The Expert System's Brother (Expert System, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

IT WENT WRONG FOR ME when they made Sethr an outcast. Where I grew up, people don’t get angry at each other. We were a community; you looked into your neighbour’s face and saw a friend. But Sethr wasn’t anybody’s friend. He stole things and he didn’t pull his weight. Give him a morning’s task and he’d take two days over it. The word began to pass between people that he was no good for the village. He was still one of us, but he got fewer and fewer smiles wherever he went. It wasn’t good to be seen talking to him. The young women he so wanted to spend time with, they stopped looking his way. You’d think this would be a lesson to him, and he’d get back into line so people liked him again, but then again you’re not Sethr. To Sethr, it was someone else’s fault and why should he change? He got angry instead, and then he got into a fight and broke Broed’s arm, and that was his last chance lost.

Right now, though, it wasn’t Elhern’s judgment we’d come to hear, but the Lawgiver’s. Her one working eye rolled into her head and the ghostlight flickered in the empty socket of the other and played in a brief halo about her tightly bound hair. She heard the accusations and Sethr’s wheedling denials, but the words went somewhere deeper, to where the ghosts lived. When her lips opened, it wasn’t quite her voice, but something else speaking through her, forcing her throat and tongue to make its words. This was the ghost. This was the Lawgiver. “Community member Sethr verdict guilty. Prognosis: unacceptable burden. Recommended sentence: Severance.”

Our houses are just like your houses, of course, because all the architect ghosts agree on how houses are built.

Because the ghosts know, and why should we know better than them?

The Severance was cool by then, because none of this was about hurting Sethr. It was because he was a burden and we had limited food and time and energy. Everyone knew that a troublemaker took too much and gave back too little, and that wasn’t our way. Our way wasn’t to punish troublemakers, either. We didn’t care about revenge or retribution for wrongs done, although I know now that there are ways of being that make those things a priority. For us, we couldn’t see the point of that; who would it make things better for? Our justice was purely to ensure the optimal survival of the community, and the Lawgiver had judged that the community would be better without Sethr in it. Lawgiver Elhern daubed the Severance across Sethr’s skin, dark red like old blood. It soaked in, and I knew it would stain him forever, no water or scrubbing would ever get it out. After that was done, they let him go. People were already backing off, because Sethr was different now. He was Severed. They looked at him and they didn’t see One Of Us anymore. He had become something alien. I remember seeing even the fleas abandoning him, springing off, almost invisible save for their movement, to find more agreeable hosts. I remember sitting there watching Sethr as he stumbled and entreated and was turned away. I couldn’t tell. He was just the same to me, the same man he’d always been, despite the harsh, revolted way everyone looked at him. I couldn’t tell he was an outcast. That was the first clue I had th...

THIRTY DAYS LATER one of Aro’s hunters came across Sethr out in the wilds. He was stick thin, skin stretched taut over bone, but his belly had burst open. He’d crammed himself full of edrauthaberries. The purple stains of their juice overlaid the red marks of Severance on his hands and mouth. They had clogged up his innards in an indigestible mass and eaten away at him, bloating him out with toxic gas until the pressure had ruptured his insides and he’d finally died.

My stomach rebelled. They were not poison to me, they wouldn’t sicken and kill me like they had Sethr, but still I couldn’t keep them inside me. They were one more pleasure of the world I would never know again. I still remember the taste—how joyous they were beforehand, how acrid and vile after.

Elhern would come over and listen, and the ghost would descend on her and flicker from her eye socket and glimmer about the line of her jaw. Then Melory would appear beside me and squeeze my hand and hold her breath while placid, matronly Elhern vacated her own face and voice, and the ghost sat there and spoke instead. And yet she never pronounced a sentence. I think the ghost didn’t know quite what to make of me. Sometimes it referred me to the doctor ghost, sometimes it just had nothing to say. The Severance hadn’t finished its work. I wasn’t entirely out, just as I would never be quite in.

When people were injured or sick, then it was down to whoever could remember what the ghosts had ordered in the past, and sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong. When people got badly hurt, when they came in with bones sticking out of the skin or where a wild beast had mauled someone, then mostly they died, where the ghost might have been able to save them. Needless to say, he certainly had no help for me. He would just sit muttering to himself outside of his house all day, hands trembling and his one eye looking at nothing. People made sure he got fed, and come night they would take him inside and tuck him up, but he was past noticing them, just lost in meaningless conversations with the ghost locked up in his head. I crept close once and heard him repeating nonsense to himself, over and over: “Installation failed, rebooting, rebooting.” He was like that for a full year, man and ghost clinging to each other like climbers on the point of falling. Then, at last, they found him cold in his bed one morning, and that was the end of Doctor Corto.

The other ghost-bearers were besieged because most people thought they could get news from the tree by questioning their ghosts.

The sting itself was on her shoulder, an angry welt like a cluster of knuckles. She wouldn’t open one eye for two whole days while her body shifted and changed to make her into a house fit for a ghost. The other eye would never open again.

The left side of her face puffed out like a fungus, over those days. The skin broke, wept, healed over again so fast I could almost watch it happen. It was worst about her eye and temple, where the ghost was remodeling the substance of her skull so it could go in and out when it pleased, or that’s what I think now, having seen a ghost-bearer’s bones. She lost her eye when the flesh bloated up like a clenched fist around it. What was left when the tight, angry swelling died down was just a hole, a socket that seemed to go too deep into her head. It wasn’t the only one, either. Pits and pockmarks opened up around it, as though she’d need more eyes or senses than the rest of us, to do her new job. She twitched and turned, and the blankets were drenched with sweat no matter how fast I changed them. She would mutter numbers or meaningless fragments of words, and I think everyone was terrified that she’d be another Corto, that it had been the ghost that was senile, and not just the man. As she lay there, sometimes her right eye would open wide and she’d stare up at me as though begging for help. We had always been alike: So people said and our reflections in still water confirmed it. We shared our mother’s straight dark hair, sharp chin and narrow eyes—like and unlike each other, just as we two were like and unlike the rest of Aro. Now the mirror was breaking. I would never look into Melory’s face and imagine my own. That was the first way the ghost took her from me, even before...

Then, mid-morning after a sleepless night when Melory’s body had twisted itself over and over as though each limb was trying to wrench itself free, I started awake at her clasping my hand back. I’d held on to her for so long, her fingers limp in mine, but now she squeezed them, she, Melory, my sister. I opened my eyes and she was looking at me, or half of her was. The rest wasn’t her anymore.

The ghostlight rippled within the swollen part of her face as the ghost answered her call, tireless in its service to the village even as it wore my sister down with its demands. Her lips parted and the words came out in that weird affectless voice that was still half hers. Some people said the ghosts sounded almost as though they were singing, when they spoke, but if so, it was a joyless song I never cared for.

“What wisdom?” whispered Ostel, who was bolder than I in that moment. His tone admitted of no doubt, just a desperate wish to know. “What our ancestors knew, and what they have forgotten, and what the ghosts will never tell them,” Sharskin breathed. “There is a word for what I am that you have never heard before, a word our ancestors knew back when they knew all things and were great and strong. Priest, that word is. Priest, I name myself, for I have heard the voices of our ancestors and been given their secrets. I am the one true priest, the sole inheritor of our ancestors’ greatness, and to me is given the task of changing the world. To me, and to those others who bear the Mark of Cain.

You will learn so much here, my friends, but know this first of all. This is the greatest secret of our ancestors: we were not born to live as witless slaves of ghosts and wasps. We are humans, and it is in our power to remake the work. That is our gift; that is our duty.”

Another night he told us about the world, this place our ancestors had come to. It was poison, he told us. When the flesh of beasts sickened us, when roots were like acid in our mouth, the fault was not within us but in the world. Our ancestors had discovered this and despaired. They had lost faith in their lore and in their descendants.

“They did not fight the world,” Sharskin told us simply. “Seeing the forces arrayed against them, the toxins, the beasts, a world inimical to them, they chose to change, not the world, but their own children. They cast their own kin out of this House and into the world, remade so they could partake of its poison bounty and forget the struggle for mastery that was their birthright. More, because they feared their ignorant children would know hardship, they gave them bitter gifts so that they would not even have to think.” “The ghosts,” I guessed and he nodded angrily. “The ghosts, the hives.”

I am ashamed of who I was that night, more so because I became a man who has always been within this body but held back by the regard of others. When we surround ourselves with people who call evil good, how quickly we accept their definitions and speak them back, round and round until every way we experience the world is tainted by it.

We hounded the woman through the trees and brought her to bay, and then Sharskin beat her to death, his face like a red-spattered mask. And we cheered him on as though he was a great hero, as though we all were. It is a great poison, to know you have a destiny and that everything you do is right by default.

“How else to change the world but to swell our ranks, to shock the herd of humanity out of their complacency and make them think. To strip them of the comfort that has them just trudge around in the same old rut over and over. Doctors know how to brew the Severance.” He lunged forwards and caught Melory’s chin with one hand. “And you’ll teach me, little Doctor. Summon the ghost and show me how it’s done. We’ll brand the whole world with the Mark of Cain, return everyone to their proper condition and open their eyes to the world!”

“Ostel, please,” I said, and all the more desperate because a part of me wanted to take what he was offering. If I just let Sharskin be right in all things, how much simpler life would be. I’d never have to make a decision again. And that thought brought me up short. That was Sharskin’s way, after all. We did what he said because he was the priest. We were like extra hands and bodies for his commandments, and he told us that was the way it had to be, the way the ancestors would have done it before the fall. Except that was the way of the villages, wasn’t it? Do what the ghosts say, bow your head, and if you’re too far from everyone else’s view of what’s right, then it’s the Severance for you, and out you go. The revelation shook me. Sharskin and the ghosts were no different, save in who benefitted.

. But they’re just talking to each other now. Talking in little circles, round and round. They’re . . . broken.” Her eye winked and the light glittered under her skin. “They’re sad.”

Another shudder went through Melory and she dropped and held her head. When the light came, I could see the bones of her hands silhouetted within the flesh.

“Authorisation not recognised,” the voice said again, but now it had changed. Instead of the flat mimicry of Sharskin the ancestors were imitating another voice, one I had known all my life. The lights about us flickered and danced, and something within the House groaned ponderously, a huge beast in pain. Melory’s face was tilted upwards, her eye sightless. Her inner light shone so brightly I could see her skull.

It wasn’t me they wanted to avoid. Of course it wasn’t. The articulated figure of the metal servant was moving. Moss and rust exploded from its joints as it turned its body towards Melory, the dome of its head showing everyone their own face, distorted by ruin and time. From the warts and nodules on either side, the ghostlight sputtered and flared in time with Melory’s heartbeat.

They were not opposites or enemies but all part of the same continuum. I thought of the dead communities that surrounded the House; somehow before they had just been a sign of the nebulous Bad that our destiny would correct, but now I considered them all over again. They were failed villages, early experiments of the ancestors as they sought to find a stable way of life in this hostile land. I thought of wise men and women getting older and worrying about how their children would survive. And they did survive. We have survived, even though the nature of this place, this planet, is to poison us in every way. There are scores of villages spreading further and further into the forest under the protection of the ghosts and the hives. If they had not changed us as they did, perhaps there would just be this dying House, speaking in sightless voices with no ears to hear. Sharskin was wrong.

Her ghost counsels against it, but she and Iblis have both shown me that the ghosts—the expert systems—were meant as servants and not masters. They do not make people their puppets or their slaves, unless people consent to it.

Our people do not need to think about the world or struggle with it, because our ancestors cared for their children and gave them what the House calls artificial ecosystems to protect them. Not just the wasps, but the lice and fleas, all the crawling and jumping and flying things that bite and sting us, and change our bodies so we can survive the world. And, incidentally, allow us to recognise each other. They are part of a system, and because they live on us and inject us with their gifts, we are part of that system, too, and when one of us is Severed from that system, everyone knows it. No wonder my friends abandoned me. I must have seemed a walking corpse, a monster wearing a mask of human skin. Our ancestors feared that their children would die on this poison world, and so they gave their children ghosts to advise and guide them. The ghosts were not meant to decide for them, but if you came into the world with a wise voice always telling you the best way, would you not grow accustomed to doing what it said? A voice to tell you how to run your lives and a voice to tell you how to build and plan, and a voice to tell you how to get well. And others. The hives hold many ghosts most villages never see, like the smithy ghost that Ostel spoke of. Our ancestors made sure that we would never lack for advice, but they did not realise that meant we would forget to find things out for ourselves. As Sharskin said, we are less than we were. I think our ancestors were desperate becau...

I let it make the choice, or else it is faulty and does not know how it makes me the heart of an invisible convocation of conflicting points of view. I like it that way. I don’t want it to tell me I’m right, or that anyone else is wrong.

I think the knowledge of our heritage will fire her up with thoughts and ideas that she can browbeat her ghost into accepting. For her, and those others who can see past their instinctive revulsion at our otherness, we will teach them what the ghosts cannot. And we will learn and grow and become more with each generation. For the House says that the night sky is full of places we might go, if we can only change ourselves enough to live there.