The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  They were nodding along, for all most of them didn’t see the connection. The mere familiarity gave them a little strength.

  Giving a sermon out here surrounded by the shuffling, questing stone-things was bizarre, but I lifted my voice, using all the tricks I remembered from Sharskin before me, the ways of speaking that put fire and certainty in people’s hearts. It’s a terrible thing when used for ill, that certainty. I only hoped I was making better use of the priest’s mantle than my predecessor.

  “Our ancestors came to a compact with this land, and changed their children so they could eat of the fruit and the meat, and till the land, and in return they would fall prey to the beasts of the wood, and catch the sicknesses of the water, and in all ways be part of the world. But to us is given a gift and a punishment, for the Severance restores us to the Original Condition of our ancestors and places us outside of nature.” So much did Sharskin say, but the next words were those Melory and I had added to the creed. “So it is that the Order and the villagers form two halves, they of the world, and we outside it, like day and night, like life and death, the whole stronger than the parts.”

  I let the echo of my voice ring away, and by then I’d almost forgotten my point, finding comfort myself in the oft-repeated rituals. Then the stone-things knocked against each other, scrabbling close as they, too, tried to understand what had happened, and I remembered.

  “The men of the stone-things are no beasts of the wood,” I told my followers. “We have seen their bodies, which are like our bodies. We have seen their bones, even, and they are like the bones of a human, not a beast.” No mistaking that shattered jaw for the spongy lattice of an animal’s skeleton. “And yet the villagers looked on them and knew them to be cast out. They are of the Original Condition like us. That means our ancestors are their ancestors.”

  “The stone-things ate some of our ancestors?” Graf asked with some disgust.

  I had some frayed ends of thought as to what might have happened, but I didn’t want to muddy the waters with my speculation. Instead: “We will go deeper into their land now. We will go, because we are the Order, and we do things that the villagers cannot. We will see what secrets we can discover, to turn back the stone-things.”

  * * *

  We were able to catch up with the corpse-dragger easily enough. Not that it couldn’t have hauled the broken bulk of its fellow away swiftly if it had wanted, but the matter seemed to be of no great urgency to it. It stopped and started, seemed to forget what it was doing, then rediscovered the shattered corpse and hauled it another hundred yards. It was heading for the huge hill, which was their house and at the same time a gigantic stone-thing.

  The thought that, curled up inside it, there might be a great human, some vast, pallid giant, would not quite go away, however many times I banished it.

  The lip of the huge shell was tilted up—propped, I thought, by the curve of the land, and yet with purpose, because it allowed the smaller stone-things to creep in and out as though it were a cave. And the aperture they used was plainly the same that, on the smaller scale, would open onto their pale passengers. We trailed the corpse-dragger all the way there and watched it vanish into the dark within, and there our nerve left us for a brief moment. To venture into a dark place full of monsters is bad enough. For that dark place to also be a monster’s belly is worse. But beyond all these usual fears was the underlying wrongness of what we’d seen. There was something profoundly unnatural at work that had all of us on a knife-edge.

  I reminded myself that we were the lords of the unnatural. We had made ourselves the ambassadors between the people of the villages and that other unseen world the ancestors had come from. The world these stone-men had come from, too. There could be no other way of it. We were cousins beneath the skin, under the shell.

  And so I led my people in. It was hard for them to follow me, but I held one secret weapon that would defeat the most mundane of our problems. From my robe I pulled a cracked globe and, with the right passes over its workings, made it give forth light. Not the light of a fire, nor the sun. A strange light that leached the colour from everything it touched, made us seem bleached as the stone-men. A cousin to the lights that glimmered from the walls of the House of our Ancestors, and perhaps to the ghostlight that showed you when a ghost was working through its bearer. The light of another world, brought here across the night sky by those who came before us.

  And so, thus fortified, we followed the corpse-dragger into the darkness of the shell.

  We were transgressing, venturing into somewhere forbidden. A path we could only walk because we were marked out. Beneath our feet was the flesh of a monster, giving slightly with a rubbery shudder at each footfall. The walls about us were of the same glistening stuff. At first, they were close enough that the stone-thing had to push its way in, but soon they fell away on either side until we were in a high hall like one of the biggest chambers of the House of our Ancestors. Above us, the walls leant in against one another to the seam of a peaked ceiling. Left and right, orifices like gaping toothless mouths quivered, and the stone-things crept in and out on their unguessable errands.

  The corpse-dragger hauled its burden through one, and peering after it, we saw three stone-things in a globular chamber, descending on the cadaver. Before we backed off, they had started to dismember it, the human as well as the beast, scouring the broken shell clean of its meat and taking each organ and fragment to the walls. Those walls were already a butcher’s collection of pieces and offal. We saw hands, feet, faces all sunk half in, and less recognisable things as well. I could see no reverence for the dead in it. The busy flensing of the stone-things seemed more a frenzy of feeding than mourning.

  A second time, my people looked to me to see if this was enough, and perhaps I should have heeded them. Instead, I signalled that we should move deeper into the great shell, past that first hall. So we passed through another gate of the thing’s anatomy, and in doing so we stepped from death to new life.

  The walls in that larger hall were warty with clear-sided bubbles set into them, each preserving what I thought were more dead specimens at first. Then one twitched, and another, and I realised they lived. More, and likely beyond the intention behind them, they were an education. The smallest of them were little more than shapeless globs of flesh floating in some cloudy medium. Moving along the wall, we found a progression of shape, the coalescing of a hollow skeleton, the growth of spindly limbs. We saw a body that formed like a pair of open hands and then, as it grew, they closed in upon one another, preserving the space between the palms as a chamber within itself. At some point, a button of hard stuff could be seen on the back of those hands, and all the bubbles from there on, larger and larger, showed a growth of shell, built up ridge by ridge. We were watching the growth of the stone-things. The clear blisters on the walls were their eggs, and this room a living hatchery.

  My followers wanted to fall on the place with their staves and knives, and perhaps I should have let them. I knew that must prompt a response from our enemies, though, and I was curious and demanded we move on. You may tell stories like this, where a succession of poor choices, three in most cases, leads to the hero learning something better left to ignorance. Melory and I had made the Order into a story, so that the villagers could fit us into their lives, and now I was living one. I was the man in the story you tell, for all you may have told it for generations. I demanded we press on, and you will recall this was the third such time.

  At the back end of that chamber, amongst the blisters on the wall, we found something worse. We found the human eggs.

  Humans, too, begin as a glob of flesh, but beyond that we are quite different to the stone-things. Watching the stages that turned that formless knot into a recognisable newborn was like seeing a child hollowed out of clay.

  We did not see a birth, though the latest sacs held infants that looked as though they should already have come from a mother’s womb. In Aro, in any village, you know your Ma. Your D
a, most likely not, for who can ever be sure, but the bond between mother and child is often the loss we feel most keenly, when we are cast out. These children would never wonder where their mother was. She would tower over them, part of the very landscape, visible wherever their shells took them. And that made me wonder how it was: if a stone-thing hatched, was it timed so that a human broke free at the same instant? Or must one wait, forlorn, for the slower sibling to break its membrane and wash out onto the chamber’s slick floor? Was there some long apprenticeship, in which the mismatched pair must grow together, or were the two made into one in the moments after that double birth?

  “Priest.” Graf took my arm, and then Illon said, “I hear a voice.”

  I had been lost in my own head all this time, and now I came back to myself, because she was right. There was a voice that issued to us from the very bowels of the place. And even I knew, then, that we should have turned back before, but hearing the voice I could not but go see what lips it issued from.

  “It speaks . . . I can hear words in it, but not like people say,” Illon added, face screwed up as she listened.

  I knew the manner of speech, though. I had learned it in the House, for it was how the ancestors spoke. They had a thousand words we did not know, and also they had a particular way of saying even familiar things that made them hard to understand. As though they had built a great tower of language through their long night journey, and it had fallen to ruin after they came here, so that we only had loose beams and sticks of it. This voice, which sounded dry as dead bones, spoke like that.

  “And so Jack crept through the giant’s castle,” said the voice, as we tried to hunt out its origin. We followed the sound of it to one side, ducking under the twitching rim of a doorway and then through a winding length of gut.

  “He found many treasures there, while the giant slept. Coins and golden eggs . . .” the voice said, and my followers murmured behind me, wondering what a Jack was.

  We came to the ossuary.

  That is an Ancestor word. I didn’t know it at the time. It means a place of bones.

  The walls of that chamber were not just flesh, as everything else. Some process had layered them over with something hard, the same stuff the stone-things’ shells were made of, as though to preserve and protect what rested there.

  “And he found a talking harp . . .” The crisp, dry voice whispered through the chamber, and I realised that it had grown quieter the closer we came, and that it had been speaking not for its own purposes but to us.

  Embedded in the stone wall were bodies, human bodies. There were a half dozen of them, and they were barely more than skeletons covered over with a sparse minimum of flesh. And then over again, with a tissue-thin layer of shell, or else the shell had been them once, and their skin had transformed into it over their long sojourn here.

  The attitudes of the bodies in their settings, the frozen expressions on their faces, the way their hands seemed to be clawing out of the stony shell, none of it suggested they had gone to this fate happily.

  “And the harp sang most beautifully . . .” Quieter and quieter, leading us past the first couple of petrified dead until we were right in their midst. “So that the giant fell into a great slumber.”

  I saw the faintest movement, saw the lines of articulation about the stony jaw, the very tongue in the forever-gaping mouth. But I was not ready when the dead man’s eyelids clicked up and he stared at me through eyes like grey marbles.

  “Hello, Jack,” came his parched voice. “I’m Bain.”

  Interlude

  The Sister Colony: Part Four

  IT WAS THE RADIO SILENCE that ate Bain alive.

  The team back at the ship hadn’t sent any more search parties out, no fliers overhead, no land team arduously trekking the many kilometres through the poison forest to reach the coast. Well, he’d expected that. But he had jury-rigged a transmitter now, sending out a steady distress beacon, and nothing. They’d been desperate, he knew. People had been dying since long before the sister team had split away. But surely they could spare a thought for their errant fellows.

  And the distress beacon, just pinging into the void, a single voice on a silent planet, singing out to the one ear. Yet that ear was deaf. They weren’t listening.

  They have forgotten us. The sister colony was nothing more than a footnote in the ship’s log. There went Bain Chan and those doomed souls who followed him into folly. Still he kept calling into that heedless bandwidth, because what else was there? He just wanted to come home.

  Lena hadn’t come home. She’d gone hunting snails to provide Geordi with more research material, determined to force the scientific breakthrough they’d come out to make. The third time she’d gone out but not returned. One recovered drone, badly damaged, yielded up a ragged edge of recording, what could only be described as a snail ambush. They had been part-burrowed into the ground. Lena had been intent on more evident prey. That had been it. All of her team had been lost.

  There were precisely seven people left in the sister colony now. Abandoning the silent radio, Bain’s legs took him meandering about the close confinement of their handful of linked domes. In this one was the cryogenics facility they’d been able to salvage, the embryos they’d taken from the ship so they could make good on the great discoveries they knew they’d make. A hundred tiny frozen dots of life, not enough for a viable colony, but enough for a proof of concept. They’d been going to stride back to the main expedition all full of triumph, declaring their victory over the planet.

  And now? Prey for snails.

  In another dome he saw Geordi Gownt, still working at his tissue analysis. Bain didn’t know if Geordi was remotely on message anymore. The man seemed to be off on some wild tangent of his own, something that simultaneously terrified and fascinated him. Bain had tried to sit through his rambling explanations, but his brain was a soup of stimulants and depressants and sheer fatigue and none of it had gone in.

  The rest of their team—We few, we happy few, he thought bitterly—were scattered across their tiny domain. Shay Park and someone else were off checking the charged fence they’d put up. Electric shocks had so far deterred the snails, though in a curiously desultory way. As though the creatures could easily break through if they wanted but couldn’t be bothered just yet. Other crew were trying to find some biochemical antisnail measure, with the caveat that, for the very reason the things represented such a damned breakthrough, there probably wasn’t a biochemical antisnail measure. Or not one that wouldn’t be fatal to all carbon-based life, humans included.

  I just want to sleep. And he had slept, of course. There were surely a few hours of shut-eye in his last four days of activity, except the constant round of ups and downs he was feeding his system had conspired with the slightly off circadian rhythm of the planet to shatter his sense of time. There were parts of his mind that were just flywheeling away all the time, sleep or wake. Others had it worse. Geordi was on record as not having slept at all in twelve days now, as though he was afraid of what he’d dream.

  Shay had been talking about leaving, just walking back to the ship. It would be months of journeying. They couldn’t possibly transport enough rations, and the whole problem with the planet was that there was nothing they could eat or even safely touch. They were almost out of everything at the base, and yet why just compound that looming problem with the rigours of some arduous cross-country trek?

  Bain’s feet had taken him back to the radio. Communication had become his obsession, but then since Orindo died and was disassembled and then had partly come back to wave at them, they were short of good technical help. He wondered about going to the lab and putting tools in that slack hand, if it was still animate under Gownt’s erratic study. Maybe Orindo was in a position to build a better transmitter than Bain had managed. Left-handed and without a brain. Given the state Bain was in, it still sounded like an improvement.

  He stared balefully at the silent receiver, as though he might only now d
iscover he hadn’t powered the thing up.

  We can’t go on like this.

  He’d been teetering on the edge of the revelation for a while. Everyone had been waiting for him to make the call, to tell them what to do. Director, direct. And so he did what he always did, when his mind reached this far end of its pendulum swing. He called a meeting so that they could demand he did something, and he could sit there knowing there was nothing to be done.

  * * *

  Geordi Gownt sat in the corner of the clean room and stared at his specimens. One of them stared back at him. He had given it an eye, just cloned one from his own tissue and dropped it into the thing’s cavity wall. He hadn’t had to perform anything actually approaching a medical procedure. The snail’s tissue had done the hard work automatically. Now it could see him.

  He didn’t know if it could, of course. And for that matter, how could it? An organ from another world, a different cell structure, the wrong hereditary information, and yet the eye followed him around the room. Self-portrait of a failing biologist.

  The holographic screens around the room showed him detailed maps of the snail’s tissue activity, the complex electrical impulses racing through the entirety of the thing’s remaining being. All those parts left over after he’d hacked pieces away for biopsy. It was close to the point where they died, based on his previous subjects. They were robust, but not supernaturally so. Adaptable, though. Both in the sense that they could navigate just about any biochemistry you handed to them, and in the way they could reconfigure the structures of their own bodies, now soft, now hard, now able to exert that murderous strength they’d displayed, even though they’d been limp as jelly the moment before.

  He giggled to himself weakly. His latest thought experiment—utterly useless to anyone but then what, precisely, was any use anymore—was to imagine if it had been the other way round. What if the snails had built a spaceship, or just adapted themselves to the vacuum somehow. What if they had come to us? What if it was Geordi Gownt on the table, everted and splayed for study, and some eminent Doctor Snail making learned remarks about the lamentable limitations of Earth biology.