The Expert System's Brother

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Yes,” he breathed. “Good, boy. The House, and the distant home of our ancestors that it left. And now . . .”

  I was watching the dart as it fell towards the green. “That’s . . . here?” But I did not believe even myself, because how could that ball just hanging in the air mean everywhere I had ever known? But then the ball was growing bigger and bigger, and I fell over as it seemed about to fill the room and crush us all, and yet it never quite did, extending out past the walls in some way and showing me a closer and closer view of its wrinkled surface. I saw murky, roiling masses that I knew for clouds seen from the wrong side, and then I was staring down from an impossible height at a great landscape of purple and green, an expanse of trees as far as I could see, broken only by the teeth of mountains. I saw no villages, no fields. The silver dart fell towards a world that had never been shaped by human hands.

  I gave up, then. I could no longer fight the knowledge that everything Sharskin said was true. He was the last priest of true humanity, and we the outcasts were his flock, his agents in the world. I gave myself over to his destiny.

  * * *

  Over the next three days I laboured. Alongside my brothers I cut wood and I threw stones at any beasts not already put off by the unnatural nature of the House and its occupants. I shored up our metal home where the roots had torn it badly, packing earth in where cracks and stress had warped the walls. I took a metal knife and cut back nature wherever it sought to break in—and I had never appreciated just how fast everything in the world grew, and how it redoubled its efforts when you tried to curtail it.

  Of my fellows, we were all of a piece now, chosen by Sharskin as robust enough and obedient enough to become his votaries. Some had doubtless deserved their Severance, criminals and the incurably idle. If so, life outside their village had cured them of such sins. Any who might try to live off the sweat of others had already been weeded out. Menic was far from the first to begin the journey to the House and never finish.

  About three in four of us were men, the remainder women. Perhaps women were less given to a life that might lead to Severance, or more useful in a community so that lawgivers were lenient where they might otherwise be harsh. At first, the thought of sharing a house with women stirred parts of me that had lain shrivelled and dormant since that last chase after Livvi and my accident, and I know Ostel had the same thoughts. Sharskin had a hard rule, though: no man was to lie with a woman, not now, not ever. It was a rule hard as metal, for him. I saw him beat a pair who flouted it, and he came close to breaking their bones. Woman with woman, man with man, these things plainly irked him, too, but if you were willing to trade his disappointment for comfort, these things were not outright forbidden. Nothing that might make a child, though. After a while, one of the veterans explained that, way back at the start of the congregation, it hadn’t been that way. Then some of the women had got with child, and everyone had discovered just how an outcast’s baby sickened and died and rotted in the womb, how the antipathy of the world was so much crueller to the unborn. After that came Sharskin’s rule, because he would have no more dead children or mothers under his care.

  When I asked how we would prosper in the future, or whether he would just keep bringing new outcasts in as he had me, he gave me a strange, secret look. He had plans for that, he said. I would not lack for fellows in the days to come.

  We all worked save Sharskin, but none begrudged him because Sharskin knew how to make the House give us food and every one of us remembered hunger keenly. More than that, he taught us. Each evening he told the House to make light, and parts of it gave out a dim amber radiance. In that otherworldly illumination he would tell stories to us. Sometimes he bade the House to make pictures in the air; more often he just used his own fine voice to deliver his message to his congregation. His tales were always variations on the same theme, reinforcing how we were destined for a greatness we would know only through him. He told us that our ancestors, the architects of the House, had been masters of the land they had once lived in. All things of the earth and sky had bowed to them, and they had metal servants to perform their every whim. Light was theirs to create; they knew no wounds nor hunger nor sickness. In their power and might they built great Houses like our own that would carry them to new places, that they might be masters of every land under the sun. Sharskin’s eyes flashed as he told us this, his hands making passes through the air that every man’s mind turned into wonders beyond imagining.

  But, he explained, our ancestors had failed us in the end. They had been fallible despite their knowledge and their power. They had not mastered this land the House had brought them to. Each night he might give a different reason why they had failed in their duty to us, their descendants. Sometimes they argued and fought one another, other times they grew lazy during the long voyage. In one tale it was a woman who led them astray. Instead of forcing the land to become their servant, our ancestors had made a compromise with the spirit of this place and betrayed all who came after them.

  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.

  What was our ancestors’ great betrayal? Our priest was waiting for one of the faithful bold enough to pose the challenge so that he could enlighten us all, and I made myself that ritual fool. “If they were so great, what happened to make us like we are now?”

  “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.” He took us back to the main chamber the next night and we heard the faint voices of the House speak in occult terms about what had been done—many voices, men, women, but all scratchy and distant and incomplete. I heard those long-lost tones recast the ghosts as expert systems, the hives as administrative community biome hubs. This world they crafted, Sharskin told us, would never change, because its people would never change. The ghosts would dole out the same lessons to each generation, and people would survive but they would never become more than they were. Without struggle, nothing could get better, that was Sharskin’s creed. And while we worked to support his congregation, he planned how he might bring that struggle back to the world. If not him, if not us, then who? We were humans of the original condition, freed from a meaningless life of shallow comfort by the Mark of Cain. We had been stripped of all the shameful changes made to the children of the ancestors. We must not mourn that loss, Sharskin insisted, nor wish it reversed. We had become men who could challenge the world.

  On the fourth day he took me from the work details. There was an initiation, he explained. Ostel had been tested already, now it was my turn. I was instantly sweating with fear. I had found a place to be, people who were my new family. What if I failed now? Sharskin explained to me that there was no failing this test. It was simply to tell how far the Severance had progressed with me and if I was sick with something that my brothers should know about. I did not entirely believe him. After Menic, I had the sense that there were many ways to lose a place in Sharskin’s congregation. What if I was sick and couldn’t work? I didn’t think they would slave for me while I just lay about.

  He took me to another chamber of the House, this one with metal beds that time and the ravages of intruding nature had bent and broken. The House was strong here, he said, and at his command parts of the walls lit up i
n an irregular pattern, shedding a weak, underwater light across us. Here the House would search my soul and find out the truth of me. For my part, I must just stand still and banish all deception from my mind.

  I might have tried to deceive it, if I had any idea what lies would serve. As it was, once the deep humming and grinding sounds began in the walls around me, I froze like the dead metal servants and waited for the worst.

  The voice spoke back to Sharskin in its artificial imitation of his voice, starting off very low as though its slow drawl issued from the bowels of the earth, then winding up until it settled on a register higher than his natural tones would go.

  “Diagnosis complete: subject in original condition incompatible with environment,” it said, and Sharskin grinned and clapped me on the arm. “Protective measures prescribed,” the voice went on, but Sharskin made a gesture, banishing the thought.

  “Truly one of us, Handry,” he told me, grimly pleased. “Thank that clumsy old doctor of yours; he has made you the man you were meant to be.”

  And then the voice, his pirated voice, said something more. “Diagnostic implant signal detected. Prior treatment incomplete. Active trace signal detected. Respond yes no?”

  Sharskin went very still, and for a moment I thought I’d failed the test after all. His eyes were hooded as he considered this last utterance, and he peered at the milky details of some of the lit panels.

  “Go back to your work, boy,” he told me. On my way out, I heard him speaking again, alone and yet not alone as the House of our Ancestors answered him slowly in his own voice.

  VIII.

  AFTER THAT, HE KEPT me in the House or by his side, singled out from all the brotherhood and, fool that I was, I took it to mean that he was impressed with the man I had become. Was I not a quick study? Did I not ask keen questions? Over the next days I came to believe that I was special, groomed to be Sharskin’s second, perhaps even his replacement in time. I was the priest’s acolyte.

  Some of the others accepted this as they accepted everything Sharskin did or said; others grumbled and glowered, telling each other that I had jumped up above them for no good reason—which was true.

  It was a hard life in Sharskin’s congregation. Two of us died in just the short time I was there. Garvell had gone to a village to steal or to scout, and the locals turned out to be more hardened to the ways of outcasts than most and drove her away with stones. A well-slung shot struck her skull and cracked it, and her fellows could not even retrieve her to bring to the House, where the invisible voices might have helped her.

  The other, a jolly man named Yerke, stepped on a thorn that lodged in his foot and turned poisonous. He bore the pain with jokes until the wound was foul and black, and then he was in great pain and Sharskin made an end of him, bringing mercy with a single blow of his staff.

  He used the act as occasion for a lecture, conjuring the voice of the House to talk about antibodies and immune system overreaction. I understood little, save that there were maladies carried by little animals that the villagers would catch but would not touch us, and yet there were many, many things that were harmless to the people out there which were toxic to us, so that even a little in our blood would send our bodies mad with horror, and perhaps kill us like Yerke’s body had killed him.

  Soon enough Sharskin called me back to the small chamber with the ruined beds and had the invisible ancestors in the walls examine me again. Their verdict was “Return signal active caution signal strength may be reduced by environment,” which meant little to me but everything to Sharskin.

  Immediately after that, he decided that a major expedition was required. I’d learned he often went wandering to seek new recruits, but now he called up all of us and gave us knives and rods of metal, and food from the House that he sternly instructed us to ration.

  “What are we doing?” I asked him, considering myself the mouthpiece of the congregation.

  “I am going to show you what it means to be the masters of the world. I will give you a taste of what is to come,” he told us. His eyes were bright and feverish, as they were when he spoke of ancestors and destiny. “You know now that you are strong, my friends,” he said. “You know that you are remade in the image of our ancestors, who built this House and travelled so far in it. Would such men suffer the world to bend their backs? No, not until they gave up their birthright and their knowledge and became the slaves who live out there, ghost-ridden, hive-bound!” He brandished his staff fiercely. “We are not slaves! We are men! We are the masters of the world, not its livestock to be driven and slaughtered.”

  I thought we were off to kill animals, or perhaps to clear trees. After all, if the world’s very nature was set against us, that seemed a reasonable reprisal. And yet Sharskin led our armed band off through the woods, filled with a righteous fury he plainly had no intention of squandering on dumb beasts or plants.

  We were on the move for three days, pushed hard and yet revelling in it because we had the strength to push ourselves hard. The food of the ancestors sustained us more than anything that ran or crept or grew in the green earth, and we laughed and joked and clashed staves with each other, knowing that discovery—by man or beast—was no longer a terror for us.

  Then, past noon on the third day, Sharskin hushed us, and we crept forwards with, if not stealth, then at least not actual clamour. We were approaching a village. I thought he meant to skirt it without alerting its occupants that we had ever been, but Sharskin had other ideas.

  The place was a little smaller than Aro, crunched in between two hills where there was little good land to farm. There were perhaps thirty of us, the entire congregation. The village must have held several hundred, but we were mostly young, angry and filled with the knowledge of our strength, and when we arrived and started banging on their walls and doors and whooping out threats, they did not know what to do with themselves. Some stumbled out, some stayed in. For all that they were the majority and we the outcasts, we mastered them with noise and threat. Their lawgiver came forth, shouting, his face flickering with ghostlight. Sharskin struck him down. I stopped dead at the sight, a transgression beyond anything I had seen. To strike a ghost-bearer? To kill the house of wisdom and guidance? And yet he did it; one blow of his staff and the man’s brains were on the ground.

  Everyone was silent then, the villagers and us, as we stared at the body. I remember looking into Sharskin’s fierce face and seeing no chagrin, no sense that he had gone too far. He had preached and preached, but it was only in that moment that we understood the full conviction of his message. The world was our enemy, the people were our enemies, but most of all the ghosts that held both world and people in chains.

  “Now,” Sharskin barked out to his horrified audience, “your tools, your cloth, pots, baskets, all your best work, you’ll bring it out now. Bring it out and build a fire for us to see it. If it’s good enough, we’ll find it a home. Anything else goes to the flames.” He levelled his stained staff at them and they drew back from the tip as though it was a stinger or a whipvine that might lash at them any moment. “Cross us and I’ll send a lad up the tree to knock in your little wasp infestation there. Where’s your new Lawgiver coming from if you’ve no vermin to spread their filth? Or maybe I’ll just put a torch to the whole tree, see how you like being homeless in this world. The beasts of the wild avoid us, friends. They’ll be a sight more glad to see you.”

  If they had come together and not cared who was hurt, they could have driven us away. We would have killed many, though, and their leader was dead, his ghost vanished into the air. They did not know what to do and I thought even then of Sharskin’s creed. The ghosts did people’s thinking for them. Now these people just stared and, after we raised our hands against them, they did as we said. They brought out the work of their hands, all the things they had spent their lives crafting, and we took anything that we liked—new clothes, containers, tools, anything the House of the Ancestors might not have.

  And we took joy
in it, too. Every one of us had been spat upon by people like this, even if it hadn’t been these people in particular. We had been weak and crawled with our bellies in the earth, and then Sharskin had made our weakness a strength that we had finally been given the chance to use.

  I whooped and hollered with the rest of them. I struck a man who tried to get back a carved stick from the pile, and I broke the stick across my knee and threw it into the fire, just because he wanted it. The others laughed and I laughed with them. We made each other bolder, urged on by the acclaim of our fellows.

  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.

  Then we took our loot and were gone before morning, before they might rediscover their own boldness. One of their hunters did follow, in fact, and tracked us halfway back to the House of our Ancestors before someone spotted her. There was a great chase then, because Sharskin could not have that village knowing where we made our home. 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.

  When we returned to the House, Sharskin brought me straight into the little room, that I had begun to think of as the doctor room, imagining that the ancestors within its walls had once been learned men of medicine because the way they talked seemed to echo the way Melory had, when the ghost spoke through her.

  “Tell me,” Sharskin demanded of them, and they buzzed and grated within the walls, then threw his own flat, distorted voice back at him.