In The Stars' Brilliance — Part One
By Georgina Kamsika
Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow readers! This week, we have a stellar new story by the brilliant writer Georgina Kamsika. This story has a rocky start, by which I mean that there's a lot of rocks about. - The Editor
In The Stars’ Brilliance
By Georgina Kamsika
Flares from the twin suns blind Mehtab despite her suit’s glare-resist faceplate. She pivots away, too buoyant in the low gravity, and stares at her own doubled shadow, waiting patiently until her vision clears. Then, slowly, she swings toward the light, her attention fixed on the thing silhouetted before her.
The thing that triggered her habitat’s sensors, but that has not, in the nearly three hours she’s been watching it, registered her presence. It looks like nothing but an eight-foot-tall lump of crimson rock sliding over the red-gold sand. There’s no suggestion of a head—no pits or bumps indicating eyes or nose or mouth—but numerous spindly limbs like extruded magma reaching, slowly sweeping, always without discernible pattern.
This thing, this alien, takes as much notice of Mehtab as her peers did back home. If they could be called peers. Foolhardy youths, all—Mehtab included—desperate to escape a dying world.
She tries to recall the lectures on first contact, but like her classmates, she paid little attention. Crammed armpit-to-elbow in an enormous warehouse, she spent more time giggling and flirting than listening to those dry professors. Lakini’s dimpled smile impressed her though—more than any protocols for encountering alien life. The general belief was of a cold and empty universe. What more did she need to know? But now, and not for the first time, Mehtab wishes her training hadn’t been so rushed.
Countries all over the dying globe had accelerated their space programs, racing to stake claim to habitable exoplanets. NASA had the biggest budget, but China and India, with their technology leads—and inexhaustible populations—soon outstripped the US.
All over the world, young people were enticed into astronaut training. In Kolkata alone, Mehtab’s cohort of eighteen-year-old hopefuls numbered in the hundreds. Some volunteered out of a sense of duty, some out of despair, but there was little difference in the end: die with your planet or die for it—an unspoken motto of the Indian Space Research Organization.
There were rigorous physical and mental tests, then week after week of lessons. Once, astronaut training might have taken months, years even, but time was something Earth no longer had.
Rocket after superluminal rocket machine-gunned out into the blackness. Star-seeding, the ISRO called it. Barely trained astronauts in one-way spacecraft were cheap—cheaper than AI-driven probes, and more replaceable. China made no public declarations, but the world noted their launches too. NASA were still planning out their timetable when Mehtab launched.
An ache spreads through her chest. She blinks away moisture and stares up into the brightness, picturing a curve of blue and green marbled with white.
So now, this alien, this thing, is a glitch in the system. An anomaly in Mehtab’s concept of the universe. A lump that moves ever forward toward a horizon remarkable only for never changing. A sheet of red sand before rocky outcroppings tall as mountains. No other signs of life, no other living monoliths, no birds, no insects, nothing.
Like a lone reed swaying in the desert breeze, I surrender to the stillness. For in the depths of solitude, I find a union with the infinite divine. Words her father might speak to her now if he could. A poet, her father brought hope to their dying world. Hope Mehtab wanted to continue with her journey.
A layer of excreted slime marks the thing’s passage, a path of dampness clumping the fine sand. Mehtab is no biologist—there weren’t experts of any kind among her class—but she can take a sample. Her mission is a bust, so she might as well do something with her time.
Her suit beeps a warning. Low oxygen. Time to head back. Mehtab takes a last look at the alien. It moves at such a glacial pace that in the hours she’s observed, it has covered only a few feet. Surely, it’s safe to leave. And besides, what else can she do?
The sky above burns clear. No rain clouds, no pollution or smog, just a blinding yellow-white atmosphere. The walk to her habitat won’t take long.
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