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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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.

That optimism that someone else will come and mend all ills, that your Ma or the Lawgiver or someone will just turn up, and everything will be well, that’s the essence of being a kid.

Better a thief than a corpse, yes, but better a thief than a beggar as well. The world finds it harder to say no to a thief.

“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.

“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.”

It is a great poison, to know you have a destiny and that everything you do is right by default.

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.