The question crossed Qlg’s mind in that slow-but-sudden way questions do, and it did it one day (there were no days then) when Qlg was chewing on a tiny gobbet of dead, rotting ichthyosaur.
“Tell me,” he asked one of his dozens of siblings, “what’s up there?”
The sibling, whose name nobody ever remembered, thought about this. “Up where?”
“There. Up there.”
The sibling looked. “Water,” he opined. “Recognize it anywhere.”
“No no no. Up there, past it.”
“Past it? More water.”
“Yes, but past THAT.”
The sibling scratched its exoskeleton with a foreleg. “Water. What’s wrong with you? You sick? If you’re sick, can I have your ichthyosaur? You aren’t going to need it.”
Qlg ate his ichthyosaur, gave his sibling an obscene four-legged gesture, and trudged to the highest point of the corpse. He gazed longingly up above, past the water and more water, and imagined what might lie beyond that.
Maybe it was… slightly different water.
Yeah.
Qlg stretched out his stubby little legs and paddled furiously upward for six days, and at the end of it he looked down with his eyes and could barely see the outline of the ichthyosaur, a full dozen body-lengths beneath him.
“Woah,” he said. “Woah.” He wondered if anyone else had ever travelled this high above the carcass, ever.
Then he wondered if he could go higher.
Qlg died some years later, but he left dozens and dozens of annoying, adventurous little children behind, most of whom spent their time trying to outswim one another.
“Tell me,” asked Gll, “what’s up there?”
“Past the water, the more water, the slightly different water, or the strange water?”
“All of them.”
Her mother considered this. “Dunno. Hard to get that high. Your legs are too tiny, you’ll get all worn out.”
Gll pouted at this, as much as you can pout with mandibles.
“Eh. Not much you can do.”
At this point the story goes one of two ways.
The first way, Gll stomped off in a huff and her stomps glued bits of the decaying pliosaur carcass that was their home to her toes, which she noticed made her feet much larger. Thus she discovered the paddlefeet.
The second way, Gll bit her mother’s face and it escalated into a fight which escalated into Gll accidentally tearing her mother’s age-weakened carapace into five pieces, each of which were impaled irrevocably on her spiny limbs. Thus she discovered the paddlefeet.
Thus, however it happened, Gll discovered the paddlefeet, and the voyages up beyond the water and more water and so on became easier and more common than ever before.
“Hey, Sp.”
Sp indicated that she was aware of this statement. It took one leg and a partial curl.
“You ever, uh…think about it?”
Sp signed in the affirmative.
“Like, about, uh, what’s really up there? Like, up there. Past the really weird water.”
Sp agreed vigorously.
“Wanna go look?”
Sp started paddling, each leg tipped with a tiny patch of mosasaur hide that turned her wiggles into strokes.
It took them a long time, and many times they wished they’d eaten sooner than a year and a half ago, but at last their tiny compound eyes gazed in wonder at a sight no isopod had ever witnessed.
On the way back down her friend was eaten by a stray fish, so it was up to her to tell everyone about what ‘light’ meant.
Blb bobbed in the water. His legs were all about ready to fall off from strain, but he wasn’t about to stop now. He’d travelled up past the Sp Zone at record pace, torn through the Seven Growing Glimmers so quickly he’d almost miscounted them as three, and now he was sure he was almost there, almost there. The speed was so fierce he’d lost a half-limb in the first seconds of ascent, but he dared not shed a single fish-bladder antiballast. He needed his momentum or he’d be lost.
Soon, soon, SOON he’d know what was really up there! Soon!
The light was overwhelming, the water was scorching-hot, and a strange thunder was growing in his ears, but he pressed on. Almost there! Almost there!
THERE!
Blb broke through a strange sort of barrier, and unfamiliar sensations surrounded his shell. It was brighter than ever, if a bit cooler, and there were noises he wasn’t sure he recognized at all. Something blue was up above – far brighter than even the topmost of the Seven Growing Glimmers – and white puffs surrounded it, whiter than bone and ivory. There were currents surrounding his shell, moving at strange speeds in odd patterns.
The sinking took much longer, as exhausted as he was, but at last he landed on the midwater platform, buoyed on fish bladders and tied by worn old sinews.
“What was up there?” they asked him.
Blb thought about this. He was about to describe a concept so new to his people that they had never even imagined it could exist: a place without water.
“Sort of thin and shiny,” he said.
The sort-of-thin-and-shiny air played upon the sea, and the sort-of-sloppy-and-jumpy sea played upon the air, and upon the sea and within the air played Kp, in her shellcraft. It’d taken many, many (mostly peaceful, thank goodness) deaths in her family to finish the main hull, but she’d made the ideal surface-going vessel: almost as indestructible, she fancied, as the legendary coconut. There was nothing in all the ocean that could threaten it and it could go anywhere, anywhere at all.
She’d been steering for a sort of large, ugly wave for the past week. It looked interesting, and besides, it hadn’t seemed that far away. Now, at last, it was almost there.
Two weeks later and she felt her hull grind to a halt against something hard and firm, like a bone. But bigger, oh so much bigger.
Kp looked up, up, up, up, up at the long slope of the wave above her. She hoped it wasn’t going to fall anytime soon.
Then she poked it, and she was relieved. “Oh. It’s just firmer sea-bottom.”
And then, inevitably, she added “I wonder what’s up there?”
Sff cursed at the controls of his otherbody, smashing at metal and bone until his hemolymph spilled. So close! So close! He’d not led an invasion that pierced the western landboard for this to end so close! He’d not walked four ape guide-slaves to death, he’d not watched a hundred scavengers perish from his scurry, he’d not lived his whole life on stories of Kp and the Landfall for this to all end so close!
He thrashed, screamed, and ejected himself, dropping already-curled to minimize damage. He bounced from the iron foot of his otherbody with enough force to chip his carapace clean in two, rolled, toddled, and fell over.
He reached out with one broken antennae and caressed the stone in front of him.
The peak of Mount McKinley. He’d made it.
And as Sff curled into a ball and hoped that he’d last until spring came and snowmelt brought him downhill, his last sight was of the almost-hidden stars, veiled behind ropey snow and the kelp-nets of cracks drawn across his broken glasses.
His last thought, following naturally, was “I wonder what’s up there?”
The world was so tiny, and so unexpectedly green. Well, the parts that weren’t brown. Some of their later wars had gotten sloppy. But then again, what did you expect from what came of trying to understand ape psychology? It had nearly gotten them all killed before they figured that one out.
Yll held up an antennae and watched as she made it disappear, then reappear. Here’s the world, there’s the world. Gone again, here again. How much of it had they really seen, had they really known?
Questions for the past. The past was for other people, like apes. The future was different.
Yll rotated her cockpit and stared across the asteroid’s surface, watched the mining systems disengage. Time to go home, time to bring the fuel.
But still she lingered for a moment at the controls, looking deeper into galactic central core. And she wondered what was up there.
Qlg, no relation to Qlg, thought of a thing, and it was so. Ten trillion miles of conduits and a bulk of metals and electromagnetic fields that outmassed a combined constellation ensued this, revolving gently to her will at a speed that made light gawp.
She was looking for something, here in this backwater little corner of this unimportant galaxy. A curiosity of the universe, something that, like so many others, was relatively rare yet existed in the innumerable.
A planet with liquid water. There. There it was.
She turned it carefully in the impossibly enormous structures that had long-ago replaced her maxillipeds, capable of handling stars without singing. Her gaze, magnified by telescopes that operated strictly by means of folding local space-time, focused on the tiny little thing.
Blue. So much blue. Strange.
And she asked herself a question, assembled out of old, long-forgotten words buried in data banks thousands of miles across.
I wonder what’s down there?