Alien Clay

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Genres: Alien Contact; Genetic Engineering; Space Opera

Synopsis

Alien Clay is a thrilling far-future adventure by acclaimed Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The planet of Kiln is where the tyrannical Mandate keeps its prison colony, and for inmates the journey there is always a one-way trip. One such prisoner is Professor Arton Daghdev, xeno-ecologist and political dissident. Soon after arrival he discovers that Kiln has a secret. Humanity is not the first intelligent life to set foot there.

In the midst a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem are the ruins of a civilization, but who were the vanished builders and where did they go? If he can survive both the harsh rule of the camp commandant and the alien horrors of the world around him, then Arton has a chance at making a discovery that might just transform not only Kiln but distant Earth as well.

Praise for Adrian Tchaikovsky:

‘Brilliant science fiction and far-out world-building’ – James McAvoy

‘One of the most interesting and accomplished writers in speculative fiction’ – Christopher Paolini

‘Tchaikovsky’s world-building is some of the best in modern sci-fi’ – New Scientist

Release date: March 28, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 416

Sample

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.

Hard asleep is, I am informed, the technical term. Hard, because you’re shut down, dried out, frozen for the trip from star to star. They have it down to a fine art—takes eleven minutes, like clockwork. A whole ship full of miscreants who are desiccated down to something that can… well, I was about to say survive indefinitely, but that’s not how it goes, of course. You don’t survive. You die, but in a very specific flash-frozen way that allows for you to be restarted again more or less where you left off at the other end. After all the shunting about that would kill any body—the permanent, non-recoverable kind of kill—who wasn’t withered down.

They pump you full of stuff that reinflates you to more or less your previous dimensions—you’ll note there’s a lot of more or less in this process. It is an exact science, just not one that cares about the exact you. Your thought processes don’t quite pick up where they left off. Short-term memory isn’t preserved; more recent mental pathways don’t make the cut. Start with a waking, therefore, because in that instant it’s all you’ve got, until you can establish some connection to older memories. You know who you are, but you don’t know where you are or how you got there. Which sounds terrifying but then let me tell you what you’re waking up into: actual hell. The roaring of colossal structural damage as the ship breaks up all around you. The jostling jolt as the little translucent bubble of plastic you’re travelling in is jarred loose and begins to tumble. A cacophony of vibration coming through the curved surface to you: the death throes of the vessel which has carried you all this way, out into the void, and is now fragmenting. There’s a world below that you know nothing about, not in your head right then. And above you are only the killing fields of space. The fact there’s a below and an above shows that the planet’s already won that particular battle over your soul and you’re falling. The oldest fear of monkey humanity, the one which makes a baby’s rubbery hands clench without thought. Such a fall from grace as never mankind nor monkey imagined.

All around you, through the celluloid walls of your prison, you see the others too. Because it can’t be hell without fellow sinners to suffer amongst. Each in their own bubble sheared away from the disintegrating ship. Faces contorted in terror: screaming, hammering on the walls, eyes like wells, mouths like the gates of tombs. You’ll forgive the overwrought descriptions. 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. Oh God! The recollection of it makes me sick to my gut. 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?

Some of us haven’t reawakened. I see at least two bubbles whirl past me in which the occupant remains a dried-out cadaver, the systems failed. Acceptable Wastage is the technical term, and that’s another unwelcome concept to suddenly have remembrance of. For there are always some who don’t wake up at the far end. They tell you it’s the inevitable encroachment of entropy over so long a journey. Maybe it is. Or maybe those who don’t wake up are the most egregious troublemakers. It’s hard to recognize anyone when their skin is stuck to their skull without the interposition of familiar flesh, but I think I see my old colleague Marquaine Ell go whirling past. She’s been shipped all the way out here from Earth, even at the minimal expense they’ve boiled the process down to, yet they might as well have just thrown her into the incinerator for the same effect.

With the reminder of that minimal expense comes another piece of knowledge. Another couple of my neurons renewing a severed acquaintance, bringing understanding that’s relevant but unwelcome. That this is intentional. It’s no traumatic wreck of the Hesperus. Not a bug but a feature. Sending people into space used to be expensive, and for people anyone cares about it still is. You’re encouraged to keep them reliably alive in transit, with actual medical care and life support and sporadic wakings to check on their oh-so-delicate physical and mental wellbeing. And, saliently, you’re encouraged to arrange a means by which to bring them back home again, their tour of duty done. Big expensive ships that can do complicated things like refuel, slow down, speed up, turn around.

But if all you want to do is deliver some felons to a labour camp on a remote planet, because it’s literally cheaper and easier than sending machines to do the same work, then you don’t ever have to worry about them coming back. Because they won’t. It’s a life sentence, one-way trip. More unwelcome revelations fall into my head, even as my head, along with the rest of me, falls into the pull of Imno 27g.

I should be beating my newly revivified fists against the inside of my bubble, except it’s whirling round and round, having dropped out of the disintegrating ship, and the world below is growing in size. The void has become a sky, yellow-blue. Can you have a yellow-blue? Not on Earth, but this is Imno’s sky. Blue for the oxygen the planet’s biosphere has pumped into the atmosphere as a by-product of its metabolic pathways, just like on Earth. Yellow for the diffuse clouds of aerial plankton. Or they’re yellow-black, actually, because of their dark photosynthetic surfaces. Blue-yellow-black should not be a colour, and of all things it should not be the colour of the sky.

We fall. At some point the chutes open: filmy transparent plastic, already biodegrading from the moment it contacts atmosphere. Like the ship, it’s designed to last the minimum possible period of time to do its job. The ship, that unnamed plastic piece of trash which was printed as a single piece in Earth’s orbit, no more than a one-shot engine and a pod to hold us all like peas. An egg-case, perhaps. Designed to carry its corpse-cargo across space to one of the current “Planets Under Activity,” as the Mandate’s Expansion department terms it. To carry us to Imno 27g, then break apart in the upper atmosphere. Fragmenting into pieces even as the one-shot medical units resuscitate its cargo from cadaver to screaming lost souls tumbling to our doom. While some of us don’t get the wake-up, others who do won’t survive the descent. Doom is what we’re all going to, sure enough, but it’s less drawn-out for some than for others. My bones jar as my chute deploys, and while I see others similarly wrenched from the teeth of the ground, I also see the handful whose chutes have failed drop away. Still screaming, as they remember just enough to know they’re about to die all over again.

I don’t die from not waking up, and I don’t die falling from the edge of the atmosphere either. I’m not written off on the ledgers as Acceptable Wastage. They have to work out very carefully the precise level of expense that’s necessary, and the precise percentage of failed deliveries—meaning dead people—this entails. 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.

They put manoeuvring jets on the pods. Little plastic things. One shot. As I fall—it seems to take so long!—I see them fire. Each one discharges its blast of bottled gas and destroys itself in the process. If that allows me to land where I’m supposed to, then good. If I end up somewhere distant from the work camp then they aren’t going to waste the work-hours it would take to retrieve me. I’ll die trapped in my bubble or outside it, because Imno 27g is full of things that will kill you. Especially alone and with only half your head together. Not that there has ever been anything in my head that would help me survive on this alien world.

But that doesn’t happen to me either. I come down with everyone else, those of us not covered under the Wastage provisions, around the same place, where they’re waiting for us. The camp’s commandant has sent out the heavy mob, just in case we somehow managed to form a revolutionary subcommittee on the way down. On seeing the riot armour and guns—the “minimally lethal” public order pieces I (now) recall from Earth, which only kill you an acceptable proportion of the time—I remember there had been a revolutionary subcommittee I was part of. Not, obviously, on the ship, because we’d all been flash-frozen corpses. And not on the way down, because we’d been far too busy screaming. But back on Earth, before they’d infiltrated our network, tracked our contacts, arrested everyone we knew for a discounted friends-and-family betrayal, I had actually been part of the problem, so I’d earned this. Back on Earth I had been stubbornly proud of the fact, too. In the prison attached to the space port, in the cramped orbital quarters, I had known that, yes, I was going to be deported to the camps, but at least I’d tried to do my bit, even a lowly academic like me.

Right now, after plummeting to this doom, then seeing the death-squad-slash-welcoming-committee, I regret it all. If a political officer magically manifested, offering a pardon if I signed a confession, I’d reach for the pen. Much unlike the song, I regret every one of my life choices that has led me to this point. It’s a moment of weakness.

My bubble deflates around me. I have a fraught minute of fighting it off to stop the clammy plastic suffocating me before they cut me out. They have a special tool for doing this, like a heated knife. I gain a shallow, shiny slash along my thigh to testify to their general lack of care wielding it. One more person becomes Wastage when they’re the last to be cut free and by then it’s too late. All within tolerance, you understand. And that’s it. We’re down. I look up into an alien sky.

I want to be still, but they won’t let me. We stumble and sway and try to make words happen with numb, clumsy tongues. The heavy mob grab us and shake us, shoving us about. Not so much physically moving us as just Lesson One in How Things Are Going To Be from now on. A heavy hand on my shoulder, a little formal handshake that makes my teeth rattle. And all the time I’m scanning the faces of my fellow damned souls. My mind keeps skipping and I can’t even remember why, but then it comes back to me. Marquaine. Marquaine was on the same ship. Was part of the same consignment of expendables. My friend, my colleague, my fellow hell-raiser and political delinquent. It can’t have been her face I saw, dried to her skull and whirling away into the abyss up there. That can’t be the end of such a brilliant mind, a celebrated career, a friend. I stagger into the others, gabbling, slurring. I paw at them, but every face is a stranger. She’s not here. She died like we all did, back in Earth’s orbit when they desiccated us, and her promised resurrection never came.

Marquaine Ell had been in the next cell to me, in the port holding facility, and we’d been able to talk through the wall. There’d been a knack to it, once you worked out that the scratched point in the wall hid a bubble in the structure that carried sound through. The whole place wasn’t much better constructed than the fragmentation barge they were going to ship us out on. If you put your ear and jaw to that one point in the wall where the scratches were, you could hear the person in the neighbouring cell if they put their mouth to the matching point on their side. The scratches were there from prisoners before us who’d found this out and had the fellowship to think of those who would come after. To save us fumbling about for the right spot. After all, it wasn’t as if anyone in those cells would be there for long. I think about them now: some prisoner on the very cusp of being shipped off on the barges, perhaps about to become Acceptable Wastage in turn, finding some way of marking the wall just to help a person they’d never meet and would never know. Just because of the one thing they’d very definitely have in common with that successor: being enemies of the Mandate, enough to be deported off-world.

Marquaine was in the next cell to me both physically and ideologically. We were perpetrators of sibling unorthodoxies, even though she hadn’t, to my knowledge, become involved with the harder-edged layers of resistance I had. The subcommittees and everything that entailed. That was me, the soft-handed academic, deciding to stick it to the Mandate. Trying to be more than an armchair agitator. And yet we were put in neighbouring accommodation waiting for the barges. That, more than anything else, told me I’d been taken up just for my scholastic misdemeanours and the other stuff had never made it into my file.

We had both been rising stars in the same field, and were about the same age. There’d been a conference, up on one of the big luxury orbitals, where Marquaine and I, and another colleague, Ilmus Itrin, had been inseparable: the Three Musketeers. 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. As the rigid scientific orthodoxy looked like it was finally in full retreat, we were spinning out all sorts of ideas in our fields. Xenobiology was the hot topic, after all. Humans had set foot on other worlds, and on some of those worlds there had been life of a sort. It seemed inevitable that the next probe would yield the Big Discovery we all knew must be out there.

Ten years before that, when I was a student, it had all been very different. Orthodoxy was like a hand at your throat. If we had anything to say that didn’t fit within the narrow spaces between those clenched fingers it was whispered in secret. Unredacted textbooks got passed hand to hand like the samizdat novels that they were constantly arresting people for printing. The first discovery of extraterrestrial life had thrown Academic Mandate into a spin. What if we inadvertently discovered a reality that didn’t match the dogma? Horrors! Except, over time, it all fell within tolerance. The looked-for upheaval to our understanding of the universe never happened. No aliens turned up to break our laws of physics, or demonstrate there was a better way to run your civilization than the way our authoritarian overlords did. So over the years, it felt like the grasp of orthodoxy relaxed. Enough for Marquaine, Ilmus and me to say the unspeakable over good coffee and printed strawberries, up at the Nineteenth Conference on the Further Prospects of Life. With Mandate officials one table over, hunching their shoulders and pretending not to hear. 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.

Let nobody tell you the Mandate isn’t patient. Here I am, thirty years from Earth, and it’s still all 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. Or else for the Internal Investigations office to flip enough people to ensure that even the close-mouthed dissidents were accounted for too, on someone’s little list. They actually missed me the first time, when they picked up Ilmus and most of the others in my small circuit. Me and Marquaine and a handful of other survivors were left, like isolated teeth in a jaw jollied up by the police in the interrogation suite. We wept for the decimated faculty, for the great minds who had been spirited away. In private, we mopped our brows and were thankful it wasn’t us. And we dared to believe that Internal Investigations was fallible. Maybe there were even sympathizers amongst their ranks. Why couldn’t we infiltrate them for a change? Except it wasn’t like that. They were just giving us more rope in case we could fashion them some additional nooses. So we went into hiding. We wore new identities as effective as fright wigs and false noses held on with string. We tried to work out who’d sold our friends to Investigations. We wouldn’t make it so easy for them, we told each other. We’d spot the spooks and the informers. We wouldn’t break.

But everyone breaks, and there are far too many informers to spot them all. They got me before Marquaine, and in our neighbouring cells at the port holding facility she never asked me if I’d sold her out, in the end. If she broke. She didn’t want to hear the answer. I was the last person on Earth she was going to talk to besides the deportation staff. So we danced around it and spoke of other matters. Earth matters. The last chance for a lot of things.

And now I have seen every surviving face and none of them is hers. My glimpse up above in the wrack of the barge was exactly what I thought. She’s dead. Or rather, she never came back to life. One of the most incisive minds of our time has become no more than Acceptable Wastage. And I, all unworthy, am still alive on an alien world.

Here’s a brief primer for the incurious.

Humanity had journeyed to eleven exoplanets at the point in time when they packed me off. As in, actually set foot on them. Unmanned missions had been to… I think the last count was seventy-eight. The sixty-seven lacking that human footprint were either still under committee review, relegated to automated exploitation, or simply canned as not being worth another look. There’s a lot of rock in the near reaches of the galaxy. Of those eleven we’d been to, nine had produced life of their own, while the other two were rich in mineral deposits and situated problematically enough that a human hand on the tiller was necessary. And how glad I am, even though I’ve just seen How I Might Have Died played out in a variety of ways, that I haven’t been assigned to any of those. Shipped out to be a cog in a mining operation on an airless toxic rock somewhere. Not that the presence of life necessarily means air or a lack of toxins.

Life, though. Nine worlds with life of some kind, out of seventy-eight surveyed. That might sound disappointing to you, but to a xeno-ecologist like me it’s fantastically exciting. My predecessors in the field were very worried the number might turn out to be zero out of seventy-eight, or out of any number you cared to mention. That would have been appalling. We’d have all been out of a job for starters.

Six of the nine living worlds have nothing on a macro-cellular scale. And I’m not talking about cells necessarily, not like Earth has. But the life on these is composed of individual units too small to see with the naked eye, perhaps forming colonies or randomly aggregate communities like coloured crusts at the edges of deep-sea vents. Or building lumpy, unimpressive reefs that are basically just stacked graveyards of past minuscule generations. So, three worlds out of seventy-eight had actually produced life on a scale familiar to a child of Earth. Again, it’ll sound disappointing to you, but it’s bloody amazing to me. Three, out of only seventy-eight. The galaxy abounds with life!

I hadn’t visited any of those worlds until now. Because there were two lists of academics who were chosen to go on a trip to the outer worlds. One was composed of individuals in good ideological standing with the Academic Mandate, and I have never kissed enough ass or compromised enough scientific principles to be on that. The other list was composed of those who had transgressed, danced their way through the show trials without actually being executed, and then been deported on the one-way fragmentation barges. Which I have in fact just had my solitary ride on.

It could have been worse, I decide, as I stand here and get my first look at this new world.

Quite aside from the possibility of mining rocks or studying alien germs for the rest of my abridged life, I understand that another of the three worlds, Imno 11c, or “Swelter,” has a mean temperature of eighty-four degrees centigrade in the temperate zone, and is geologically active enough that the air’s mostly smoke. The life there, by all accounts complex and fascinating, exists in slow migration along deep-sea vents, in a lethargic ecology powered by geothermal energy. It’s basically snails all the way down, or at least blobby mollusc-looking things with shells made from the heavy metals the critters need to get out of their systems to avoid being fatally poisoned. Getting fatally poisoned is, I am led to believe, the second most common cause of death amongst the labour camp workers on Swelter, after catastrophic pressure-crushing accidents, because the seas are very deep and water is very heavy.

In contrast, the relevant moon of the third planet, Kaleb 3p, or “Tartrap,” is really fucking cold. And dying from being really fucking cold is, I understand, de rigueur there. It orbits a gas giant out in the far reaches of that overpopulated system and only tidal heating from its parent planet prevents it from freezing solid. It has seas of liquid hydrocarbons and a complex ecosystem built up of exotic chemosynthesis. Everything there is very big and very slow, so much so that we don’t know how most of the species actually produce little big slow aliens because none of them have got round to it in the several decades since human researchers arrived there. In contrast, Imno 27g, my new home, is a paradise.

It does not feel like a paradise, not to any of us. We stand there, still in the crinkly paper one-pieces they put us in when they froze us and shipped us out. The clothes, if that’s even the word for them, are already falling apart. We end up holding disintegrating handfuls in front of our relevant bits, pinning the wretched garments together at shoulder and hip like we’re at the galaxy’s cheapest toga party. It’s cold too. I know, intellectually, that it’s morning and 27g has a serious diurnal temperature swing that means we’d be sweating buckets by noon and then freezing by dusk. And the air smells of burning. I also know, intellectually, that this is from by-products of the local photosynthetic pathways. The fact that we can smell what the air is like is already one up on either Swelter or Tarpit, because if you take a deep breath of the atmosphere on either of those you’ll end up dead in short order. So I am very, very lucky indeed. I have seventy-seven potential problems but being on Imno 27g isn’t one of them.

(For the avoidance of doubt, and for the slow students at the back, Imno is the Astro-discovery Mandate program that revisited this star system. It was the 27th one the program renamed under the new conventions, and this world I have just put my feet on is the sixth out from the star. We don’t call it that, of course. We call it Kiln, and back on Earth I assumed this referred to the temperature fluctuations, but I was wrong. Kiln had a secret that nobody back at Mandate HQ had been telling. It’s easy enough to bottle up information after all, when it takes thirty years for word to get back to Earth, and there’s only one state-controlled channel.)

Our bubbles have burst around a cleared field, artificially flattened and still with machine tracks all over it. The welcoming committee are keen to get us into the camp proper—we can see the familiar chainlink and hard-plate walls of it rising into a grimy plastic dome, a real taste of home. The deportation camp Marquaine and I were held in was made of just the same stuff. I do my best to take a look beyond, because it’s an alien world and, fine, it’s the alien world I’m going to die on, but you have to be curious, surely. Right then I assume they’re going to just have me digging holes and cleaning privies, never to emerge again, so I want to see the Great Outdoors at least once.

There’s a forest. They’ve cleared a hundred metres of space between it and the camp’s walls, but I catch a glimpse of it before they hustle us inside. They’re not exactly trees and not exactly plants, honestly, but the basic physics of solar collection produce a convergence with those, even if they’ve started with very different building blocks. And the essential stuff of Kiln’s biology is carbon-hydrogen-oxygen, as well as those familiar building blocks like amino acids, which can form entirely of their own accord without any actual life present at all. Life on Swelter and even Tarpit has an overlap with Earth, and Kiln even more so. But still very alien. Incompatible. Reaching the same ends by different means. The “trees” look like chonky vases crowned with a great rosette of black petals, twenty metres across in some cases. There’s no dendritic structure at all—no branching from bough to branch to twig, the pattern that repeats ad infinitum in Earth biology, from trees to the passageways of the lungs. Here there are just those big bulbous tuber trunks and the extravagant whorl of enormous leaf-petal-sail things that are the photosynthetic surfaces. They’re almost black, eating as much light as they can, not even greenness escaping them. The swollen trunks are yellow-orange, only slightly different in colour to the dusty burnt-looking ground. We see no motile life in that first brief snatch of Kiln, though it is out there. The cleared ground keeps it at bay, at least during the day, at least long enough for us to walk across it. Then they get us inside the camp’s fence, kicking the laggards and beating us with gun butts. Most of the others are only too glad just to get under cover, away from the alienness. It’s me who dawdles, staring. It’s me who takes the blows on my back and shoulders. Not even properly professional brutality; there’s almost an edge of hysteria to it. There’s a distinct sense of hurry, with plenty of mirror-visor helms glancing at the treeline.

They next herd us into an enclosed chamber just within the gates, leaving us there and gassing the fuck out of us. Something eye-watering and acrid sears my throat and stings my skin. It goes on for a good three minutes, which I know because I’ll go through it plenty more times, and eventually I just count the seconds. Everyone is given a solid lungful of the stuff. When it’s done, one of my fellows, a woman, is on the ground wheezing, gasping, clutching at her throat. She’s dead even before our guards come back in, or else they were politely waiting for her to die before they returned. Just to save themselves the trouble of not helping her in person, rather than not helping her remotely. It was an allergic reaction. I’m told about half a per cent of people can’t take the decontamination. So at least my odds were pretty good when it came to this particular death.

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

But I’m not feeling immortal. I don’t think I ever felt quite so mortal in my life. I remember how it had been in the justice camp, waiting for my trial. I was so bloody defiant. The principled scholar in opposition to the fascist regime. Let them do their worst! I would stand on the scaffold and spit in their eye. Except it hadn’t been the scaffold. My execution is going to take place over years of privation, light years from home. Whatever the minutiae of the desiccation process, I suspect in most cases defiance doesn’t survive rehydration.

They finally let us out of the airlock, the decontamination chamber, and we see what’s under the camp’s dome.

The usual, of course. The local earth bonded into mockcrete and shaped into low, unlovely buildings. I can instantly tell you which is the labourer dorm, which is the workshop and infirmary—or maybe the infirmary-slash-research facility (it’s always reassuring when the science needs sick people on hand as a ready resource, yes indeed). I see the expected network of gantries, towers and upper residences, where the staff and guards live, and from which privileged vantage point they can look, spit and, if need be, shoot down at we lesser beings. They’ll have the communications and control up there, their link to the satellites and whatever orbital infrastructure’s in place for Kiln. They’ll have the lifeline to Earth. After all, they’re due to go back someday unlike us. But all of this is just home cooking from my perspective, and not what I’m interested in. Because the camp buildings make a ring, and what they make a ring around are…

For a brief moment I think the central structure is made up of dead trees, because the walls of it are of the same rounded shape. My second assessmen