The Expert System's Brother

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Sharskin’s scornful look hurt me more than a blow. “People die, boy. That’s what happens to people. They die everywhere, and nobody died near here in a long, long time. The ghosts don’t want us here because they know we would not accept their chains if we knew the truth about ourselves and where we came from. But you’ll see, both of you. You’ll see the House of our Ancestors, and you’ll know the greatness you were born to inherit.”

  For the best part of that day we travelled, cutting straight between the trees, and for most of that day we were looking right at our destination without realising it. I took it for a hill grown over with vines, moss and small trees, webbed with clutching roots hunting out soil across its surface. Surely Sharskin’s mysterious home must be just on the far side of it, for his quickened pace showed we were nearly there.

  And yet it was strange, that hill. There was an odd regularity to the curve of it, despite nature’s attempts to bury what lay there, and there were projections as well, which at first seemed merely rocks scattered down its slope, but set out in patterns. Despite all the encrusting foliage, I was reading meaning into every line of what I saw.

  I stopped walking. Sharskin and Ostel carried on a few steps and then looked back at me. I was trying to picture something in my head: something of the hill’s size, and decorated with . . . spikes? Fins? Whatever they had been, time had ground them down and broken them off, yet been unable to erase them.

  “Is it . . . ?” I stared wildly at Sharskin. “It can’t be a house.” The hill was larger than my village.

  But Sharskin was smiling at me, more approval for me to bask in. “It is,” he confirmed. “It is the House of our Ancestors, Handry. Can you believe it?”

  “Barely,” I confessed. “How could anyone build so large? And there’s no tree, no fields?” Everything I saw was different to everything I knew. I could feel my mind stretch, yet not wide enough to swallow what I was being told.

  “Oh, Handry!” Sharskin laughed at my expression, not meanly but because he was brimming with revelation he wanted to share with me. “You don’t know even a fragment of it! Yes, this is their House, that they built so grandly, but any man can imagine a bigger house. That’s no great dream, that’s not what made our ancestors the giants they were! Let me tell you their greatest feat, Handry. This house of theirs, they did not even build it here. It moved! Long ago, they raised this great hall and lived within it and moved it, so that it could bring them here from far away!” His voice rolled out through the forest, over the mound where our ancestors had dwelled. “It came from the night sky, my friends! It moved through the great darkness of the night like a log on a river until it had carried them here. Can you believe it?”

  We could not believe it. Even when we found out it was true, we could not believe it.

  VII.

  THE DOORWAY TO THE House of our Ancestors was low and square with rounded edges. Roots and vines had pried at it, eager to access the secrets within, but they had been cut back mercilessly. I had a moment of doubt, looking at the way the plant life had been carved from that entryway. The edges were clean and sharp, impossibly so. I pictured a beast with shearing mouthparts it might not reserve only for roots.

  Seeing my hesitation, Sharskin clapped me on the shoulder and took out a knife from within his robe. It had been about his neck in a scabbard of hide, and I’d glimpsed it before, assuming it to be Borra or Jasp-wood, or maybe whittled from an animal’s horn. Instead, it was the silvery stuff his staff was made from. “It’s metal,” he told me. “Our ancestors loved metal and plastic and synthetics, things we can’t build from anymore. Just another indication of what we’ve lost, and what we’re the inheritors of.”

  Ostel examined the knife blade, turning it so the sun glinted from the flat. “In the high ground north,” he said, “they make stuff like this. They dig it out of the ground and put it in a fire. They have a ghost-bearer for it.”

  Sharskin nodded, though I didn’t think he was entirely glad that Ostel knew it. “The smithy ghost, yes. In some few places up by the mountains. But this is our birthright, and most villages have forgotten it entirely. Handry’s never heard of metal before, have you?”

  I said I hadn’t, and that restored his equilibrium. “You should go in,” he told us. “This is your home, now. This place, where only those restored to the original condition may live. You bear the Mark. You have earned admittance.”

  Ostel and I exchanged glances, some residual caution tugging between us. But why had we come so far in Sharskin’s shadow, if not for this? What would be the point of walking away, even if he would let us? We had a destiny, after all. It was a good thing to have when the world was turned against you.

  The walls of the House of our Ancestors were also metal, though I didn’t realise immediately because time had corroded and grimed them until a grey-brown patina covered everything, inside and out. Only in places where new roots had driven questing feelers in could you see the silver flash, and that lasted mere days before exposure to the air darkened and dulled it. The House had two walls, one inside the other, and to enter we passed through a small room with another of the square doorways in the far wall. The floor and walls around us were crumpled and scarred by generations of invading plants that had made free with the place before ever Sharskin had come to hack them away.

  I had thought the inside would be dark as a cave. My mind was full of the thought of animal lairs, pitfalls and just a general horror of lightless enclosed spaces. As I crossed out of that odd little room, I saw that in this, time had been my ally. The great shell of dirt and trees and vines that wrapped about the House had torn its metal skin many times, so that the dimness all around was pierced by shafts of daylight and the curved ceiling was scattered with artificial constellations. The roots had thrust in all over, but they had been cut back just as at the door, in what was surely an ongoing battle with nature.

  I saw even then that Sharskin’s destiny had a deadline. One day all of this cave of wonders would fall in upon itself and be lost to the world, and if we had not regained the powers of our ancestors by then, we never would. The House had stood for hundreds of years, Sharskin said, and doubtless it would endure long past our deaths, but that is not the same as forever. There was no excuse for dragging our feet and letting the next generation of outcasts do the work.

  The inside of the House was divided into many rooms, each connected by those same square doorways, some of which were still half blocked by doors that looked to have slid in from within the very walls themselves before becoming rusted into place. We saw just the first chamber of it then, a great arched space, the walls lined with strange blocky sculptures and, where the mould and moss had been thoroughly cleared away, decorated with little spiky pictures. Right then, though, our attention was on the occupants. Even as the two of us entered, others were creeping out from nooks and holes or ducking it from neighbouring rooms. They were men and some women, mostly young and one surely younger even than me, and every one of them bore the red Mark of Cain somewhere on their body. And they bore it proudly, wearing tunics open to show the blazon of it against their chest, going in breechclouts to display the crimson splash of it against their legs, wherever their lawgivers had chosen to mark them. I could only stare, because the contrast between Sharskin’s followers and the pitiful work crew at Orovo was staggering. These men were fit and strong, not the starved skeletons of those thrown away and left to die. They would have driven out the Harboons in a day, and given the good people of Orovo nightmares to see the Severed so powerful and so unified.

  Their looks to Ostel and myself were hostile and suspicious, but that changed when Sharskin stepped in behind us. There were lots of hard grins amongst them then, and I saw them truly note the spatter of red up my face, the patterns on Ostel’s. We were immediately reclassified from intruders to comrades, our Severance not a sign of abandonment but a badge of brotherhood.

  “My friends!” Sharskin called into that echoing space. “Welcome our n
ew companions! Ostel and Handry, who were cast out from their homes but who were strong, as you all were strong. They survived even with all the world against them. They have earned the right to be among us and to know the truth of their inheritance!” A cheer went up, which was a long way from the reception I had become used to from any other group of human beings. Sharskin had walked past us to stand before his congregation and now he turned, his arms spread wide. “Look upon the House of our Ancestors! Man’s hands built this place. Everything you see was crafted by those who came before us. Those skills were ours once and they shall be again! See these marks?” And he pointed his staff at the spindly little pictures set into the walls. “Men set learning in these marks that I can unlock, learning the lawgivers and their ghosts don’t want you to know! 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.”

  It was a speech he had surely given many times before, but I suspect he never tired of it. “Do you think a ghost came and told men how to build this House?” he asked us. “No! They discovered that knowledge for themselves, wrested it from the world with their own hands. Do you think a ghost led the way from their far home to this place? No! They studied the skies and made their own road, surviving terrors and hazards you cannot even imagine.”

  I looked from him to his followers, then to Ostel, who was no help and saying nothing. Sharskin plainly saw my thoughts on my face because he nodded, kindly enough. “It’s a lot to take in, boy, isn’t it? You’ve questions, so many of them? Ask one now. Set your mind at ease. What’s the greatest thing you need explained?”

  I took my heart in my hands, knowing that if I angered him, nobody would lift a finger to stop him killing me like he’d killed Menic. “How can you know this?” I asked.

  His smile only broadened, though, a teacher with a quick pupil. It was the right question after all.

  “The House of our Ancestors told me,” he explained reverently and, seeing my expression, “You think I mean a ghost, perhaps? Do you see in this face of mine any fit dwelling for ghosts?” And they all laughed, because it was hardly something you’d mistake. “Or you think I’m deranged, thinking a house can tell me anything? Is that why I was Severed in the first place, because my mind’s not right and I hear things that aren’t there? I don’t blame you for wondering, boy, but you only think that because you’re ignorant and born of ignorant folk, kept in the dark by the ghosts rather than allowed to ask proper questions. Handry, I understand you, I do! I’m giving you a hard meal, small wonder you cannot swallow it.”

  At that, Ostel raised a timorous hand because his mind had very much been on something simpler than the wonders of the ancient world. Sharskin regarded him fondly. “You will learn the secrets of how this world was made,” he told us, “and how we were betrayed, but first we will eat.”

  I would rather have learned. My shrunken stomach had been growling for a while, but hunger was an old friend after all, and eating had been no joy to me for a long time, save that concoction of Iblis’s. I readied myself for a handful of berries or grains that might or might not make me sick, and would fill my mouth with a bitterness I could never become accustomed to. I felt a sudden stab of longing for the meals and treats of my childhood. In that moment I would have traded all Sharskin’s brotherhood for the chance to go back.

  Then one of his followers pressed something into my hand. It was a dense slab of something, shiny where the light touched it and nothing like food. I stared at it and at them, and Ostel tried to bite his and made a gagging sound as it deformed beneath his teeth without actually breaking.

  There was some laughter, the sort that grows from seeing someone else’s misfortune, but then Sharskin struck his staff on the floor with a hollow boom, and one of his people came forwards and showed us that the shiny stuff could be peeled back like the rubbery bark of a tree, and within was something soft like clay. I met Ostel’s eyes and shrugged, and touched my tongue to it.

  Sweet! So very sweet and good, and in a breath I’d taken a bite of it, expecting to have to chew away to make it palatable. It had no texture, though, and slid down my throat with blissful ease. I gobbled the finger-sized slab down, and then another, feeling it seem to swell within me, not to pain but to a welcome fullness. There were no cramps, no gagging. My body was not fighting to eject everything up or down. Sharskin looked on approvingly as Ostel and I gorged ourselves and, though we could not speak, our mute eyes shone gratitude back at him.

  “Real food,” he told us. “Food fit for humans.”

  * * *

  After that, he took us to another chamber within the House, just me and Ostel. The others had seen this before, and they had duties and chores just as the two of us would have soon enough. For now, though, despite the food, despite all we had seen, we needed that one step more to make us part of Sharskin’s world. We needed to be shown.

  The walls of this chamber were craggy with angular projections he called consoles, some of which had been cracked open by old roots to show a honeycomb of metal pieces within. Sharskin trailed his fingers across them and I saw a deep flicker of light within them, as though they were cages for ghosts.

  “This room is the heart of the House,” he told us in hushed tones at the threshold. “This is where our ancestors stood and remade the world. Here they planned their greatest victory. Here they fell from grace and into sin. When they issued out from the House, friends, it was to become lesser men, meaner creatures comfortable in their ignorance. Of all their children, it is only we who are privileged to know the truth.” And he strode into the chamber, leading our eyes until we saw huge forms standing there and cried out, shrinking away. There were alcoves along one wall, and each was occupied by a thing that seemed manlike, but far larger. Certainly it was no beast: two arms, two legs, and if not quite a head, then at least a neckless dome where a human head would be. They were eight feet tall, though, and their limbs were hard metal, each joint marked out with sharp lines. I counted seven standing upright in their bays, and one that had emerged, frozen in mid-step across the floor, its arm reaching out forever for something time had long since taken away. I could see the trails where intruding vines had grown up around it before being torn away. Errant root fibres and hairs were still clogging its joints. Its face was a curved mirror surrounded on either side with nodules, warts and blank, glassy eyes. Three jagged pictures were on the left side of its chest, the sort that we’d been told held the learning of the ancients.

  “Our ancestors had many servants,” Sharskin explained to us. “But after we fell from the true path and turned our back on our destiny, they would no longer labour for us. Remember, though: there once was a golden age when these metal men were ours to command, and no man had to cut wood or dig. And know that such a time shall come again, for we will bring it about, you and I. But perhaps even this has not convinced you of your destiny. Perhaps you still shrink from greatness. So let me show you the truth, and you will finally know how cruelly the world has deceived you.”

  He turned away, looking up at the curved ceiling where breaches in the metal had been sealed with moss and hide and some of the odd, filmy cloth the ancients used, the stuff Sharskin had made his robe out of.

  He barked out, “Playback display tutelary video interstellar navigation year two introductory module.” The jumble of nonsense and half-familiar words a ghost might use, but spoken with human inflection and flair. And the House spoke back to him, saying, “Confirmed. Working.”

  It spoke in a voice like a copy of his own, similar and dissimilar to a ghost taking over a human throat, for it did not come from him or from any living lips, but instead sounded like a dead thing mimicking his tone.

  Ostel and I cowered, staring into every corner, sending terrified looks at the great metal servants in case one had come to life at Sharskin’s
bidding. For a moment I knew sheer dread, that this uncanny voice had spoken from the walls, from nothing. I was on the brink of a world that contained so much more than I ever knew, and everything was terror.

  Then everything was wonder, for in the air before us, pictures began to form. They were faint, so that I had to squint to make them out. Parts of them were missing and once or twice the entire vision flickered and died, only to spring up slightly changed. I saw spheres hanging in air that had been painted with a panorama of stars, moving around each other, coming closer, falling unimaginably further away. A woman’s voice was speaking, but her words were faint and scratchy, and those I caught were strange to me, just sounds made in a voice that was humanlike and yet not human.

  We saw a ball that was blue and green. It was brought forward for our attention as though proffered by an invisible servant, and Ostel and I stared at it blankly, trying to understand its obvious import. Before our eyes a silver dart sprang from it, just a speck at first, then larger and larger so that I understood the ball was still very far away, and the dart was leaving it behind. The woman was speaking in calm, measured tones, and once or twice her intonation was that of someone making a humorous aside, though I could not get the joke. She used some words I knew, but they were all strung together in ways I could not understand and half of them were missing.

  The silver dart grew very large until it filled most of the room, surrounded by a cloud of little spiny pictures as though it was swimming in a sea of forgotten knowledge. Something about its shape was familiar, the parts of it that jutted out and the pattern of them across its metal skin. Then it was small again, or it was further from us, and there was another ball hanging in the air before it, painted a swirly green from top to bottom.

  Ostel was still gazing blankly at it all but I sent Sharskin a fearful look and found his eyes already on me.

  “It’s the House,” I got out, hearing my own voice shake.