Avi found a mat of this stuff on the base of some of the rock formations. During a lull in the wind, it moved up a rock face, very slightly. That could just be some small-scale atmospheric vortex, but he’s recorded the same thing multiple times, in different wind and weather conditions, from dead still air to gales. The vortex event was the strangest. I was there, looking through Avi’s eyes, and I saw the Dusty Woman start dancing. Avi was recording the wind speed and gradient, and I saw the Dusty Woman pause—yes, pause, in the middle of the dance. Imagine it, in the light of Avi’s headlamps: the wind still blowing, but the dust formation holding.
There are so many possible non-life scenarios for this phenomenon. The first thought in my mind was liquid helium II—in spite of its peculiar behavior, it is not alive. So we can’t discount the possibility of a non-life explanation.
We have been discussing all this nonstop until we get tired. In the evenings we sit with bottles of beer or cups of chai and watch the city skyline. There are the searchlights arcing through the polluted air. In the distance are the Citadel towers like multicolored candles. Chirag plays our stories back to us.
The lindymotes lay on the rock face to rest. They felt the stirrings, small and large, and rearranged themselves. They were flung into a dance by great vortices of air, and they went whirling. When the whirling stopped as the wind died, the lindymotes felt the magnetic field lines shift and change, and held their place for a moment before falling slowly down on to the surface.
“We are playing!” said some of the lindymotes.
“We are being played with,” said others in wonder.
“We are becoming something,” said some of the lindymotes.
“We are making something,” said others.
And so they knew they were themselves, tiny and separate, but together they were Dusty Woman.
One of the things I learned from my grandfather is that you cannot separate life from its environment. Understand an environment well enough, and you will understand what kind of life might arise there. Environment is the matrix that works with the life force to generate life-forms. That is how the environment becomes aware of itself, when it intra-acts at different scales. So I try to keep my mind open to possibility, even when my imagination comes up with something fantastic, so later on I can apply the constraints that are needed. Imagination has an even larger phase space of possibility than life. Sometimes in the immersphere I feel I am slipping away from Earth itself. It is scary but also exciting.
Annie:
Today I am a little shaky. I was stopped by a cop last night. I was walking back through campus at close to midnight when it found me. Its swiveling eyes locked on me, and the voice, gravelly and machine-like, said: Stop. Do Not Move. It scanned me top to bottom with the blue light. The cops can make mistakes. But it found me in its database and I was released. Some of my friends are convinced that the so-called mistakes are deliberate, used as a cover-up to kill leaders of the resistance. My colleague Laura was one of the “mistakes.” Nobody was punished for her death. The AI tribunal pronounced the cop guilty of an interpretation error, and it was wiped. And that was the end of it. I’ve heard drone killings are better because they are swift—you have no time to be afraid. The drones are so small that you only notice them, if at all, when you are about to die.
Okay, deep breath. I am alive, I am alive. And what about life on Shikasta 464b?
I think a non-life explanation is the most likely. Magnetism is the most obvious thing to consider. Shikasta 464b has a roughly octupolar magnetic field that doesn’t do much to protect it from its star’s solar wind. The peculiar magnetic field, I believe, is due to the extreme heat of the dayside, which causes magma to upwell from the interior onto the surface, dragging with it denser magnetic minerals in long wisps and tendrils. This also causes the local variations in the magnetic field in both space and time.
I’ve looked at Avi’s analysis of the dust fragments. Lots of silica and basalt grains, and—magnetite crystals! Not surprising that the dust moves around in response to the variations in the local magnetic field. There is so much magnetic material churning close to the surface of Shikasta b that the local fields must be shifting all the time. This would result in magnetic dust moving in weird ways, like Avi has observed. A relatively mundane non-life explanation for Dusty Woman’s behavior. Of course, as Kranti points out, the environment shapes the possibilities for life. It would hardly be surprising that if life exists on this world, it would take advantage of the peculiar magnetic field distribution.
So. How would life adapt to magnetism, especially to complex and ever-changing magnetic fields? We have magnetotactic bacteria on Earth, and birds that migrate based on the little crystals in their skulls. But navigation wouldn’t be much use when the magnetic fields are so weirdly distorted, when they change all the time.
The three of us have been talking about a new idea that is beginning to take shape. Our old questions: (a) What separates life from non-life? (b) Why is it that so many indigenous cultures regard the universe itself as alive? I think of my grandmother’s string games during winter nights. Her fingers working. The constellations shifting from one to another. My favorite is Two Coyotes Running Away From Each Other. Her fingers and the strings between them hold the cosmos in a way I can’t articulate.
This is what we are thinking: that there is no clear boundary between life and non-life as biologists define it. The answer to “what is
