The Fractal Maze
Through the second rabbit hole, Na-Yeli thinks, her pressurized exoskin preventing her from feeling the atmospheric pressure increase, five more to go if the shell structure is regular. And regularity is what she gets in the next layer, regularity at almost every level. Repetitive, self-similar structures everywhere in full, multihued geometric glory. Yet their colors vary. Vermillion branches on mauve trees, yellow buttresses on purple castles, intricate ice flowers with blue petals, scarlet stamens, and viridescent stems, too much to take in at once.
In the realm of the fractal queen, she thinks, so pretty after the dullness of the helium grayscape.
Exquisite castles of crystals, enticing spirelets of stalagmites, and ethereal silhouettes of stalactites. Lightning flashing in an almost staccato rhythm. Icy structures, menacing like Mandelbrot nightmares. Icy structures like snowflakes squared, fractal-like tendrils growing out from massive pillars, branching out all the way into atomic realms. Icy structures like transparent trees on acid with an inner light show.
Crystalline edifices of all shapes, kinds, and sizes. Stalactites growing up from the nano-scale to mountain-sized: microscopic needles, barely visible mounds, tall pillars, small hills up to huge mountains. Complemented by their mirror-image cousins: stalagmites growing down from an invisible ceiling, almost-but-not-quite fitting with their floor-bound kindred like the closing maws of a planet-sized crocodile.
Their growth guided by the whims of random chance, symmetry, and iteration. The crystalline complexities arise from both the bottom and the ceiling. Na-Yeli has no idea how the latter is possible, but the glassy, fractal structures drooping from above almost touch their crystal counterparts from below. Yet, spread very irregularly, there are the odd mergers—columns where stalactite and stalagmite unite—and maybe these are strong enough to hold up the immense ceiling, in this micro-gravity? But this throws up a chicken-and-egg problem; for the columns to form, there had to be a ceiling. So then what held up the ceiling in the first place?
The whole layer is like one huge cave, there is no big sky to fly through. And while the numbers of columns and other mergers between floor and ceiling are relatively rare, the stalactite heavens and stalagmite netherworlds often approach each other so close she can’t fly through these narrow passageways. She has to carefully make her way in an unpredictable fractal maze. Thankfully, the atmosphere is thicker than in the helium dogfight layer—pressure about 60% Earth-normal—and the gravitational pull, while increased to 0.074 G, is still so gentle that gliding on thermals is quite easy. And flying—even if she takes the long way around—is multitudes faster than walking (which could also be quite treacherous).
In the meantime, her sensors and spectrometers dutifully analyze the atmosphere, finding it an almost fifty-fifty mix of ammonia and carbon dioxide. Temperature a chilly one-hundred-and-fifty degrees Kelvin. Anyway, there is light. Without the constant lightning that also continuously recharges the near-ubiquitous instances of both phosphorescence and fluorescence, she thinks, it would become pitch-dark in here.
The reflective signals from her radar and sonar have become extremely complex to the point of being indecipherable. Her lidar has gone haywire the moment she has jumped through the opening in the South Pole. Reflections of far-off structures are reinforced by similarities closer by, while reflections of nearby structures are diminished through absorption. It becomes well-nigh impossible to use them to determine if something is close or in the distance. So line-of-sight it is, a much lower load on her batteries.
But line-of-sight is unreliable, as well, as fractal structures look similar over a wide range of sizes, wreaking havoc with her sense of depth. So she flies slowly, not helped by the turbulence that seems to occur randomly and often brings her dangerously close to the fractal tendrils of all types of crystalline growths. The razor-sharp fractal tendrils, as confirmed by the maximum zoom of her combined camera equipment.
On the one hand, her exoskin’s metamaterials are tough. On the other hand, she only has a limited amount of them. There, another turbulent bump, and her right wing inadvertently touches a crystalline fractal branch, causing a rip in its outer layer of metamaterials. They are self-repairing, but a small bit did get scraped off. She can’t keep this up forever.
Then there’s the lightning. There’s a ton of electricity in this layer: static charges, direct and alternating currents, electromagnetic swirls and eddies, interference patterns with fractal signatures. Na-Yeli’s betting that these also power the lavish light show. Sharp fluorescent oranges, reds, and yellows. Soft phosphorescent greens and blues. And bright white flashes reflected and refracted everywhere.
The static discharges flashing between the various crystalline structures aren’t the worst, as they always try to find the path of least resistance. Na-Yeli is relatively safe if she stays in large gaps. Intuitively, it seems similar to the uncertainty principle; that is, the larger the gap, the smaller the chance of a lightning bolt. On the other hand, the lightning bolts that do cover large distances are the really powerful ones. In full Faraday cage mode, her craft can take a certain amount of lightning strikes. But she has a nick in her right wing already, so she wants to avoid the really big electrical discharges.
Unfortunately, they have huge siblings, the enormous lightning strikes from the hazy clouds that drift throughout this fractal maze. Followed by a slow thunder that seems to reverberate for long, long seconds.
After the chilly serenity in the previous layer—even if it was spiked by vehement dogfights—the light show in this veritable fractal labyrinth becomes overwhelming. At first, it was a nice change of scenery, but the constant attack on her visual senses has become wearying. She’s reluctant to put up filters, as they might make her miss seeing some crystalline fractal tendril that, when she scrapes past it, might open another tear in her metamaterialistic armor. Some are large enough to spear her, outright. Some are large enough to land upon if their fractalized surface didn’t look so bloody sharp.
She’s been underway for over fourteen hours—including her passage through the treacherous, frigid neon layer—and hasn’t had a chance to sleep. Fatigue is rearing its heavy-lidded head. But there’s no way to fly on autopilot in this highly unpredictable terrain, and she hasn’t seen a landing spot she trusts, just yet. Maybe it will come after the next turn, after the next crystalline structure, bombarding her with a myriad of colors. If she could just stay out of the way of all the lightning, large and small, flashing in all its stroboscopic irregularity, thank dog. A recurring pattern might have been hypnotizing.
Fatigue worsened by constantly battling the turbulence of the volatile atmosphere. It would be great as a joyride in an interstellar amusement park, but Na-Yeli has stopped seeing the fun in this. She’s tired, bone-tired, dogfight-tired, and just wants to rest, but sees no opportunity for it. If this is just the environment, she thinks, I shudder to think of what aliens it will host.
Her attention wavers and there, another scratch after touching a crystalline, fractal tendril, sharp as a million mini-razors, again on her right wing. The pain peaks through her fatigue, but this is not the right way to stay awake.
The constant barrage of light, geometry, and rough atmosphere is also not enough to keep her awake. Deep exhaustion sets in, no matter how hard she fights it. She could use some exquisite drugs—or medicine, depending on your point of view—to stay awake, but is extremely reluctant to do so. Not because she’s afraid of side effects and possible addiction, but because of the precedent. If she has to resort to extreme measures already, barely at the start of her long expedition, then what can help her if things get even harder, crazier, and more challenging than this?
She doesn’t dare sleep, she doesn’t dare to land, and a vacuum-balloon will be swept everywhere, inevitably experiencing a puncture. Something has to give. She’s been falling in and out of short bursts of sleep in mid-flight. She must touch down, but nothing, really nothing looks safe. She falls asleep again ...
... to be woken by a crash landing. She’s hit the ground, a ground like a bed of nails, where the nails of the nails have nails, all razor-sharp. Some of her exoskin has been punctured, but not as much as she feared. She shudders to think what an Earth-normal gravity would have done to her inadvertent touchdown. She’s hanging over a thick, fractalized crystalline branch at a worrying angle. She hurts all over her body, but emergency meds are releasing painkillers. She should check the status of her systems, but she doesn’t care. All she wants to do is sleep, and as the painkillers set in, that’s exactly what she gets.
—or—
Author’s note: while Dante’s Inferno has nine circles before one reaches the Centre of Hell, the Enigmatic Object has six layers before one reaches the Core. “This is a tremendously impressive book!” Sarah B at NetGalley.