The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

life?” depends on your context. My people, like Kranti’s people, knew long ago that the universe is connected, every bit linked with every other bit, and even the bits changing form and purpose all the time. This is not mere mysticism—it is consistent with science. If science had not started as a reductionist enterprise through an accident of history, this idea would be familiar. Over the last few days the three of us have been mapping “information channels” or “communication pathways,” although we are not certain these are the same thing. We started with a diagram of a human—there are stabilizing negative feedback loops within each organ for homeostasis, but from organ to organ these pathways connect, forming even larger meta-loops. But because humans are open systems, the pathways connect outside us, to the biosphere itself. They connect with the negative and positive feedback loops of the ocean (breathable oxygen, thank you, phytoplankton) and climate as a whole, as well as human-human interactions. Zoom out beyond the biosphere and the density of connections thins out, but the threads are still there—solar irradiation providing light and heat, cosmic rays influencing mutations, magnetic fields, gravitational fields reaching out through space between planet and star, planet and planet. Zoom in, into the human body, down to the cells, down to the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, and the pathways are there, tangled and dense. There may be some kind of fractal self-similarity governing the scale change. If we draw this “loop diagram” for a part of our biosphere, what do we see? The densest loops are those within living organisms, because they must have stabilizing feedbacks to allow for steady states, for homeostasis. “But even rocks have these,” I told Kranti and Chirag exultantly. Rocks “communicate” through the laws of physics and geology—they sense gravity, they are subject to heat and pressure, they participate in cycles at long and short scales, from weathering to the carbonate silicate cycle, for example. “Their loops are just not as dense.”

So then what is life, and what is not-life, depends on what cutoff choice you make in communication loop density. There is no a priori distinction between life and non-life.

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,