Happy and Seahorse

The night of the same day I arrived on her planet, she sat me down to see her stars. On a rock at the top of a high hill above her underground home, she turned my chin toward the southwest.  And there it was---the peculiar constellation she’d promised me that afternoon. A formation of twelve stars tracing a minimal and yet strangely exuberant pattern. A sparse caricature ready to fully consecrate the perceptive observer. As it happened, the twelve stars seen from this planet form a happy face. No wonder these people destroyed their world. 

            “That face up there made us think we were divine.” She said this with a short laugh as she leaned back on her arms, her elbows inwardly bowing even more beautifully than by women on my planet. A bowing evolved to allow arms to swing past widened hips. Widened hips evolved to allow the birth of bigger brains. Her pale pale skin evolved for the underground life that has been an ultimate consequence of the bigger brains. And their conception of a self-centered cosmology incited by a chance pattern in the sky. 

            “Most of my ancestors saw Happy higher in the sky.” Looking toward me, she laughed again. “That must have made it even more woo woo.” 

            Higher in the sky? Woo woo? Every one word she said lead to two questions I wanted to ask. She grew arithmetically more mysterious as we spoke. All while my small brain fell distracted by her beauty and candor. She was naked from my perspective. From hers, her clavicles were covered and so she was modestly dressed. 

            “Higher in the sky?” I asked. “What do you mean, like a long long long time ago?”

            She looked to me and smiled with just her upper lip. I could tell she found it cute how I speak. “You mean it would’ve had to have been a long long long time ago for the stars to move far far far enough to appear in a different place?” she asked.

            I smiled, my intellect so far below hers that it registered no insecurity. 

            “Space is big and the slow-moving stars are very far away, true,” she said. “But what I was talking about is just perspective; it’s the perspective that was different for my ancestors.” 

            I nodded as I thought about that. “You mean the planet is tilted way over like a top and it,” I made a gyroscopic motion with my finger, “goes around?” 

            She laughed. Her eyebrows lowered, and then raised to high crescents. “You’re on the right track,” she responded, and raised a hand to hold down the short, diaphanous skirt around her neck as she scooted over to me. The night was not too hot to sit closer. “You’re right that it’s our perspective and not the locations of the stars that changed. And you’re right that if our spin axis had a big tilt with respect to the orbital plane, then the height of the stars in the sky would change over a precession cycle.  My ancestors could have seen the stars vault through the sky at higher altitudes.” As she said “vault,” her throat rocked forward suggesting she was imagining the leaping animals that still lived at the time of her ancestors. “No. Such a tilted planet would be as scorched and unlivable as the one we’ve created.” She grinned at me, her giant cave eyes an alabaster. “You know shit spontaneously combusts when the day can be six months long,” she said, her head rocking dorkishly on her neck as she stretched it upward to reach my level. “Above the boiling point, metabolism for life don’t work so good.” 

            When she talked about her squandered planet, even while playfully making fun of me, her tone was deeper and tethered to lower ribs. “But we don’t got that. Such a big tilt.” She suddenly sprung forward from her elbows to seize and turn my chin. “Because of that. Lookie. Our big moon.” 

            She released my head and leaned back again onto her arms, her elbows returning to their erotic bends. “It stabilizes our spin axis.” She smiled.

            After I was done looking at the moon, the big moon, I looked again at the happy face. The pattern of twelve stars was indeed a good outline of such a face…but could these really smart people have truly believed they saw the perfection of god? Their own divinity? Should God’s signature appear as a dot-to-dot for a three-year old to complete with a crayon? Shouldn’t the sketchiness of this seeming sacrament have become loud long before these people became smart enough to develop the technology and practices that destroyed their climate? How could they have developed such powerful abilities over a whole planet before realizing that with so many planets in such a big universe one of them could easily, if not necessarily, have a chance happy face in its sky. 

            “Anyway that’s not what I meant.” She turned to watch the part of the sky I was watching. “That’s not the reason Happy was higher for them, my ancestors.” She laughed. “I just meant that back then when it was cooler they lived at lower latitudes.” She shrugged at me. “That’s all.” 

            I nodded as I smiled with just my upper lip. She was so attractive. And she looked at me in a way that told me that she found me attractive too. And attraction toward being attractive built into a show of sparks through the highly ionized air between our bodies. “How do you know ‘woo woo’?” I asked.

            The brains of her people process things at three times the rate mine does, but she was slow to respond. She was distracted by the sparks. She smiled big and then turned to look at me. “We watch as much of your TV as you do. What do you think we do all day down there---play golf?” She laughed again and rocked up from her arms to swing above her lap an invisible club in the way she had probably seen on my TV. As she did this, I admired the corrugation of muscles above and below her naked belly button. The shallow landscape of the whole valley between her iliac crests, in fact.  A pearly texture marbled through the isotonic activities of a cave dweller. Her meat was not the sinewy strandedness of a meadow leaper. I had never seen a body as erotic as hers.

            I saw that she was looking at me; looking at me look at her. Loving the tremendous effect she was having on me. Loving the tremendous effect I was having on her. Looking like any moment she might spring forward and bite my nose. “So Happy was higher back then because of why again?” I asked.

            “…”

            “…”

            “…”

            “…Oh yeah, latitude,” I said, distracted by our locked eyes that were having an independent conversation. 

            “You know, a constellation has something in common with your quantum mechanics,” she said, in a manner suggesting my physics was merely an element of her anthropology. 

            I laughed. “I like it when you talk dirty to me.” I knew she would understand my reference because she watches my TV.

            “Both depend on the observer.” 

            My initial thought was that a constellation is just a collection of star positions, and so I couldn’t see how that depended on the observer. But I didn’t have long to think about that because, anticipating my ignorance, she rocked forward on her crossed calves to collect for demonstration a few small rocks on the ground in front of her. As her body was forward, before me naked appeared everything exciting she had been sitting on. I was too shy and respectful to stare directly at what most attracted me, but I came close. In the brief opportunity, I watched a spot at the top of her inner thigh. Toward the back. A silver-dollar sized dimple covered by very thin skin. If I had been a burrowing little bug wanting to make a home inside her, this would be the entry gate. 

            “Even if stars could exist without an observer, you can’t have a constellation without an observer. Even under your classical physics.”  

            I pulled my gaze away from her to quickly process that thought. “You mean a constellation is not just a collection of stars, it’s a perspective.”

            She grinned, seeming to appreciate my summary. “You know that stupid pattern up there is also the first intelligent signal we received,” she nodded upward, “from them,” and laughed as hard as she had yet. “They send us our own fucking happy face!” 

            I laughed too. “Because that’s what it took for you to realize there was other life in the universe?”

            “Exactly! Arrested development. We had such a fucked-up cosmology because of that thing in the sky.” She nodded with disdain toward the southwest. “For a long time, we thought we must be the only people in the universe. Who else would see an image of themself, even a shitty little sketch like that, in the sky above their campfire? All of that out there,” her waive was quite inclusive, “must just be the landscape God planted around our Big House.” She said ‘Big House’ with capitalized consonants to show me she knew what this meant on my planet. 

            I thought about that. Yes, it was very special. Mind blowing. If you had a happy face in your sky, how could you get beyond a feeling of privilege? I could start to see now how all her ancestors, big brains or not, could get so side-tracked by such a thing. “I guess it makes sense that they would first send you a picture of the thing you’d most easily recognize; the distinguishing feature of your own sky. Sort of like calling to somebody in a noisy room by their own nickname---hey Stretch! Or hey Zitface, or something.”

            “Exactly!” she said again, this time in an adoring voice that made my heart prance. “So you know what they sent next?”

            “Their name?”

            “Exactleee!”

            “…”

            “…”

            “…”

            “So what was it? Their name.”

            I could tell she wanted me to ask. She further stalled, coyly. Laughed. “Seahorse.”

            “Seahorse?”

            “Seahorse.”

            “That’s outrageous! They had a seahorse in their sky?”

            “Yup.”

            “So Happy and Seahorse became pen pals? Across the whole galaxy or something?”

            As her torso dieseled with laughter, my eyes climbed from her naked breasts, into her deep cleavage and up to the small skirt around her neck. I wanted badly to see the clavicles under it. 

            “Eventually, we and the seahorse people got a common language down. When they first described their seahorse, that was just too much. We thought it was all a prank. But then they explained why them with their seahorse contacting us with our happy face wasn’t really so weird after all. In fact, the seahorse in their sky was half of the reason why they were calling. The other half was the happy face in our sky. They knew how influential Seahorse had been in the evolution of their culture and religion and they wanted to know how Happy had worked out for us. Their perspective allowed them to be open and curious about the perspective of others, and of course to expect that there are others.”

“And with that perspective it was pretty simple astronomy to then work out which planets are looking up at some weird pattern?” 

“Yup.” She gave a short laugh, a laugh tethered to deeper ribs, and then she rocked up to hold her knees. “The seahorse people, their planet is still green. Still full of plants and animals.” She gazed skyward, perhaps in the direction of the green planet. 

I gazed over her hot and barren world. 

“They started off on the same path we did,” she said. “They industrialized, polluted, exploited. But only until they saw the environmental consequences kill the first seahorse. That stopped them, completely changed their behavior, their relationship with their planet. The killing of the seahorse had been very upsetting for them. Humiliating. Humbling. Every religion and philosophy on their planet had started with the seahorse. The seahorse was divine.”