Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Adrian, Tchaikovsky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2024-02-23T17:00:00+00:00

17.

The different Excursionista teams don’t mix, as a rule. No grand camaraderie in adversity. And I wonder if it’s just personality clashes, or whether they also don’t want to mix the stuff we’ve brought back from the great outdoors. Bad enough that each of us carries a novel microbiome from our particular region of interest. Probably best not to see what happens when you combine it with the germs from another site entirely.

A handful of people are bold enough to cross the biological picket lines, though. For Ilmus and me it’s Parrides Okostor.

‘How bad was yours?’ he asks in a hushed voice. His day seems to have been easier, working on a ruin already half scoured of life.

I’m about to tell him exactly how bad it was when Ilmus, beside me, says, ‘The actual work, it wasn’t so bad.’

I cock an eyebrow. ‘Seriously? 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.’ There’s a weight of untold personal history there that neither Parrides nor I feel we can break into. The unspoken llmus, who has always been meek and neat and controlled because, when you don’t fit into the precise boxes the Mandate orthodoxy prefers, you try not to have too many protruding spikes and edges to your persona, in case they catch on something. In the end it was their intellectual edges that tore the veil and had them swept up in the purge, but now I wonder just how many other heresies and idiosyncrasies Ilmus burned inside themself before then. Sacrifices on the Mandate’s altar, just so they could keep on living.

We’ve made too many sacrifices, all of us. And it doesn’t stop. I look over at Keev and his people, joylessly chewing like it’s their last meal, and decide I have to do something.

After we’ve eaten, I contrive to attract the attention of the guards. They come in with truncheons and gas grenades at the ready, in case I’m already back on the insurrection game, but instead I tell them I want to speak to the commandant. I’m well aware everyone can hear me, and for those who think I shopped Clem and the uprising to the authorities, this is surely just more ammunition. But right then I am fired up with righteousness and I don’t care.

The guards almost seem to have been expecting this. They escort me out and up to the gantry, where I shuffle my feet out in the open for a while before I’m eventually ushered into the great man’s office. Terolan is there as always, save that he is pointedly wearing a filter mask – something fancy and durable and not made of paper.

‘Ah, Professor Daghdev,’ he greets me pleasantly. I am not offered a chair, there is no tea, but the cordial tone of voice remains, like the emaciated corpse of his former hospitality. ‘Am I to understand that you have some manner of complaint? Perhaps you feel you are being treated unfairly.

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