Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I am an ecologist, not a poet, but mere biology does not suffice to do justice to the appalling sight of half a hundred human beings all revivified at once, and none of them understanding why, even as you don’t understand why, and the vessel coming apart in the wrack, and the world below, the hungry maw of its gravity well.

They were yesterday’s men, we knew. We were the future. Now I’m in the future and it’s not what we thought. That iron hand was just shifting its grip. Maybe relaxing to see which parts of its contents would wriggle the most, so it could apply properly targeted pressure.

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.”

On the run, amongst the gutter dissidents, you do your best to look as wretched as possible. Not because someone stronger will take anything you have if you flaunt it, though that happens, but because everyone’s eyes will say Who did you sell to buy that?

But, dull as they surely are, they have one big advantage over firebrands like me and Ilmus. They get to go home. It’s a sentence, but with a full stop at the end, not just a trailing ellipsis that only closes with death.

All the usual departmental fun and games, except now she’s on a hostile alien world and privileges of rank include things like not being eaten while out collecting field data.

life becomes complex over time, as new variations slot into new niches that then create the opportunity for further niches still.

“A lot of symbiosis,” Primatt says, catching her breath at the top of the stairs. “Cut something open and there’s something else inside it, wearing its skin.”

Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small.

The laws of nature and the cosmos encourage conditions that give rise to life as we know it, and that life was always going to become us. Hence, we were meant. It’s manifest destiny all the way down. A mandate from the dawn of time.

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?

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.

I can’t claim to be a paragon beyond the possibility of doubt when there was just nobody left for me to name by the time I couldn’t run any more.

Is this the lesson of life across the universe? That it’ll always find a way to get you?

I wonder what he’d done, where they’d had him before they shipped him out here. What struggles and defeats have fallen into the spaces behind that hard, flat face. A disillusioned revolutionary is a dangerous thing. Like a cache of yesteryear’s explosives that might never go off or could explode all on its own.

“Losses all round” is probably the motto of humanity’s contact with extrasolar life. And more than likely the motto of my life going forwards.

“Pull the lever when I say. Then run.” That is the sum total of her instructions.

“Dead” is the default way we learn from things. Ask any scientist. There’s a limit to what you can learn just by watching the rat frolic around the maze. Eventually you have to cut the sucker open and section its tissues.

When you can’t see the woods for the trees, then you just clear back the trees to an appropriate distance, so you have a properly sterile arena to do science in, right?

I don’t think anything else brings home just how far I am from Earth more than those alien rainbows. That and the fact that these wildflowers are hungrily carnivorous.

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

Hope is what it’s about. That most human of qualities. People may rise up if you deny them food and water. They may take up the torch and the club if you suppress their religious beliefs, or separate them from their children, or a variety of other liberties that authoritarian regimes have dabbled with. But hope’s the tricky one. A people without hope, what will they do? One of two things: nothing, or everything.

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.

And sometimes you need the taste of piss in your coffee to wake you up and remind you how the world treats you.

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.

On Kiln no species is an island. Nothing needs to be ruggedly self-sufficient, because there’s always someone who can do the thing for you, better than you could, in exchange for what you’ve got. Evolution as a barter economy. Everything becoming better and better at finding ways to live with its neighbours. Daniel in the lions’ den lets the lions eat his legs, because then they will carry him meekly about on their backs.

We march on. We reach the camp. When I falter, someone comes back for me. Empathy is a hole that lets the rain in. That’s how they get us.

It hadn’t even saved him from transportation, in the end. Every time he’d turned someone in, a little of the unorthodoxy had stuck to his fingers, until he’d looked as dirty as the rest of us and they shipped him out.

It’s amazing how little you can buy someone for, sometimes.

The spores can get into their brain and turn them mad, but it’s only madness if you’re a devotee of the Mandate’s fuckery. By any rational human standard, it’s sanity. Everyone will smile and hug it out, and we’ll run naked through the happy woods of Kiln like nature’s children. And possibly, if we’re to continue this ridiculous hypothetical, there’ll be some hairy Kilnish Bigfoot shambling out of the trees in a bathrobe, come to teach us meditation and yogic flying or something.

That’s why he was a convict who’d gotten himself transported to the extrasolar camps. If he’d done bad things for the system against people, he’d be the commandant.

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.

Know thyself is the Earth adage, but here on Kiln it’s Know one another.

The essential fragility of our plan is exposed, the fragility of the human body subjected to bullets and beatings. But we have a unity of purpose no revolution ever had before. We have confidence in our comrades, rooted in absolute certainty. And they have the guns.

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.

“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?”