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.
Our pictures are being analyzed the world over by scientists and amateurs and nutcases via our Citizen Science Initiative. We hope someone will find something. But the far more exciting pictures from a major mission to a water world are eclipsing ours. As is, need I mention, the latest cluster of wars.
Still, we have some traffic. When we discover something it immediately goes to our site, becomes global and public. Our reports are clear and contextual—they lack the aloofness of scientific papers, but they’re plenty rigorous. Then the world gets to dissect, shred, and analyze what we have to say. Like our finances, everything is public, everything is transparent. I like to think we are changing the culture of science, from the margins, a fringe bunch of scholar-activists in little circles around the world. I’ve realized after all these years that what’s bothered me about Western science is that there is no responsibility. No reciprocity. You just have to be curious and work hard and be smart enough to discover something interesting. The things you discover, you have no relation to, no responsibility for—except through some kind of claim-staking. I grew up in two worlds—the world of conventional science, and the world of the Navajo. I used to think there was an insurmountable wall between them. But looking through Avi’s eyes, I’m beginning to see whole. I’m feeling more complete.
Of course, there really is no such thing as a complete person. That’s another Western concept, isn’t it? We are open systems, we eat, we excrete, we interdepend. We feel your absence like a three-legged chair.
Chirag:
The lindymotes did not belong here. They had been forged in the lava beds, and here it was cold, so cold! Some of them were swept by the currents past the great cliffs of the boundary into the fabled nightside, where they nucleated tiny snowflakes as gases condensed around them, snowing on the frigid, tortured landscape. But others managed to stay in the boundary lands—flung against the canyon walls, they left their tiny footprints on the surface, only to slide down into sheltered gullies. Here they found that the wind was not as strong, and they could perceive the twists and turns of invisible pathways, magnetic field lines. They felt the pull and tug of these, and aligned themselves so. The invisible pathways changed, sometimes slowly, sometimes at random, but the lindymotes followed them like little flocks of sheep across a meadow.
I know metals and money. I went into metallurgy because I wanted to see if there was a way around extractive industries like mining. And I went into money because I wanted to kill that god, Money. Nothing against money, but Money? No. I know what it does to people.
Actually I wanted to jump-start an economy based on retrieving metals from waste, so that we didn’t have to destroy lands and peoples for ore. In our college days, I promised Kranti on more than one drunken night that I would change the world. But I’ve been sober since, drunk only on the tragic poetry of life.
And here we are, on the verge of discovery. Kranti suspects that we have discovered a form of life so alien that we can barely recognize it. She gave me some technical stuff about orthogonal Walker Indices and negative subzones of phase space—but what it boils down to is that there are, possibly, at least two life-forms on Shikasta b.
One is Avi, or what he has become.
How to explain Avi? It is a task nearly as impossible as explaining you. To explain Avi—and Bhimu—to explain them is to go back in time to you and me, but where to begin? Perhaps it should be the time you lent me your battered copy of Jagdish Chandra Bose’s Response in the Living and the Non-Living. It was somewhere between Ambedkar and Darwin, I think—you had been pushing books on me, my English and Hindi were both improving, my head was singing with ideas, a magnificent incoherence within which my slowly awakening mind wandered, intoxicated. From my mother’s simplistic dreams for me, which I had unconsciously adopted—a good job and reasonable wealth, freedom from want, your usual middle-class unexamined life— from that, you took me to a place that whispered, “the universe is larger than this.” I remember the exact moment I opened the book and Bose’s dedication leapt out at me, “to my fellow countrymen,” as though the great scientist had himself touched my hand across time. I knew already that he was anti-caste, that he had the ability to walk away from fortune, and that his contributions had only been recognized decades after his death. But it was because of that book that I got really interested in metals. I decided then to go into metallurgy, even though the engineering program’s chief objective was to produce mining engineers. Why not get to know the monster intimately? My real interest was in the mining of landfills, in reclamation of metals from electronic waste—but what caught my poetic imagination was the possibility that metals were alive, in some metaphorical sense, if not the literal. Bose’s experiments on plants and metals under stress
