In The Stars' Brilliance — Part Seven
By Georgina Kamsika
A sudden thrill drags her back to memories of her youth: a junglee child covered in mud and baked dark by the sun, ever hunting, ever finding. Each rock was a fossil, every star part of a constellation. Her baba laughed at her discoveries.
It dawns on her now why this feels like that Kolkata of her youth: no authority breathes over her shoulder, no one cares what she spends her time doing. In fact, there is more freedom here than there ever was back home. No prying aunty eyes loom over the far-off ridges, no Amma calling her home. Nobody questioning her decisions: about what to wear, what to do, how to love. While it is possible that this alien judges her for the inelegance of her space suit, she will never know.
And with that the pain departs. The very last of the crushing weight is lifted. Breathing deeply within the confines of her suit, she runs a hand over the blossoms again. This is her discovery, her planet. And she is free to do with it whatever she wishes.
Mysterious purpose complete, the creature heads up the hill toward the sandy basin containing Mehtab’s habitat. Tonight—maybe tomorrow morning—its arms will touch the synthetic walls. How will it react to something so alien? Will it adjust its course to avoid the foreign object? Will it stop to analyse? Might it react in anger—or defence—and destroy her habitat?
She presses her hand against the creature’s pollen-dusted skin. It is not the crusty, hard rock that she expects; it gives at her touch, and a damp substance clings to her glove, slimy and sticky. Slight resistance tugs as she pulls away, and she leaves an imprint behind.
Maybe she will never communicate with it. As with the elephants and dolphins of earth, it is an impossible dream. But she can try. What else is there to do? The alien gives her a purpose. She will see—has already seen—things no one has before. She will interact with a whole new ecosystem, name it, maybe change it—join with it.
Her habitat will fail, her food systems and air recyclers collapse, but she will leave a mark here, however faint, for the rest of time. And she will always have her father’s poetry and Lakini’s love to sustain her.
Perhaps she will reincarnate as another roving monolith, a twin to her silent companion, sweeping these alien fields of purple blooms, or perhaps as one of the insects that harvests the pollen from a monolith’s skin. Or another as yet unknown creature.
The alien inches closer. Its path converges with her trail to the habitat and smudges her footprints. Her back to the suns, Mehtab follows. Everything has two shadows—gifts of the binary suns. Today one is dark and one a fainter echo. Mehtab’s shadows paint her image in duplicate across the slope of the creature’s retreating back.
The tracks she’s left in the soft sand tell the tale of her visits to the alien: the comings and goings, the life she has. The creature’s trail now joins her own, envelops it, sweeping and blurring her footprints—overwriting but not erasing her record, making it a story of them both.
She waits for the ache to fill her chest, but there is none. She steps onto the freshly wetted path. Her boot leaves a new print, sharp and clean, stark black below its sunward edge. One human, two shadows, and a thing she may spend the remainder of her life hoping to understand. At least she will not die alone.
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
This is such a lovely story! Existential dread, culture, and connection with the unknown all rolled into one. A heartwarming ending in the face of cold, beautiful, endless universe. Fantastic job!