So there I was, putting off working, one hand doing a landed fish impression on the keyboard, a coffee-cup in the other. I shifted my attention into neutral and let just whatever turn up, eyes focussed in the middle distance, coffee approaching the optimum temperature for swigging. Idly flipping over a mental loose rock, something caught my mental eye. Merely through the act of coming into the focus of my consciousness, it was immediately bolstered by the increased attention paid to it; so important to be noticed, it obviously warranted having more thought applied in fleshing it out. By the time I was consciously aware of it, it was effectively what I've written. I jotted it down. I made one or two quick passes over the result for the sake of such things as grammatical cohesiveness; and in one or two transitional points I had to add a few words so that they'd be at least vaguely referenced, rather than utterly obscured. But the detail given was all there at the time - I almost got the impression that there was a swarm of stagehands just out of shot scrambling about readying things Just In Time. (Kind of like an ad that used to be on TV for a range of printers.) While I wrote it all down at the time, some bits I only recognised (like the caramel floor) or understood (like the name) later. All this is said in apology for the condition of what follows. There's no plot or other context that serves to frame or border it - hence "vignette". Character development is basically not present. And (something which annoyed me slightly at the time) virtually no soundtrack whatsoever. I can say that the setting is "in space" (not that that narrows things down much: I'm figuring it must be interplanetary), and that the shuttle features the ellipse as a major design element. (I've just realised where I saw the main window before - Arthur C. Clarke's _Against the Fall of Night_ - only it was a video display there. So much for originality.) Oh, and why I'm posting it? Well, I flatter myself to think that it might give some people ideas for images - there are more fractals in it than meet the eye. Myself, I came up with a new kind of abstract machine that could be modelled as an n-unsigned counter machines with an unorthodox repertory of operations (and verified that it's equivalent to a Turing machine). But that reminds me: time to get back to work. Morgan L. Owens "A man is a small thing. And the night is very large and full of wonders." -{*}- There was a shaft of light shining from floor to ceiling beside the window - or was it ceiling to floor? At neither end was there any visible light source, just a bright spot as if it were the target of the beam. The real give-away of course was the fact that it violated the truism about the invisibility of light: it was able to shine with a milky glow without any assistance from anything in the air to scatter it. She figured the effect could be achieved by some sort of standing wave effect: elaborate radio-frequency fields generated at points unknown around the cabin, interfering with each other to dump all their energy into this one narrow region, harmonising to produce the visible range of frequencies. She thought she could see it wriggle slightly in response to her movements. The shaft of light spoke; well, if the builders could manage it with light, then sound shouldn't have been too much trouble. All it said was "Your destination," brightening briefly at the same time. Outside she could see what the beam was probably referring to. She tried on a few descriptive comparisons: a cartoon cloud, or a bunch of grapes with pearls instead of grapes. "K'," the shaft said. She looked at it, for lack of anything more appropriate to focus on. "Its name is K'. You are unable to pronounce it." "Kih?" "K'." "K." "K'." "K'." "K'." She gave up. They had drawn nearer. A sculpture of a bunch of grapes perhaps - sculpted in opal. The overall greyness was resolving into something less easy to characterise. The sweeps and blurs of colour gave the impression of being layered, as if the apparent surface allowed partial views into deeper parts. They were more than just sweeps and blurs, however. As the shuttle continued to approach, shifting perspectives told her that they represented elaborate structures, tangled branchings, clumps of woolly cables, (more) bunches of grapes. But nothing was so straightforward to be one particular colour, and some shifted both in response to changing angle of view and internal changes of their own. She was also gaining an idea of the size of K' - at least a dozen kilometres in length. Not all of what she saw was attached to the main body, she saw. Almost every structure was accompanied by a swarm of objects of bewildering variety, from sizes that would dwarf their shuttle (and festooned with their own elaborate structures and escorts) down to the limit of visibility. Things would attach themselves to the main body; attachments would break off and move freely. She didn't see the entrance ahead: her eyes kept snagging on one detail after another and there was too much for her to assimilate. Nevertheless, before too long she realised that their view was no longer shifting, and that the surface like a broken rockface before her, decorated with bursts of capillary piping, could be called a wall. What got her attention was the shuttle being opened. The shuttle wasn't opening. Instead, it was being swiftly dismantled around her. The shaft of light had already vanished without her noticing. Starting with the largest components in the shuttle's design, psychedelic shrubbery of various proportions and assisted by clouds of insect-like things, from the size of small birds down to gnats, would separate each part from its neighbours and then dismantle each. In some cases, the process was so thorough that pieces would effectively dissolve before her eyes into the haze of midges enveloping them. Everything seemed to ignore her as she stepped aside for the floor to be chewed up. Otherwise she wouldn't still be standing. She looked down between her feet at a string of beads that was being drawn out from somewhere underneath the shuttle. About half a metre away, a bundle of straight wires about ten centimetres long was hovering horizontally just above the floor and engaged in a rapid dance about each other. Every time a bead passed underneath one of the wires would drop down and slice it in two. The wire would return to the bundle, the two pieces of the bead would be carried away through one hole in the wall or another, and the thread on which it had been strung would be drawn further into a puckering in the floor. The wires were about the simplest things she saw there. Then without warning one of the wires leapt up out of the bundle, crumpled in on itself like a protein finding its tertiary structure, and threw itself to the floor; this extended a pseudopod and drew it in. As the pseudopod collapsed back (the wire within dissolving), ripples of density spread outwards through the floor and interfered with other ripples passing back and forth from other events in the floor (not all of them apparent). The floor itself had the appearance of glitter and grit suspended in acrylic. It was difficult to tell, given the back-and-forth swaying that was the rippling effect, but the individual flecks appeared to be moving about. She had no idea how deep it was, and nothing caught her eye that didn't demand her fullest attention. Was that a cluster of pipes down there or just a denser-than-average accumulation of grit? Now the swirl of activity developed a focus on her, though there was no specific indication to the effect. Instead, she found herself nudged and guided out of the room by passing objects, each apparently by complete accident as it raced off to carry out some far more important task, toward a short corridor lined with more of the piping that had been scattered on clumps on the wall. Here, they made up the wall. "Piping" didn't do them justice. Every pipe was thickly carbuncled with tiny opalescent stacks of thin plates of various diameters. Mites were clambering from plate to plate, trekking from stack to stack. Spindly spiders clambered above, disassembling, reassembling and shuffling whole stacks. Spots of diffuse brightness moved along the pipes, as if shining things were flowing within at different speeds and in different directions. They provided the only illumination in the corridor but it was quite sufficient, as any given tube was lit along at least half its length by these spots. Refracted sparkles from the stacks provided another layer of illumination. Out of the corner of her eye, they appeared to combine to form elaborate signs, but she couldn't parse any meaning. The corridor was only a few metres long, and she arrived in a small room. The floor was a smooth caramel hue, while the ceiling glowed softly in a shifting arrangement of colours, like coloured oils swirling on a light box. The colour of each of the walls wasn't fixed either; being one tint directly before of her, and shading into another as the angle the wall made with her gaze narrowed. Not only that, but she was sure the colours themselves were shifting up and down the spectrum, just too slowly for her to apprehend. She had already mislaid the corridor. Close up, the walls appeared to be obsessively grooved in a rectilinear labyrinth, with antlike dots of at least two different sizes crawling along in the grooves. Sometimes when two dots met, they'd both reverse directions; other times only one would do so. Larger and smaller dots could apparently pass over or through each other. In short, it was much more understated than the (shuttlebay?) she'd just left. To say that she was overwhelmed by this stage would be an extreme understatement. There was literally so much going on around her that she could feel her brains starting to leak out of her ears. Whatever she glanced at screamed its significance and activity. Sitting exhaustedly on the floor, she shook and bowed her head. She made the mistake of allowing her eyes to focus on what she was sitting on. It wasn't a single colour. Instead, it was divided up into a grid of brown and yellow squares, each roughly a millimetre on a side. She couldn't help but try and determine the pattern, but if there was one it always just barely eluded her. There was definitely one there: it was certainly not just a random arrangement of noise - she searched in vain for three consecutive brown or yellow squares (except diagonally, but even then only as part of a longer row) - but nor was there any periodicity she could put her finger on.