With her tongue between her lips, she removed the screws and exposed the innards. Do Not Remove.” But she knew that if it wasn’t plugged in, there was no danger in it. It was very big and heavy and, hugging it to her chest, she almost dropped it. The old Motorola radio was on the shelf where she remembered it. Guiltily, she let herself into the spare room. “Jeweler,” Ellie read slowly, pronouncing three syllables. Inside, a burgundy-red stone was glistening in the sunlight. Now they were strolling down State Street on a brisk March day and had stopped before a store window. The nursery stories, the aunt was convinced, had been memorized. “Read it.” Her mother’s sister had not believed that Ellie, age three, could read. “Go ahead, Ellie,” her mother gently urged her. But she also felt a joy in its existence, a delight that such wonders might be. She felt sorry for the poor creature, condemned to silence. “Their necks are so long, the talk can’t get out,” her father said. Leaving the monkeys, they turned a corner and came upon a great spindly-legged, long-necked dappled beast with tiny horns on its head.

Life was better up here, far safer than crawling through a forest of legs. So now she was up all right, at a giddy altitude, perched on her father’s shoulders and clutching his thinning hair. So once I said to her, ‘Ellie, you don’t have to scream. “She used to scream when she wanted to be picked up. “It’s not politeness,” her father told them. When she was two years old, she would lift her hands over her head and say very sweetly, “Dada, up.” His friends expressed surprise. On her face was an odd expression for a newborn-puzzlement perhaps. She looked at the bright lights, the white- and green-clad figures, the woman lying on the table below her. Her tiny brow was wrinkled, and then her eyes grew wide. WHEN THEY pulled her out, she was not crying at all. The polyhedral world had been performing its enigmatic function for eons.

Every constellation was being attended to. Every bowl was aimed at a particular part of the sky. Gliding in polar orbit about the great blue-white star, it resembled some immense, imperfect polyhedron, encrusted with millions of bowl-shaped barnacles. But it was so oddly and intricately shaped, so clearly intended for some complex purpose that it could only have been the expression of an idea.

WILLIAM BLAKE Songs of Experience “The Fly,” Stanzas 1-3 (1795)īy human standards it could not possibly have been artificial: It was the size of a world.

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