The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Then its leading edge rammed the carved side of the valley, bringing a shower of stones and dirt. I heard the call from above and jammed my branch into the earth, anchoring it as deep as possible to pin the cumbersome shell between it and the wall. My fellows were doing likewise and then we were all running clear.

  Up above, Graf’s people had their own levers and were prying the biggest rock they could find over the edge. I heard Amorket’s shriek of triumph as it went over. She must have been in the forefront of the push, burning the strength the Furies infused her with.

  I half expected the stone to just bounce from the stone-thing’s curved shell, leaving nothing but a pale scrape. Instead the missile led with a jagged edge that shattered the creature into twenty pieces and exposed torn pinkish flesh beneath.

  We swarmed forwards. I was looking for . . . I can’t say what I was looking for, but perhaps my imagination had conceived of something like the angular devices of the ancestors, tucked under the thing’s shell. Instead it was all a mass of pinkish grey, shapeless now the shell had gone, some firm as muscle, other parts running like jelly. We got our branches and tried to pull it apart, to find whatever it was inside that spoke.

  Abruptly it opened up. There was a chamber within it, a hollow heart to the beast. We exposed it to the air and then recoiled with cries of horror.

  In the centre of the stone-thing, we found something. Curled up on itself, broken by the stone’s impact, there was no mistaking the form of a man.

  Interlude

  The Sister Colony: Part Three

  ORINDO SNAPPER WAS WAVING at him.

  Or that was the first impression Bain’s overdrugged and sleep-deprived brain gave him.

  The snail was still alive, although they’d peeled the thing out of its shell and partially anatomised it. Which meant that, in some weird remnant way, Orindo Snapper was still alive, too. Despite the fact that they’d all seen his head and various chunks of him being passed back and forth by the snails.

  It was Orindo’s arm, his left arm. DNA had confirmed ownership and Bain guessed they could even have taken its fingerprints if anyone had a particularly forensic turn of mind.

  It was attached to the snail. Specifically, it had been grafted, if that was the word, to the lining of the interior chamber of the creature they’d caught, the one that’d come sniffing around their camp. There was quite a selection of junk in that fleshy sac, much of it from their abandoned research base. All of it was set into the thick walls of the cavity. Not just sitting there, either. On the other side of a clear dividing panel, Geordi Gownt the biologist was talking them through it as the medical remote continued the dissection.

  Vivisection, Bain corrected himself, watching the ripple and twitch of Orindo’s fingers.

  “This inner chamber . . .” Geordi was a cadaverously thin man now, haggard and grey, reacting to their current state of emergency even worse than Bain. “The whole organism is . . . organised about it.” His words came in an irregular ebb and flow, at the whim of tides of fatigue. “The structures surround it . . . far more complex than just storage as we’d . . . as we thought. Perhaps it evolved from . . . but now, we think, we think it’s a way of experiencing the world, we . . .” There was no we. They couldn’t spare a whole team on the investigation, just him.

  “A sense organ,” Bain prompted. “They, what, take stuff in to feel it out and taste it?”

  “More, more than that,” Georgi insisted, seemed to forget he was talking for a moment, then pressed on. “This tissue here, this is what carries reactive and impulsive . . . impulses around the body. Nerve tissue analogues, though the biochemistry is . . . incompatible with ours. Obviously. Native life here, it’s . . . less centralised. And from what we observed before we . . . came out here, from what the main team observed, the more complex the behaviours, the more distributed the neurology. Opposite of what you’d expect in Earth life. Whole body a brain, almost. This species, it’s as spread out as we’ve seen, but more . . .”

  “Just get to the damned point, Geordi!” Lena fairly shouted at him.

  “This is . . .” He looked hurt. “This is the point, what I’m trying to tell you . . .”

  “The membrane of the chamber, you said,” she drove on relentlessly.

  Orindo kept waving, posthumously. Bain fought down the urge to wave back.

  “Well yes, it does seem to, does appear that some remarkable . . .” Something seemed to sharpen in Geordi’s face and manner. “Director, the membrane serves as a permeable biochemical interface with the world, a profoundly catholic one. We’ve tried introducing it to a variety of substances, including many that are toxic to the native life here.” Meaning commonplace Earth substances, Bain suspected. “The membrane has adapted to serve as an . . . interface, perhaps that’s the . . . it can . . .” They were losing him again. His hand trembled and the arms of the medical remote halted, fail-safes cutting in.

  Lena took up the slack. “Bain, we came here because there seemed more give in the oceanic biochemistry, so we thought we might be able to adapt it to our needs more easily than the terrestrial biomes the main team is working with. And we’ve found the give, or at least our best example of it. These snails are equipped to take on an incredible range of habitats—temperature, chemical gradients, pressure. We think that there must be a huge variation in conditions across their undersea range, and rather than speciate to specialise in particular niches, they’re the ultimate generalists. This organ, this cavity of theirs, it can alter its composition to make use of whatever it comes across. Which is probably why they can break from the water so easily. But the same ability means they can bridge the gap to us.”

  Bain stared at that forlorn hand. “What am I even looking at?” he complained. “A sense organ, you said. So this is it . . . investigating Snapper?”

  “We’re a component of a new environment, something biochemically distinct and alien, but they’ve evolved to encompass anything they come across, and that dumb adaptation has done what all our research has failed to achieve,” Lena told him. “This is the key, Bain. This is what we take back to the main team, when we can finally get a channel open to hail them. The goddamned snails have done the hard work for us. We can build on what we learn here. We’re going to live, Bain. The colony’s going to live.”

  “Well then . . .” All too big, too much, overwhelming. “We need access to the ship, servitors, more samples. We need that open channel.”

  “We need more snails,” Lena finished for him. “I’ll get a team together and go hunting, see if any others have come up the beach after us.”

  She was almost joyous as she marched off.

  * * *

  Geordi Gownt stood in the clean room after the pair of them had gone. Not exactly clean, not now, not with various snail fluids all over it. Clean in the sense it kept the mess in one place. The medical remote was still paused, waiting for him to pick up where he’d left off. The snail quivered and spasmed beneath its poised knives, showing no signs of dying just yet.

  He hadn’t been able to say what he’d wanted to say, but that was more and more a feature of his life, here out on the frayed edge of human existence. The words wouldn’t come, or came lumped together so densely that the pressure twisted his meaning into obscurity.

  A sense organ, they’d said, but that hadn’t been what he meant, quite. Yes, the snails used the lining of their internal cavity to experience the world, just as a human might use their hands to feel something out. And yes, that investigation of whatever objects it ingested was conducted at biochemical arm’s length, and in a way that led to rapid change and adaptation of the lining so that the snail could safely handle whatever it took in. Geordi didn’t think you could poison them, which had been Lena Dal’s original instructions. They probably had the mother of all immune systems, too, or the local equivalent. But none of that quite explained the grafting.

  The late Orindo Snapper’s arm was not just set into the wall of the cavity. There was a pe
rmeable connection between human tissue and snail. The conductive fibres of the not-mollusc’s body had, via the adaptable cavity membrane, meshed with the dead nervous tissue of Snapper and revivified it, taken it over. And of course that didn’t mean the snail would be touch-typing or shaking anyone by the hand any time soon. Nonetheless, the random twitches of those moribund fingers were being triggered by impulses originating within the alien creature, and Geordi couldn’t find any sign of ongoing decay in the hand.

  Which should have him ferociously excited. It was arguably the medical discovery of the century. They could isolate the membrane and use it to preserve human organs and parts perhaps forever. And he hadn’t even mentioned the facility to Bain and Lena, because it wasn’t what was on his mind.

  What he’d discovered, in examining the boundary between human and alien flesh, was the ongoing changes to the snail’s fine structure, spreading out from that connection. Similar, lesser, changes could be tracked from everything else it had implanted into that cavity wall. There was some manner of mediated dialogue between the physiology of the organism and whatever it ingested and stored.

  Geordi stared at the dying snail, trying to pull all these strands of thought together. As though the collection of findings the creature had taken in was not just being felt out and examined but was being incorporated into the entity’s very workings. Becoming part of its mind, came the sleep-deprived song in his head. The snail has Orindo on the brain. It didn’t have a mind, of course, or even a brain. And yet he watched the flowerings of new structures and new complexity spread into the snail, fast enough to be visible, fanning out from where it had latched on to the human arm. He watched and felt a curious sense of dread.

  VIII

  A SMALL MAN, HIS skin so pale I felt the sun had never touched it before now. Hairless, toothless (I saw, as his jaw was smashed). And yet a man.

  Like the brackers’ captive, save ours was already dead. And I remembered how that unfortunate’s pasty skin had been bruised and broken, ruptured and bloody every which way. I thought the brackers had beaten him, before. Looking at this exhumed corpse, I felt that to touch that skin would be like plunging my fingers into mud. And he was not separate. He was not apart from the thing that had contained him. Probably the blood and other injuries the brackers’ captive had borne had concealed the signs, but we could clearly see that there were places where his body and the slick grey-pink flesh of the stone-thing touched without boundary between them. A shuddering of death in one rippled through the other without division.

  Everyone was staring at the body, but I stood and looked past them, out at the muddy waste where the stone-things dragged their shells. I saw them anew, picturing encysted within each one a curled-up human form.

  Melory was kneeling by the ruin of flesh. She had found other things that had been fitted around the man’s body within its womb. They were lumpy, irregular, as though they had wept out of the stone-thing’s flesh like pus from a wound, and then coagulated.

  “I think,” she said slowly, “this was what I heard talking.”

  “It’s a ghost?” The pieces she had looked a little like metal, but only a little.

  “A ghost’s mouth,” she told me, and then Illon had called out, because there were other stone-things coming over. When that mouth had ceased speaking, they had heard the silence.

  They didn’t just crawl towards us in that slow, relentless way of theirs. They were up on their long legs, high striding their way over the ground. I saw a dense fist of mouthparts there hiding a palm full of teeth and hooks and rasps. It had been terrible before, but how much more so now I could picture the cramped cadaver at its heart! I felt a revulsion to my very bones, and wondered if this was how we looked to the villagers, something unnatural given a final edge by the fact that it looked like us.

  I ran forwards, holding my arms out, staff held high. I was ready to beat a quick retreat if I needed to, but the nearest stone-thing veered off and then came back, the fingers of its mouth waving before my face but not touching me. Black button eyes peered at me from the shell’s rim, but I felt it was using some sense other than mere looking. It knew I was there, and it knew me for something apart from the world. Not the instinctive aversion of a beast, nor yet the antipathy of a human being. Something new. It was, I think, curious.

  Melory, and the Tsuno scouts, they’d all seen the bracker’s prisoner and known him for Severed, though he’d had none of the mark on him. I would have to tread through the implications of that when I was out of the stone-thing’s shadow.

  More were coming, and they knew Melory was there, and Amorket, too. They kept trying to bully past us to get to prey they could understand. And yet we stood in their way, shifting, shouting, even pushing at their shells or striking them with sticks. We were confusing whatever sense they relied on. They couldn’t work out what we were. Or else they were thinking it over, and any moment they’d come to a decision and crush us.

  “Melory,” I said. “You need to go. Go back to Tsuno. Take Amorket and run.”

  We had been forced away from the shattered stone-thing, and now one of its fellows had discovered it. Its mouthparts and feelers pattered across the dead flesh, human and beast, and then a sound came from it, not a word, but near to a word. As though a tongueless man was trying to give voice to his grief. Abruptly all the stone-things nearby were moving with a greater purpose, more and more insistent as they tried to push past us. I felt they knew villagers were close, but they couldn’t quite know where, as though they had the scent of them but nothing more. Our presence was confusing them.

  “Go,” I said again.

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not in danger like you are. We’ll cover for your escape. We’ll see what else is here. Maybe there are eggs we can break or food stocks we can ruin.” Our standard tactics for driving out beasts, which surely wouldn’t be sufficient here. I wanted to say she should tell Tsuno what we’d found out, but what would the villagers do with such knowledge? She would tell the House, though, and perhaps the ancestors had some memory of what we faced, or had a weapon we could turn on them. “Just go,” and then a stone-thing knocked me down, not intending to but impatient to get to what it knew was there.

  I thought Amorket would stay, stubborn as she was, but when Melory scrambled back up the slope she followed, leaving only those of us in the Original Condition to face the stone-things.

  Except they would not face us, but wanted to follow Melory out of the valley, and probably all the way to Tsuno. I knew we had to prevent that, and so we got to work. We started with noise, and we beat on their shells with sticks. Then, when they were reaching the top of the valley side, we got our beams and branches and levered them up, all of us bending our backs against each one to upend it and send it down. I’d hoped to see them rocking on their tops, legs waving in the air, but they righted themselves with dismaying speed, and then one of them kicked Illon, knocking her onto her back and winding her.

  It was above her immediately, arched legs a cage around her. She didn’t scream, but kicked at its fleshy underside, and I saw a mouth gape there. Not a mouth, not quite. An opening to that inner chamber, the house of the pallid men.

  I dashed forwards and seized Illon by the wrist, hauling her out from under the creature’s shadow. I was too late, really. I saw what I’d far rather not. The orifice in the thing’s underside had yawned open and peering out through it I met eyes set in a dead white face, devoid of expression, nail-less hands questing blindly out towards where Illon had been, slack mouth mumbling. I didn’t want to hear what it had to say.

  We kept moving, not anywhere but in circles, and the stone-things crawled, now slowly, now with sudden bursts of speed. Melory and Amorket were long gone, and I hoped the Champion was equal to any mundane difficulties that lay between here and Tsuno. Without them, the stone-things remained agitated, plainly remembering an intrusion and fumbling out blindly for signs of what had happened. Then one of them latched onto th
e carcase of its dead kin and began to haul it away.

  My people were clustering around me, asking what happened now. I gave the stone-things a few long breaths to see if they were going to become a problem. Their attitude towards us remained . . . paradoxical. They plainly knew we were there, but they had the animal’s awareness of us as other, something that smelled or tasted or just felt wrong. Not prey, therefore. Nor did they take us as a threat to them, though some animals will run from our very presence and some might attack us if we entered their home like this.

  The sensible decision would have been to pull back with what we’d learned. All I felt we’d learned was to ask more questions. That was why I made the decision to press on.

  Or, no, it was more than that. What little we had learned told me that these stone-things were not beasts to be driven away, but they remained the business of the Order of Cain. They were outside the realm of the villagers.

  I turned to my people, the priest with a congregation again. They were frightened and confused by what we had seen, and I couldn’t blame them. I felt the fear in me, too, but blunted by knowledge.

  “I’ve told you of the time the ancestors came to this land,” I said, and the old words in this strange place had them frowning and scratching their heads, even Illon, who hadn’t heard them so often. “Those of you who’ve been to the House of our Ancestors have seen the ancestors themselves act it out, how they brought their house across the night sky like a boat. And you all know—better than any villager—that the land they came to was poison to them, so that they sickened, and their children sickened, and they were like to starve and leave nothing but their empty House.”