It could not be climbed, being smooth to the touch and unpleasant to be in contact with for any length of time. It could not be drilled through, nor broken. It could not be dug underneath.
The people of the Community asked themselves what the wall was for, and they came up with many stories in answer: it was to protect them from something big and deadly outside. It was to protect something small and fragile from them. It was the edge of the world. It was a portal into another space.
They came up with stories of where they’d come from, that they had been created here, dropped from heaven, that they themselves had built the wall and then forgotten.
The oldest granthers were sometimes consulted, and they said what they knew: that the wall had been there when they, in their time, had consulted the oldest grannies they knew. They told other stories while they had the ears of the young, stories of the way they had learned to climb on the small hills within the Community, on the taller buildings, on even taller buildings they built just to try to mimic the surface of the walls, and how nothing had made it easier to climb.
They told stories their grannies had told, about making better drills, the drills which now were used for mining and construction, to try to get through the wall. The drills which worked so well on stone and steel and even diamond had broken against the wall.
Sometimes they told tales their grannies had remembered, about their granthers and the time they had dug down, down, down and not gotten anywhere at all, except that they had found a cave full of strange mushrooms, mushrooms which now were a staple of the Community diet.
The young scholars noted all of these things in their book, seeing only the ways that the wall had not been beaten. In the next office over, in a university devoted to the study of everything about the wall and thus to metallurgy and mineralogy, engineering and physics, three students began putting together their first prototype airplane.
It would not go over the wall. Nothing could get over the wall. But they would have learned how to fly.
