illegal artilect research was going on, under the camouflage of physics research, that it never occurred to her to look closely at the camouflage itself, at the very thing that Eunice was making no effort to conceal.’
‘Then . . . it was physics all along?’ But Geoffrey couldn’t see where else to take that thought.
‘Physics all along,’ Arethusa said.
‘This is just supposition,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Eunice is gone. Lin Wei is gone. If the Gearheads didn’t find anything intact on Mercury back then, there won’t be anything there now, all these years later.’
‘So look somewhere else. Doubtless you’ve noticed the planet projected onto my sphere.’
‘I was wondering when you’d get to that. Is it a real world, or a simulation?’
‘Real enough. It’s an Ocular composite image of Sixty-One Virginis f, a planet we call Crucible. It’s just under twenty-eight light-years away – hardly any distance at all in cosmic terms. A hop and a skip. I showed Crucible to Eunice because there was something about it, something remarkable that Lin Wei would have wished her to see.’
‘And you’d know all about Lin Wei’s intentions, wouldn’t you?’
‘There’s an odd undercurrent to that question,’ the vast form retorted, with unmistakable menace.
‘Suit yourself,’ Geoffrey said. He was thinking of the girl at the scattering again, the figment that bore a striking resemblance to the younger Lin Wei. ‘This discovery,’ he went on. ‘Shouldn’t it be public knowledge?’
‘Soon it will be. The discovery was made late last year, less than four months ago. We’re still in the embargo phase, meaning that . . . at this point in time . . . there are probably fewer than a dozen people in the solar system currently privy to this data. All but one of them has an intimate connection with Ocular. You’re the exception.’
Geoffrey wondered where all this was leading. ‘So what did you find?’
‘I can’t take any credit for the discovery. It was made by Ocular itself, or rather by Arachne, the controlling intelligence at the heart of the instrument. Arachne is an artilect – a very smart one, forged from the fruits of Eunice’s lab. The Cognition Police know about Arachne, and technically she – it – is within their threshold of concern. But they’ve given the project a special dispensation. Arachne is a harmless orphan, floating in deep space, blind to the world except for what she sees through Ocular’s own eyes. What she found was stupendous and world-shattering. That was why she brought it to my attention.’
The image had changed while Geoffrey’s attention was distracted. It was still the same blue planet, but now the cloud cover had been scoured away, the blue-green marble polished back to oceans and ice and land masses.
‘I’m not—’ Geoffrey began.
‘Let’s zoom in,’ Arethusa said, ‘down to an effective resolution of about three hundred metres. That’s not enough to image fine-scale structure like roads or houses, but it’s more than adequate to pick up geo-engineering, cities, deforestation, agricultural utilisation, even the wakes of large seagoing vessels. The area you’re seeing now is about one thousand kilometres across, centred very precisely on the equator.’
Geoffrey stared at the thing Arethusa was showing him. It was obvious to his eyes that it had no business being there.
‘Arachne called it Maximum Entropy Anomaly 563/912261. Obviously it needed a better name than that. That’s why I decided to call it Mandala.’
‘Man-da-la,’ he repeated, stressing the syllables slowly. ‘It’s a good name.’
‘Yes.’
And he marvelled. If the malleable skin of Crucible – the very planetary crust – had been warm wax, and into the wax had been embossed the hard imprint of an imperial seal, a seal of great intricacy, the result might have been something like this Maximum Entropy Anomaly, this Mandala.
At its heart was a system of concentric circles, ripples frozen in the act of spreading, but that basic organisation was obscured within layers of additional geometric complexity. There were squares, triangles, smaller circles – some positioned at the middle of the main formation, others at some distance from the centre. There were spirals and sinusoids. There were ellipses and horsetails and comma-like formations. It was, as near as Geoffrey could judge, marvellously, hypnotically symmetrical, in both the vertical and horizontal planes.
‘And this . . . thing – it couldn’t be a mistake, something . . . I don’t know, imprinted on the data by . . . what did you call her?’
‘By Arachne? No. She’s infallible. I’ve injected enough test patterns into the Ocular data stream to be certain that she’s absolutely dependable. Of course, we ran even more exhaustive tests, and we’ll have run many more by the time we go public with this. But there’s no doubt – Mandala is real.’
‘OK,’ he said slowly, sensing that Arethusa’s assessment of his intellectual worth might depend acutely on his next utterance. ‘It’s real. And I see that it isn’t natural. Nothing natural produced that, not in ten billion years. But do you know what it is?’
‘To the best of my knowledge . . . a system of mirrored channels, cut into the planet’s surface. Lined with something highly reflective, which is sometimes exposed and sometimes covered by water.’
‘Sometimes?’
‘Crucible has two large moons. Their tidal effects produce an ocean swell, or rather a pattern of ocean swells, which sometimes lead to the channels being inundated. Water isn’t a good reflector, so the effect is very pronounced. Water races into the channels and fills them in a complicated fashion. In a similarly complicated fashion, the water drains or evaporates from the channels again, leaving the mirrors exposed once more. The pattern doesn’t appear to be quite the same from cycle to cycle. Whether that is down to chance, or whether the system is running through iterations . . . computational state-changes . . . we can’t know. Not until we have a much closer look.’
‘Are there moving parts?’
‘That’s a good question, and the answer again is we don’t know – our resolution isn’t sufficient to discern that. But here’s the thing: whether or not any part of Mandala moves, the entire thing must be self-renewing, or under constant repair. Whether it’s ten thousand or ten million years old, it must repair itself. If we dug channels like that
