by Neil Clarke
“She’s with her uncle on the other side of the planet.”
“Well,” I say, standing. “Thank you for your hospitality, Havair Heurex, but I should be going if I’m to finish my book before …”
“Yes,” she says. “Good luck and all.”
“Thank you,” I say, heading for the door. But I pause. “Does Fish know?”
“That you’re dying?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t told her.”
“Then if it’s all the same, please keep it that way.” I look around the room at her many drawings. “She seems to be doing just fine without me.”
“So you’re the last one?” she says, and I know what she means.
“Goodbye, Havair Heurex.”
I swim away from her underwater home, and when I arrive back at the bungalow that afternoon, I surprise a green monkey while it’s inspecting the dead lizard. The monkey leaps away, leaving the carcass behind.
I press every page of my book, inserting lithographs of Fish’s drawings throughout the text. But my novel is incomplete. I have the final chapters yet to write. And as each day comes to a close and I look at my hastily scrawled words that make no sense I worry that I won’t finish this before I die.
“Moms says I can see you again, long as I keep my neural on.”
Fish stands above my bed, the morning light slicing my bedroom in half.
I sit up. “Fish! Hello!”
“I’s at my uncle’s,” she says. “But I’s back now. Get up you loafing fool, ’cause we gots work to do!”
I laugh, and it’s as if a switch has been flipped and an engine turned on. My words flow as easily as water again. I will finish this after all.
Fish comes by every day now. In the mornings, she studies the art of bookbinding. In the afternoons, she creates new illustrations. She says we have too many, but I tell her there’s always room for more art.
She draws: Yvalu’s transport ship landing in heavy rain; a flock of migrating sea birds on Muandiva silhouetted in the bright sun; a pine forest reflected in the glassy lake of Naa; Yvalu and Ubalo, da Vinci-like, reaching for each other’s hand, galaxies swirling behind them; Yvalu tasting the dirt of Muandiva. And sometimes, she inks words, which she will never let me read.
I write:
“Yes, I’s seen him, ” the street vendor said to Yvalu as she showed the woman a holo of Ubalo’s likeness. “On Suntiks, he sat over there in the shade, throwing back lagers, listening to them steel drum bands. ”
“You sure?” Yvalu said, her hopes rising. “You certain?”
“Absolute, ” the woman said. “Certain as Shaddai makes the sun rise and the stars turn.” She made the namaste gesture and bowed. “This mentsh, he were here, same as you stand now.”
I pause to laugh.
“What is it?” Fish says, eyes flashing as she looks up from her pad.
“I’ve figured it out!” I say. “I know how my book will end.”
“Don’t tell me!” Fish says. “I want it to be a surprise.”
“Okay,” I say, smiling. “Okay.”
Later, when the sun dips low, Fish goes home, and I head out to the porch to relax in the cooling afternoon. The early stars emerge, their constellations familiar to me now. The sugarcane bends in the breeze. The crickets chirp in the grass. High above, a ship, bright as a star, moves across the sky and vanishes. I take a deep breath. I’m so tired. So damn tired. But all is good, all is good.
I search the yard, but the lizard is gone.
“Reuth Bryan Diaso, citizen of Ganesha City, Mars. Born on Google Base Natarajan, Earth orbit, one gravity Earth-natural. Died on Ardabaab, Eish orbit. Age: ninety-one by Sol, two hundred ninety-three by Shoen.”
So says Reuth’s wiki now. In the morning, I’s coming to see him, but he wasn’t in bed. Why don’t he answer my call? I thought. Where’s he at?
I found him under a coconut tree, flat on the grass. He get real intox and pass out? The ants were on him something bad.
Moms and I buried him in the sea. We thought he’d like that, being with all them colorful fish. His wife and kid died a long time ago, I learned. And that crazy fool left everything to me!
Mornings are stellar quiet without the sounds of his pen on paper and the clink of setting type. There ain’t no more words to press. Moms don’t like it, but I sit out back in his bungalow, drinking tea, watching the gulls cross the sky, just like him.
A baby lizard skitters ’cross the deck and pauses to gaze at me. I pick up my pen and write:
“Don’t you worry, Ubalo!” Yvalu shouts to the stars. “I’s confused before, but not no more. I know where you at, and I’s coming to get you!” Yvalu walks freylik down to the sea, cause that’s where the most beautiful fish swim, specially in mornings, when the sun comes up and turns them bright rainbows. “I know you hiding under there, waiting for me, Ubalo, so you best be shiny. I got such a kiss waiting for you, it’ll make stars shine, it’ll make universes.”
Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and currently inhabits the Boston area, where she is a physics professor at a small and lively state university. Several of her science fiction short stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best volumes, and shortlisted for awards. For the wider context in which “Shikasta” was written, see the original anthology at csi.asu.edu/books/vvev/. For her essay on the multiple inspirations and challenges of writing this story, see her blog at vandanasingh.wordpress.com. Her second short story collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, is out February 2018 from Small Beer Press.
SHIKASTA
Vandana Singh
Chirag:
This is the first time I am speaking to you, aloud, since you died.
I’ve learned by now that joy is of two kinds—the easy, mindless sort, and the kind that is earned hard, squeezed from suffering like blood from a stone. All my life I wanted my mother to see her son rise beyond the desert of deprivations that was our life—she wanted me to be a powerful man, respected by society—but so much of what she saw were my struggles, my desperation. So when the impossible happened, when our brave little craft was launched—the first crowdfunded spacecraft to seek another world—the unexpected shock of joy took her from illness to death in a matter of months. She died smiling—you remember her slight smile. You were always asking her why she didn’t let herself smile more broadly, laugh out loud. “Auntie,” you’d say, “smile!” That made her laugh, reluctantly. You were always pushing at limits, including those we impose on ourselves.
For months after you were killed, I would wake up in the morning, wondering how I was going to live. But we kept going—your absence, a you-shaped space, was almost as tangible as your presence had been. And now, nearly 12 years later, we celebrate in your name the arrival of our spacecraft on another world. A homemade, makeshift craft, constructed on the cheap with recycled materials by a bunch of scientists and scholars from the lowest rungs of a world in turmoil, headed to a planet that of all the nearby habitable worlds had the least chance of finding life.
It was soon after the time of launch, over a decade ago, that our moment of fame got eclipsed. The world’s mega space agencies’ combined efforts found life on Europa. Suddenly ice algae were the thing. Six years ago the discovery of complex life on the water world of Gliese 1214b had the international press in a frenzy. Those of us who had dreamed up our space mission, and made of the dream a reality, were forgotten, and almost forgot ourselves. The wars and the global refugee crises took their toll. Now the first signals from our planet have catapulted us once more into public view, although some of the news reporting is critical. Why spend so much time and effort on a planet like Shikasta 464b, when the water worlds appear to be teeming with life? Yes, Shikasta 464b is a lot closer, about four light-years away, but it is a hell of fire and ice. A poor candidate for life—but we are dreamers. We want to think beyond boundaries, to find life as we don’t know it.
You helped me see that I could be more tha
n I’d imagined. You took my bitter memories of classmates laughing at my poor English, my ignorance, my secondhand clothes, and gave me, instead, Premchand and Ambedkar, Khusrau and Kalidasa. You taught me that a scientist could also be a poet.
So we are making this recording, for you and for posterity.
Sometimes, I practice a game I used to play when I was younger. I pretend to be an alien newly arrived on Earth, and I look at Delhi with new eyes. The dust-laden acacia trees outside the windows, the arid scrubland falling away, the ancient boulders of the Aravalli Hills upon which the squat brick buildings of the university perch like sleeping animals. In the room is the rattle of the air conditioner, the banks of computer monitors. That slender, dark woman in the immersphere—she is here, and she is not here. She is in this room, the modest control room for the mission, and she is four light-years away with her proxy self, the robot you and I named Avinash, or Avi for short. She is Avi. Despite the light delay time, she is there now, on that hellish world. The immer’s opacity clears, and I can see her face. For just a moment her eyes are alien, unfocused, as though she does not see me. What does she see? If I speak to her she will become the Kranti I know, but before that she is, for just that moment, a stranger.
Kranti:
I will describe the planet to you, because you will never see it through Avi’s eyes. It is a violent place. Imagine: a world so close to its sun that they face each other like dancing partners. That’s how Annie first described it to me, when her group found it. The light curve signature was subtle but it was there. Shikasta 464’s only known planet, a not-so-hot Jupiter, had a tiny sibling. Two Earth masses, a rocky world too close to its sun to be in the habitable zone. But between its burning dayside and the frozen night, there was the terminator, the boundary.
Nobody actually believed we would get there. I say “we” but really I mean the spacecraft, the Rohith Vemula.
How hard were those early years! Now we have our reward: the signals, first from the spacecraft, and then from Avi! I can see through his eyes, as you should have been doing right now. I know what he knows, even though the knowledge is more than four years old. My grandfather is in Bhubaneswar, celebrating with palm beer. He says that because I am a kind of famous person now, all will work out for our people. But I know and he knows it is not that simple.
From faraway Arizona, Annie is looking at the pictures on her screen. The substellar side of the planet, always facing its dim red star, is all lava seas. But in the terminator, what you called the Twilight Zone, the temperatures are less extreme, and the terrain is solid rock. For this reason you and Chirag designed our proxy to be a small, flat climbing robot, with very short legs, There he is, up on the cliff face, like a crab.
I am used to boundaries. Ever since my exile from my people’s ancestral home, I have lived in in-between places. Living on a boundary, you know you don’t belong anywhere, but it is also a place of so much possibility.
Through Avi’s eyes, the planet’s terminator has become more and more familiar.
Annie:
For my people the number four is sacred—four directions, four holy mountains. It always felt right to me that this project began with the four of us on a rock, stargazing. We’re still figuring out what it means to be together again after all this time, without you.
Let me begin with the old question: How do you know when something is alive?
I grew up on the rez. Red dust and red rock, mesas and buttes against the widest sky you’ve ever seen. I grew up lying on boulders with my cousins, watching the constellations move across the sky, and the stars seemed close enough to touch. During the winter, when the snow still fell, we little ones would huddle inside the hogan, listening to our elders tell the stories of how Coyote placed the stars in the sky. My plump fingers would fumble as I tried to follow my grandmother’s hands deftly working the string patterns— with one flick of the wrist, one long pull, one constellation would turn into another. The cosmos was always a part of our lives; even in the hogan there was Mother Earth, Father Sky. Now we live in boxes like white people. My uncle is a retired professor and a medicine man. He says our rituals and ceremonies keep us reminded of these great truths, even in this terrible time for our people.
Growing up, I thought I’d follow his footsteps—my Uncle Joe, the professor of Futures Studies at Diné University. But I took freshman geology to fulfill a science requirement, and ended up hooked. I remember the first time I realized that I could read the history of the Earth in the shapes and striations of the rocks, the mesas, and the canyons. I ended up going to the State University as a geology major, hoping to do something for the Navajo economy, which relied at that time on mining operations. I was naïve then. Luckily I got distracted by exoplanet atmospheres—late-night homework session, too much coffee, my boyfriend at the time—so here I am, planet hunter, all these years later, looking for biosignatures in exoplanets.
I’ve been looking at the images and puzzling over a few things. After several thousand exoplanets, we still don’t really understand how planetary atmospheres originate. Earth is such a special case that it only tells us of one narrow band of possibilities. With the exception of the noble gases, nearly all the gases in our atmosphere are made by life. I’m thinking about my grandmother’s story of the holy wind—life is breath, breath is life, literally and in every other way.
Shikasta 464b is too close to its star to do more than graze its habitable zone. Which is why it is last on everybody’s list for habitability. But my argument is that (a) the thin atmosphere (only 0.6 atm) is nevertheless more than what we’d expect of a planet that ought to have lost much of its atmosphere long ago, so what’s causing it to persist? Could be geology, could be life. And (b) the terminator between the magma pools of the dayside and the frozen desert of the nightside is actually relatively temperate in places, with temperatures that might allow for liquid water. There are trace amounts of water vapor in the upper atmosphere, but—let’s not get excited—likely not enough to create oxygen by photolysis—nah, if you want an oxygen atmosphere you have to look elsewhere. There is hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, but that is hardly surprising on a world with active geology.
So Kranti and I have been going back and forth about how we would actually know something is alive. We decided that since we both come from tribal cultures we should ask our elders the question. My Uncle Joe, who is a hatalii, says that life is a property arising from connectedness; the universe, being whole, is therefore alive. Don’t dissect things so much, he says, professor and medicine man all at once. See the entirety of things first. It is only through the whole that the parts come into being. Kranti’s grandfather comes of a hill people of lush tropical forests—they call themselves the People of the Waters—and he says that rocks, stones, and mountains are alive, they are gods.
Anyway, getting back to the point about the terminator—all those years ago some of us broached the idea that there are worlds where life is (a) different from what we recognize as life, (b) not widespread over the planet; in fact the planet might well have only a few habitable regions on it, and (c) it is theoretically possible to find pocket regions even in such inhospitable places as Shikasta 464b where some kind of life thrives, and (d) that life could well be complex life if the pocket habitats are (despite the name) deep enough, large enough, last long enough to have these forms of life evolve. Which is one reason I like red dwarfs—Shikasta 464 is a beauty, brighter and heavier than average, but still, a red dwarf: small, resilient, and very, very long-lived (as I, too, hope to be). Long-lived enough to up the possibility of life on one of its planets. I hope.
Our little rock is quite a mystery. It shouldn’t have as much atmosphere as it does, tenuous though it is. Considering how close it is to its star, the solar wind ought to have stripped much of it away. Plus the frozen antistellar side is so cold that some of the gases in the atmosphere should have rained out as snow. So why so much atmosphere? Perhaps outgassing—Shikasta b is a happenin
g place, lots of active geological processes churning up the surface—but our models don’t give us the numbers we need. So—life?
I like it when we are surprised by the universe.
Chirag:
It began from a single discussion in a certain university in Delhi. The four of us—Annie, Kranti, myself, and you—talked all night.
You were witness to the great shaking-up of civilization in the 2020s— the wars and civil strife, the wave upon wave of refugees fleeing the boggy, unstable tundras, the unbearable heat of the tropics. You saw the anoxic dead zones of the ocean—you hung the “I can’t breathe” banners over the bodies of the refugees floating among the silvery carcasses of dead fish, the photograph that made you briefly famous. From the shaking of the world arose little groups that came together the way sand gathers in the nodes of a banging drum: fiery intellectuals and dispossessed tribals, starving farmers and failed businessmen. We saw it grow—little groups around the world, islets of resistance, birthplaces of alternate visions, some of which became the solidarity circles from which our dreams emerged. We witnessed the collapse of things as we knew them, saw the great world-machine sink to its steel-and-chromium knees, threatening to drag us all down with it. We saw the paradox of life carrying on through the mayhem, in the big cities and small towns, even as our peoples fought the killing machines all around the globe—the small rituals of breakfast on the table, sleepovers for one’s children, bringing your lover chocolates on her birthday.
It was a mad idea, in the midst of all this, to dream up a crowdfunded cheap space program, to send an experimental robot as explorer on another world. So many friends left us in outrage, accusing us of turning our backs on the real struggles. Those of us who remained launched the worldwide solidarity circles, the crowdfunding. Dissent was the spice and oil that moved us forward. The circles formed offshoots, generated ripples of their own, they birthed art movements, films, new university departments, even the growth of independent city-states around the globe, as long-existing boundaries wavered and re-formed. Then, during the spacecraft’s journey, we scattered, were lost, some claimed by strife, others by the sweeping pandemics of the last decade. It is a miracle then that some of us have been able to return to the project, now that the signals are coming in thick and fast.