Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

They say never start a story with a waking, but when you’ve been hard asleep for thirty years it’s difficult to know where else to begin.

Start with a waking, end with a wake, maybe.

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.

I mean, honestly, I’ve survived so much by now, I should be feeling immortal.

A final irony, the career academic ending his life as a lesson.

Actual dinner, spun out of an actual food printer, just like Momma used to make.

“Professor Daghdev,” the commandant tells me, “you are a convicted dissident and heterodox thinker. You have been sent to the extrasolar camps. Because they know, back home, what our situation here is, you were diverted to one of the least lethal destinations within human reach. But Kiln will still kill you, sooner or later. It kills them all, the Labour. It’s what the Labour is for. It’s what you’re for. But in recognition of the assistance you can provide, I am offering you the opportunity for it to be later.”

I stare up at the impossible things. These alien works. Built. Incontestably, intelligently built. Supplied with power too, Terolan said. A network of communities (were they?) spread over the planet. A civilization (was it?) reduced now to just dry relics like this.

So where were the remains of the kiln-makers of Kiln?

You have to understand that a big part of the Mandate was based on the absolute nature of knowledge. You can’t dictate properly unless you have a list of things that are right and lawful against a list of things that aren’t, and never the twain shall meet.

Life under a life sentence can be better, or it can be worse. He showed me the first, and now I’m seeing the second. Or maybe worse is relative. I haven’t seen Excursions yet.

As it turns out, I’ve got a fair amount of worse to go.

It’s fear of the whip, not greed, that turns us all into potential betrayers.

Machines are expensive. Humans who’ve fallen foul of the Mandate’s justice system, on the other hand, are in ready supply and can be shipped out relatively cheaply, if you freeze-dry them and don’t have any intention of bringing them back.

Earth has been excised from my life and my future, and all thoughts of travel time and relativity and the rest can join it.

If I’m a personnel file, it’s one she hasn’t opened.

Kiln. Kiln is in charge. Any control we think we have is purely illusory.

“From now on, Arton, you are a champion of Orthodoxy. We are here to find out what happened to the people who built these ruins, do you understand?”

For a brief moment I both like Terolan more and feel a little sorry for him. Then I remember the example tank and all the other cautionary tales I’ve heard. 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.

Science, as a creed, should care about truth. It shouldn’t be bent for political aims.

But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you.

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.

If a lion could speak, as the saying goes, we couldn’t understand it, but we could sure as hell anatomize its larynx.

A man of leather, bone and spite, and here I am just flab and book learning in comparison.

“Sometimes,” they say, “you just need to burn something to feel better.”

How can you learn the ecology when everything can switch partners the moment the dance changes tempo?

Hope is what it’s about. That most human of qualities.

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

Every revolutionary group I ever knew spent far longer clutching for how to describe what they were than talking about what they were going to do.

Madness and sanity are judged by majority norms, after all, and if it’s all of us on one side and just him on the other, who’s mad exactly?

It does, I admit, sound profoundly sinister when I talk about it like this. But I mean it literally. Know thyself is the Earth adage, but here on Kiln it’s Know one another.

“You ever think about the fundamental paradox of our society? How they build a tight-knit machine of a state by breaking everyone down into solitary units turned against each other? How you compel mass obedience out of the most individualistic drives of selfishness, greed and fear?”