Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“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!”

Even the commandant looked like he’d taken a mouthful of wasps right before he sat down with us to breakfast.

“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. 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.”

Humility is a humiliating thing to learn at my age.

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

That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of your goods, when they come for that demographic which includes you. 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. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. 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.

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.

She’s not political and never was, at least until now. Being incarcerated by an oppressive regime makes you political by default.

I mention once that they’re paranoid but Ilmus corrects me, pedantic to a fault. Paranoia, they note, is a term reserved for irrational fears.

Sometimes you go through your whole life not rocking the boat and they throw you over the side anyway. Any oppressive system needs an element of arbitrary punishment just to keep people properly on their toes.

I have ceased to believe in randomness, because seeing random chance in the world is the result of insufficient data and we all know too much now.

The thing with a tree, though, the thing with a snake, the thing with a human… that branch, fanged mouth, or vaunted highly evolved brain are absolutely fucked without a trunk or a body.

“This could have been your crowning achievement,” he tells me. “To contribute to solving the mystery. Instead of which you make it all about politics.” Thus sayeth the politician when the scientist ventures an opinion.

I was the great thinker, wasn’t I? So why do I feel each individual idea rattle around the inside of my skull like dried peas, without anyone else to appreciate them? A late time in life to learn that I am indeed not an island. Not even a peninsula or an isthmus, but a landlocked little county utterly dependent on cross-border trade with all my neighbours.

“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?”