe. "The artifact has the mass of the Earth, approximately. But the Earth is eight thousand miles wide. This thing has been puffed out like candy-floss; it's filled with struts, threads and whiskers of iron, like delicate scaffolding. The structure's not a bad approximation to a space-filling curve. Strictly speaking it has a fractional dimension, somewhere between two and three... And it has a fractal architecture. Do you know what that means?"

"I don't have a math background," Kapur said.

Mace let his silence comment on that for a long second. "You're going to do well with the Godel theorem, then," he said lightly.

"What?"

"Never mind. When we inspect the 'Flake closely we'll find the tetrahedron motif, repeated again and again, on all scales. That's why we call it the Snowflake," Mace said. "Not because of its shape, but because a snowflake is fractal too. Recursive structures at all scales. And it's been there a long time."

"How do you know that?"

Mace, his Eyes fixed on the 'Flake, absently rubbed at his nostrils with his palm. "Because it's so damn cold. In the aeons since its sun died, it's cooled to close to the background temperature of the Universe -- three degrees above absolute zero... although," he mused, "when the thing was built the sky still shone at about eighteen K.

"Do you understand what these numbers mean, Kapur? I know you've hardly been off Earth before this assignment." Mace wasn't bothering to conceal his relaxed, malice-free contempt. In fact this was Kapur's second such mission. The first had been a requisition to the failed Assimilation of the Khorte Colony.

He said, "Why iron?"

"Because iron is the most stable element. The Snowmen -- the builders -- wanted this to last a long time, Kapur."

Kapur nodded. "Then was this a planet, once, before being spun out like a... fairy tale castle?"