The Expert System's Brother

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He wanted to talk, though, and what he had to say was pure intoxicating madness.

  “Handry, you should come with me when we leave here.”

  I eyed him, still thinking this was about lust and companionship and knowing that two outcasts just meant two mouths for the same meagre amount of food we could scrounge. And he was stronger than me, so it wasn’t as though I could keep him from taking more than his share if he’d wanted.

  “You’re better than most of these walking corpses,” he said. “You, Ostel, Menic, you’ve all been Severed for a while and lived. The rest would starve before they reached where we’re going. I can’t save them.”

  My bafflement must have communicated itself through my expression because he grinned at me. “Come on, Handry, you’re a boy who asks questions of the world. Rare and valuable, that is. So ask.”

  “Go with you where?”

  “No, ask!” He gripped me by the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “Ask what the point of it is, what we’re for, what being outcast means!”

  “I don’t know any of those things,” I complained. “How can I?” And yet I was thinking, even then, that I’d never even thought to question it. “We’re just cut off. We’ve had our . . . human-ness taken from us. We’re broken.”

  “No!” Sharskin hissed, his pincer grip tightening until I squirmed. “That’s their lie, Handry. We’ve not been made less, we’ve been restored. We are finally how we’re meant to be.” His wide eyes pinned me, cutting past my incredulous gawping. “There’s a place we can go, Handry. Those who are strong and resourceful enough to go there. We can live there. There’s food and shelter. There are others like us. A community of those who’ve been cast out. How does that sound, boy?”

  “Impossible,” I blurted out, and he laughed.

  “Well, no wonder, with that attitude! But it’s true. Come with me and do what I tell you, I’ll take you there. You can be one of us.”

  “One of what?” My mouth was still making words even though my mind was already convinced. Of course I would go with Sharskin. I would follow him forever, because he had answers and confidence and vision, more than anyone else I ever met. Sincerity blazed in his face like ghostlight.

  “This,” he told me, raising his red-stained hands, “this is the Mark of Cain. That’s what our ancestors called it. But because of this mark, it means we’re restored to the Original Condition.” He said the words with weight, making them names for great invisible things I couldn’t guess at. “We’re the real people, Handry, now all that ghost-taint is stripped from us. Don’t think of yourself as broken or wrong. You’re how a man is supposed to be.”

  I felt something inside me, swelling until it hurt, as though I was Sethr with his bloated stomach. It was my heart, though. It was my pride. Here was this man, so impossibly healthy for an outcast, so in control of his own journey, telling me I was special. He was saying the things that marked me out, made me better, not just a reject abandoned to die. Of course I’d go with him. How could I not? Tell me you wouldn’t, if you’d lived like me, and I’ll call you a liar here and now. A little kindness, that was all it took to make me his; kindness, and the fact that he understood what it was like. Even Melory couldn’t know that, not since the ghost came to her, despite all the years we’d spent in each other’s shadow.

  Next morning, along with Ostel and Menic, I left Orovo in Sharskin’s company, striding out into the wilderness with a direction and purpose I’d long been lacking.

  VI.

  OSTEL WAS A TALL, skinny man—skinny before they had Severed him, even skinnier now. His village had been some place called Pavo that I hadn’t been to, and their Lawgiver had got creative with the Severance, daubing it in patterns on his face and chest so that he wouldn’t ever be able to hide what they’d done to him. As though any of us ever could. As though, even wrapped in thick hide from head to foot, it wouldn’t scream out at every normal person that we weren’t one of them. But that artistic streak was probably why Ostel was still alive, seasons after being cast out, because the Severance hadn’t quite taken, just like with me. Even though—unlike me—they really had meant to cut him off forever. Just what he’d done that they’d Severed him, he never said. It wasn’t a question most people would answer. We liked to think of ourselves as the wronged, the rebels. I really was blameless, but it was a story borrowed around all of Sharskin’s followers, and they couldn’t all of them have been mistakes. Nobody wanted to remember that they’d brought it upon themselves.

  Menic was shorter and broader. He’d been strong before they Severed him and not been outcast long, so he’d kept most of that muscle. A man like that, fit and well, you’d think I’d remember him from the fighting, but somehow I couldn’t recall him at my shoulder as we drove the animals out of the tree. I began to have my suspicions about just why he’d been thrown out of wherever he came from, and they were confirmed soon enough.

  It started the first night after we left Orovo when Sharskin asked him to build up a fire while Ostel and I went foraging for what we could find. Feeding the four of us was tricky because we all reacted to different berries and roots and grubs in different ways, which meant whoever went out had to gather a bit of everything those parts had to offer and hope there would be something everyone could stomach. The two of us got back in the dark to find Sharskin asking Menic where the fire was. Menic made himself look simple and just muttered that he wasn’t any good at building fires, never had been, so very sorry. So Sharskin made the fire, and lit it, too, through some trick of his that wasn’t anything like the fooling with sticks and stones that hunters did. Menic was good at eating, and he’d chew over just about everything even if he spat it out, and I remember Sharskin watching him across the fire, expressionless. Ostel and I could see just what was going on and we expected some sharp words from our guide and leader, but Sharskin said nothing. We didn’t realise he was counting, inside his head. That was one.

  The next day we set a punishing pace through the forest, interrupted only when we had a face-off with a big Sevner, the largest I ever saw. It had been stripping a tree with its pincered trunk, but it obviously decided we were bad news when we broke through some undergrowth behind it. It was large as the house I’d lived in with Melory, hump-backed and solid on its six tubular legs, with its fat tail curving down to make a seventh. It tossed its head in the air, brandishing the forked horn that jutted an arm’s length from over its top eye, and trumpeted at us from the slits in its flanks.

  Sevners look slow, but they can chase a man down when their blood’s up, and this one was plainly in no mood for us. Our Severed smell, that most animals would rather avoid, had obviously riled it; we had no choice but to scare it off. We set up a-hollering and a-hooting, and then Ostel and I started throwing stones, aiming at whichever of its eyes was turned towards us. Sharskin himself just strode forwards, arms out wide with his big sleeves flapping, waving his shining staff so that the sunlight glittered and dazzled across its big, dumb-looking face.

  I thought he was going to get stomped flat because for a moment the Sevner was bunching up its legs to charge him down. Then it changed its mind and shouldered off into the trees, squealing in panic and cracking the trunks with its weight.

  I remember Menic had been at the back, though he’d done his share of the hollering at the start. It hadn’t come to a fight and Sharskin said nothing, but he was counting and that was two.

  That evening, though, he had Ostel build the fire and told Menic to go gather for us, and that was apparently too much.

  “Go gather yourself,” Menic told him, sitting down and warming his hands. “You wanted me to come with you. Wasn’t my idea. So, here I am. You got what you want.”

  Sharskin stood very still, and that was three and enough. Ostel and I took a prudent step away, because we both reckoned Menic was going to get a slap, and then maybe the two of them would end up scrapping because Sharskin was strong, too, and he’d want to beat some sense into our travelling companio
n. We were slightly right but mostly wrong.

  Sharskin hit him with that silver staff, just flourished it in the firelight and whacked Menic in the side of the head with it, with all his strength. I heard the man’s skull crack like a pot and he had a heartbeat and a half of rolling on the ground and screaming before Sharskin rammed the end of that staff through Menic’s eye, pinning his spasming body to the ground and turning the scream into a deflating wheeze of breath that soon became nothing at all.

  Ostel and I were frozen, staring at what he’d done. Sharskin turned towards us, staff still gory with Menic’s brains. His face was hard and I could see many things in his eyes, but no ghosts. He seemed the utter antithesis of all we had known before our Severance, the Outcast personified, brutal, mysterious and free of the shackles of others.

  “Listen to me,” he directed us sternly, and we listened.

  “We are cast out, all of us,” he told us. “See what that means? No lawgiver will come save you. No community will step in to provide for you or protect you, save that which we make together. Leave me and starve, if you will. Walk away now, and take your chances with the cold and the beasts, and with them,” and he jabbed his bloody staff back towards Orovo, “who will never take you back, and never accept you, and in the end won’t even suffer you to live. Or stay with me and obey me, for to me is given wisdom and truth.”

  He paused, as though there was some real chance of either of us just wandering off at that point. He had just bludgeoned our companion to death, it was true, and might do the same to either of us while we slept or on the trail; for some infraction, real or imagined; for no reason at all. But he spoke fire. He spoke lightning. His words were like a door through which we could glimpse . . . ancient things, secret things. And what else did we have save the hunger and the cold?

  “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. Remember what I told you, Handry? This mark, that cut us off from our kin and left us with all men’s hands raised against us, this is a badge of pride. This is the restoration of our birthright, freedom from the tyranny of the ghosts. This does not cast us down, it raises us up so that we may once again approach the power and majesty our ancestors knew, before they fell from grace.” His smile was brilliant, as hard to look at as the sun. “Now, will you follow where I lead?”

  He knew we would; we knew we would, but there is a special magic in saying so, binding yourself with word and thought to another man’s purpose. From that moment, as Ostel and I tried to outdo ourselves with our babbling pledges, we were his followers and members of his congregation.

  With Menic left behind, our journey proceeded more swiftly and smoothly. There was a moment, though, when Ostel almost tripped himself over the dead body. The stories we had told each other as children were true, I discovered: there was one flesh an outcast could eat without sickening. Ostel wanted to butcher Menic and take the meat, looking for a couple of nights of full bellies and not having to break his fingernails scratching in the earth for roots.

  But Sharskin would not have it. He did not strike Ostel but his disapproval alone was enough to make the man cringe.

  “He was lazy and worthless,” was Sharskin’s epitaph for Menic, “but he was one of us. We are a select brotherhood. We do not eat the flesh of our own.”

  “But . . .” Ostel waved a shaking hand at the cold corpse.

  “Hold out, my friend,” Sharskin said, gripping him by the shoulder. “There will be food, where we’re going. When we reach the House of our Ancestors you’ll never want for it. You think I grew strong on twigs and worms? But not our own. It is forbidden.”

  So we followed him into the wilderness, watching no further ahead than his footprints as he navigated by sun and stars. We made his fire and kept his watch, scavenged for scraps to feed us, and Sharskin lit the fire with a bright square he held cupped in one hand and took the lead when we found some beast that wanted to challenge us. Each night he told us more of the same tale. Yes, the world had turned against us, but it wasn’t some stupid accident or punishment for our crimes. We were important, singled out as special for all the world. And yes, that meant hardship and tribulation, but it was for a purpose. We were marked out to bear a burden by our ancestors, who recognised in us the strength to do their will. And how much better it was to suffer because I was special, than just because I’d been a clumsy fool once when I was thirteen!

  We skirted a couple of other communities on the way, both big ones, though smaller than Orovo had been. Then we found the first abandoned one, and that brought us up short. I had seen how a village was born; I had not thought they could die.

  Sharskin gave us some small time to pick through the wreckage. The tree at its centre had burned long ago, and the houses were empty and decaying. They were not quite like the buildings of Aro or other living communities, though not a world away from them, as though the architect hadn’t quite known how houses were supposed to be. There were some bones, too—human rather than the open lattice bones of animals. I poked about around the base of the scorched tree, finding the scars of an aborted attempt to cut it down before the fire was set. Most of the bones were around there. I found one skull where half the bone was just eaten away, riddled with holes all about one side, and tried to imagine the ghostlight flickering there.

  When Ostel and I had tried and failed to satisfy our curiosity, we returned to face Sharskin’s quizzical gaze. If he was expecting us to have solved the mystery, he was to be disappointed.

  The next village we found was also dead but the tree was not. Instead it was diseased, the trunk warty and puffed out with boils. The houses looked as fallen-in and rotten as the last lot, perhaps even more so, but we could not go close to investigate. The air was thick with big, barbed wasps issuing from all those nodules on the trunk, hives and hives and hives of them. We saw a few dead animals closer in, the wasps busily stripping them down and crawling in the hollows of their skeletons. Neither of us wanted to see if the world’s antipathy for us would ward their stings away, and certainly Sharskin was keeping a prudent distance. I never knew whether the ruins and the undergrowth concealed a trove of more human remains or whether the inhabitants had time to flee the horror that had taken over their tree.

  “Something is there that destroys communities, some malaise,” I speculated.

  Sharskin grinned a little. “You think so?”

  “Or something was here,” I corrected myself. “Once. These are old places.”

  “Half the answer, that is,” Sharskin told me. “Right lines, boy, but wrong conclusion. But you’ll understand it all. I’ll teach you what went on here, back then. Just a little, and the rest will come to you in a flash, you’ll see.”

  We avoided another dead village, all overgrown with creepers and brambles, and dead for no reason we could see, save that Sharskin kept a good distance from it. That night, though, we camped in the shadow of a tree surrounded by a different sort of ruins.

  People had lived here, though we saw no signs that this was where they had died. We lit our fire at the base of a tree that seemed the same type a village would grow around, just like the virgin one that Iblis and her ghost had picked out. At the base of its lowest branches I could make out a swelling, as though a hive had begun there and failed.

  The houses that had been raised here were not like those I knew, or even like the clumsy imitations I had seen so recently as ruins.
There was little left, but Ostel and I found thin struts of a stuff like Sharskin’s staff, that he called metal, though they were corroded away until we could snap them with our fingers. There was cloth there, too, or perhaps the hide of no creature I ever saw, thin and rotting, but plainly something that had been stretched between the metal to form a makeshift roof. It shredded to dust when we pulled at it.

  Ostel was thoroughly spooked by this. Back where he came from, which was a very long way indeed, his village told stories about further communities still where animals lived like men and built their own houses, and these new ruins were solid proof of that as far as he was concerned.

  “What beasts made this?” he asked in fascinated horror. “Are they still here? Did they go back to the wild?”

  “No beasts,” Sharskin told him, standing up from the fireside to take in all the tangled wreck with a sweep of his staff. “This was one of the first homes of our ancestors, once they left their great House to come out into the world. This was where the real humans lived, before they became slaves to ghosts. Probably they died, too.” He did not sound very sorry about it. “But they had already gone astray,” and he jabbed at the failed hive on the tree. “They had lost sight of their destiny.” His grin came back, but the light of the fire made it look awful and majestic. “I shall show you the true wonder of our forebears, my friends. You will be elevated, as I was. I will show you how much more humanity should be, than what it has become.”

  “And food?” Ostel asked plaintively.

  “Like you never tasted,” Sharskin promised.

  * * *

  “If you listened to the ghosts for a hundred years, you would never come to this place,” he told us the next day. “I will initiate you into the world’s greatest secret, that the ghosts would go to any lengths to conceal from you.”

  “Because people died here?” I guessed.