The Expert System's Brother

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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  Dedicated to my son, Alex, who often has great difficulty fitting in to the world he was born to

  I.

  IT WENT WRONG FOR ME when they made Sethr an outcast.

  Where I grew up, people don’t get angry at each other. We were a community; you looked into your neighbour’s face and saw a friend. But Sethr wasn’t anybody’s friend. He stole things and he didn’t pull his weight. Give him a morning’s task and he’d take two days over it. The word began to pass between people that he was no good for the village. He was still one of us, but he got fewer and fewer smiles wherever he went. It wasn’t good to be seen talking to him. The young women he so wanted to spend time with, they stopped looking his way.

  You’d think this would be a lesson to him, and he’d get back into line so people liked him again, but then again you’re not Sethr. To Sethr, it was someone else’s fault and why should he change? He got angry instead, and then he got into a fight and broke Broed’s arm, and that was his last chance lost.

  They brought him to Lawgiver Elhern. Quite a crowd came to watch. I was there myself, just thirteen and more interested in some time away from the fields than what was going on. There was a whole bunch of us kids come to see the law doled out—Livvi, Melory, Kalton, Chogger and me. We’d not needed Elhern’s ghost to perform such duties for years. Aro, our village, it was a peaceful place before then.

  Elhern was a greying woman, still strong and stocky. She worked her own farm most of the time, with her two grown sons and a woman she’d taken in, and when you heard her speak, you’d not think she was marked for special wisdom or judgment. Right now, though, it wasn’t Elhern’s judgment we’d come to hear, but the Lawgiver’s.

  Her one working eye rolled into her head and the ghostlight flickered in the empty socket of the other and played in a brief halo about her tightly bound hair. She heard the accusations and Sethr’s wheedling denials, but the words went somewhere deeper, to where the ghosts lived. When her lips opened, it wasn’t quite her voice, but something else speaking through her, forcing her throat and tongue to make its words. This was the ghost. This was the Lawgiver.

  “Community member Sethr verdict guilty. Prognosis: unacceptable burden. Recommended sentence: Severance.”

  And Sethr was all howls and pleas then, finally understanding he’d gone too far. He promised he’d mend his ways, but some things just stay broken. The Lawgiver had heard his history and judged that he would never mend enough to pull his weight. He would be cast out for the good of everyone. The Lawgiver had spoken.

  * * *

  Let me tell you about Aro. It’s much like where you come from, I’m sure, but there will be differences. Our tree is halfway up a hill, and it leans out quite a way so that the few visitors we get think it’s about to tear its roots free and fall on us. It would crush half the houses if it ever did, because we’re not spread out like some places I’ve seen. All the big buildings are clustered in a ring in the tree’s shadow, and when we got together to do anything—including Severing Sethr, in this case—it was within that circle. We had our hunters, but as a community we didn’t look outwards much. This isn’t something I understood, when I lived there, but I’ve travelled since. Not by choice at first, but I’ve seen more of this world than just about anyone.

  The tree is a big one, too—the roots go all the way through the hill and further; if you go round the far side, where some of the Ertibeest herders have their huts, you see loops of great segmented root curving from the ground as though caught midway in reaching for you. When we were young, younger than when I got hurt, we used to tell each other stories about people who had been grabbed by those roots and pulled into the hill. That’s just kid stories, though. Roots are roots, they’re not a part of the tree that cares about us, not like wasps or ghosts.

  The hive is high up in the central fork of the branches where you can barely see it from the ground. There are wasps going in and out all the time, though. You just don’t remember them until you get stung, and then you look up into the shadow cast by all those long, leathery purple leaves and feel a bit sore, but you know there was a reason, it’s just part of the natural way. These are the little wasps I mean, not the special ones, the Electors. Nobody could miss those.

  Three hundred and seventeen people lived in Aro—probably smaller than your home, but it was rough country around there without much good wood for building. Our houses are just like your houses, of course, because all the architect ghosts agree on how houses are built. I must have seen twenty villages now, and always the same roofs rising to a tuft, the same bowed walls because it’s easiest to cut Terfel wood like that, so everything fits together like a big barrel. Because the ghosts know, and why should we know better than them?

  Well, that’s part of the story. I’m getting there.

  If you were looking at Aro, standing there facing the side of the hill where the tree comes out, and you looked to the left side past the first ring of houses, you’d see a house slightly off, a little skewed to its neighbours. That was where I lived. That was where we lived, Melory and me. That was where we were happy, before it happened.

  * * *

  The Severing took place two days later. It was like a festival, like getting the harvest in. Not that every adult wouldn’t tell you how serious it all was, but things like that don’t come along every day, or even every year. People felt that Sethr being banished was like a vindication of our ways, things working as they should. I remember there were mickle-cakes and sugarworm skewers, and the adults had a little of last year’s tunny, which made them laugh and remember things. I remember wanting so badly to get a drop of that, to see how wonderful it must taste, the way the grown-ups loved it so much. I couldn’t know that I would never taste it. I never will.

  Now we come to Doctor Corto, because it was the doctor’s job to boil up the Severance that would cut Sethr off from us forever. Corto was old, maybe the oldest person in Aro, although after hitting “grown-up” we didn’t keep count of the years much. Too old, though, was Corto. He’d been the doctor for as long as anyone could remember, since he was barely a grown-up himself, and he’d begun to go wrong. When they brought sick or injured people to him, they said, the ghostlight came and went in his face, and he repeated himself or forgot or just stopped talking altogether. The ghost had to fight, to do its work through him, and for a year or so before Sethr’s casting out it was a risky business getting hurt, in Aro, because you never knew if you’d get treated or not.

  Anyway, he had a cauldron there in the middle of all that coming together where he was mixing the stuff up, like hot red mud, but his mind wandered off and then so did he, when he should have been minding it like it was poison.

  I remember how excited I was. It wasn’t that I hated Sethr so much, but it was change and it was difference and when you’re thirteen that’s like all the rest days and celebration days rolled into one. I was chasing around with Livvi and Kalton; we whooped through the crowds like mad things trying to catch each other
. Or mostly it was Kalton and me trying to catch Livvi, because we were thirteen and it was just starting to become important that she was a girl and we were boys, though I don’t think we could quite have told you why. But you can imagine the sort of half-formed thoughts we were harbouring, thoughts that seemed to come from unexpected places in our bodies. We were on the cusp of something. It was a boundary I would never properly get to cross because of what happened next.

  I was tracking Livvi through the crowd by the mild exasperation of the grown-ups she elbowed or shoved. I was a little ahead of Kalton, I remember. He was off to my left, and never as good a runner as me. But then I saw a space I could shortcut across, and maybe make a lunge for her so we’d both end up tumbling together to the ground, which seemed like an inexplicably fine thing to my thirteen-year-old body right then. Except it wasn’t a space. Except it wasn’t a shortcut.

  It was Doctor Corto’s cauldron, of course, that the old man had just abandoned because his mind never stayed in one place long enough to do his job properly. I burst from the crowd and saw it, too late to dodge aside. Instead I tried to jump it, just one big flailing leap, arms and legs everywhere. I thought I’d cleared it. I remember the exultation at having done a mad thing and got away with it. Wouldn’t Livvi be impressed? Except even as I thought it, my heel caught the rim of the pot and I crashed down on the far side, and the scalding Severance slopped over my leg and halfway up my side, and a splash of it up my cheek and onto my brow.

  I was screaming right off because it was boiling hot and it hurt like nothing I’ve ever suffered before or since. Everyone came running with cloths and gloves and they got it off me as quick as they could while I cried like the child I really was. I remember how careful they all were not to get a drop of the stuff on themselves even after it was cool. They were all telling me it was going to be all right. I don’t think people realised just what had happened or how things would go.

  I remember sitting at the front of the crowd, still racked with the pain of my burns, wrapped in wet cloth, while Sethr got anointed. The Severance was cool by then, because none of this was about hurting Sethr. It was because he was a burden and we had limited food and time and energy. Everyone knew that a troublemaker took too much and gave back too little, and that wasn’t our way. Our way wasn’t to punish troublemakers, either. We didn’t care about revenge or retribution for wrongs done, although I know now that there are ways of being that make those things a priority. For us, we couldn’t see the point of that; who would it make things better for? Our justice was purely to ensure the optimal survival of the community, and the Lawgiver had judged that the community would be better without Sethr in it.

  Lawgiver Elhern daubed the Severance across Sethr’s skin, dark red like old blood. It soaked in, and I knew it would stain him forever, no water or scrubbing would ever get it out. After that was done, they let him go. People were already backing off, because Sethr was different now. He was Severed. They looked at him and they didn’t see One Of Us anymore. He had become something alien. I remember seeing even the fleas abandoning him, springing off, almost invisible save for their movement, to find more agreeable hosts.

  I remember sitting there watching Sethr as he stumbled and entreated and was turned away. I couldn’t tell. He was just the same to me, the same man he’d always been, despite the harsh, revolted way everyone looked at him. I couldn’t tell he was an outcast. That was the first clue I had that I was marked, too.

  They brought me to Doctor Corto, of course. I still wonder whether, if he had been younger and fitter, and if the ghost could speak through him properly, maybe he could have made everything right. Maybe there was some antidote to the Severance, if he could have applied it quickly enough.

  He examined me, and I remember his eye, its pupil going big and small and big again as the ghost tried to reach him. He would open his mouth, and that voice that wasn’t quite his would say, “Secondary decontamination onset,” just like the ghost should, but then his lip would droop and twitch and his attention would wander. “I’m cold,” he said, not seeing me, and even with a fire riding high in his hearth right next to him. “Sera, where are you?” Calling for his wife, who’d been dead since I was very small. His hands would shake and the ghostlight would gutter in his face, flaring fitfully in his creases and in the cracked and swollen skin about his empty socket.

  II.

  THIRTY DAYS LATER one of Aro’s hunters came across Sethr out in the wilds. He was stick thin, skin stretched taut over bone, but his belly had burst open. He’d crammed himself full of edrauthaberries. The purple stains of their juice overlaid the red marks of Severance on his hands and mouth. They had clogged up his innards in an indigestible mass and eaten away at him, bloating him out with toxic gas until the pressure had ruptured his insides and he’d finally died.

  I remember loving edrauthaberries. Whenever we kids had work that took us beyond the village boundaries, we’d keep an eye out for the red leaves of their bushes and go prying about the base of their stems for the fruit. I could eat a hundred, back then, and we’d squabble and barter over the biggest ones, so sweet and rich. To Sethr they were poison and he’d known it. He’d only gorged himself on them when he was too hungry to care.

  Ten days before they found Sethr, I ate some edrauthaberries for the first time since the accident. They were bitter on my tongue, bile rising in my throat even at the taste. I forced them down, because I was desperate to be the person I’d been before, as though just going through the motions would somehow overwrite what had actually happened. My stomach rebelled. They were not poison to me, they wouldn’t sicken and kill me like they had Sethr, but still I couldn’t keep them inside me. They were one more pleasure of the world I would never know again. I still remember the taste—how joyous they were beforehand, how acrid and vile after.

  Meat was worse. I tried the flesh of every animal we kept and everything the hunters came back with, and even a mouthful had me vomiting up what little I might have in my guts, or retching out bitter spittle when there was nothing left to me. Bread I could eat, though it had to be cooked so hard it was almost burned. Even then I got sick a lot, just from the air, from the water. I had pains, fevers and cramps. My eyes stung and burned and I coughed all the time, waking myself up over and over each night. The red stains of the Severance were joined by blotchy rashes and sores from touching just about anything. I learned to go about covered head to toe because all of a sudden the world and everything in it was my enemy.

  But I could have lived with that. Only just, but I wasn’t Sethr. They’d got the Severance off my skin as quickly as they could, rather than leaving it to soak into my bones like they had with him. If it had been that, then my life would have been pain and suffering but it would have been bearable. We were a community, after all.

  Except the lines of our community had been redrawn, and I was on the outside looking in.

  I was scarred by the Severance—just the heat of it. It raised a great streak of a welt on my face that lasted for days. I couldn’t stop touching it—it felt huge under my fingers, tender and throbbing. At first I thought it was that, which made people look at me the way they did. I thought they didn’t like me because I was ugly.

  I told myself that, anyway. I must have known, deep down, it was more. What had happened cut both ways, after all. I must have felt that lack of connection inside me, only there were so many of them staring suspiciously at me that my reactions got lost in it.

  But I’d got the Severance on me, a good long splash of it. It had soaked in, despite everything they’d done to scrub it off my screaming, kicking body. I was marked.

  While I was recovering, the pain of my burns was still the thing sitting big in my mind, that and being half starved all the time. Yet I started to notice the little things. There were no fleas where I slept. I’m not boasting; we had fleas and vermin just like you do in your home. It’s the natural way, after all. They come from the tree like the wasps do. And they’re a nuisan
ce when they bite, we all know it, but that’s how things are. They keep us fit and active, and like I said, I certainly got sick a lot after.

  And the wasps, when I saw them, they didn’t sting me anymore; they cut a wide path around me.

  And by then I was walking about and trying to be just one of Aro’s sons again, going into the fields, helping out with the woodworking, scaring away the Helibugs. It wasn’t the same. People didn’t like me anymore. No, that’s not the right way to say it. They couldn’t like me. I’d been Severed, even if not all the way. They looked at me and their senses told them, Not one of us.

  It wasn’t aggressive, not at first. I had been a part of the community, and now I wasn’t. When we were out clearing stones or running pests out of the fields and I needed a tool, suddenly nobody would be handing one to me just as I reached for it. When someone brought the water round, they wouldn’t think to go to me with it. I’d have to go get it myself, and they’d look a bit surprised when I turned up in front of them. Maybe they would hold onto the gourd just a little too long, when I took it. Once, we had a Lazzar come in after the livestock at night and we were doing a count up to make sure nobody was hurt after we drove it off, and they missed me. Even standing right there in the firelight, they counted and called names, and I was never included. I had to look after myself most of the time, because there was only one other person who would look out for me. Melory, my sister.

  Melory was born right before me. We came into the world together. We weren’t always friends, because siblings aren’t, but we were never enemies long. By that age we both had others whose company we sought out, but we always came home to the same house. When Melory was being teased, I went and sorted it out, with words and sometimes with fists. When I cut my foot open, back when I was nine, she dragged me all the way back to the village. We were all the family we had. Ma had died hunting Arraclids when we were seven, and though some kids reckoned they knew who their Da was, we never did. Like most of the kids there, we were children of Aro, and the community brought us up, but mostly we brought ourselves up. We were always there for each other.