USS Enterprise Flying Through V'Ger's Interior — Print & Oil Painting

A canyon, with a wall rising on either side of it. This is a picture about architecture rather than about space, and the perspective is the whole event: both surfaces run away from us toward a point near the centre while the gap between them narrows into blue-black.

The walls are made of cells. Thousands of small rectangular lights in ranked rows, green shading to cyan, each row stepping slightly out of true with the next, so the surface reads from a distance as woven cloth and from close up as circuitry. The rows follow the curve of the walls without a break for as far as the eye can follow them.

The ship sits upper centre, small and almost entirely unlit: a dark saucer seen from above and ahead, a short neck, a rounded body with one warm point of light beneath it, and nothing else legible at that size. It is not the subject of the picture. It is the thing that establishes the scale of the subject.

Somewhere past the edge of the charts a civilisation of machines had found a small Earth-made probe, taken it for a fellow traveller, and built all of this around it before sending it home. The corridor above is what that piece of kindness looked like from the inside. Part of our Star Trek collection, and V'Ger's Radiant Core in the Blue Void goes to the far end of it.