Later the tension got a bit too much for us. Chirag and I went off to the old campus and found the boulder on top of the hill where we used to stargaze as college students. We lay there talking and drinking tea from a local tea shack. After we had exhausted the subject of Bhimu, we were silent for a while. This is where it all began, all those years ago.
After a while Chirag said, “You know we are shaped by the cosmos. Cosmic rays are raining down upon us right now. Causing mutations in our cells, affecting evolutionary pathways. All those distant cataclysms light-years away, determining whether I end up a monkey or a man!”
“Can’t tell the difference,” I said, expecting a rude retort, but he just sighed. Chirag the poet. But the mood had taken me over too. I couldn’t see Shikasta 464b’s dim old sun with the naked eye, but I knew what he meant. I thought back to the old stories I’d heard as a child. When the nights were mild, we would sit around a campfire and look up at the constellations as the elders told the stories. Every once in a while a coyote would call from the sagebrush, as though joining in. Through all the years of my scientific training, I lost that feeling of belonging in a great old universe. Modern science is a shattered mirror—you see bits and pieces in each shard, sometimes in great detail, but never the whole. I nearly gave up the old way of knowing for the new way. But I’ve felt it more and more lately, and under that sky I felt it again.
Kranti:
I came back from the hospital just in time for the evening newscast—two more official mammal extinctions as of today. The strangest is a species of whale that was only discovered three years ago. They found the bodies on the beaches of Siberia. When the sea ice went, ice algae went also. That caused a catastrophic ecosystem collapse, leading to anoxia, which killed all the fish. Now this whale is extinct. I think of the forest I would have grown up in that also is no longer there. I am filled with so much sadness.
On the positive side, we have received two more messages on the secure line. They are almost the same as the first one. But when we plot them, the images are larger and larger.
Chirag says that Bhimu is coming home.
If she comes home, if we all survive, it will be very interesting to see how far she has come. AI intelligence is quite different from that of animals, and so it must evolve differently. How will an ultrAI on Earth interact with other Earth species? We are only just starting to figure out Avi’s interaction with Saguaro on a planet four light-years away. Humans have learned to communicate with three other animal species. We can speak a little bit of Gibbonese, and a very rough Bowhead, and some dialects of Dolphin. What Bhimu could contribute to our increasing therolinguistic abilities, we don’t know.
Even with the heat madness and the terrible things people do to one another, and the long lines at the refugee service centers, the old solidarity circles are coming up around the world. Like small ecosystems, they are emerging wherever new ideas and old ones have the freedom to develop. People are meeting in their houses, solving their problems together, discussing alternatives. Even some bastis have developed their own currency. What is the critical density of these kinds of pocket ecologies, beyond which we can have system change? When will we change our ways en masse, in time to immer inside our own biosphere, so we can heal with the Earth systems that maintain life on this planet?
When our project first started, I had a lot of arguments with my cousins. They said: why don’t you raise money to help our people? I did not have a good answer to that and still that is so—but actually our crowd-funding initiative ended up putting money into the community. Annie is funding an alternative school on her reservation, and Chirag has started a scholarship for Dalit scientists. My part of it has helped the tribe hire the best lawyers for the big fight. And you gave us the DADS, Drona’s Apology Defense System, the most intelligent drone-destroying system ever designed, keeping us safe from Arizona to Indonesia. But I know that we would not have collected so much money if the projects had only been about community transformation. People are much more willing to fund space exploration projects.
We have a dream, the three of us—no, the four of us, because you are here in your own way—a dream for an alternative university, one distributed across the world, that includes the best of indigenous knowledge practices and explores a new kind of science, just as rigorous as the one we know, but it goes beyond the shattered-mirror model, the one Annie described.
Another thing our way has shown us is that our practices, like radical immersion, allow certain values to emerge that then feed back to affect the practices, illuminating Frowsian value dynamics in a new way. See, how you practice science is a function of your values. Normally, you design experiments or observations based on distance and so-called objectivity. But you lose information in the process. When you change the practice, it also changes what you value. Chirag always says I am too idealistic. Probably that is true.
We are the shadow people, the broken people emerging from the cracks in the collapsing structures of the world. For so many generations, we have been told we are primitive, backward, in need of help, in need of uplifting. Sometimes we have even been invited to what Chirag calls “the smashing, burning, drinking mega-party that is modern
