A star field of about a thousand stars, centred on the ecliptic pole — the point the Earth’s axis gyrates around, which does not move and which no culture has ever named. A faint circle marks the 25,772-year path the celestial pole walks; it brightens behind the pole and fades ahead of it, so the circle reads as a route being travelled rather than as a ring. A small white marker is the pole itself, labelled, and a line reaches from it to whichever star currently holds the office. It runs continuously, with no beginning and no end to it — there is nothing here to start or to finish, which is the plate’s point — and a control sets the year for a reader who wants to look at a particular one. As it runs, one named star after another takes the pole and is left behind: Polaris now, at half a degree; Gamma Cephei in about three thousand years; Vega in about twelve thousand, and never closer than four degrees; Thuban — which held it when the pyramids were laid out — in about twenty-one thousand, and then Polaris again after a full circuit. The star holding the office flares, and the rest of the sky stands down a little while it does, because that is what a pole star does to a sky. The whole field turns slowly about whichever star currently holds the position, and the centre of that turning visibly moves when the office changes. The turning is real and the rate is not: nightly rotation at a thousand years a second would be an unreadable blur, so it is slowed to something that can be watched, and that slowing is the one invented quantity in the figure.