The ice watched the strange thing that had recently entered its world.

It was hot, very hot. This was uncomfortable for the ice. A sizeable crater had already been melted in its pristine surface, and it did not like that. But the melting had slowed as the large object cooled, and now the ice felt the allure of information as it observed events taking place.

Events were a rare thing, for the ice.

After the rate of the object’s sinking had reduced to a few millimeters a minute, the object had undergone some fascinating transformations. Parts of it had shifted. Spaces within it had been revealed - it was apparently hollow. New objects had emerged from these spaces, also glowing with a subtle heat. They had begun to move around the larger object, doing actions that the ice could not identify. It focused on these smaller objects for now, as they seemed to act much more quickly. Delaying observation might mean missing information, and that would be a shame.

The ice observed the objects for some time, recording their movements, trying to infer a pattern. If there was one, it was subtle and complex. No mathematical expression that the ice knew matched them. Sometimes objects were still, sometimes they moved in irregular paths. Sometimes they were solitary, and sometimes organized into groups of inconsistent size. Groups formed, broke, and reformed unpredictably. Some objects seemed to interact primarily with the greater object. Some moved in and out of its interior spaces. Some instead moved away from it, out of the crater and into the wind, where their heat signature glowed feebly against the piercing cold. Those never seemed to stay outside long.

Unable to identify a consistent movement pattern, the ice instead hypothesized a characteristic. These objects, the larger and the smaller, were based on heat. All of them had it, and the smaller ones seemed fond of it, staying mostly within the aura of the larger. The larger seemed to give away its heat freely, eagerly even, into the surrounding medium. One class of object radiated heat, and the other lived within it.

The ice tested this hypothesis. If heat was integral to the smaller creatures, and they required the heat of the large one to function, then if heat was removed they would cease to function. It waited until a small one moved outside of the crater once more, then cracked. The small one fell into the crack, and the ice closed above it. This seemed to cause a great deal of movement among the other small ones, but not the big one, which remained entirely static. The ice was fascinated. Clearly, it was not sessile, since it had arrived here. Why did a stimulus which caused such a pronounced effect in the other objects have no effect on it? Curious indeed.

After some time, the smaller one which the ice had enclosed stopped its movements. This occurred after only a moderate reduction in its internal heat. The ice decided to consider the hypothesis confirmed. After opening another crack beneath the object and dropping it into the lightless depths below, it turned its attention to the larger object. The smaller ones were interesting, but it could not neglect this one, which was clearly of a very different type.

The ice wondered what would happen if this one ran out of heat too.