Across a Billion Years by Robert Silverberg

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