Life Beyond The Stars

I lie on my back, looking up at the stars. Above me, billions of pin pricks of light – far too many to count – cluster in faraway galaxies, and I wonder about the people who live on the distant planets and whether they too are looking at the stars and contemplating life in another universe.

After I while, I begin to grow cold. Yellow fog is rolling in from the Olympus Mons, bringing with it the chill of early autumn. Many cycles ago, my father travelled to the polar ice caps – it was some sort of data-gathering mission for the government – and he still talks about it to this day. Every time he does, my mother reminds him that she’s much happier living in the south; but I see the far off look in his eyes and I know that he’s remembering something that made him happy.

I once asked him how it was that he and my mother got together when they seem so different: he’s still full of wanderlust despite being ‘settled’ in this cosy community; and she’s the quintessential homemaker, never happier than when she has us all seated around the table, filling our bellies with her roast sisquil and her hiblan pie. She’s content to sit by the fire in the evenings, knitting huge piles of socks, sewing hampers full of shirts; but he’s in another world, his eyes closed, climbing undiscovered mountains and mapping out uncharted territory.

He asked me once if I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and when I told him I wanted to be an explorer, he laughed and ruffled my antennae. “Knowing you,” he said, “you’ll start with Mars and then go on to investigate the whole galaxy!” I’m aware that he was joking, but I can’t help feeling a thrill in my stomach when I think about one day travelling to Earth or Jupiter, the closest planets to us.

I glance again at the myriad stars glowing above me and try to pick out any that might be an inhabited planet. My father claims that life exists on Venus – maybe even on Earth too; but my mother doesn’t think that’s possible. “How would anyone breathe?” she argues. “There’s hardly any carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere – everyone would suffocate!”

I know from my science lessons that Earth has a ridiculously high percentage of nitrogen – something like 78%  – and wonder whether the things that live there resemble us in any way. Maybe the strange atmosphere has deformed them so that they don’t have the requisite numbers of limbs – like only two or three legs instead of four; or perhaps they’ve just learned to adapt and they’re like us, only a different colour. Thinking about it, it would be pretty cool to meet someone who didn’t have blue skin; but I have a feeling that my thoughts have now wandered over to the fantastical and that the likelihood of any form of life existing on a world out there is practically nil.

Of course, when I was younger, I had no problem at all in believing in alien life forms. Back when I shared a bedroom with Zrak, we used to lie awake at night, watching the shadows dance upon the walls and whiling away the time by telling each other stories about the strange creatures who lived on Jupiter or the two armed people who inhabited Venus. Back then, before we knew any better, our imagination had no limits and we constantly scared each other stiff with our lurid descriptions of emerald seas and sapphire skies – not to mention the bizarre creatures with stripes or spots that roamed over ridiculously verdant terrain. Zrak even invented a domestic animal like our own pet xurgle – a four-legged beast covered in fur, with a long tail. I initially liked the idea of his kat, but then he started to fantasise about other, wilder versions of it that were much bigger and could tear a person limb from limb. After the third or fourth time of me waking up the whole household with the screams triggered by my nightmares, our parents decided it would be better to let us have our own rooms.

If I half-close my eyes and squint, I can almost fool myself into thinking I can see a shooting star. I experiment by opening three of my eyes and keeping the other two closed. If I alternate which eyes I open and close, the stars hop about in the heavens, almost as if they are dancing. I like the idea of the stars partying: it suggests the universe has something to celebrate and that we’re not alone on this funny red planet of ours.

My mind drifts. I imagine a star becoming larger and larger, closer and closer, until it lands in front of me and I realise that it’s not a star but a spaceship of glowing light. A hatch slides open and I have to shield my eyes from the luminescence of the silver bipeds that begin to emerge. They speak to me – a strange series of musical chirps so different to the guttural growls I’m used to – and although I don’t know what they’re saying, I can sense that they come in peace.

It’s a beautiful fairy tale, but I know it will never happen. My mind flits back to my mother’s comments about the atmosphere on other planets and I sadly admit that, even if we were visited by other lifeforms, they’d probably die within minutes of breathing our nitrogen-deficient air. Perhaps one day in the future, we’ll develop our technology sufficiently to build spaceships of our own and travel the galaxy on a quest to discover new life forms – and when we do, I’ll be the first one to sign up.

Flies are beginning to circle my head now – the little blue-green ones that like the dark. Eventually, I’ll go in; but for now, I remain still, prostrate on my back, dreaming of what lies beyond the stars.