Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

And of all things, in the midst of that chaos, to remember I am an ecologist. Out in space where there isn’t even an ecology. Was there ever a less useful piece of self-knowledge?

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.

part of the long-term plan. They gave us enough rope, and the purges only started after every loudmouth malcontent had been given a chance to identify themselves.

(it’s always reassuring when the science needs sick people on hand as a ready resource, yes indeed).

we’ve found other minds. And three complex ecologies out of seventy-eight worlds is one thing, but one other intelligent species in the whole universe cracks all our assumptions wide open. For a moment I forget that I’m a prisoner because my mind has just been freed. The guards muscle in before I can assess it further, and march me off to go before the commandant. I haven’t been in the camp five minutes and already it seems I’m in trouble.

All that effort just to trap a few witless fools who’d never have strayed if not for the prearranged inducements of professional traitors.

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.”

it. Ilmus was someone who had rejected binaries all their life. Small wonder they were high on the list when the scholastic purges first came.

They have the mostly-not-lethal crowd guns, but the actually-quite-lethal pistols too, as well as chemical sprays and truncheons, all the symbols of a happy and well-adjusted state.

Her own eyes are wide too, nakedly scared for just one moment before she collects herself and reminds herself who’s in charge. Kiln. Kiln is in charge. Any control we think we have is purely illusory. But she draws the illusion about herself like the emperor’s new clothes and takes comfort from it nonetheless.

On Kiln it apparently occurs with large and complex organisms too, via some means of trait selection not yet properly understood. This gives rise to a kind of rapid-response evolution. Everything is adapting to everything else constantly.

Scientific Philanthropy, right? ‘The universe has a direction.’”

He knows that every place I’ve ever ended up was because the science, the finding out, mattered the most to me. And Kiln is a great big abyss of finding out waiting to be plumbed.

“Cognitive dissonance, yes. 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.

You can have a divine backing for any angle of an argument, and it’s not like religion just goes meekly away when persecuted.

The universe is a pyramid: physics leading to chemistry, leading to biology; microbes leading to worms, leading to vertebrates, leading to apes, leading to us; then the broad mass of humanity leading to Mandate officials, leading to the fine minds of the Cientificos. Because why bother building a pyramid if it’s not you on the very spindly tip of it?

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.

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

While the guards are welded together by the Mandate’s single purpose to control, we are all individuals seeking individually to resist. And so we break under their hammer. We splinter into ever-smaller groups or else get crushed together in too small a space. They contain us and they break us.

Exposed to what? To everything that is Kiln. That fantastically opportunistic biosphere that says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I shall find a way to infiltrate their biology and make them my own.”

in. I am a scientist, after all, not just an anarchist. Discovery!

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

Earth has a lot of surplus people and the Mandate can afford to run its transportation policy with extreme prejudice.

We laid waste to an alien ecosystem. We just… we did anti-science.” Ilmus looks at me, unrepentant. “Sometimes,” they say, “you just need to burn something to feel better.”

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.

you. I stand there in the dark, and for a moment I can forget the dire peril we’re in because a wave of wonder washes over me. 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?

Camp knew where they went down. Sent drones, even. Saw plenty of sign they were still alive. Only there was no rescue party. There wasn’t anything worth rescuing. Only people.

says. “It’s not Kiln that kills you. It’s protocols.”

The journey of seven days and nights in a wilderness starts with a single step, and it can end with one too.

She abandons her balance, over and over, because I’m there to catch and correct her.

I diubt thiz vwey much

But then the Mandate was all about those neat boxes, those false binaries. Orthodox and unorthodox; his and hers; us and them.

hypnagogic

So here we have someone who was never on a subcommittee, or robbed a bank, or even fiddled his taxes, but the algorithm looked into his data footprint and electronic pareidolia did the rest.

If you program your computers to expect wrongdoing, then they’ll most certainly find

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.

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

seeing random chance in the world is the result of insufficient data and we all know too much now. I can see how all the pieces go together, because I’m in the jigsaw.

They’re not looking for extinction but connection, and they can no longer connect with their fellow humans.

Splitting us up, separating us, must have looked like a good idea. It should have been. It’s the old playbook against the industrial organizers. But you don’t contain a disease by dispersing

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?

He feared we’d fail, so he made sure we failed.

And looming like a grand shadow behind all these Kilnish transgressions is his history on Earth.

They have full protective gear on, masks included, and gas grenades in case they need to put down a general riot. But most of all, they spark fear. That’s how they get you. How a small group of uniformed stormtroopers can always face down a turbulent crowd. Fear of their weapons, of their discipline, of the brutal force they can mete out.

Symbiosis and carnivory, an understanding that death is just a part of the deal.

there’s nothing the enforcers like more than a target that’s not fighting back.

“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?”

spiracles. As though the whole structure is about

I can do anything, because I am the world. And, for that reason, I do nothing.