In The Stars' Brilliance — Part Four
By Georgina Kamsika
Solitude hits again as physical pain. That ache, a weight on her chest. Home was Amma chopping vegetables by the stove. Or Father enticing her to grab some street food with him. Strolling with Lakini through Park Street Cemetery and the ever-present, ever-critical crows.
Mehtab stops, an idea forming. Those crows—they whittled branches into hooks, extracting food from the strangest of places. They used tools, interacted with objects. Might the alien react to objects placed in its path? What if she put down a series of rock samples? Different minerals, or plastics, or cloth?
She rockets back to the habitat, expending the last of her suit’s propellant. She gathers some empty plastic containers from her stores, tops up her air, then heads back out. She struggles with her burden, awkward in her suited hands. Boots drag through the shifting sand, sliding back a little with each step. She regrets her earlier haste; the suit’s booster assist would come in handy right now. Sweat builds in her eyebrows, then burns trails to her eyes. Her gloved hand rises instinctively, only to clank against her faceplate.
She places two containers in front of the alien, side by side to block its route. This close to it, she can now see joints. There’s a grinding break in the middle of each arm, almost like an elbow. And here, closer to her, three protrusions that move as fingers, with a nub acting as thumb.
The alien creeps forward. One rock nub brushes the corner of a box. All arms freeze, and even the slow crawl stops. A minute passes, then two. The fingers flex, thumb nub catching against the plastic.
Mehtab holds her breath. She knows the composition of this planet. The alien will never have come across anything like this.
The reaction is slow but obvious: a clear distaste for the synthetic material. The arms touch then pull back. Does it taste with its fingers? Or smell? Does the plastic just feel wrong to it? Toxic? The creature angles its body away from the containers before it moves again, choosing a new path that takes a wide circle around the obstruction.
So, definitely some form of consciousness. Is it as smart as a Kolkata crow? Can it use tools? Too many unknowns. She consults her chronometer. Ten hours of darkness. She should sleep.
Georgina Kamsika is a speculative fiction writer born in Yorkshire, England, to Anglo-Indian immigrant parents and has spent most of her life explaining her English first name, Polish surname and South Asian features. She graduated from the Clarion West workshop in 2012, was the UNESCO Cities of Literature Writer for Wonju in 2022.
As a second-generation immigrant, her work often utilises the speculative element to examine power structures that are mirrored in the real world, touching on issues of race, class, and gender. She can be found at kamsika.com and @GKamsika on most socials.
Copyright © 2025 Georgina Kamsika