Field Journal, Third Season at the Domestic Site.
Today we recovered the most exquisite evidence yet of the Ancients' central rite. The image survives in what they called a foto-relic, a flat luminous tablet preserving light: an adult of the species, seated, cradling a smaller specimen against the chest, both arms folded into a rigid cage of protection. The adult's face is contorted. Earlier scholars read this as grief. I now believe it is rapture, which among the Screen People was nearly indistinguishable from pain.
Note the posture, which recurs across every stratum, unchanged for a thousand years. The small one is held above the heart, never below. It is passed between adults with the trembling caution my colleagues reserve for the crumbling scrolls of the deep archive. Voices, we may infer from the throat-relics, dropped to a hush. The larger humans, elsewhere so loud, so devoted to their glowing tablets, here abandoned the tablets entirely. Set them face-down. Forgot them.
This last detail is the significant one. In every other context the Ancients could not release the glowing slab; it was fused to the palm, consulted at meals, in beds, in the sanitary chambers. Only in the presence of the small new specimen did the devotion break. Only here did they look at a living face for hours and record nothing, sell nothing, share nothing.
We have long assumed the Screen People worshipped their tablets. I no longer think so. I think the tablets were merely what they held while waiting. They were a people who spent their entire lives learning to hold something correctly, and who understood, in one hushed and terrible moment near the beginning, that they had been practicing on the wrong thing all along.