New Space Novels by Adrian Tchaikovsky: An Excerpt from Alien Clay

They say you shouldn’t start a story by waking up, but when you’ve been in a deep sleep for 30 years, you don’t know where else to start.

It may begin with awakening and end with awakening.

I’ve heard that hard sleep is a technical term. It’s hard because you’re shut down, dry, and frozen for your journey from star to star. They make it into art – it takes 11 minutes like clockwork. The whole ship is full of villains and they are dry to the point of being able to do anything. . . Well, I was going to say that you can survive indefinitely, but of course that’s not the case. you don’t survive. You die, but you’re flash-frozen in a very specific way, allowing you to more or less pick up where you left off on the other side. After all, a detour about it would kill any body that is not withered – a permanent and irreparable kind of killing.

They are full of things that re-expand you to more or less previous dimensions – you will notice that there are many more or less In this process. It’s an exact science, but it doesn’t bother you exactly. The thought process does not pick up where it left off. Short-term memory is not stored. The mental path these days doesn’t work. Therefore, start by waking up. Because until you can establish a connection with an old memory, that’s all you have at that moment. I know who I am, but I don’t know where I am or how I got there. It sounds scary, but let me tell you, when you wake up, you’ll find yourself in a real hell. The roar of massive structural damage echoes as ships are destroyed around you. The jostling impact when the little translucent plastic bubble you’re riding on loosens and starts rolling. A cacophony of vibrations that travels through the curved surface to you. The death knell of the vessel that carried you here, carried you out into the void, and is now fragmenting. At that time, there is a world below that is not in your head and that you know nothing about. And above you there is only a cosmic murder field. The fact that there is a bottom and a top indicates that the earth has already won a certain battle for your soul and you are falling. The oldest fear of apes is the fear of involuntarily clenching a baby’s rubbery hand. It is a fall from grace that neither mankind nor apes ever imagined.

You can also see other people around you, through the celluloid walls of the prison. Because there can be no hell without fellow sinners to suffer. Each in its own bubble, torn from the collapsing ship. His face was contorted with fear, he screamed and banged on the wall, his eyes were like wells and his mouth was like the gate of a tomb. Please excuse the excessive explanation. I’m an ecologist, not a poet, but mere biology isn’t enough to appreciate the horrific spectacle of 500 humans being brought back to life at once and no one understanding why. you For reasons unknown, the ship falls apart in the cracks, and the world below is the hungry mouth of a gravity well. oh my god! When I remember that, my stomach hurts. And above all, in the midst of that confusion, I remember that I’m an ecologist. A universe without even an ecosystem. Has any self-knowledge ever been so useless?

Some of us have not yet woken up. I see at least two bubbles flying past me. Inside, the crew was left as desiccated corpses, and the systems malfunctioned. “Acceptable waste” is a technical term, but it’s also a concept you don’t want to suddenly remember. Because there will always be people at the end who will not wake up. They say this is an inevitable violation of entropy on a very long journey. Maybe so. Or maybe those who don’t wake up are the worst troublemakers. It’s hard to tell who it is when the skin clings to the skull without any familiar flesh intervening, but I notice my old colleague Markein El whirling past. I think I saw it. She was transported all the way from Earth here at minimal cost with a boiled-down process, but it might have been better to throw her in an incinerator to achieve the same effect.

Another piece of knowledge comes from remembering minimal costs. Another couple of my neurons resume a severed acquaintance, bringing with it a related but unwelcome understanding. This is intentional. Not the traumatic wreck of the Hesperus. It’s a feature, not a bug. Sending people into space used to be expensive, and it’s still expensive for anyone interested in space. It is recommended to provide practical medical care and life support, waking up from time to time to check on your very sensitive physical and mental health to ensure you stay alive while on the move. And, noticeably, it is recommended to arrange means of bringing them. return After completing the mission, return home. Large, expensive ships capable of complex maneuvers such as refueling, decelerating, accelerating, and turning.

But if you just want to send felons to a labor camp on a remote planet, it’s literally cheaper and easier than having a machine do the same job, so you don’t have to worry about them coming back. Because they don’t. It’s a life sentence, a one-way trip. Even as my head falls into the temptation of Imno 27g along with the rest of me, further unwelcome revelations fall upon my head.

I should have smashed my newly revived fist into the inside of the bubble, but it was falling from the collapsing ship and swirling around, the world below growing larger and larger. The void became a yellow-blue sky. Do you have yellow and blue? This is not the earth, but this is the sky of Immuno. Blue represents the oxygen that the planet’s biosphere pumps into the atmosphere as a byproduct of metabolic pathways, just like on Earth. Yellow is a diffuse cloud of aerial plankton. Alternatively, it is actually yellow-black due to its dark photosynthetic surface. Blue, yellow, and black should not be colors, and above all, should not be the color of the sky.

we fall At some point the chute will open. It is a film-like transparent plastic that is biodegradable the moment it comes into contact with the atmosphere. Like a ship, it is designed to last for the minimum amount of time possible to accomplish its mission. The ship is just a nameless piece of plastic junk printed as a single piece in Earth’s orbit, with a single engine and a pod to hold us all like peas. Probably an egg case. It is designed to carry a cargo of corpses across space to one of what the Mandate’s expansion division calls one of its current “active planets.” It carries us up to Immuno 27g and then breaks us apart in the upper atmosphere. Single-shot medical units reanimate their cargo from the dead, crushing lost souls as they scream and tumble to our doom. Some people don’t wake up, and even if they wake up, others don’t survive the descent. Destruction is certainly something we all face, but for some it lasts less than for others. Every time the chute unfolds, the bones tremble, and while I see others similarly torn from the teeth of the ground, I also watch a handful of bones fall as the chute fails. They’re still screaming because they remember just knowing that they’re going to die all over again.

You won’t die by not waking up, and you won’t die by falling off the edge of the atmosphere. I am not recorded in the ledger as acceptable waste. They will have to calculate very carefully the exact level of expense required and the exact proportion of delivery failures, or deaths, that this will entail. After all, who would want to spend a penny more than necessary to send a death row inmate to a concentration camp in a faraway world? People who rebelled against the system and now have to pay their dues for the rest of their lives. Some people are like me. You’ll hear the numbers later, but acceptable waste is 20 percent. If that sounds like an absurd loss of investment, you don’t know the history of people transporting others from place to place against their will.

They loaded the pods with maneuver jets. small plastic thing. One shot. It seems like it will take a lot of time to fall! – I see them firing. Each injects a bottle of gas, destroying itself in the process. If you can land where you need to land, that’s fine. Even if I end up far away from the work camp, they aren’t going to waste the labor time it takes to retrieve me. I would die trapped in a bubble or trapped outside a bubble because Immuno 27g is full of things that will kill you. Especially when you’re alone and only half your brain is with you. There was nothing in my head that would help me survive in this other world.

But that doesn’t happen to me either. I land at the same spot with everyone else who is not subject to waste regulations and they are waiting for us there. The camp commander sent a large crowd in case we managed to form a revolutionary subcommittee during our descent. When I saw riot control armor and guns – the “minimally lethal” security equipment I (now) remembered from Earth, that only killed an acceptable percentage of the time – I I remembered it there. had I was on a revolutionary subcommittee. Of course not on the ship. Because we were all flash-frozen corpses. And it wasn’t on the way down. Because we were too busy shouting. But back on Earth, before they invade our networks, track our contacts, and arrest everyone we know for betraying our friends and family, I actually I got this because it was part of the problem. When I returned to Earth, I was stubbornly proud of that fact. In the cramped orbital quarters of a prison attached to a spaceport, yes, I knew I would be deported to a concentration camp, but even a junior scholar like me could at least do what I could. I’ve been trying to do that. .

Now, after plummeting to this fate and then watching the Death Slash Welcome Committee, I regret everything. If a political official magically appeared and offered me a pardon if I signed a confession, I would reach for a pen. Quite unlike this song, I regret every single choice in my life that led me to this point. This is a moment of weakness.

Bubbles deflate around me. I struggled to fight it off for a minute to avoid choking on the sticky plastic before it cut me off. They have special tools, such as heated knives, to do this. I got a shallow glowing cut along my thigh, which attests to their general carelessness in handling it. One more person will be wasted when the last one is released and by then it will be too late. Everything is within tolerance, you understand. That’s it. I’m depressed. Look up at the foreign sky.

This is an excerpt from alien clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, £10.99); New Scientist Book Club’s latest book recommendations. Register here and read along