Deliver “some crimes to a labor camp on a distant planet”… Alien Clay
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They say no story ever begins with one awake, but when you’ve been a rough sleeper for thirty years it’s hard to know where else to begin.
Start with a wake, end with a wake, maybe.
Rough sleeping is, I’m informed, the technical term. Difficult because you’re turned off, dried up, frozen to travel from one star to another. They have a beautiful art: it takes eleven minutes, like clockwork. A whole ship full of evil, who are bent on anything they can. . . well, I was going to say that it would survive indefinitely, but of course it doesn’t. you don’t to survive. You die, but in a very specific flash-frozen way that allows you to restart right where you left off at the other end. In response, they would kill any body that did not wither, a final, irretrievable kill.
They fill you with things that more or less inflate you to your previous dimensions; you’ll notice there’s a lot. more or less in this process. It’s an exact science that doesn’t care about you being exact. Your thought processes don’t quite pick up where they left off. Short-term memory is not stored; newer mental pathways don’t make the cut. Start with a wake, so that’s all you have at that point, until you establish some connection with older memories. You know who you are, but you don’t know where you are or how you got there. That sounds scary but then I’ll tell you what you’re waking up to: real hell. The roar of horrific structural damage as the ship breaks up around you. The tiny translucent plastic bubble you’re traveling in breaks free and begins to fall. A cacophony of vibrations reaches you from the curved surface: the death of the vessel that brought you all this way, into the void, and is now tearing itself apart. There’s a world below that you know nothing about, not right now in your head. And all you have above you is the death zone of space. The fact that there is a lower one and an upper one shows that the planet has already won that particular battle against your soul and you are falling. Mankind’s oldest fear of the ape, which unthinkingly squeezes the child’s rubbery hands. It was a fall from grace that man and ape never imagined.
Around you, through the celluloid walls of your prison, you see others too. Because it cannot be hell to suffer among fellow sinners. Each one was cut from the container where its bubble dissolved. Faces twisted in terror: screaming, hammering on the walls, eyes like wells, mouths like the doors of tombs. You will forgive the excessive descriptions. I am an environmentalist, not a poet, but mere biology is not enough to revive the terrible vision of half a hundred men at once, and no one understands why, even you you don’t know why, and the ship is disintegrating in the ship, and the world below, the starving poplar of its gravity well. Oh God! Remembering that makes me sick to my guts. And of all things, in the middle of that chaos, to remember I’m an environmentalist. In the space where there is no ecology. Was self-knowledge ever less useful?
Some of us never woke up again. I see at least two bubbles circling next to me, in which the occupant follows a dry corpse, the system has failed. Allowable is the technical term for Wastage, which is suddenly another inappropriate concept to remember. Because there are always those who do not wake up at the end. They tell you that entropy’s invasion is inevitable on so many long journeys. Maybe it is. Or maybe the ones who don’t wake up are the worst problem. It’s hard to spot anyone when their skin is attached to their skull without a stretch of familiar flesh, but I think I see my old colleague Marquaine Ell walking by. They have sent it here from the earth, although they have reduced the process with minimal expense, but they might as well throw it in the incinerator for the same effect.
With the reminder of this minimum expenditure comes another knowledge. A couple of my neurons are renewing an acquaintance that has been cut, bringing an understanding that is important but not welcome. That’s why on purpose. It is not the traumatic disaster of Hesperus. Not a bug, but a feature. Sending people into space was expensive, and still is for anyone who cares. They encourage you to reliably keep them alive in transit, with real medical care and life support, and timely wake-ups to check on their delicate physical and mental well-being. And, obviously, you are encouraged to arrange a means to bring them back home again, duty done. Big ships that can do complicated things, slow down, speed up, turn around.
But if all you want to do is deliver some crime to a labor camp on a distant planet because it’s literally cheaper and easier than sending machines to do the same job, then you never have to worry about getting back. Because they won’t. It’s a life sentence, a one-way trip. More unsavory revelations flood my head, even as my head, along with the rest of me, falls to the pull of the Imno 27g.
I should have punched my newly resurrected fists inside my bubble, except it’s spinning and spinning, out of the disintegrating vessel and the world below is growing in size. The void has become the sky, yellow-blue. Can you have a yellow-blue one? Not on earth, but this is Imno’s heaven. Blue has been pumped into the atmosphere by the planet’s biosphere as a by-product of its metabolic pathways, just like on Earth. Yellow due to hazy clouds of plankton in the air. Or they are actually yellow-black due to dark photosynthetic surfaces. Blue-yellow-black shouldn’t be a color, and of all things it shouldn’t be the color of the sky.
We fall At some point the taps open: transparent plastic, which is biodegrading from the moment it comes into contact with the atmosphere. Like the ship, it is designed to take as little time as possible to do its job. The ship, that nameless plastic bin that had been imprinted as a single piece in Earth’s orbit, nothing more than a single-shot engine and a pod for us all to hold like peas. An egg case, perhaps. Its corpse cargo is designed to be transported through space to the current “Planets in Action,” as the Mandate Expansion department puts it. Anthem to take it to 27g, then break it in the upper atmosphere. Tearing him to pieces, single-shot medic units resurrect his cargo from the corpse as screaming lost souls fall to our wasteland. While some will not wake up, others will not survive the fall. Doom is where we all go, sure, but it’s not as long for some as it is for others. My bones crack as my shaft opens, and as I watch others shatter through the teeth of the earth in the same way, I see the handful of failed shafts go down as well. Still screaming, because they remember enough to know they’re going to die again.
I don’t die from waking up, and I don’t die from falling off the edge of the atmosphere either. I am not written in the ledgers Acceptable waste. They must carefully work out the exact level of expenditure required, and the exact percentage of failed deliveries (ie dead people) that entails. Because who wants to spend a penny more than you when you send convicts to die in a labor camp on a distant world? Those who have gone against the system and will now pay their dues forever, for the rest of their lives. People like me. Later I hear the figures: twenty percent acceptable waste. If you think the loss of investment is absurd, then you don’t know the history of other people being sent from one place to another against their will.
They put maneuvering jets in the pods. Small plastic things. a shot When I fall, it seems to take so long! – I see fires. Each one blasts the bottled gas and destroys itself in the process. If that allows me to land where I need to, fine. If I end up far from the field, they won’t waste the hours of work it would take to retrieve me. I’ll die trapped in my bubble or outside, because Imno 27g is full of things that will kill you. Especially alone and only half of the mind together. There is nothing in my mind that would ever help me survive in this strange world.
But that doesn’t happen to me either. I go down with everyone else, those of us not covered under the provisions of the Waste, in the same place, where we are waiting for us. The camp commandant has sent a heavy mob, just in case we somehow manage to form a revolutionary subcommittee on the way down. Seeing the riot armor and guns – the public order pieces I remember from Earth (now) being “minimally lethal” and killing you only an acceptable proportion of the time – I remember that. be I was a part of the revolutionary subcommittee. No, obviously, because on the ship, we were all flash-frozen corpses. And not on the way down, because we were too busy shouting. But on Earth, before I infiltrated our network, tracked down our contacts, arrested everyone we knew for the discounted betrayal of friends and family, I was actually part of the problem, so I won this. Back on earth I was also proudly stubborn. In the prison attached to the spaceport, in the narrow orbits, I learned that yes, I would be deported to the camps, but at least I tried to do my part, even a humble academic like me. .
Right now, after falling into this debacle, watching the death squad-slash-reception committee, I regret everything. If a political official magically manifested, if I signed a confession offering forgiveness, I would reach for the pen. Unlike the song, I regret all the choices in life that led me to this point. It is a moment of weakness.
My bubble deflates around me. I have a full minute to fight to stop the seductive plastic suffocating me before it cuts off. For this they have a special tool, like a heated knife. I earn a shallow, glistening chafing across my thigh to witness the general lack of care with which she is handled. One more person becomes a Wastage when the last one is released and by then it’s too late. All within tolerance, you understand. And that’s it. We are down. I look at a strange sky.
This is the summary Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, £10.99), the Last chance for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read with us here
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