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.

Except, contrary to the Mandate’s fond imaginings, the universe isn’t a place of binaries. Control is not either absolute or absent. It’s a gradient, and here we are at the shallow end. The Mandate’s writ here is finite and thin, a veneer of authority over an angry pulsing vein of resentment.

“The Mandate is simultaneously deeply interested in science and utterly hates it,” I tell him. “Science is what gives them their legitimacy. Their… mandate, actually. Their justification for doing everything they do is that they have a logical, rational piece of thinking, which means it’s the best way to do things for the greatest number of people. So they love science, because it gives them permission to do all the shit they do. Right up to the point someone puts together an inconvenient but cogent argument that gets in the way of how they want the universe to be. They want very specific answers from science. Black and white answers to complex questions. Everything sorted into predetermined boxes.”

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.

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.

“Anyway, you can have Science in place of God.” It feels good to talk like this, even hushed and crammed into a corridor. I haven’t had a chance to stretch these mental muscles for a while. “People’ve dressed up their justifications in a white lab coat since lab coats got white. Except science can also be powerfully inconvenient in that it’s supposed to shift to follow what you’ve learned about the world, while doctrine is supposed to be iron. And the universe is inconveniently big and complex, you know? You keep moving out from your core need of ‘we have to justify why we get to tell you what to do,’ and the map keeps unrolling. There’s always new territory you need to constrain to fit your social constructs. Until you’ve built an entire model of the universe with you at the centre of it. Whether God put you there or you’re the inevitable product of evolution.”

Humility is a humiliating thing to learn at my age.

An enquiring scientific mind and a rigid orthodox thinker, all crammed into that one head. Simultaneously driven to find out the answer, and absolutely sure he knows what that answer will be. Which means, to academics like us, he’s a very dangerous man indeed.

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

The unspoken llmus, who has always been meek and neat and controlled because, when you don’t fit into the precise boxes the Mandate orthodoxy prefers, you try not to have too many protruding spikes and edges to your persona, in case they catch on something. In the end it was their intellectual edges that tore the veil and had them swept up in the purge, but now I wonder just how many other heresies and idiosyncrasies Ilmus burned inside themself before then. Sacrifices on the Mandate’s altar, just so they could keep on living.

This is what sinks revolutions. The heavy hand of the state, squeezing everyone. The surveillance and informants, and neighbour watching neighbour, until you end up doubting everyone except yourself. You even end up doubting yourself.

You look at the death they sentenced you to, and squint until you can pretend it’s living.

The thought that maybe this is a constant of intelligence, anywhere you can see the sky and have eyes to do it with. Does all life of sufficient complexity look up after sunset and wonder at the lights and what they mean?

A people without hope, what will they do? One of two things: nothing, or everything.

My fragile clay was thrust into the Kiln, and I feared the burning, but now I see the shape of me as I’m drawn out. Fired and fit.

What links us to the world links us to each other. What links us to each other is part of a chain that reaches far into the past.

Empathy is a hole that lets the rain in. That’s how they get us.

Let this cup be taken from me, I think, and isn’t my self, the understanding of my individual separation from my fellows, that cup?

The old Arton Daghdev who lived with fear and uncertainty, and never truly knew another person. Who doubted everyone, and because of that came to doubt himself. Who lived in a world where the vast mass of billions of people were crammed shoulder to shoulder and in each other’s armpits and yet each one alone.

And to a greater or lesser extent, all my past conversations with other people were like this. Words dropped into a well, then attempting to read the ripples for the true meaning of what’s being said.

My absence impoverishes the whole, but not so much as all that. No more than anyone else’s would.

Here in my final moments, before they feed me to the incinerator, I am sanguine. It’s because the others are well. I’m cut off from them, and the basal substance of me cries out at the severed ties, but I am a man still. I am a mind, and the greater good can be grasped by the solitary intellect as well as the community spirit.

I am a human and I am something else.

He doesn’t understand that what we have is the greatest stabilizing influence a human mind ever encountered. Having someone else to lean on isn’t a thing anyone should be ashamed of. I’d never be able to do this without her.

I hunt for a camera and stare into it, searching for that moment of connection.

can do anything, because I am the world. And, for that reason, I do nothing. I’m so full of potential that my little human body seems irrelevant.

We’re all together in the dream that Kiln is having, and the decisions just happen in the space between us.

I see there our fate, when our long lives are gone. Back to the soil of an alien world, nothing wasted.

I want to tell him that I’m still me, because I am. But at the same time, yes, I’ve changed. Because who could possibly experience all this and not change? What would be the point of it, if the man who walked out the far end of these events was the same as the one who walked in?

you can still be yourself, even as you become a part of something greater.

Peace arrives, and in that peace we come to terms with what we’ve become. Because we are changed, and that’s hard. It’s like therapy. Sometimes in order to escape the bad place you’re in, you have to go through trauma and hardship. Sometimes letting go of the barbed wire means tearing your skin some more, before you’re free. We talk, and information passes between us that is not talk. We try to understand what it is that we understand.

The whole world, awake—a greater thing that we are an integral part of now. It’s difficult to adjust to, each one of us being simultaneously many things. We could get lost easily. Perhaps the only thing that saves us from being washed away by that ocean of thought is the fact that, the moment we did lose ourselves, the greater mind would lose itself too. It relies on our individual complexity to exist in its active state. Without us it would be no more than sleeping seeds waiting for the rain.

I am Arton Daghdev still, and I know that what we will bring to Earth is the second greatest monstrosity ever perpetrated upon the human species. But the thought of what we might become is irresistible. Presented with the means, how could we not? We brought Kiln back to an awareness of itself. Maybe we can do the same with Earth. Start with a waking, end with an awakening.