The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “We have to fight,” Lena told him. “We’ve caught this one. We can take it apart, for a proper examination. Find a way to poison them, something they don’t like. I’ve already asked the biotech team to . . .” She stuttered to silence, because of course she was here to get his rubber stamp of authority on just such an action. Bain just waved it all by. One more decision I don’t have to make.

  When she came shouting for him, three hours later, he assumed the worst: an army of snails on the horizon, the entire slope beneath them just one more alien monster a mile across. There was something unfamiliar in Lena’s haggard face, though. It was excitement.

  “You’ve got to come and see,” she gabbled at him. “You’ve got to brace yourself. It’s . . . not good, Bain. It’s horrible. But . . . the implications! You’ve got to see for yourself.”

  So he went, and he saw for himself, and it was horrible. But at the same time it was hope.

  VII

  KALLOI DIED THE NIGHT after we got back to Tsuno.

  It was the blood. He got torn up when the brackers went mad. When, perhaps, the stone-things turned up at the far side of their village, and they were fighting. We wrap ourselves in these bandages because the world is poison to us, in a way that actual poison is not. That is the backwards way we live. The things that are made to be dangerous—venom, savage beasts—are no terror to us, but mundane things that no villager would worry about can be death. That poison world got into Kalloi’s wound. When we got him back, he was already shivering, his skin livid, feverish. He was babbling, and Melory did her best but it was not enough. Before the sun rose, Kalloi had fought the stuff of the world that was inside him, and lost. We of the Order took him and burned him, rather than the village way of returning someone to the earth. The things of the earth will not decay us.

  It was not the first time. In fact, it was a common thing. If a wound could be washed, with boiled water, then most likely the patient would live. Or sometimes the wound swelled angrily but the fever broke, and they lived. Sometimes a life could be saved with the loss of a limb, a second severance to cut away the poisoned part. It was a reaction, Melory said. The thing that killed us was not even the world-stuff itself, but the way our bodies could not abide it. Our blood, our flesh, fought so fiercely against the touch of every part of this world that we consumed ourselves, a man who burns his house down to drive out the vermin that had crept into it.

  Illon was very drawn. She had come with Kalloi and me, seen all we had seen. He had died, and it might have been her. It was her first true lesson about life in the Order.

  “All we can do is remember,” I told her. “I’ve told you the Ancestors had their way of setting down what they knew, their writing. There is a wall in their House where we place the names of all who come to the Order and pass on, as we all shall. Kalloi’s name shall join them. We die, Illon. But we live longer than we would alone and Severed.”

  I watched her carefully. This was often the moment you can see whether someone will thrive in the Order. She didn’t rail or complain. Instead she looked me in the eyes and said, “What can we do?” And she meant revenge; she meant doing the job we’d been called here for.

  “We are going before the Lawgiver again,” I told her. “But I think we will go to war.”

  * * *

  The boy Lawgiver got a collection of Tsuno’s more respected people together to hear what we had to say. Old men and women, mostly, confused and uncertain, shoulders not strong enough for the load they were having to bear. Looking over them, I saw the limitations of village life. They’d lived all their days with the ghosts telling them how to do it. They hadn’t had to make decisions about anything important. A bad harvest, a sickness, a shortage, the appropriate ghost would have the answer. And I remembered thinking just this, when Melory finally brokered the compact that led to the Bandage-Men and our mystery. We made things better. We solved problems they didn’t know they had, because any problems the ghosts didn’t address just became part of the way life was. And suddenly the Bandage-Men were fighting their beasts and taking their outcasts. And passing word from one village to another, and though that seemed the least of what we do, ten years has shown me it’s actually the biggest change of all. As the Order grows and prospers, villages will become more and more used to being able to speak to one another at will, and even the ghosts will start to figure us into their advice, and the world will become better.

  But right then we were on the raw frontier, and that great change for the best was still just ripples moving out from Orovo and the House of our Ancestors. It hadn’t reached Tsuno, particularly. And Tsuno had a problem I wasn’t sure how to help with.

  As chief hunter, Erma was right there when Melory and I stood before the Lawgiver. I saw she wanted to control the words. She didn’t want us to talk about her mystery, but more than that, it was the brackers. She didn’t war with the brackers. She’d lived her whole life a secret way that let Tsuno, all unknowing, use the brackers just like we want the villages to use us. To make things better, even if the ghosts and most of the people never realised.

  If we stood before the Lawgiver and said, we must go and fight the brackers, burn their houses, drive them out, they’d do it. We would lead, but they would come after. And people won against animals, usually. Although the brackers were very strong, and also very smart. I didn’t much fancy the idea of going to war with them, if I were honest with myself. And yet what we were actually going to propose seemed worse.

  Melory set it out for them. If it were just a matter of fighting brackers, it would be me, because that’s what they know I’m for. Because it was more complicated than that, better Melory took the lead.

  She told them what we learned in brief, terse sentences. She had been up all night with Kalloi, and I saw the strain on her. It was hard for a villager to feel the death of one of ours, even if that villager was Melory, but the doctor ghost felt the death of a patient, and that let her open the door to grief a crack.

  I heard her say the brackers were here because other things had come to where the brackers lived. She described the stone-things, which were strange and new to everyone. She said the stone-things were making war on the brackers. Without ever mentioning Erma’s mystery, she said we should see if we can push the stone-things away, and then maybe the brackers would go back to their places and leave Tsuno alone. The Lawgiver would do anything she told him to, I thought, because the ghost had nothing.

  After that, we talked amongst ourselves. The stone-things didn’t quite react to us like animals normally do, but they didn’t seem to want to attack us. We should make best use of that, therefore. We should take our strength here and go to where they are clearing the land, go deep into their place and see what we can see. Worst come to worst, we could take strong beams and overturn them to attack the soft parts underneath, or heavy stones to break their shells. There was a pattern and a plan to the way they were moving, though, which might mean that there was some vital point, a stone-thing leader perhaps, a hatchery we could destroy. A village of many people is stronger than just many people each on their own. Yet a village has ghost-bearers: threaten them, and the strength of the village is paralysed. Sharskin knew that, and he held a whole village helpless while they outnumbered our people twenty to one. Not my proudest moment, and yet a lesson worth learning. If the stone-things had leaders . . .

  Or ghost-bearers . . .

  I gave my followers the plan. Some wanted to fight the brackers instead, for Kalloi, but they would do what I told them. I instructed them to spend the day preparing to fight. Sharpen their knives, gather stones for their slings.

  “You must do the same for the Tsuno folk,” I suggested to Melory, after. “If it is war, we will need them, too, backing us up.” We would be the vanguard, doing the fighting, but if the villagers could come after, finishing the wounded among the stone-things, breaking their houses if they had them, that would free us to keep pushing forwards.

  “The Lawgiver can do th
at,” Melory said. “You’ll need me. Because of the ghosts.”

  “Tell me about the ghosts.” Because when she was overcome by them, in the middle of the stone-things . . . I had only seen her like that once before, and it was the first time she came to the House of our Ancestors, when Sharskin caught her. The ancestors tried to talk to her ghost, her expert system, and it nearly drove her mad before she mastered them.

  She nodded, when I mentioned it. “Incompatible systems,” she said. “But it was close, maddeningly close. I could hear words . . . like the ancestors talking, almost.”

  And then a wasp flung itself past my face and I flinched away, looking round for Amorket. She was at my shoulder again, in that way of hers, but this time her focus was on Melory.

  “You hear them, too.”

  We looked at her warily.

  “The voices,” she said. “You hear the voices. Many and one. Speaking terrible things.” She was looking gaunter than before, and I was grimly sure it was because her personal hive was breeding ever more wasps from her, consuming her even as it urged her on.

  “I do . . .” Melory said slowly, and I braced myself in case this was something Amorket would treat as punishable by death.

  Instead, the Champion seemed to sag within her armour. “I thought it was just me,” she whispered, and I interpreted that as, I thought I was going mad. “I hear the Furies all the time, but when we were there . . .”

  “Your wasps . . . talk to you?” Melory frowned.

  “They tell me where they are, what they are doing, always, all of them all the time,” Amorket confirmed hollowly, and then, in a weird singsong voice, “Telemetry targeting requesting refuel reservoir exhausted percentage recalculating recalculating.” Her jaw snapped shut. Melory was staring at her, wide-eyed.

  “Can you talk back?” she asked.

  “They don’t listen to me,” Amorket said sullenly. I remembered her shouting at the bracker and wondered if it had actually been her Furies she’d been yelling at. “They . . . they know me. They feel with me. I am angry, they are angry.” Though her wasps never seemed less than angry to me. “I want to fight, they fight; I triumph, they triumph. I am calm, they . . . but it is so hard. I cannot find the calm in me.” Her face spasmed and the wasps boiled out from her armour and crawled about her, as though jealous that she was talking about them.

  Melory blinked. “Handry, Amorket and I need to come with you, when you go to where the stone-things are. I know that’ll make things more difficult, but you need to protect us, and I need to . . . gather information, use my ghost to scout.”

  “If it gives us a choice other than just going to war,” I agreed. I remembered the stone-things killing the bracker. Not hard to imagine a person being ripped apart in the same way.

  “And I need to speak to the House.” She was already on her feet and heading towards the Tsuno tree and its hive, which would amplify her words and pass them on.

  * * *

  The next morning Erma had left before us, on her own. She was going to the brackers, I knew, and I didn’t like the idea that she was out there following her own path, which might clash with the Lawgiver or with me. If it came to Tsuno or her brackers I had no doubt she’d fight for her village, but she was trying to save both. I wasn’t sure what she might do, what seemed a good idea to her right up until the moment it went wrong.

  She was outside our control or knowledge, though, so Melory and I mustered the Order and we all set out ahead of first light, heading into the wilds. Our path would detour around the bracker village, heading for the ragged wound in the trees the stone-things had made. Depending on what happened it might come to war with the brackers instead, but I didn’t want to think about that just then.

  Melory was very quiet for most of the journey, walking in the midst of us to make sure nothing from the forest tried to go for her. Amorket trailed us as usual, and I kept my eye on her.

  The stone-things had cleared more trees when we came to their scar. They had bared a whole valley that led sloping off downwards to the northwest, working out from what I thought was a great rocky hill at first. Looking down the slope at them, we saw plenty of their curved shells dotting the barren ground. Some were still, others worked at shunting rocks and trunks. A couple were . . . well, I wasn’t sure what they were doing, save that they were using their rubbery fistfuls of mouthparts to pick up and play with the detritus their progress had left behind, making patterns with it, as they had at Portruno with the bodies of the dead.

  “Is there some secret in that?” I asked Melory. “Like the writing of the ancestors?”

  “If so, I can’t read it.” She had her eyes almost closed anyway.

  “You hear them?”

  She nodded.

  Illon pushed forwards hesitantly. “Do the shells have ghosts in them?”

  Melory shook her head, eyes entirely closed now. “Ghosts,” she said in her teaching voice, “are something made by our ancestors to help the villages. It’s not as though ghosts could . . . get lost from a hive and seek out a new home, but . . .” But she didn’t know, was the obvious answer.

  “That’s what they talk to.” Amorket had walked a few yards along the slope and was staring over at the hill. Even as I went over, some part of my mind was picking at that: a hill planted down lopsidedly in the middle of the valley as though it had fallen from the sky like the House of our Ancestors once did. It looked out of place; it loomed higher than our own vantage point, and the stream that ran along the valley floor pooled around the foot of it, its natural course obstructed.

  The stone-things were busy around it, and in and out of a crack in the hillside. Except the crack seemed weirdly regular, as though someone had just lifted the edge of the hill’s base up into a peak there, like I might with the hem of a cloak.

  “They talk,” Amorket said. I could see the dots of her Furies as they ranged through the air towards the hill. At the same time the shape of that hill was nagging at my mind, as was the way the earth had been disturbed in a vast furrow stretching back from its base.

  Illon voiced the thought before I could, and perhaps I was too leery of being thought a fool.

  “It’s one of them,” she said. And of course that was impossible, but at the same time, the moment she said it, we could all see it. It was large enough that the regular stone-things could pass in and out of it easily, dominating them and the landscape both. We did not see it move, but the track of its progress overnight was plain to see. The stone-things had brought their house with them, a living house that moved on its own, just like the House of our Ancestors.

  “She’s right,” Melory pronounced. “They talk to it.”

  “Talk how?”

  “Like the ghosts talk to the tree. They have ears that catch invisible sounds, sounds that don’t pass through the air like our words, but are carried by . . .” She grimaced. “It’s like there are invisible rivers, and when I use my ghost to speak to the House, the river carries my words there, because of what was built in my head. Which means these stone-things have something within them that is the same.”

  “Where does this get us?” I was staring at the hill, trying to imagine it moving. The edge of it tearing out of the mud, vast finger-legs beneath stretching themselves . . .

  “What if we could use it to talk to them? When the bracker attacked one, the others all swarmed in,” Melory went on thoughtfully. “I heard it call them and tell them it was hurt.” A sidelong look at Amorket. “They’re like her and her Furies, always linked by this talking. So I’ve been thinking, what if we shout?” She saw I didn’t understand her. “Shout, Handry. Shout so the others can’t hear it when it calls. Flood the river with our own words.”

  “Won’t they come because they hear us shouting?” Illon asked.

  Melory was grinning now. “If we shout just right, then nobody will hear anything. Our words meet their words and run into them, so nothing gets down the river at all.”

  * * *

  W
e picked our ambush carefully, finding a wall of the valley the stone-things had carved up until there was a good straight drop down to the churned mud below. Melory picked out our target, a stone-thing engaged in shoving and dredging the loose stones and fractured wood towards the valley’s edge. Leaving Graf in charge, I and a half dozen of our company descended, carrying stout branches as big as we could handle. We crept close to the thing as it ground along, and it paused for a moment before moving on, turned a little to give us space.

  The first of the wasps looped past, almost bouncing off the stone-thing’s shell, and then the air was busy with them, dancing about the stone-thing. They didn’t sting, but just swung about it, crawled over it, the air heavy with their buzzing.

  The stone-thing stopped moving and a shudder went through it. That was the sign that Melory’s plan was working, I hoped. She said she would use Amorket’s wasps to amplify her words, so that instead of a single voice, the air around the stone-thing would be thronging with an unheard chorus, taking up all the space in that invisible river, making it impossible for the beast to speak to its fellows.

  The creature lurched, rising half up onto its legs and stumbling before dropping back down. Abruptly it seemed confused, blind to the world and not knowing which way to go. That was our signal and we rushed forwards, planting our branches in the dirt at the shell’s base and levering it towards the high side of the valley. It was huge and strong, and if it had just been shove against shove, we’d never have moved it, but it was confused and unsteady. I could read a human panic in its movements at suddenly being severed from its fellows. Every time it tried to go another way, we dug in our stakes and deflected it. Every time it veered towards the cliff, we pushed it on. Occasionally we saw the black dots of eyes weaving from beneath the shell, trying to understand what was going on, and we kicked at them, struck them with our branches. We harried the thing mercilessly because, if it had been given a chance to recover, it could have crushed us easily.