He did a quick mental calculation—a neglected skill in this day and age, of which he was inordinately proud. The result impressed, but did not surprise him. On this scale, the original basic image would be much bigger than the Galaxy. And the computer could continue expanding it until it was larger than the Cosmos, though at that magnification, computing even a single image might take years.

Donald could well understand why Georg Cantor, the discoverer (or was it inventor?) of the numbers beyond infinity, had spent his last years in a mental home. Edith had taken the first steps on that same endless road, aided by machinery beyond the dreams of any nineteenth-century mathematician. The computer generating these images was performing trillions of operations a second; in a few hours, it would manipulate more numbers than the entire human race had ever handled, since the first Cro-Magnon started counting pebbles on the floor of his cave.

Though the unfolding patterns never exactly repeated themselves, they fell into a small number of easily recognized categories. There were multipointed stars of six-, eight-fold, and even higher degrees of symmetry; spirals that sometimes resembled the trunks of elephants, and at other times the tentacles of octopods; black amoebae linked by networks of contorted tendrils; faceted, compound insect eyes… Because there was absolutely no sense of scale, some of the figures being created on the screen could have been equally well interpreted as bizarre galaxies—or the microfauna in a drop of ditchwater.

And ever and again, as the computer increased the degree of magnification and dived deeper into the geometric depths it was exploring, the original strange shape—looking like a fuzzy figure eight lying on its side—that contained all this controlled chaos would reappear. Then the endless cycle would begin again, though with variations so subtle that they eluded the eye.