Once upon a time there was a hole.
I could tell you that this hole was deep, or wide. I could tell you it was rough inside, or smooth. I could say it was big, say it was small, say it went clear through or that it could hold water. I could say it was in the ground or in a wall or in your bedsheet or in a cloud. And all these things that I might claim? They'd all be true.
The hole was a shapeshifter.
Most shapeshifters are not holes. In fact, most of them aren't even sometimes holes. They might turn into different people and leave it at that, just another layer of potential personalization under the makeup and the clothes. Or they might be skilled enough to be other animals, and swim with the fish and fly with the birds and go superluminal with the void-whales, and never bother with your pedestrian sort at all. Some can be plants, or mushrooms, and a few have even learned to be yeasts and euglenas and things like that.
There are other strains of shapeshifter that can become rocks and boxes, pens and pegs, chairs and stairs. These are the most patient kind. They will lurk for far longer than might seem normal, ignoring small provocations, to ambush the right prey at the right moment. (This kind of shapeshifter is carnivorous. They mostly haven't got the hang of being a bush long enough to fix themselves a nice lunch out of only sunshine.) A shapeshifter just like that might be biding its time right now as the hat on your head or the moon in your very own sky.
But the one I am talking about was a hole.
The hole did not know where it had come from. This is always something of a confusing question for shapeshifters, as many are not exactly raised in the culture. They sprout from seeds and spend a perfectly respectable forty years being a Ponderosa pine tree and then one day notice that they are really quite consistent about winning the canopy-height race and, having learned this about themselves, they branch out a bit, so to speak. Or they are born in a normal family just like yours and discover that it is not as customary as they thought, to heal so fast and to have such a nice complexion, and the next week they are socially engineering themselves into corporate espionage under faces not their own.
The kind that are objects have it even worse. A car expects itself to make choices much less than a tree does. Some, after normal childhood amnesia about a few growing pains and their time as a Hot Wheels, go for the entire standard lifespan of a car, bearing up pridefully well under salt and scratches, resisting tire changes the way you flinch at having a suspicious mole removed, but otherwise doing nothing very exceptional. They may be passed from owner to owner until one finally trades it in for the tax advantage or because they can no longer see the road well enough. They realize in blind terror, at the moment that the car-crushing machinery at the junkyard is coming for them, that they have other capacities, and can become a traumatized chunk of uranium, foxing the electronics but good and frightening away anyone who might wish it harm. Typically, if they evade collection by opportunistic nuclear technicians, they then spend a few years working through their issues, and imitating discarded refrigerators and washer-dryers, and eating raccoons and rats. Once they have matured and settled down they prefer to become statuary, and switch to a mainly pigeon diet.
The hole, though. Where could the hole have come from? It thought about that a lot. Perhaps there were other holes like it, and one of them had been enjoying a stint as a cave when it suffered an earthquake, sectioning off a part of itself like the gap inside a geode. Perhaps it had once been a great big empty lakebed. Not a lake. If you fill a lakebed enough, it is no longer a hole. And then perhaps it had rained a lot, and the hole shapeshifter had escaped, damaged and diminished and too frightened to remember its history, into the distance, fleeing the hated water. Maybe one of the more life-like shapeshifters had swallowed a bit of air, and failed to burp it out for so long it developed a mind of it own. Maybe one of the object-ive sorts had closed itself around a marshmallow in a science classroom in a middle school just like the one you went to, and sucked all the gas out of itself to make the marshmallow swell and quiver and deflate, leaving a shapeshifter-hole-type gap between belljar and goo. The hole could not remember.
Shapeshifters can persist for a very long time. There are even ordinary things that do it. Immortal jellyfish. Pyramids and all the grave-goods inside. Ancient trees and ancient arrowheads. The general idea of sharks. And these things are armed only with luck, while shapeshifters are no less likely to be lucky and much more likely to be able to evade a danger by being adaptable and clever. So, it's not too surprising, that a hole like this wouldn't know where it came from originally. Even if it had once known very clearly its exact origin, it had forgotten. Maybe while it was creating a space under a bathroom stall door that did not need one. Or killing six-sided time in a beehive, nervous not because it might be stung but because it might have honey poured into it. At some point other memories had taken precedence: how to avoid high tide and hermit crabs. Why not to imitate a trash can. Which sorts of buildings it is safe to hide in as a gap in the drywall.
Normally, this did not trouble the hole too much. Holes are not too introspective: what is the good of looking into yourself if you know full well that by your very nature there is never anything to be found there? It did not need to know its past. It had a future to worry about. It had to stay on the move, lest it fill with spiderwebs, dust, the aforementioned rain. It had learned to avoid being a tree-hollow, and picked up a phobia of owls in the process. It had learned that if it shifted, panicking, onto the encroaching owl, then the bird would cease to trouble it, but then sooner or later it would be visited by maggots, instead. It spent more of its time being a divot, a dent, a den, a spot in need of darning, in stone pavers and wooden beams and the earth itself and your socks. Why would it matter what other hole it had cleaved off from, or what quirk of shapeshifter physiognomy had created a hole from a parent which was not a hole?
But it did think about it sometimes. There isn't much to do when you are a hole. Imagine it. If you became a hole, right now, a burst seam and a pocket in the stuffing in the chair beneath you, could you possibly carry on your present friendships? How many of your hobbies are accessible to holes? Would your job, whatever its protestations of fair-minded equal opportunity, perceive you as only a regrettable absence in your role - and try to fill it? And none of the nice theaters and music halls will sell a hole a ticket. So the hole's mind wandered, and it thought about where it might have come from.
It thought about other things, too. Sometimes it frightened itself, thinking about all the air that was normally in it. Why, it wondered, was it safe for a hole to be full of air, but not water? The air was not essential to its continuance. It had tried being vacuum before, not in your vacuum, but the one belonging to your neighbor four doors down. (It didn't care for it, though less because of anything to do with vacuum and more because dust and grit and cat hair went flying through it at an alarming pace.) At one point it argued itself into believing that water ought to be fine. It could be a hole in the sand, and persist in being one as the tide came in. It transpired that this was not wise of it and it hightailed up the slope of the beach, destabilizing three castles and badly startling a clam.
Sometimes the hole thought about the things in which it made its home. It wondered what floors were for, as it cozied its way between the boards and into the knotted parts of the planks. It imagined rocks must be for something, too. Was it interfering with their purposes, when it formed a tunnel from one end of a boulder to another and had to squirm out of the way to avoid opportunistic rodents? Why did air move through it in the way it did when it was this shape, that one, here or there, in a birthday balloon, in a fan blade?
You may have gotten the impression that the hole never settled down for long, and you would be right. The longest it spent in one place was as an air pocket inside a butte in a desert, all alone. No trees trying to grow themselves bonsai style in its perch on a cliff. No snakes nesting in it. No hermit crabs. But it did not stay there for more than a few months. It wanted to explore and to see what else there was to see, to learn, to be a hole in.
Shapeshifters are pretty good at getting around, as a general rule. If you can change your shape, and especially your size, you can change what parts of the world contain you. This is the underlying thing that motion is. There is a bit of a trick to it, but any shapeshifter that is not still learning the introductory skills of turning from blob to pancake and back can do it: race across the country without ever moving, or indeed growing, a muscle. Sometimes they can do this fast enough to get a bit of altitude. One new to being a paper airplane might boostrap itself as a series of alternately very tall and very short boots, gaining height and establishing new levels at which its sole hangs before stretching upward again as a stylish black leather stiletto, and with enough focus overcome the tyranny of gravity to get a forgiving falling start, for a longer tour of the sky.
The hole could not do this. That is to say, it could move. It could go from being an air pocket in the middle of the butte to being a scoop out of the west side of the butte. It could slide down the cliff-face, or even become a towering vertical crevasse, till it reached the ground, and then it could go from gopher-hole-without-a-gopher to pothole to ditch to tidepool-without-the-tide, scooting around as fast as it cared to.
But the hole could not go into the air.
It had tried occasionally when it was bored. It felt like such an excursion ought reasonably be possible: had it not managed to be the vacuum created in your neighbor's appliance? It didn't need air in it; shouldn't it be able to be a hole in the sky?
Of course, household vacuum cleaners do not allow for particularly pure vacuum. Perhaps if it was going to be a hole in the air it would have to be very thorough about it somehow, but then it would be able to whiz through the air as a sonic boom, puncturing clouds that look like castles and alarming air traffic controllers the world over.
This insight did not allow it to leap up into the air. Mostly this did not bother it. It had observed flying things, but it hadn't observed any flying things like itself that it felt like it wanted to emulate specifically. Animals flew. Objects flew. But holes didn't, and it was a hole.
Then again, it had not met any other holes that did anything.
Eventually, as it visited more places, found unobtrusive hiding places on boats to investigate more continents, it did grow more and more dissatisfied with this limit in its capabilities. Maybe if it were in a purer vacuum it could fuse with it. Maybe that was where all the other holes were. Perhaps it was alone because it had not yet found a way to join the hole-gestalt in which all the celestial spheres hang.
It resolved to stow away on a rocket ship.
This was ludicrously difficult. It would be hard for you, and while you're admittedly much larger and easier to see than a sneaky little hole, you are also somewhat better educated on the topic of rocket ships. The hole had no opportunity to reap the benefits your education has given you in skills applicable to traveling to space illicitly. Its first several attempts failed dismally. You probably could have told it, if you had been consulting, that it was not likely to get off the ground as a hole in the fuel tank. Not only was this very uncomfortable for the hole once fuel started dripping out and rendering it not as empty as it liked to be, it scuttled the mission - and by the time the inspectors came along to see where the fuel had gone, the hole was elsewhere, so they could not simply repair the flaw and get on with things. Rocket ship people are far too serious and careful for that. A mysterious defect was if anything worse than something they could identify by looking. Had they been able to see the leak they might have said to themselves, ah, it was a stray bullet. Or, I see, a rivet here was not up to the standard we set. But the hole instead fled the scene and grounded the ship.
It tried again. If it did not have the educational background that might have best served it, at least it knew better than to try the same thing twice. The second rocket ship it attached itself to, as a puncture in a fin, small enough to escape notice. The ship in fact launched. But it did not reach space, and whether this was the hole's fault or not it certainly didn't know. It spiraled down into the ocean in its piece of shrapnel and narrowly escaped onto a passing branch of driftwood. Fortunately for our story not ending so ignominiously, the branch was able to carry it to shore - after many grueling weeks of vigilantly being an interior air pocket in a burl of the wood, lest a wave fill it with dreaded water.
Uncomfortably damp and much chastened, it next tried being a hole in a space suit. This scrapped no missions and killed no astronauts, but it did not get the hole into space. Astronauts prefer their space suits to have zero (0) holes in them. They are fastidious in this matter. The relevant space suit was not brought along on the next ascent.
The hole thought that perhaps it would benefit from being even smaller.
Usually it did not like to be too small. A small hole is vulnerable to things that a large one would shrug off. No hermit crab has ever attempted to wear the entire Sydney Opera House. If it became tinier, so tiny as to be unobjectionable even to picky, choosy, fussy astronauts and their assistants? If it was a pinprick in a pair of pajamas, hidden in the lining or the label? Then a traffic jam of dust mites, or a bead of sweat, or a particularly ill-timed bend in the fabric where it made its home, could be the end of it.
By this point the hole was awfully frustrated about the whole business, though. It risked it.
This got the hole into space.
But it did not get it into vacuum.
It transpires that astronauts do not tend to wear their pajamas on space walks. At least, not just pajamas on their own, where any stowaway holes could slip out into the eternal black day of the sky. There is stuff in the way. The hole had worked out by now that the astronauts were not wearing space suits because solely because they were so comfortable and fashionable. It did not burrow out of the protective layers of the astronaut it was hitching a ride with. It glumly supervised the space walk from the pajama collar, watching but not touching the world it wanted to explore from mere inches away. The astronaut didn't even say thank you.
The mission concluded and the hole returned with everyone else to Earth.
The hole explored further spaceships. It would not be deterred by this setback.
Now, it might have occurred to you to wonder about the wisdom of the hole's plan. It had not, really, tried being pure vacuum: it had tried being thin air, and thinner air than that, but nothing so rarified. It had not tried being surrounded by more absence: it had tried being surrounded by many kinds of substance. A cleverer hole, a more timorous hole, might have ventured to one of those aforementioned belljars and attempted to be a hole in the ill-fated marshmallow, as an experiment it could plausibly abort with an emergency exit through the apparatus if necessary. If it found a spot on the skin of the ship that would allow it to hitch-hike into the starry void, it might evaporate altogether. It had never been so big a hole. It did not have any strong theory of why this would be a pleasant outing and not a fatal one. Still, it kept trying. Part of the life-cycle of holes, perhaps. It is hard to guess if the hole had an instinctual push toward seeking the sky, if it had instincts at all, or if it was merely obsessed in the way any creature might be obsessed with anything.
Eventually, after a great deal of trial and error, the hole found a part of the ship that was thick enough that a tiny, teeny little divot was easy to mistake for an inconsequential dent or scratch. Nothing to scuttle the mission over; accelerating at high speed through the air does not do good things for a hull's complexion anyway. After the brief indignity of a buffing cloth the hole was allowed to launch, this time without any astronauts it would put in harms' way by loosing itself from the ship when the time came.
Now: I have told you that the hole was of different sizes. At times large, at times like this one very small. However, what is a "large" hole?
Most things, if we wish to compare them to one another, we measure in mass: rhinoceroses and rutabagas, tea in China and platinum cylinders in France, the Earth itself and the expected quantity of potato in your inflated bag of chips.
A hole does not have mass. It has, arguably, negative mass, in the sense that a slice of cheese bearing a hole will weigh less than one of similar dimensions sans hole. But it does not seem, does it, that the hole itself is bigger in a slice of cheese than in a convincing replica of gold? This even though the absent gold is considerably denser and therefore more massive, than is the absent cheese.
Volume is the intuitive way to measure a hole. It has volume, to be sure - the amount of space in the hole that you could fill up with something, if you wanted to make the hole very uncomfortable and disinclined to be cooperative. The hole did not have a fixed volume, but it had a range it had not before exceeded. When you are trying to camouflage yourself among bullet gouges in brutalist garages, or be undercover as a caterpillar-nibble in a leaf, or go unnoticed as one of a hundred potholes up and down a well-trafficked avenue, you do not get too big. Even a canyon is not too big. A borehole all the way to the center of the Earth and big enough to swallow a city would not be too big.
The hole had never been too big before.
But now it was maybe too big.
I say: maybe. The hole certainly, as it breached the atmosphere and felt the texture of the jubilant bouncing air molecules behind, experienced a sensation. You could call it a stretching sensation, maybe, though there is precious little mapping between a hole's experience of the world and yours. (Furthermore it had no experience with stretching. Holes are inelastic beasties: they may distort under stress, but, you will observe, this is because their surroundings stretch, not because they do so themselves.)
The hole stretched, if you will pardon the inexactness, and it stretched instantly. It did not normally change its shape instantly, taking its time choosing its path and dimensions and target every time it slid down a drainpipe or moved on from a stint within a temporarily hollow Easter bunny. But it was normally creating a space for itself where none existed. In this case, it simply - joined and possessed the space that was already there. And it was all already there, with no delay, no lag time in which the hole propagated at a leisurely pace. As soon as the hole touched it, the hole too was all already there.
This was uncomfortable, but only for a moment.
If the hole had come hoping for a community of like-minded - like-bodied? like-disembodied? - fellow holes, it was disappointed. The hole of space, before this new arrival, appeared to have been unoccupied. Just a naturally-occurring nothingness, shaped as it was because of the way the positive space within it coalesced and swirled. No more personable than were the holes in a leaky roof or a well-loved T-shirt stubbornly held onto since middle school. No friendlier than a perforated gut or a bomb crater.
The hole found that it did not mind. It was used to being alone. If there were no other holes here, so be it. It had more to experience than it could have imagined before, even without having to suddenly invent the concept of social skills from very literally nothing. Just like when it had visited your neighbor's old Hoover, it had things inside it moving around at high speed; but it was now so tremendous (in volume, of course) as to find them barely itchy.
If there were other holes, anywhere at all, and they too made their way out of their little wells full of rocks and hermit crabs and corrugated cardboard, it would welcome them. But this is really the ultimate comfort for a hole: it was satisfied to be everywhere there wasn't anything else.