"Maybe. Maybe not. When this was built, only a billion years after the Bang, there were scarcely any heavy elements to form planets. The Galaxy itself would have been no more than a disc of smoke, illuminated here and there by hot-spot protostars." The gun-metal Eyes rotated to Kapur. "Kapur, you also need to understand that it's not just the physical structure that's important here. There are many levels beyond the material; even now that thing is an iron-wisp web of data, a cacophony of bits endlessly dancing against the depredations of entropy."

Kapur smiled. "You use words well, Mace," he said.

Mace seemed uninterested. He went on, "The Snowmen loaded everything they knew into this artifact. Eventually, they... went away." He grinned at Kapur. "Maybe. Or maybe they're still here."

Kapur shivered; he grasped his own bony elbows. "And why, my friend? What do you think? Why did they build this marvelous sculpture of iron and data, slowly cooling?"

Mace still grinned. "It's your job to find out, isn't it?"

Kapur stared into the cold, waiting heart of the Snowflake.

He was not expected to succeed here.

Kapur had failed before.

He had watched the Khorte Colony, an ancient, hivelike accretion of crystalline carbon -- diamond -- fold in on itself, burn, die; perhaps one percent of the Colony's stored knowledge had been saved amid the devastating beams.

Kapur's mission was Assimilation. Humans would not let the Xeelee take anything they could not Assimilate.

Kapur wondered if this bright young Navy man had ever heard of the Khorte Colony.

The yacht tacked into the laser breeze, slowed, halted before one tetrahedral plane. Two men pushed through an air-curtain into space, bulbous and clumsy in cold-suits.

The faintest spurt of low-velocity helium pushed at Kapur's back, propeling him towards the Snowflake. The fat, padded suit was snug and warm around him, like a blanket; he felt oddly safe, remote from the immensities around him. At the center of his visor Mace sailed ahead, arms and legs protruding comically from the bulk of his cold-suit.

They stopped a few thousand miles from the iron plane. The face swept to infinity all around Kapur like a vast geometrical diagram; the horizon was razor-sharp against the intergalactic darkness, the three vertices too distant to perceive as corners. His Eyes, set to human wavelengths, made out some detail in the 'Flake; it was like a gigantic engraving, glowing dully in the smoky light of the Galaxy.

Kapur felt small and helpless. He had four days left.

Mace's commentary came to him along a laser path, helmet to helmet. "All right," Mace said. "Here we are in our patent cold-suits; inside, as snug as bugs; outside, radiating heat at barely a fraction more than the background three K."

As Kapur stared the Snowflake seemed to open out like a flower; he saw layer on layer of recursive detail, sketches of nested tetrahedra dwindling into the soft brown heart of the artifact. "It's wonderful, Mace."