by Neil Clarke
But of the four of us who first talked the whole thing into being, that night on the boulder under the unusually clear Delhi sky—only you have not come back. You gave yourself to this perhaps more than any of us, and then you were taken down, flung back into the earth from which you rose. I can still see your hands caressing the chassis that was to be Avi, muttering your strange AI spells, the grin lighting up your face as the robot came alive. You had no defense against the pain the world inflicted on us—you were Annie’s uncle dying of radiation poisoning in the Navajo desert, you were Kranti’s younger cousin shot by the police, you were my newborn sister laid outside a school in the hope that someone could feed her. Ultimately they came for you, and you knew in that moment what it was to be all the peoples of the world who have lived in hell. Each time I think of what you must have gone through, I die with you and for you, and I live for you, again and again.
I live for what the four of us represent. We are the idea of the destruction of caste, class, and race come alive. Together we are walking alternate paradigms, irrefutable counterarguments to the propaganda of the powerful, to the way of life that is accepted as the norm. We live in dangerous times, and because people like us threaten the established order, we are dangerous, and therefore in danger. I don’t really know who the men are who guard us, but it is part of S.R.’s promise to me. S.R. approached me himself with the offer of protection for our project. Accepting it made me feel uncomfortable because his god is Money. Money, he says, is what will set Dalits free, and indeed it has freed him. So much that he can walk the streets (that’s a euphemism for his armored car) surrounded by bodyguards and impunity. I am grateful for his protection, and for his support, although we only took a small fraction of what he offered. But his is not the kind of freedom I seek. I am uncomfortable around power, I suppose. Or maybe I am more of an idealist than I admit to Kranti and Annie.
You see, I remember what it was like when I was a child. Before we came to Delhi, my mother cleaned houses in Patna. She always pushed me to go to school, and she would ask me to repeat my lessons to her in the evenings, so she could learn to read too. I remember her repeating the letters after me, and sometimes she would be so tired, she would fall asleep before I had finished. Once when I came home crying because the teacher had pushed me to the back of the class for being a Dalit—she told me why she had named me Chirag. I remember her eyes burning in her face, saying, in the darkness of my life, you are the light. What use is suffering if it doesn’t make you stronger? Much later I came across the poetry of Om Prakash Valmiki, who could have been speaking in my mother’s voice. Here’s how I translated his words for Annie.
That wound
Of the hammer-blow
On the rock
Births sparks
That night in Delhi, we started thinking about how we would explore space, and why. We were in a climate funk—the West Antarctic ice shelf had collapsed faster than predicted. Sea walls had been breached in Miami and Mumbai and Boston; fish were swimming in the streets of Kolkata. We’d thought to escape from grim reality by going to a movie, but they showed one from the tweens that pissed us off, called Interstellar. Lying on the cooling rock, you said, suddenly: “Trash, burn and leave. Yeah, I’m going to be a space colonizer now. That’s my motto. Having fucked up the only world we have, I’m going into space to fuck up a few more.” You laughed, bitterly, and started singing “Trash, burn and leave” to the tune of some pop number I don’t even remember. “Shut up,” said Kranti and Annie together. “Or at least sing in tune,” I said. We laughed, drank a little more, and wept a little too. That was the start of one of those passionate discussions you have in college that goes on all night: How would we—those on the other side of colonization—do it differently? We couldn’t have known then that the answer to the question would take our whole lives.
We look for life on other worlds because we want to deepen what we mean by human, what we mean by Earthling. As our own atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels fall and species go extinct like candles winking out, year after year, we want to bring attention to the wonder that is life, here and elsewhere. It is an extension of our empathy, our biophilia. Build your approach, your business model, your way of thinking around that paradigm, and you’ve already built in respect for every human regardless of race or class or caste, connection between all life, and an enhancement of the collective human spirit. Back in the early years of the twenty-first century, one of my people—Rohith Vemula—was driven to sacrifice his life for a vision of a better world. I had suffered from depression for some of my college years, and in the days following that first late-night conversation, I reread what he had written before he died, how he’d wanted to go to the stars. It felt as though he was speaking to me across time and history, urging me to live and dream, reminding me who I was, “a glorious thing made of stardust.” I can live for this, I told myself that night.
Now I wish I could tell him: Brother, you did it! You took us to the stars.
Kranti:
I’ve been spending more and more time exploring Shikasta b. Chirag tells me that it is not wise to spend so much time immersed. But I can’t help it. When I am in the immersphere, I feel all relaxed, all tension goes away. I explore the Twilight Zone in Avi’s little body, sampling data. It is becoming a place to me. Every night we look at the images, locate features on a grid, and name things.
Here’s the description Annie posted on our Citizen Science website:
Shikasta b’s sky is clear and filled with stars. Looking sunward, the star Shikasta 464 is a dull red sphere, bathing the planet with its inadequate light. Most of its radiation is in the infrared. Avi is standing at the eastern edge of the terminator, atop a cliff some 10 kilometers high. The view of the dayside is spectacular. Here the ground falls away in sheer vertical walls down to a redly glowing plain, where large pools of magma hundreds of kilometers across are connected by lava rivers. Near the cooler terminator region the surface lava in the pools crusts over, and enormous bubbles of noxious gases break through it at irregular intervals, popping like firecrackers that would be louder if the planet had much of an atmosphere. Fine droplets of molten rock rain down from these explosions. Behind Avi the top of the levee is a cracked and fissured plain, dark and shadowed, with a few odd rock formations. On the nightside the images beamed from our orbiting satellite show a frozen terrain cut through by fissures and canyons on a much larger scale. Perhaps deep in the cracks tidal friction from the interior warms the place enough for life to have a tenuous hold. We don’t know yet. But the terminator between the two extremes is our best bet.
Today Avi has begun exploring a small canyon that we have named Shiprock. It is a maze of narrow gullies between jagged rock walls about 40 meters in height. Avi has already mapped it from the air; now he is methodically mapping details from the surface level, moving up the walls, along the canyon, poking his antennae into holes and cracks.
I am remembering, as I clamber up and down the terrain with him, the time I spent with my grandfather during summer holidays in my final year of college. He had returned to our tribal lands the year before. The refinery had ruined the land in the 20 years of his exile, and now the mining company wanted to extend the open-cast mines. My grandfather’s village, my people, were all scattered by the initial displacement, but they had come together to fight for their land. The police brought the company goondas with them, looking for the agitation leaders. This is what they call an “encounter killing”— cold-blooded murder that is reported as a killing in self-defense. Four people, including my cousin brother Biru, were killed the week before I arrived.
I can’t talk about it still. I have been insulated from the troubles of my people for so long because my mother took us children away when the refinery displaced us. Most of my childhood was spent in Bhubaneswar. I was good at studies, so she got me admitted to a Corporation school, even though my grandfather was against it. They had such arguments! But my mother won. She had seen too much
violence and death in the war against our people; she wanted me to be safe, to get a modern education. My grandfather didn’t speak to her for three years. Then he was forced to come to Bhubaneswar to find work. It proved my mother’s point, that we could no longer live the way we had for thousands of years, so why fight and be killed? When she realized my grandfather was still active in the struggle she shook her head and said he was a fool. I never paid attention to all that, only to my studies. Only when I went to Delhi for university I realized what it meant to be Adivasi. I was so integrated into modern life that I had forgotten my native language and customs—but with my black skin and different features I was seen as backward, someone who had come to a top university because of the reservation system. I joined an Adivasi resistance group, and slowly began to unlearn the Corporation propaganda and learn again the language and history of my people.
That summer I went back to Odisha to see my grandfather. I still remembered the green hills and the clouds that would sit on top of them, and the plain, which used to be crisscrossed by small rivers and streams. But so much had changed. I stood in the dust and heat of the foothills and hugged my weeping aunt, as the bodies of the “junglee terrorists” lay before us. Biru lay on his side as though sleeping. Blood had seeped from the gunshot wound on his head into the ground. That day I understood for the first time the reality of being on the receiving side of genocide.
In the terrible days that followed the raid, our relatives, the hill tribes, hid us from the police. I went with the fugitives into the cloud forest. The narrow trails were filled with the calls of unfamiliar birds and beasts. Up there under the shadow of the mountain god, eating wild mangoes from the trees while a light rain fell, I had a strange experience: belonging. I looked at my grandfather’s face, lined and seamed from decades of suffering, and laughing so defiantly despite all our sorrows, and I finally understood why he fought for what was left of our home.
In those days my head was filled with all kinds of grand ideas. I was a budding intellectual, all the worlds of knowledge were opening before me. I was writing a thesis on extensions of Walker Indices, which are a set of parameters that try to tell how alive something is, from a rock to a mountain goat. My grandfather was proud of me, and always wanted to know what I was studying. In his village he had been a man of wisdom and power; in the city he was an activist by night, and a gardener for hire by day.
But he was the one who taught me to see in a different way. My vague ideas of semiotics grew sharper and more vivid during that time in the forest. I didn’t put it all together until some years later in my first academic paper—but what the forest taught me was that Nature speaks, that living and nonliving communicate with each other through a system older than language. In fact, physical law is only a subset of the ways in which matter talks to matter. When my grandfather went foraging for medicinal plants for the injured people, I saw him come alive to all the life around him. I had never seen him like that. I realized there is a way of being alive that we have lost by becoming civilized. I published my first paper in my final year—a very technical one on extensions of Kohnian semiotic theory—but the basic ideas, they all come from that trip.
What I am trying to do now—immersing myself in this alien environment—is because of those long-ago forest treks with my grandfather. Whenever I used to ask him how he knew something about the forest, he would say that he just paid attention. At first I used to get irritated. Now I understand better what he meant. He practices a kind of radical observation, in which he opens all his senses to information flow without preconceptions, and simply waits until something crystallizes. This sounds ridiculous to Chirag: “just the kind of mumbo-jumbo that people associate with the ‘mystical savage,’” but I think this radical, unfiltered immersion can lead to alternative ways of understanding the world. For example, all the emerging discoveries of animal language—the monkey species in Australia, the bowhead whale in the Arctic—the scientists in each case spent so much time with the animals, getting to know them, listening to their recordings day and night.
That is what I am doing here, on Shikasta b. And I want to understand Avi, whose Walker Index is 7.8, in between life and non-life. This is the first time he has been on active assignment in an alien world. He can learn. On an AI scale, he is a genius. In what ways will Shikasta b change him?
Annie:
This radical observation thing of Kranti’s—as she says, it’s nothing new— indigenous people have been practicing it for millennia. She was afraid Chirag would scoff—but I think she has a point. She thinks we should go even deeper. Let’s tell ourselves Shikasta b’s stories, she said, stories about this place. Maybe in assuming everything is alive, and giving each thing a certain agency, different degrees of aliveness will become apparent. What she’s saying, I think, is that if you are looking for a pattern and don’t know what it is, it makes sense to invent patterns of your own, semi-randomly. This Monte-Carlo-like shaking up of patterns and paradigms can throw up notions that you might not have reached through logic alone. This goes against conventional wisdom, which says—hey, we humans like patterns, so beware: the patterns we find are likely simply in our heads, as opposed to real patterns. The thing is, when it comes to “real”: what we recognize as patterns and connections are neither purely cultural (or anthropomorphic) nor purely “natural.” As Kranti says, “What is culture but a specific kind of contextualizing with the rest of one’s environment?”
Well, it could all be a waste of time. But we have that—time, I mean. What’s to lose?
Actually Chirag didn’t scoff when we suggested it. He was about to—I know the signs well: the way his left eyebrow starts going up, and the deep sigh—but his poetic side saw an opportunity. It was funny how his face changed, you could see that internal struggle. He has declared himself the official scribe, collecting our story ideas and rewriting them.
Once there was a planet too close to its star. They shared a vast and complex magnetic field, and their proximity made a beautiful world of extremes, separated by a circular boundary. In the boundary world it was neither too hot nor too cold, but it was always windy. Various species of hot beings lived on the dayside, and they wanted to know what it was like on the other side of the world, where the star’s heat and light did not fall. So the forces that shaped them—heat and pressure and magnetic forces—turned them into huge molten balls that rose from the lava seas and were flung at the sheer walls of the boundary, where they fell apart, crashing back down into the molten ocean. But the tiniest of them cooled and solidified into lava dust motes, and were able to ride the wind.
The Great Eastern Highlands, where Avi is exploring, is my favorite place on this planet. Imagine looking down into the magma pools of hell from such a height. I’ve never had vertigo—spent most of my childhood clambering up cliffs—but the vids from the edge of the great levee make me nervous and excited. I can hear the wind blowing at Avi’s back, a constant dull, muted roar—the cold surface current from the frozen nightside. Higher up, hot air from the substellar side swirls in the opposite direction.
We’ve gridded off the highland plateau on top of the levee. The dramatic temperature difference at the terminator makes for a fissured, tortured landscape. Lots of crevasses, passageways, mazes, all bathed by the dim, angry grazing light from the red dwarf star. Avi has made progress on his ground-based survey of Shiprock Canyon, which winds between sheer basalt walls on the plateau. His headlights reveal a maze of passageways, rocky arches, and bridges. At first I thought there was something wrong with his optics, because when he looked up, the stars didn’t look so clear at about 30 degrees around the zenith. Dust? The atmosphere is very thin, but I can imagine solidified lava bits from the molten rock fountains in the plains below, being swirled around by the wind.
Could there be dust devils on Shikasta b? Kranti’s message read. And as I sipped my coffee in the glowing sunrise of the high Arizona desert and looked at the newest image, I thought: Nilch ‘i. I remember
my grandmother explaining to me when I was very little that the whorls on my finger pads and the little vortex of hair on my head were signs of the holy wind that animates us. There’s Nilch’i on another world, raising dust into a vortex, making this being, this Dusty Woman. Now that I know what to look for, I can see her form, faint but discernible against the backdrop of rock and sky, a dust devil composed of lava dust. She is whirling along the canyon like a live thing.
Dusty Woman danced through the narrow passageways of Shiprock Canyon, shaking her skirts and looking into the caves and hollows.
“Who is tugging at my skirts?”
But the wind took her voice away, and when it died she had to lay down to rest and wait until the wind picked her up again.
Kranti is making up a story about Saguaro, a creature that lives in the fissures and passageways of Shiprock Canyon. Chirag declares we are silly, but has joined the fun: his contribution is Balls of Fire (the semisolid glowing lava balls that are sometimes hurled up from the magma pools, hitting the levee wall with a splosh). We also came up with lindymotes (after my sister Lindy) for the little solid bits of lava that are blown over the magma pools toward the great cliffs. These have left their mark on the tops of the canyon walls, which have been roughened over millennia of constant battering by these windborne particles.
You should see Avi scuttle after the lindymotes like a little dog. He’s been doing some odd little dancing steps. There’s something we can’t yet see or sense that he can. It occurred to me that we should plot his movements, just in case they give us some kind of clue. Avi’s certainly been behaving weirdly. I wish you were here to see this, because more than anything, he is your baby.