A celestial globe is a portrait not of the earth but of the skies. Globe-makers in many cultures - Persian, Mayan, Indian, European - over the centuries made many such representations of the heavens and of the pictures they saw there, working in papier-mâché, wood, brass, and sometimes in precious metals. These globes were Earth-centric, of course, and humanist; the human view, the view from the Edge - for the Earth is at the rim of its galaxy, which itself is a hick town in a far-flung province of the universe - was placed at the centre of Creation. And because of the distances involved, the unending light-years, the globes were fictions, as the night sky is; they were portraits not only of space, but of time.

When the young woman from New York, Ava, who had spent much of her adult life restoring sky-globes for this or that museum or private collector, read a story in an online news source about a crackpot American in the Mexican desert who claimed to have discovered an ancient buried globe from outer space, she naturally suspected a fraud.