It touched the stud.
Greenish light blossomed from the globe. The zone of light expanded until it became a sphere more than twenty meters in diameter, practically filling our section of the lab. Suddenly we saw figures moving along the surface of the sphere of light.
High Ones.
What we were getting was a 360-degree movie, with ourselves inside the projection field. The globe was showing us five or six different sequences, each blurring imperceptibly into its neighbor. As we turned, certain sequences vanished and were replaced by others; but a few remained constant. It was a struggle to take in anything, because so much was going on. In the first few minutes I went spinning round and round in my place, trying to scan everything at once, and unhappy because one scene was vanishing even while I was trying to figure out what another one was all about. I didn’t envy the scholars who would have to make sense out of all this. At least there was a camera with a fisheye lens stationed right next to the globe, filming the whole giboo in all 360 degrees. The only way to deal with an information glut, you know, is to make a record of all incoming data and then cope with each item, bit by bit, at your own data-handling speed.
After a little while I stopped rotating and concentrated on viewing each sequence at length, despite the frustration of having to miss all the rest of what was going on. I’ll try to describe some of the pictures I saw.
One scene took place in a city of the High Ones. I think so, anyhow. I saw figures moving around, the dome-headed, six-limbed humanoids familiar to us from the plaque designs. Their skins were a deep, rich green in color and were covered by shining overlapping scales, hinting at some kind of reptilian ancestry, perhaps. They glided rather than walked, seemed almost to float; I can’t explain why they looked so graceful.
Their city consisted of sky-high pillars set perhaps fifty meters apart — I had no way of judging scale. High overhead, a kind of netting was strung to connect the tops of all the pillars. Buildings dangled from the netting like spiders from a spiderweb, each swaying gently at the end of a long cable, each at a different distance from the web above and each far from the ground. These suspended buildings mainly had a teardrop shape, although there were spherical, octagonal, and cubical ones too. Smaller cables provided transport from one dangling building to another; the air was full of High Ones riding up, down, or sideways, clinging to cables that appeared to move of their own will. A golden-green sunlight filtered through the top of the web, giving everything an undersea look. As I watched, night came; and suddenly the light of a thousand stars blazed down, and the buildings themselves began to move, sliding upward or downward on their cables, while High Ones in great numbers passed from one to another. I have seen alien scenes, Lorie, but nothing so alien as this. Those huge, graceful beings (somehow I think of them as much bigger than humans), those dangling houses, that eerie daylight and that dazzling starlight, all blended into something immensely strange.
The camera angles added to the effect. I would have thought that just about every way of filming a scene has already been used in the four centuries or so since Edison rigged up his first movie camera. But whoever had taken this billion-year-old flick had not seen things remotely the way a modern cameraman would; and so we had a constantly shifting viewpoint, now from above, now from underneath, now from within, the camera drifting around that weird city so freely that I had to grab the edge of the lab bench to keep from falling over in dizziness.
For a long while I watched as though in a dream as these beings went about their unimaginable business, gliding up and down on their cables, bowing to one another, gracefully touching hands, exchanging gifts (I saw some inscription nodes being handed out), and engaging in conversations that I could not hear, for there was no sound accompanying the projection. Then I turned to face the next sequence.
It showed a scene inside one of the dangling houses: a large red-lit room whose walls appeared covered with a living substance, something soft and rippling that swelled and shrank in an unpredictable cycle, now puffing up and becoming tight as a drumhead, now deflating, now writhing like sheets of flesh.
There were nine High Ones in the room. Two, clutching cables mounted in the ceiling, were lost in trances, or, for all I could tell, were dead and stuffed. (The funeral customs of alien races defy all comprehension. So do the funeral customs of non-alien races. Can you explain to me the virtue of putting dead people in a box and burying the box in the ground?) Three of the High Ones stood in a far corner, taking part in what might have been a quaint folk dance or perhaps some kind of sex: they had formed a circle, facing inward, with their arms interlaced and their heads pressed cheek-to-cheek, and they were sliding around and around and around in a slow, determined way. You figure it out. Another High One was crouched over a miniature model of a globe much like the one that was entertaining us; it was projecting a tiny image, but we weren’t able to see it clearly. The remaining three High Ones sat in a pit in the floor, passing a flask of some colored fluid back and forth, and now and then dipping the tips of their fingers into it.
The adjoining sequence showed a building under construction. First a cable descended from the web-work. Then machines at ground level sent spurts of — plastic? — into the air. Midway between ground and web the spurted stuff collected around the cable as if pulled to it by a magnetic field, and shaped itself into a neat eight-sided structure. Everything was done automatically, and it took about six minutes.
The fourth sequence was a purely abstract pattern, a coiling and uncoiling of green and red shapes that was so unsettling and disturbing that I don’t feel like talking about it.
The fifth sequence revealed an empty landscape, no trees, no grass, ice-covered boulders scattered about, sky copper-red, ground iron-gray, the sun pale and feeble. In the middle distance was another group of three High Ones, heads inward, arms interlaced, cheeks touching, doing that same slow dance.
The sixth sequence presented the interior of some kind of cave whose walls were encrusted with huge uncut gems, great glistening crystals of a hundred different kinds. The camera peered through the floor of the cave, which appeared to be made of glass, and revealed colossal machines throbbing and hammering in an underground chamber: huge green pistons pumping endlessly, sleek black conveyor belts, spinning turbines. High Ones wearing yellow belts (the only clothing I saw on any of them) walked down the aisles between these devices, pausing occasionally to examine control panels.
I had come full circle, for the adjoining sequence was the city scene again, not much changed. But the room with the nine High Ones had vanished, and now I saw a close-up shot of a single High One who held an inscription node in his hands. The camera zoomed in on the inscription and lingered there a long while, long enough for the inscription to change several times.
The sequence next to this no longer showed the construction project; now it depicted —
But why go on? For a full hour I watched these scenes, all of them fascinating, all of them bewildering. I could continue multiplying mysteries by listing everything, but you must have the idea by now of how remote and strange these people were, how advanced their civilization, how little we comprehend them.
Curious thing. The usual effect of archaeology is to discover kinships with the ancients. “How very much like ourselves the early Egyptians were!” an Egyptologist will say. “Lying, cheating, fixing elections, dodging the draft, all our own special little sins, existed back then too! Even as we, the subjects of Pharaoh had foibles and ambitions, hopes and dreams,” etcetera, etcetera. Substitute Sumerians for Egyptians, or Cro-Magnon cave painters for Sumerians, and you will still find the experts telling you that the more closely we get to know them, the clearer it is that these figures out of the remote past were Just Plain Folks.