Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

‘What did I do?’ I demand, and by the second time it’s more pleading and begging. There aren’t many good reasons to be hauled off to see the big man. And I can’t see why they’d need to make an example of someone right now, given all the varied examples that our delivery method provided us with, but that’s the only thing I can think of. They’re going to dangle me from the scaffolding just to make sure everyone else is sufficiently educated as to the way things are run around here. A final irony, the career academic ending his life as a lesson.

‘What?’ they’d say. ‘You don’t want this unpleasant circumstance we’re forcing on you? Then you’re obviously in favour of this absurdly exaggerated opposite we’ve just invented.’

It’s not enough to be able to do a thing. People, human people, want to be able to believe it’s right to do so. The first thing those in authority do, after they’ve used main force and brutality to take over, is paper over everything with reasons why they were right to do it. Both because it helps you keep people in line if you can get them to believe it, and because it makes it easier to enjoy the spoils of your brutality if you convince yourself you’ve earned it. Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small. There’s something in the way humans are wired that means we want to be right by some external measure. So we invent philosophies to tell us we were right to do what we did and we’re allowed to do what we want. You find a god, basically, who tells you you’re okay. And maybe it’s actual God, because that’s an easy out. God says. Why? If you’re asking that question then you haven’t got faith and you’re out of the God club.’

Just because the tyrant dresses like a clown doesn’t mean he’s funny.

The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.

And it is lies about science which cut most deeply, telling you that this or that group of people are naturally inferior, or another group has an innate ability to lead. That there is sufficient genetic distinction to make the call, when in actuality we share the vast bulk of our inheritance with mushrooms. Or else that, because of this kinship with mushrooms, our leaders are justified in keeping us in the dark and feeding us shit.

And sometimes you need the taste of piss in your coffee to wake you up and remind you how the world treats you.

You hear ‘survival of the fittest’ and imagine evolution like a boxing match, where the last champ left in the ring takes the belt. What makes you ‘fittest’ isn’t being bigger and stronger than everything else. It isn’t even necessarily being better at any given thing than everything else. Because you need everything else. That’s how biology works. Each cell needs the other cells, each organ needs the other organs, each organism needs the other organisms. The base unit of life is all life. But let me tell you about Kiln. It makes Earth look like a boxing match. How do you become the fittest on Kiln? It’s not about how many enemy empires you can trample to dust with your sandalled feet. Surviving on Kiln is all about how much life you can interlock with. The services you can provide. On Kiln no species is an island. Nothing needs to be ruggedly self-sufficient, because there’s always someone who can do the thing for you, better than you could, in exchange for what you’ve got. Evolution as a barter economy. Everything becoming better and better at finding ways to live with its neighbours. Daniel in the lions’ den lets the lions eat his legs, because then they will carry him meekly about on their backs.

Well, none of that’s on the table. I’m on the table, though.