Bewilderment

-

THE PLANET PELAGOS had many times more surface than Earth. It was covered in water—a single ocean that made the Pacific look like the Great Lakes. One sparse chain of tiny volcanic islands ran through that immensity, bits of punctuation sprinkled through an empty book hundreds of pages long.

The endless ocean was shallow in places, kilometers deep in others. Life spread through its latitudes from steamy to frozen. Hosts of creatures turned the ocean bottoms into underwater forests. Giant blimps migrated from pole to pole, never stopping, each half of their brains taking turns to sleep. Intelligent kelp hundreds of meters long spelled messages in colors that rippled up the length of their stalks. Annelids practiced agriculture and crustaceans built high-rise cities. Clades of fish evolved communal rituals indistinguishable from religion. But nothing could use fire or smelt ores or build any but the simplest tools. So Pelagos diversified and invented new forms, each stranger than the last.

Over the eons, the few scattered islands radiated life as if each were its own planet. None of them was large enough to incubate large predators. Each pinprick of land was a sealed terrarium sporting enough species for a small Earth.

Dozens of dispersed intelligent species spoke millions of languages. Even the pidgins numbered in the hundreds. No town was bigger than a hamlet. Every few miles we came across a speaking thing whose shape and color and form were wholly new. The most universally useful adaptation seemed to be humility.

The two of us swam along veins of shallow reef down into underwater forests. We scrambled up onto islands whose complex communities were threaded into immense trading networks with islands far away. Caravans took years, even generations, to complete a deal.

No telescopes, Dad. No rocket ships. No computers. No radios.

“Only amazement.” It didn’t seem like an outrageous trade.

How many planets are like this one?

“There might be none. They might be everywhere.”

Well, we’ll never hear from any of them.