Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Mandate is very into polar binaries, it’s in all their rhetoric. “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.” Or countless variants on that. “You don’t want these laws? Then you must want rampant anarchy!” was the one you saw trotted out most often.

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.”

You shoot someone up with a cylinder of even random Earth microbes and it’s not going to go well. With Kiln germs it’s like Earth microbes with a doctorate in invasive fuckery, and the concoction has gone to work with a will. There’s stuff growing on him, out the edges of his eyes and from under the fingernails of his one hand.

Mostly it’s human sweat and toil, though. This sort of thing is hard to properly automate, while humans are good at adjusting and adapting on the job. That’s part of it. More than that, though, it’s expensive to automate, and would require a highly trained crew of valuable technicians and operators running your fleet of shiny machines. Because once you invest in automation, you have to take care of your junk. With labourer-class people, not so much. It’s cheaper to have a half-assed crew of expendables that you know you’re never going to have to return in good condition or risk losing your deposit. Earth has a lot of surplus people

Someone once said, probably, that exploring an alien planet was terribly intrepid, bold and glamorous, and that someone can sod off, frankly. Because, once you have a full-on space industry and alien planets you can physically go to, you find it’s actually quite inconvenient to do so. The business of physically exploring them becomes devolved to your society’s equivalent of the unpaid office intern. Someone who won’t be missed, and whose sudden demise won’t much impede the mission.

Any oppressive system needs an element of arbitrary punishment just to keep people properly on their toes.

And then the guards in their heavy suits are there, caught in that weird Schrödinger’s Thug situation, where they want to drag me about as painfully as they can while simultaneously not aggravating my condition to the extent it will lessen the impact of all the rest of the pain they have planned for me later.