Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, some… - Alastair Reynolds

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Nature shouldn’t be able to do this, Sunday thought. It shouldn’t be able to produce something that resembled the work of directed intelligence, something artful, when the only factors involved were unthinking physics and obscene, spendthrift quantities of time. Time to lay down the sediments, in deluge after deluge, entire epochs in the impossibly distant past when Mars had been both warm and wet, a world deluded into thinking it had a future. Time for cosmic happenstance to hurl a fist from the sky, punching down through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling through these carefully superimposed layers, drilling the geological chapters like a bullet through a book. And then yesterday more time—countless millions of years—for wind and dust to work their callous handiwork, scouring and abrading, wearing the exposed layers back at subtly different rates depending on hardness and chemistry, util these deliberate-looking right-angled steps and contours began to assume grand and imperial solidity, rising from the depths like the stairways of the gods.
Awe-inspiring, yesterday. Sometimes it was entirely right and proper to be awed. And recognising the physics in these formations, the hand of time and matter and the nuclear forces underpinning all things, did not lessen that feeling. What was she, ultimately, but the end product of physics and matter? And what was her art but the product of physics and matter working on itself?