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 than 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
