I’m reposting the whole story so far for people who may have missed it yesterday… more during the course of the rest of the week…

A GLOBE OF HEAVEN by Salman Rushdie

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. 

The American, Maria Celestis, had spent years trying to prove that aliens had landed on Earth in that barren Mexican wilderness, setting down their spaceships on landing strips in the desert whose marks could still be seen. It was a small story, and it probably wouldn’t have been printed at all if Maria Celestis at seventy had not been a woman of striking beauty, wild-haired, majestically tall and slender, with black ferocious eyes. 

She had been coming and going across the US-Mexican border for much of her life and when she was young the men in the frontier town of Parallelville had all lusted after her, but none of them got close. Lately she had begun to drink, and it was in Orson’s bar in Parallelville, when she was in her cups, that she first told the story of the celestial globe buried in the desert, a globe made of stone. “I suddenly saw,” she said, “that the stars were in the wrong places, that this was a globe whose point of view was not Earth-bound. Not human.” She claimed to have found the Rosetta Stone of UFOlogy, an artifact that proved that we had been visited by migrants from across the galaxy, or from another galaxy far away.

“Those damn illegals,” said Orson the bartender. “No telling how far they’ll come just to get into the USA.”

The young Manhattanite, Ava, couldn’t get the ridiculous story out of her head. If the globe existed it would be a rarity. Stone globes had not often been made. She didn’t believe in the space travellers, but she wanted to believe in the globe. In the end she took a few days’ vacation and flew to Mexico to look for Maria Celestis.

It wasn’t hard to find her. There she was in Orson’s bar near the bottom of a bottle. She led Ava to a shed at the edge of town and showed her the globe. It was a huge orb, with a diameter of perhaps twelve feet. It stood on wooden struts, illuminated by a triangle of lights set around it on the floor. “I dug it up,” said Maria Celestis, “in case anyone was interested. But you’re the only one who came.”