Kapur closed his Eyes again -- turned them off, in fact; the orchard of data frost-flowers melted to cold, inert iron.

Kapur and Mace made three more trips to the iron epidermis of the Snowflake. Mace pointed out more forests of rustling data, tentatively mapped by humans. There were tigers in those forests, though, Kapur came to realize; great beasts of wisdom and understanding whose nature humans could not even guess at.

Kapur spent several of his precious hours hanging immobile, his cold-suit barely warmer than the ancient, surrounding echo of the Big Bang. He felt old, inadequate. Assimilation -- bloodless Assimilation -- depended on psychology, on the determination of goals. The goal of humanity was to rise up, to grow, and ultimately to confront the Xeelee. If Kapur could determine the goals of the Snowmen, then those objectives could be subvened to serve human purposes. If not, then the 'Flake, the 'Men, had no value.

But how could Kapur, inexpert as he was, touch the dreams of the ancient individuals frozen into this data sculpture?

He consoled himself with the thought that failure would be no disgrace, that he could return to his home, his job, without shame.

Kapur did not discuss his feelings openly with Mace; but, as his time wore away in the musty cage of the yacht, he sensed Mace's swelling mood of triumph. The Navy man was intelligent and endlessly fascinated by his surroundings, Kapur came to see; but he clearly felt that Assimilation was a fool's errand, a sop thrown to liberal instincts before the Navy was unleashed.

He was probably right, Kapur thought.

It was Mace's faint gloating, as much as a sense of outrage at the damage the Spline gravity wave planet-breakers would do to the Snowflake, which determined him to keep trying to the end of his time. He could endure failure, he decided; but not failure in front of Mace.

He had a new idea.

"Tell me this," he said to Mace. "How much data characterizes a human being?"

Mace opened his mouth, closed it again.

Kapur pressed politely, "If my thoughts were somehow transcribed, day and night for my entire life -- how many bits to capture that?"

Mace smiled and closed his Eyes. "All right, policeman; let's play games. You produce, let's say, a hundred thousand discrete thoughts per day. Each concept is -- what, a hundred bits?

"We'll give you fifty years of active adulthood, between infancy and the onset of age. That gives, ah, two times ten to power eleven bits in all." Mace pursed his lips, opened his Eyes and studied Kapur briefly. "Interesting. So there's the equivalent of something like ten to power forty-nine human individuals in the 'Flake--"

Kapur nodded. "Isolate one of them, with your sensors. Can you do that? Pick out an island of bits. I don't want to know what happens within it; arrange it so I only perceive the inputs and outputs."