“I am not big. I wonder what it is to be large?” said the flea, hopping from strand to strand on an old, old tapestry. “I can dance with a dust speck and jump two hundred times my length, but I am not big. I wonder what it is like? I think I will ask someone. Spider! What is it like to be big?”
The old, old, creaky spider in the corner of the ceiling stretched her many legs. The flea was too small for her to eat, and too hard, but she found his company pleasing now and again. Even a spider can’t eat everybody it knows. “I am not big,” she said, spinning careful cobwebs as she spoke, like a knitting, predaceous grandmother (she was indeed a grandmother, though she’d never seen her grandchildren). “I can snare the flies and crop the air clean of whatever may flutter through the air in here, in this little room, but I am not large. No bug I’ve laid eyes upon escapes me save I call it small or poor (or friend, in your case), but I know my place. I am small. I will ask your question of another.”
So the spider spun herself a slim new line and shimmied her way out of the room on a fancy thread, legs twinkling. She came to a big place where the air moved with purpose and coolness, and she spoke again. “Bird! You eat bugs where I can never reach. Your wingspan is ten times my body’s length, your beak could swallow me whole without a single bite. What is it like to be big?”
The swallow swooped down from her nest in the topmost corner of the courtyard, snapping a little thing with wings from the air on her way down. “I am not big,” she said, lightning on the stone before the spider with all the ease of a comfortable, well-worn zephyr. “Daily, I flit and flutter about in the high reaches of places a thousand, ten thousand times my size and millions of times my weight. I am not the largest thing in the skies, but I am smaller still than the things that tromp down here. I will ask one of them for you. Priest!” she twittered, swallowsong rising up with a sweet demand, “What does it mean, what is it like, to be so large?”
The passing priest cupped a withered hand to his ear. “Eh?”
“What is it like to be big?” asked the swallow, a bit more loudly and a lot less flowery.
“To be big?” The priest chuckled and fussed with his robes. “Oh my word no no no, I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me, dear bird. I am a small man – each and every one of my five sisters and four brothers outgrew me. My wife looms over me, and she is not a big woman. My children towered above me before they were grown. And that’s just for people! Why, people are not very big at all. For the real size, you must look to things, not to people – even the biggest elephant, after all, would fit comfortably in the corner of this cathedral. Is that not right, my lovely one? Surely you are the one to tell us what it is, to be big.”
The cathedral chuckled, a sound like a quarry with indigestion. “Priest,” it ground out in a voice too deep for most to ever hear, “you flatter me with well-meant foolery, my love. I have been here for near a thousand years, yet I am made of rock that is older than I can begin to comprehend, hewn from places shaped by forces that would shatter me by careless lack of notice should I touch them. I am small in this world, priest, and I will ask the one whom I came from for your question. My mother, my mountain! Tell us what it is to be big.”
The mountain took a moment to find its voice – which was a quiet, strong one – as they speak very seldom (perhaps once every ten thousand years, if they are garrulous). “Little daughter,” it said, “my heights soar above all else for miles, yet they are eclipsed by the breadth and might of my roots, which sink deep, deep beneath you all, to reach places unknown by any living mind. I know little of true size. I have stood for longer than any can or ever will imagine, since this plate we rest on rammed its neighbour more than sixty million years ago. I am but freshly-made. This world I rest on is bigger than imagining, even my imagining – and what do mountains do all through the centuries beyond imagining? – and I will ask it your question. Earth, my creator: what is it to be, to be so big?”
A planet’s voice is discrete, tidy. It speaks using whatever materials are close at hand, from its dust on your feet to its atmosphere in your ear.
“I don’t know,” said the planet, most thoughtfully. “I have never considered this. Do you think I am big?”
“If you are not, I know not what is,” said the mountain.
“Oh no. No. I am small, among the smaller of our little solar system, biggest of the rocky planets though I be. I wander through a space whose endless depth in all directions makes me shrink, and I do so under the eternal hand of a glowing fireball three-hundred-and-thirty-thousand times my mass; I did the math, you know. It is not just big, it is strong – every moment it sheds enough energy to burn you all away in an instant were I not shielding you strongly. Oh my sun, my Sol-mate, whose light burns life into me, can you tell me what it is like to be so big, to shine and be marked all across the cosmos?”
The sun thought. “I am not so large,” it confessed, voice crackling through the electromagnetic spectrum. “I am bigger than red dwarves, yes. I am bigger than planets, yes. But for a yellow star? Not so large, no. I burn slightly cooler than is the norm for my peers, and I am just as slightly smaller. I am just barely below-average, my little planet. And I do this inside the bounds of a system whose grip upon us all makes mine upon your person pale. Galaxy, Milky Way, do you know what my planet speaks of, to be big?”
“No,” it said, choosing each word carefully and flatly lest it sink to causing strange ripples in nebula, setting black holes to vibrating with sounds that were the opposite of music. “I do not. I am average among my peers. Perhaps a little larger than average. I am smaller than my nearest neighbour. Andromeda contains one trillion stars. I contain two hundred billion. Yet I am larger than the majority. But galaxies are small. There are many of us. For each of my stars there is one of us that you can see from your seat. And there are more unseen. Ask the one we inhabit whose edges I do not know. Universe. What do you think it is to be big.”
The universe laughed. This meant that everything in it also laughed – every star, asteroid, dust particle, truck driver, doctor, and planet laughed, and knew exactly why for at least one instant. “Us?” it giggled. “We? We should know what it is to be big? We are a possibility, all of us, one of more than can ever exist or be guessed at. A chance, a fragment of what could happen. We are a what-can-be, all of us, and that is the smallest and most precious thing of all. We do not know what is it to be big. We are small, all of us, even the largest, even against nothing at all. That is our answer to all of us.”
“Yes,” said the Milky Way.
“Oh yes,” said the sun.
“I see,” said the planet.
“Truth,” said the mountain.
“Of course,” said the cathedral.
“Goodness,” said the priest.
“Surely so,” said the swallow.
“Hah!” said the spider.
“Oh,” said the flea.
“But what does it really feel like?”