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 happening 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.
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
