"Yeah. And as delicate as wishes. Hey, Kapur. Give me your Eyes. I'll show you the data."

Kapur hesitated, gathering his resolve.

He hated using the implants. Each time he Opened his Eyes he felt a little more of his humanity leach away.

Now he breathed deeply. The air inside the cold-suit was warm and scented, oddly, of cut grass. With an odd, semi-hypnotic relinquishing of will, he deferred to Mace.

His Eyes Opened wide.

The Snowflake changed, kaleidoscopically.

"You're seeing a construct from our passive probes," Mace whispered. "False-color graphics of the data streams."

Terabits of ancient wisdom hissed on whiskers of iron, sparking like neurons in some splayed-out brain. It was beautiful, Kapur thought; beautiful and monstrous, like the mind of the antique gods of mankind.

His soul recoiled. He sought refuge in detail, the comparatively mundane.

Kapur knew that the mission profile had been designed with caution in mind. The Spline ship had parked over an AU away; he and Mace had approached in a yacht riding a tight laser beam, eschewing chemical flame. "Mace, what would happen if we let stray heat get at the 'Flake? Would we disrupt the structure?"

"You mean the physical structure? Maybe, but that's not the point, Kapur. It's the data that's the treasure here."

"And would a little heat be so harmful?"

"It's to do with thermodynamics. There's a lower bound on how much energy it takes to store a bit. The limit is set by the three K background temperature of the Universe."

"So the lower that global temperature is, the less energy a bit would take."

"Right. And so if we raised the 'Flake's temperature, even locally, we would risk wiping out terabits. Also, it follows from the thermodynamic limit that there's an upper bound on how much data you can store with a given amount of energy -- or, equivalently, mass. The upper limit for the Snowflake's mass is around ten to power sixty-four bits. Kapur, we estimate that the 'Flake actually holds around ten to power sixty."

Kapur stared into the flowerlike heart of the Snowflake. "I should be impressed?"

"Damn right," Mace growled, "For a start, the whole of human civilization would be characterized by only ten to power twenty bits. Even after hundreds of Assimilations. And, just in technological terms, to get within four orders of magnitude of the theoretical limit... it's almost unimaginable.

"Now. Look." Mace, silhouetted like a cartoon grotesque, pointed at a knot of color and activity. Kapur perceived something like a sunflower, a fist of spirals and tessellations surrounded by "petals," great sheets of information which faded into the background chatter. Pellets of data streaked into and out of the core -- a little like insects, Kapur thought at first; but then he saw how the pellets embedded themselves in the sunflower, endlessly enriching and renewing it.

"What is it?"