Utopias of the Third Kind Read online

  Vandana Singh

  Winner of the

  Carl Brandon Parallax Award

  Finalist for

  Philip K. Dick Award

  BSFA (British Science Fiction Award)

  Nominated for

  Locus Award

  Honor List

  Tiptree Award

  “Sweeping starscapes and daring cosmology … make Singh a worthy heir to Cordwainer Smith and Arthur C. Clarke.”

  —Chris Moriarty, Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Vandana Singh’s science fiction … highlights the interplay between scientific and mythic narratives, focusing on the ways that ‘stories make the world.’ She combines seemingly opposed categories, such as tradition and modernity, human and animal (or machine), the urban and the natural, and—most frequently—myth and science.”

  —Michael Saler, Times Literary Supplement

  “There’s a wonderful discordance between the cool, reflective quality of Singh’s prose and the colorful imagery and powerful longing in her narratives.”

  —Washington Post

  Utopias of the Third Kind

  plus

  PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES

  1. The Left Left Behind

  Terry Bisson

  2. The Lucky Strike

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  3. The Underbelly

  Gary Phillips

  4. Mammoths of the Great Plains

  Eleanor Arnason

  5. Modem Times 2.0

  Michael Moorcock

  6. The Wild Girls

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  7. Surfing the Gnarl

  Rudy Rucker

  8. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

  Cory Doctorow

  9. Report from Planet Midnight

  Nalo Hopkinson

  10. The Human Front

  Ken MacLeod

  11. New Taboos

  John Shirley

  12. The Science of Herself

  Karen Joy Fowler

  13. Raising Hell

  Norman Spinrad

  14. Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials

  Paul Krassner

  15. My Life, My Body

  Marge Piercy

  16. Gypsy

  Carter Scholz

  17. Miracles Ain’t What They Used to Be

  Joe R. Lansdale

  18. Fire.

  Elizabeth Hand

  19. Totalitopia

  John Crowley

  20. The Atheist in the Attic

  Samuel R. Delany

  21. Thoreau’s Microscope

  Michael Blumlein

  22. The Beatrix Gates

  Rachel Pollack

  23. A City Made of Words

  Paul Park

  24. Talk like a Man

  Nisi Shawl

  25. Big Girl

  Meg Elison

  26. The Planetbreaker’s Son

  Nick Mamatas

  27. The First Law of Thermodynamics

  James Patrick Kelly

  28. Utopias of the Third Kind

  Vandana Singh

  29 Night Shift

  Eileen Gunn

  30 The Collapsing Frontier

  Jonathan Lethem

  Utopias of the Third Kind

  plus

  Lamentations in a Lost Tongue

  plus

  Arctic Sky

  and much more

  Vandana Singh

  PM PRESS | 2022

  “Lamentations in a Lost Tongue,” original to this volume, is a selection from a yet unfinished longer story.

  “Arctic Sky” was first published in Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, Zubaan Books, 2014.

  “Utopias of the Third Kind” is original to this volume.

  “Hunger” was first published in Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, Small Beer Press, 2007.

  “The Room on the Roof” was first published in Polyphony, Wheatland Press, 2002.

  “True Journey Is Return: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin” was published in Antariksh Yatra, Vandana Singh’s blog, 2018.

  Utopias of the Third Kind

  Vandana Singh © 2022

  This edition © PM Press

  ISBN (paperback): 9781629639154

  ISBN (ebook): 9781629639246

  LCCN: 2021936608

  Series editor: Terry Bisson

  Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com

  Author photo by Claudia Ruiz Gustafson

  Insides by Jonathan Rowland

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the USA

  Contents

  Lamentations in a Lost Tongue

  Arctic Sky

  Utopias of the Third Kind

  Hunger

  “A Source of Immense Richness” Vandana Singh interviewed by Terry Bisson

  The Room on the Roof

  True Journey Is Return: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Lamentations in a Lost Tongue

  I MET HIM IN a town in California. I had been wandering aimlessly, looking into shop windows, and found myself before an optician’s. I was looking unseeingly at a tower of artificial tears in the window of the store, thinking about what to do next, and plagued by a faint sense of melancholy. Then the reflection of a man appeared next to my own and I turned to find beside me a thin, spare, older man about my height. He was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and corduroy pants, and he was dark brown, with a fine, lined, handsome face. His black hair was streaked with gray. There was a subtle sense of his being out of place—in a very different way than the displaced feeling that was my own constant companion. He was staring at the display of artificial tears.

  “Do you know what that is?” he asked, looking at me for the first time.

  “Artificial tears?” I said, puzzled.

  “Asombroso,” he said softly, staring at the display. Then, louder, looking at me:

  “Amazing! So much sorrow in the whole wide world that we have run out of tears and they must make more!”

  He gave a short laugh that was half wonder, half something else I couldn’t name, smiled politely at me, and turned and walked down the street. As he walked away I saw the burden of a heavy sorrow on his stooped shoulders; yet he walked with energy, with a spring in his step.

  Urged by a sudden compulsion, I hurried after him.

  “Please, I’d like to speak with you.” I looked around a little wildly, and there, like a miracle, was a café with outdoor tables. “A cup of coffee?”

  With the coffee before us, I tried to engage him in conversation. Between his fair English and my schoolgirl Spanish, we managed quite well. I had thought he was, perhaps, from the highlands of Mexico, somewhere remote. It turned out he was an insurance agent in a small town in Peru. He had grown up in a village up the mountain from the town, where his family had farmed with increasing difficulty, as the mountain springs dried up. His ancestry was mixed Spanish and Indigenous, he said. He was a widower, visiting his daughter and her family, his first trip away from the small town. He spoke of the awe he had felt arriving in Lima. And then to take a plane, to fly above the mountains, over the clouds to LA! It had been profoundly disorienting.

  “I’ve seen it on TV,” he said. “I know the world is full of marvels. But to walk in these streets—that’s something else.”

  “Do you ever go back to your village?” I asked him.

  “Not often,” he said. A distant look came into his eyes—he saw, not the clamor of the street before us, but the high mountains of the village. I felt him slipping away from our conversation. I wanted to hold on to him, to tell him—look, in some way I don’t understand, we’re related. Not by blood but something more subtle. And I wanted to know the nature of the great sorrow he carried. It seemed to me that the shadows around him carried the weight and tears of something larger than one person’s life. Fanciful thought! But that urgency compelled me to pull out the sketch of what I called the symbol and push it across the table to him.

  “I’m wondering,” I said, as I had so many times before, “whether you’ve seen anything like this before.”

  He came back from wherever he was and stared at the piece of paper. He started to shake his head. Then he stared at it again. Abruptly, his shoulders sagged. He covered his face with his hands. He looked at me.

  “I have never seen such a thing,” he said. “But—it reminds me. There’s a place up over my village, where the spring was. The water used to come out from under a rock and circle down, something like this, this espiral … Spiral? Yes. And when you looked up from one place where I liked to sit, you would see the sun in the center of the two peaks. Of the mountain. Like in your picture, but it is not quite the same. Enough to remind me.”

  People have said different things about the symbol. To one person, it’s a woman, arms flung out, dancing; they ignore the broken spiral. To another person the spiral reminds them of something they’ve seen, perhaps a pattern on a carpet, but the dot and the wings or arms are a peripheral add-on. This man was among the few to whom the symbol meant something in its entirety.

  The symbol is my excuse for the aimless wanderings of my early retirement. Since there is no particular direction, no rudder in my life, I have clung to this fortuitous discovery, a rough sketch on a crumpled piece of paper that I found in a park in Delhi. Not having any compelling stories of my own in a life of unrelenting ordinariness, I have found that the symb
ol gives me access, for a while, to the far more interesting lives of others. Stories in which I become, for a brief moment, a listener or receiver, if not a participant. After all, every word written needs a blank page, every song a silence against which the notes are heard.

  “Please, do tell me, more,” I said. I saw the tears rise in his dark eyes.

  “The spring,” he said. “The first thing I remember seeing as a child. It was life to our village. My mother—she used to send us children to the high pool to get the water, in the summers when the big one dried out.”

  Through his words I saw the arid, rocky rise of the mountainside, the streaks of snow on the high slopes like banners. The wind blowing cold and dry. The patient llamas on an outcrop against the sky. The father, face weathered by the sun and toil, in a stony field of alfalfa. The high, clear voices of children, and against it all, the constant, reassuring sound of water, faint but discernible. The boy standing at the very spot where, at a certain time in the afternoon, the sun would be exactly between two peaks on the top of the mountain, and you could see the glacial meltwater meandering down the slope, circling around the outcrops, to fall into a pool as cold and clear as the winter sky. From here it overflowed into a thin stream that fed a larger pool near the village below. One evening the boy’s uncle came from a town two valleys away to visit, saying he could take his nephew back with him, to school and a job and a new life.

  The boy had come to this spot to think. He saw the sun above the mountain, and the water. And then the water turned into a mighty stream and came roaring down, but when it got to him it vanished, and there was, just as suddenly, nothing—just dry desert and the sun beating down, and the sense of terrible loss. At this point the boy sank to his knees in horror, but suddenly he was back in the normal world, with the water spiraling down as before and the tips of his dusty old shoes wet with it.

  “I had seen a vision,” he told me. “It said the spring would flood, and then dry up, and there would be no more farming. But I didn’t know that then. I told my parents what I had seen, and they looked at each other, and they let me go. I left my village and became—someone else. My parents refused to leave, so I would go to see them and my sisters and brothers. Three years before they died, there was a flood, and my youngest brother was one of the ones killed. The next summer the stream dried up.”

  I sensed that was not the end of the story. He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced, and bit into the pastry. He passed his hand over his eyes.

  “Wherever I go” he said. He stopped, cleared his throat. I felt again the presence of a sorrow much larger than the man before me.

  “Wherever I go,” he said, “I get a feeling. Not the vision, that’s only happened one other time.”

  He didn’t tell me about the other time. He said that whenever he is close to water, or where water might have been, he senses its past or future. He knows, for example, that there’s the ghost of a waterfall in the rocky mountainside behind the row of shops. No trace remains that is obvious to the eye, but it is there, and he can tell that the water is cascading down and through the shoe store, and over the street, splashing us as it goes past. No matter where he goes, he is haunted by the ghosts of streams, rivers, and pools. His one trip to the ocean was so overwhelming that he cannot even talk about it. So he stays in his small town, where he knows his ghosts, and he visits the sacred pools and springs as a man might visit friends who will understand his craziness, and because they give him some peace.

  “I came all the way here,” he said, smiling a little, “because my daughter insisted. I had to come. I was afraid, but now I am here. Thank you for the coffee, and for listening. You are very kind.”

  I didn’t stop him when, after a while, he got up to leave. I resisted the urge to tell him I would like to know him better, that I felt a connection between us that must mean something. We said our goodbyes, and I watched him walk along the street. He didn’t need any artificial tears. I understood at last what kinds of sorrows he carried with him as he left the sidewalk to walk along the curving edge of the vanished stream.

  It was then that it came to me that the land itself is a page on which a greater and more complex story is continually being written—that what I called “the symbol” was perhaps a fragment, a letter of that script which only a few have learned to read. That we carry around with us, perhaps consciously, perhaps not, ghostly sorrows that may well be dirges, laments in ancient, earthy languages long forgotten.

  Because a story needs its silences, I will not tell you whether I met him again the next day. I will not tell you whether we talked until dawn in an outdoor café, whether he and I went tracing the vanished streams of that town for the entire week that I was there, whether I got to know him in the dark of my hotel room with the fireflies dancing against the window, whether, after the sweet comfort that strangers who are not strangers can give to each other after lifetimes of being apart, I have begun to hear, very faintly, the sound of rushing water underneath the asphalt and concrete veneer of civilization, a song in a language I hope someday to understand.

  Arctic Sky

  I WAS LET OUT of prison on my seventeenth birthday. That was yesterday.

  Eight months ago I was a different person. Everything was different. There was, for instance, the light of sun on snow, the endless sea, the sky of the Arctic. I thought I was brave, a rebel taking on the greatest cause in the history of humankind. On the ship Valiant, sailing from Northern Canada to the East Siberian Sea, the light reminded me of a certain look I remembered in my mother’s eyes. Angry as I was with the world, I felt a kind of peace here, a momentary easing of breath.

  I remember, when we got to our destination, how the oil rig was a tiny blip in the border between sea and sky, a crooked arm raised up, a scarecrow. TundraSaur’s rig was only the second major oil drilling operation in the Arctic, but the world’s oil companies were desperately scrambling for permits to start drilling. Beside me on the deck, Natalia stared at the shoreline of her country, her jaw set. Her hair was streaked with gray, and there was a scar on her jawbone shaped like a sword. She had led several protests in Russia and had been in prison twice. We had barely spoken to each other for the past three days—she was angry with me for insisting I would take part in the action, and had told me horror stories of prison life. Her anger was no match for my obstinacy, although if I hadn’t lied about my age, the others would not have supported me. Tentatively I reached out and pressed her hand where it clutched the railing. She didn’t look at me or smile; just nodded, patted my hand, and went inside. A truce of sorts.

  We laid anchor just outside Russian waters. Now the rig loomed large before us. There were four security boats reconnoitering the waters around it. Natalia spoke to them in rapid Russian over the radio. “We come in peace,” she said, “to protest the drilling for oil in the Arctic. We are currently at anchor in international waters.”

  A man replied belligerently in Russian.

  “He’s just warning us we’ll be arrested if we enter Russian waters,” Natalia said. Now the game was afoot.

  The night before the action felt to me like the last night in the world. I had volunteered to be among those courting arrest because I wanted to bring climate change to the attention of the Indian public. Although there was a national action plan on climate, the government was building coal-fired power plants as though there was no tomorrow. (With that much fossil fuel being burned, there wouldn’t be). All the work of scientists like my mother, all their warnings, had gone to nothing. Reading the news about cyclones and floods, heat waves and freak storms was bad enough. When the sea came for Mumbai, breaching the new sea wall and sweeping away the familiar streets of my childhood, it brought horrors from which even Fahad Uncle couldn’t protect me. I was haunted—by my mother’s eyes, when she lay dying, by the memory of walking through waist-deep flood waters, terrified I’d be swept away. In my nightmares I heard the roar of the water, felt Mona’s hand slip from mine, again and again. She had been my mother’s graduate student. Fahad Uncle shouted, grabbed me, made a leap for her, but the current was too strong. There were snakes in the water, and the distended bodies of slum children, and once, a pink, plastic doll with bright orange hair, smiling maniacally. Three years later there are still nights I can’t sleep.