The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Still, it would be nice to have life that will talk back to us! Or at least to Avi. If we truly find life on Shikasta 464b, Avi’s position will become delicate. He will no longer be a highly sophisticated measuring instrument, but an alien communicating with potential native life-forms. We have spent years talking about the ethics of the situation, considering how we represent peoples at the receiving end of colonization. You designed Avi’s protocols for what he should do if we were to find life. But you also put in enough leeway for Avi to develop in his own way—I am beginning to recognize some of your fierce independence in Avi’s strange behavior.

  Of course we wonder about Bhimu all the time. The twins, one on Shikasta 464b and one on Earth, each developing according to his environment. You took Bhimu away for safekeeping; it’s what cost you your life.

  I’m taking advantage of the armistice and a plane trip voucher to fly out to Delhi. But first I’m going home to Window Rock for a few days. There are places where life on the rez has become impossible because of the heat and the advance of the sand dunes, but we’ve found pocket habitats, we’ve learned to adapt. The coal mines have closed. We are working toward 100 percent renewable energy. Life is rough and difficult, due to the long drought in an already dry land, but adversity has brought the old ways to the surface again. The heat madness has not erupted among us as much as in the world outside our borders. The Southern Federation wants us to join them but many of our people are resisting. There have been incursions from the west, skirmishes on the borders. Refugees coming in from the south, they say, tore down the old Wall between the United States and Mexico with their bare hands. With bleeding hands they moved up in a wave through El Paso, and were turned back with gunfire.

  It’s been a year since I visited, and in that time so much has changed. Cousin Phil is involved in the Resistance, working on disabling drones. He tells me his DADS can get several of them in one sweep. They drop from the sky like flakes of ash, he says. Uncle Bill’s new wind farm is taking off. Lindy’s working on a desert farming project. I need to see them; I need a Blessing Way ceremony. I need to remember what it means to call a place home, before I leave.

  Kranti:

  Are you listening? Are you listening?

  I hear that voice in a dream. Like a bird calling, again and again. It is me. Are you listening? I cannot remember if I have dreamed that dream again and again, or if it is just a memory of the first time. Who is speaking to me? Is it you, or someone else? What is it I have not listened to?

  There is so much I do not know. I feel awkward when people praise me. Actually sometimes I feel angry. It is like they are saying, how surprising that you know so much, Adivasi girl. An embarrassed laugh—I thought Adivasi girls could only be maids. Very good ones, no offense. But a Ph.D. scientist. Well, genius can appear at random, anywhere. Besides, she went to a Corporation school. They should put all tribal children in those schools. Look at what the illiterate terrorist junglees are doing… .

  They used to hold me up as an example of what a good Adivasi should be like. They stopped when I started supporting my people’s fight against the corpocracy. Then I was called ungrateful, hypocritical, and worse names. But there are more interesting things in the world than angry, ignorant people, so I turn away from them and I think: everything in Nature communicates, whether through language, or signs, or signals. Even matter, dead matter speaks through physical law, the interrelationships of variables. I have tried to listen, that is why I wonder about the dream. What is it I have not listened to? Is it Avi speaking to me? Is it you?

  When I told Chirag and Annie about my dream, Chirag was quiet for a bit. Then he said:

  “Do you think it was Bhimu?”

  I was surprised. Bhimu, calling me in a dream! Chirag looked embarrassed, then admitted he has had recurring dreams that Bhimu is calling him. In the dreams he is wandering through mountains and deserts, following her voice, convinced she will lead him to you. When he is awake he thinks of her lying in pieces deep inside some forest, her bioware torn apart.

  “Just as likely,” Annie says, “that she is growing up somewhere in the hills, or in a desert among nomads, perfectly safe.” We have been waiting, listening for Bhimu, all these years.

  Some weeks ago, Annie and I had made up a story about Dusty Woman writing in dust on the canyon walls—Shikastan graffiti. Recently we have been seeing dust patterns, both dynamic and stationary, that seem to be telling us something. I know humans can deceive themselves—hubris is powerful. So I learn humility; as the indigenous peoples have always known, humility before Nature tempers our delusions. We junglees don’t have a word for Nature—that is a foreign word, a separation word. But you know what I mean.

  What is Shiprock Canyon telling us? Its shapes and passageways, its corridors and caves are all mapped now, and we are getting a sense of how strongly the winds blow over it, and the thin vortices that form in certain areas. There are dust ripples like writing on sloping walls, what Chirag calls “the calligraphy of the wind.” This inorganic material cannot by itself be alive.

  Avi has also been doing flybys. He will rise suddenly over the canyon, turning slowly, scanning and sensing the magnetic fields, wind speed, visibility. I have realized that he has been increasing the range with each flyby, mapping the larger terrain within which Shiprock Canyon is embedded. And the data he’s collecting—if we are right—could mean something spectacular.

  Saguaro lived deep beneath the canyon, in the darkest places. He was slow, sleepy with the years. Time flowed for him like cooling lava. He could not see, but he had visions. He sensed rivers and pools of fire, and the deadly cold beyond. The heat below and the cold above fed his body, which was shot through with long cables of exobacteria, sipping electrons and passing them along. The passageways in which he lay had been shaped by magnetism and geological forces, so the biocables that were artery and vein, nerve and sinew for him, were likewise arranged in response to the ambient magnetism. He lay and dreamed.

  Annie:

  What we are beginning to notice is that superimposed on top of the ambient magnetism are smaller-scale variations, like signals riding a radio wave. Where are those variations coming from? Here, up high on the great terminator ridge, the subsurface temperature is too low for rocks to melt, and it is too far for the dense, ionized heavy metals to extend from the planet’s core. We expect spatial variations due to the way magnetic ore is distributed, but we don’t expect the magnetic field to vary in time so delicately. It’s as though there are magnetic beasts in the subterranean caverns and passageways of Shiprock Canyon that, through their movements, create these fine magnetic signatures, ever-changing with time. The response of the magnetic dust is consistent with this hypothesis. So Dusty Woman twirls, the wind dies down suddenly and the dust, for a fraction of a second, changes pattern in a way inconsistent with the fluid dynamics. Now that we are thinking along these lines, we can see in Avi’s data the gap between the observed motion of the dust and what we’d expect with only the wind and the ambient magnetic fields as factors.

  Maybe Saguaro, or something like it, really does exist in the depths of the canyon. I can’t avoid thinking that Dusty Woman is not merely a dust devil. We’re going a little nuts, I think.

  Amid all the excitement we are trying something new. Outside the mission room is a small patch of arid scrubland dotted with acacia trees. It slopes up to the observation post on top, where there’s a sentry. But on the way up there is a side path into a bunch of trees. It leads to a small clearing, ringed by large boulders. Rainwater forms a small pool here, and the trees are hung with the woven nests of baya weaver birds. This is a nice little place to sit. You can barely see the city spread out below us, due to the haze. The air is warm and thick, and the little birds sing and dart about. An ecologically impoverished place, but one where we can practice the idea of radical immersion.

  Chirag has the greatest difficulty with this. He is not used to sitting still; he says it makes him nervous. Chir
ag is letting his determination get in the way—have you ever seen anyone pushing themselves to relax? But he’ll get there, once he stops trying so hard. As for me, all I have to do is to hold my corn pollen bag in my hand, and take myself back home in my memory. I hear the singing, I smell the corn. I see the dancers, feel their rhythms in my bones. Uncle Joe’s voice in the background, deep and slow. As I breathe myself into receptivity, I become aware of the world around me—there’s a flash of bright yellow, a little male weaver bird darts from the top of a rock to the hanging nest, an insect in his beak. There’s the water gleaming, a muddy brown in the afternoon light. A ripple breaks the surface; a tiny frog, whose pale throat goes in and out as it breathes. We breathe together and I smell moisture in the air, just a hint, as though the monsoons may be sending us some rain after all. The weavers go chit-chit in the underbrush. Clouds pass overhead in small flotillas. Later, when I’ve come out of this, I will remember that I forgot myself in my immersion. I forgot my separateness, I became part of the cosmos, from the frog at the edge of the water to the clouds and beyond. Inside the control room, I say the Hózhó prayer, the word so inadequately translated as “beauty,” and everything seems touched by the sacred, even to opening the fridge to get my lime soda. Later Chirag will ask me what it was like. His imagination fills in for experience, and he will give me his poet’s words to speak into the recorder.

  Kranti is already in the immersphere, going straight from this world to Shikasta 464b. I don’t know what she sees when she practices immer— immer on this world, I mean. She never talks about it.

  Chirag:

  Avi is increasingly following his own ideas. Of course we can’t send him commands and expect him to comply immediately—we are separated by four light-years, after all. But he has a communication protocol that is clearly being violated. He is modifying his own algorithms, ignoring, for example, the need to add commentary to his reports, or to explain what he is doing. I have seen him move lumps of magnetic debris in a way that looks like an attempt at communication with whatever it is he thinks he sees here. I think he has crossed the blurry boundary between non-life and life. We are estimating that Avi’s Walker Index is probably around 8.3.

  There’s one more strange thing. It’s to do with Bhimu. When she and Avi were separated, literally made two, they had already laid the foundations of a new communication system. A private language analogous to what identical twins sometimes make up, but one that makes no sense to us. I’ve started to look at their old transcripts again. In the patterns I am finding similarities to some of the signals from Avi. In Avi’s transmissions, what seems like random noise overlaying the signals is revealing regularities astonishing in their subtlety. Am I deceiving myself, seeing what I want to see? Or is this a hint that Avi is trying to reach Bhimu—that perhaps she is still—alive?

  We have been listening for Bhimu all these years in vain. It is strange that Avi’s twin, who was to stay with us on Earth, was the one we lost. After the raid you escaped with her. For her safety you didn’t tell us where. They captured you—but not Bhimu—in a remote region of the eastern Himalayas.

  You were at their mercy how long, none of us can bear to think. How long before the picture of you was circulated, lying on the forest floor with gunshot wounds to your chest? They dressed your body in the uniform of one of the insurgent groups, and circulated your picture as a triumph of the progressive state versus the terrorists. Allegedly you had been hunted down after days of tracking you through the forest, yet the uniform was recently ironed, with its creases intact. Later we tried to find Bhimu among the tribals of the Northeast, and then, among the new hunter-gatherer anarchist groups. There are so many of the new groups, so many different philosophies: in the West, the gun-toting Savagers and the peace-loving Edenites, and here in India the Prakrits of MadhyaBhum and the Asabhyata movement’s adherents in the East. I hope that wherever she is, Bhimu is well. And that she’ll forgive us for separating her from Avi.

  If Avi’s Walker Index is up to 8.3, what might Bhimu’s be? We have no way of knowing.

  And if Avi is talking to the aliens—what is he saying?

  Kranti:

  Living things, always they contextualize. That is what adaptation is, a constant conversation with the surroundings, a contextualization intended to maintain life as long as possible. Ancient systems of medicine like Ayurveda talk of life force, what we call prana. It is called chi by the Chinese, holy wind by the Navajo. There are complex paths through which the life force flows in the body, and in Ayurveda the prana flows are part of a greater network, the cosmic prana. Could it be that life force inside living beings is a kind of metaphor for the communication channels? With the difference that in living beings beyond a Walker Index of 8, the information flows are top-down causal, shaped by the constraints and demands of the highest scale at which an organism exists … .

  Living things have boundaries and sub-boundaries. But there is no absolute boundary because we are all open systems. In that sense what you define as life depends on the cut you make. Ancient peoples, forest dwelling people, desert tribes, they have always made different cuts in the world than scientists. Sometimes I make the cut as a scientist, sometimes as an Adivasi. I can slip from one world to another very quickly.

  Chirag:

  Kranti’s not being concrete, of course. Her mind has always moved faster than her words can keep up with. What she is trying to say is that if this is a life-form, it is communicating via local magnetic fields, and it may actually be morphologically distributed. She is saying that perhaps its body is here, there, and everywhere. Maybe the universal constructor, the control unit, is distributed too. Either that, or we have a superorganism of some sort. There is, after all, no a priori way of telling the difference between an individual and a community of individuals. And there are life-forms on Earth, Kranti points out, like slime molds, that can exist as individuals as well as collectives. Those survey flybys that Avi did, if we are interpreting them correctly, are like the view you get when you rise up in an airplane over a city at night. You see nodes and structures, grids and symmetries. What he’s seen—what we’ve seen through his eyes, converted to visuals—is absolutely breathtaking. Magnetic field lines swirling and shifting, field variations that are too dynamic and too widespread to be explained by mere geology (that’s Annie scoffing at me in the background for using “mere” and “geology” in the same breath). In the dark spaces between the glowing lines, in the gradations, there are suggestions of long, sinuous shapes that move, and starfish-shaped exclusions that rotate slowly in place. Something lies deep within the fissures and canyons of the terminator plateau. Through its magnetic senses it knows the high escarpment, and the magma seas far below. And—another speculation here—since the magnetic fields of planet and star are constantly interacting with each other, how astonishing if this beast—if it is a beast indeed—is also sensing the storms and moods of its parent star!

  Saguaro lived deep beneath the canyon, in the darkest places. He was old and wide, branching like the forks in a tree. Lying nearly still, he sensed the deep, fiery places beneath him, the pulls and tugs of the magnetized lava surging below, rising up like incandescent lace. Overhead he sensed the great cold, the more distant, yet larger, grander pull of something unfathomable, enormous beyond comprehension. The tugs from the star surged and varied, so although he could not see the red dwarf, he came to know its moods, its storms and meditations. He felt the tugs mediated by cold rock, the rock within which he lay like a many-armed god, but above that he had a sense of space, of motion. Here, in this tenuous region, he sensed the flow of magnetized material as dust, smaller bodies that moved differently, as though free of the grasp of the earth below. And a longing rose up in him to stretch toward that intermediate space between the star and the planet, neither of which he could see. But he knew their deep hearts, their veins of fire. Stretching, moving, he sensed he could make the lindymotes (for that was what the dust was) move in response. Throu
gh their resistance he knew the wind, and he thought: there is someone other than me in that clear space above the rock. I must speak to it, he said, and in that moment of recognizing another, he also knew loneliness. So he shifted his massive, coiled, many-branched body, and the wind, through the motion of the lindymotes, knew him too. So he danced with the wind, and Dusty Woman said: who is shaking my skirts?

  Annie:

  Kranti had a sort of breakdown last week. I don’t know what to call it. She collapsed just after a session in the immersphere. We got her through the barricades to the university hospital. Chirag and I were terrified. She is stable now, somewhat annoyed at all the fuss, which is heartening. I’m so glad I’m here with the two of them. Together we four are something that deserves a name of its own. So far Chirag’s only come up with AKCX, which is kind of clunky.

  Kranti’s mother and grandfather came to be with her. Her mother is a stern woman, very focused on the care being given to her daughter. Her grandfather is a character. He’s very old, wiry and thin, with a bright and irreverent gaze. He reminds me of my great-uncle Victor. I could stay up trading stories with him all night. Grandfather, as we call him, tells us how his foothill tribe is trying to create a hybrid lifestyle, an alternative economy based on their old ways but “internet-savvy.” If only the rest of the world would let them be! They are sitting on huge veins of bauxite, which are needed to feed the world’s demand for aluminum, and for staying on their land they are treated like terrorists, under attack by drones and paramilitary forces. And they still have not given up. Listening to Grandfather’s somewhat broken English, I am homesick suddenly, for the high plateau.

  Update (a): Kranti’s been told that she can get back to work in a couple of weeks. She’s not sick in any way we understand—but I think it is a lot to take: all those hours spent looking through Avi’s eyes! The neurologists tell us her EEG shows irregularities that were not in her baseline data. Chirag has this wild idea that the apparent irregularities are actually patterns, similar to the so-called noise in Avi’s signals, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the as-yet-undeciphered private language of the twin ultrAIs. If it’s happening with Kranti, is it a matter of time before this process, whatever it is, starts to happen with Chirag and me? What are we becoming? Could ultrAIs like Avi can achieve a connection across the gulf of space-time, resulting in the formation of a being that is morphologically distributed over such vast distances? Maybe I’m being fanciful.