Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Because who wants to spend a single cent more than you have to when you’re shipping convicts off to die in a distant world’s work camp? People who’ve gone against the system and are now going to pay their dues permanently, for the rest of their lives. People like me. I hear the figures later: twenty per cent Acceptable Wastage. If that sounds like an absurd loss of investment, then you don’t know the history of people shipping other people against their will from place to place.

We’d talked out-of-doctrine science over the fancy tea set they’d printed out for us, loudly enough to twitch the ears of our respective faculties down on Earth. The grasp of the Academic Mandate had seemed loose right then, and we believed in the freedom of knowledge and the inevitable triumph of reason.

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.