The Expert System's Brother

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And so I waited for Melory to turn from me, because that would be the last, the end. I was being thrust into a hostile new world. I was struggling to find things I could eat; I was struggling to avoid getting into arguments and fights with all the people who had known me just a short while before. If Melory had gone with the majority I would have died. Of starvation; of despair.

  And she must have felt that break, inside her—the gap that had opened between me and everyone else. She didn’t let it rule her, though. She knew I was her brother. I was the same boy who’d shared every adventure, who’d dried her tears and let her dry mine. It must have been hard for her, but she fought past what her insides were telling her about me, and saw that I was still just Handry, who she’d known all her life.

  And every day that passed after that just brought home how I’d have died without her. Three years I clung on at Aro, and it was like the whole community, the buildings, the tree even, were trying to shake me off. My friends weren’t my friends anymore. Livvi, Kalton, Chogger, they stayed away. I know Livvi’s Ma told her I was a wrong one now and she mustn’t go near, but Kalton’s Ma was dead just like ours was. He didn’t need anybody steering him away. His own eyes told him I wasn’t right.

  I could see just how it would have been, how I’d have ended up getting a beating or even just driven out altogether. Every little thing that went wrong was my fault. It wasn’t that people really thought I’d broken the fence or scared away the Ossclaws so that the traps stayed empty, or that I brought the stinging rain unseasonably early. If I’d been able to look them in the eye and ask the question like a normal person, then they’d have said no, of course not, how could I possibly . . . ? And yet they looked at me, when this or that mundane thing went off course, when a gourd broke, when someone stubbed their toe. Some part of their minds was casting about for a cause, and there I was, the boy who wasn’t right, the boy who didn’t belong.

  But there Melory was, too, and she wouldn’t let any of those looks or that talk go unchallenged. She did what I could no longer do, go and be angry with people and make them ashamed of what they were thinking. And if it didn’t stop them thinking just the same next time round, well, she was my untiring champion. She would go take on anyone to defend me. And she’d go early to the baker for the burned bread he made at her insistence, and that he probably wouldn’t have done just for me. She brought me water the many times I was sick, and when I twisted my ankle out on the top fields she forced people to come carry me back, when they’d most likely have left me there for the elements.

  She always smiled, too. That was the one sisterly act she couldn’t quite pull off. I knew she was scared for me, and it wasn’t just because of what had happened in the past. Melory was brighter than I was, cleverer than just about anyone our age. I saw where her eyes strayed, and hers weren’t the only ones. Whenever my name came up, lots of people looked over to wherever Lawgiver Elhern was. Sometimes, when I’d get into a big argument with someone, because I was too tired and hungry and frustrated to keep my temper in check, they’d actually send for her. Elhern would come over and listen, and the ghost would descend on her and flicker from her eye socket and glimmer about the line of her jaw. Then Melory would appear beside me and squeeze my hand and hold her breath while placid, matronly Elhern vacated her own face and voice, and the ghost sat there and spoke instead.

  And yet she never pronounced a sentence. I think the ghost didn’t know quite what to make of me. Sometimes it referred me to the doctor ghost, sometimes it just had nothing to say. The Severance hadn’t finished its work. I wasn’t entirely out, just as I would never be quite in.

  And things only got harder, towards the end of those three years, because the doctor’s vessel was dying. For a whole long year, Doctor Corto just stopped seeing patients at all, and the ghost wouldn’t speak through him anymore. When people were injured or sick, then it was down to whoever could remember what the ghosts had ordered in the past, and sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong. When people got badly hurt, when they came in with bones sticking out of the skin or where a wild beast had mauled someone, then mostly they died, where the ghost might have been able to save them. Needless to say, he certainly had no help for me. He would just sit muttering to himself outside of his house all day, hands trembling and his one eye looking at nothing. People made sure he got fed, and come night they would take him inside and tuck him up, but he was past noticing them, just lost in meaningless conversations with the ghost locked up in his head.

  I crept close once and heard him repeating nonsense to himself, over and over: “Installation failed, rebooting, rebooting.” He was like that for a full year, man and ghost clinging to each other like climbers on the point of falling. Then, at last, they found him cold in his bed one morning, and that was the end of Doctor Corto.

  * * *

  The next ten or twelve days were tense with waiting. Doctor Corto had been less than useless for an age, but we had no doctor at all now, and although we all knew the tree would choose a replacement, each day that went by without the Electors spawning just tightened the fear that something had miscarried. And speaking of which, pity the mother due to give birth right then, pity anyone sick or injured, staring up at the swollen boll of the hive and hoping for a sign that normal life would resume. The other ghost-bearers were besieged because most people thought they could get news from the tree by questioning their ghosts. Everyone had heard some story, some tale by an outcast found near Aro, or from some traveller from another community. Everyone had heard from someone who had heard from someone who was told by their Grandma about a village Where Things Went Wrong, where the tree died, where the wasps flew away. Lawgiver Elhern and Architect Brosa—herself as old as ever Corto had got, and going the same way—spent every day turning away petitioners who were sure that, if they just asked some new way, the secret would come out.

  And they couldn’t ask. Their ghosts came to them with knowledge, but they didn’t carry off prayers to the tree or the hive or wherever they waited when they weren’t incarnate in flesh. I know more than just about anyone now, about how it works, and it doesn’t work like that. Perhaps it was supposed to once. Perhaps, if it did, we wouldn’t be in this fix and I wouldn’t be trying to work out what to do about it.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Over the next few days the hive swelled noticeably, its outsides crawling with the humble wasps we saw every day, that were the tree’s means of sampling and testing its dependents, meaning us. Almost nobody got stung in that time, which sounds grand except when you realise it means the tree isn’t listening to us anymore. Its attention is elsewhere, and if everyone had dropped dead, perhaps it wouldn’t even have known.

  So everyone was holding their breath, and nobody more than me. I thought it would make everything right again, actually having a proper doctor. I was sick, after all. I was half Severed, and that was something the doctor ghost had jurisdiction over. Once we had someone other than mumbling old Corto as doctor, I could be cured. I was in a fever pitch of excitement. Three long years I’d lived in the unthinking disdain of my kin in Aro. It had been hard, almost too hard to bear, but now there was an end in sight.

  In that, I was entirely correct, of course. I think they were my last moments of childhood, those few days of hope. That optimism that someone else will come and mend all ills, that your Ma or the Lawgiver or someone will just turn up, and everything will be well, that’s the essence of being a kid.

  At last, late enough that everyone was going a bit mad with worry, the Electors came out and started buzzing lazily about between the houses. They were far bigger than the normal wasps, longer than your second finger and with fat, bristling bodies. Once they hatched out, there was no mistaking they were around. The air vibrated with their labouring wings day and night. And when they stung, well, it hurt enough to make grown-ups cry. Or so they said, because of course they didn’t sting me.

  They were busy, though. I reck
on about one in five from Aro got stung in the next few days, and each time everyone else watched anxiously to see if the recipient would show signs of the doctor ghost coming to stay. Children started following the Electors around, shrieking and pointing at anyone who received their attentions. Those who had been stung but not chosen were left hurting and rueful, and perhaps a little relieved. Being the doctor was a great honour and a great responsibility, but it meant your life would never quite be your own, either. Everyone was a servant of the village, it was true, but those ridden by the ghosts had to share their very heads.

  And life went on, despite all this. The fields wouldn’t just hold their ripening, nor would the pests stay away by prior arrangement until a doctor was found. Everyone worked. I worked, most of all. I worked harder than anyone because I had to show them I was still there, still part of the community, for all their eyes told them otherwise. I volunteered for the worst jobs, did extra shifts, ran errands, anything people would trust me with. I was so desperate to belong. And the work was harder for me, too. When I pulled weeds, the plant juices raised a rash on my hands that nobody else had, and I was always working on a half-empty belly because there was so little I could keep down. Pollen puffed my eyes up and picking fruit gave me blisters. It wasn’t just the village. The world was trying to reject me.

  And of course I was out working when word came from the tree that the long wait was over. The Electors had chosen. Who was it? Everyone wanted to know. Such a babble of voices that nobody could hear, like clumsy hunters treading over the tracks of their quarry. I pried and craned about the edge of the crowd of field workers, forgotten about, excluded from the excited rush and whisper of news.

  But then they were looking at me. For the first time in years, they had turned to me, and for a moment I thought I was in again, the Severance worn off, my curse lifted.

  But you’ve guessed, of course. You’ve known for a while, because I tell this tale with foreknowledge of what came after, and so the very choice of my words has guided you towards an unavoidable conclusion. It was her. Melory had been stung, and straight off she had started to show the signs. My sister would be Aro’s new doctor.

  III.

  THEY’D TAKEN HER TO her bed, of course, and by the time I got there she was already lost to the fever. The sting itself was on her shoulder, an angry welt like a cluster of knuckles. She wouldn’t open one eye for two whole days while her body shifted and changed to make her into a house fit for a ghost. The other eye would never open again.

  I sat by her bedside all that time, save where I had to go to the baker to beg some food. One benefit of everyone’s mind just skating over the fact of you is, nobody comes banging on the door to find out why you’re not pulling your weight. So I looked after her; I held Melory’s clammy hand and mopped her swollen forehead and talked to her, over and over, mostly utter nonsense but just so she could know I was there. We’d been together from Ma’s womb and for sixteen years after that, and now she was on a lonely journey through strange places. I wanted her to know I was still there. I didn’t want her to forget about me.

  The left side of her face puffed out like a fungus, over those days. The skin broke, wept, healed over again so fast I could almost watch it happen. It was worst about her eye and temple, where the ghost was remodeling the substance of her skull so it could go in and out when it pleased, or that’s what I think now, having seen a ghost-bearer’s bones. She lost her eye when the flesh bloated up like a clenched fist around it. What was left when the tight, angry swelling died down was just a hole, a socket that seemed to go too deep into her head. It wasn’t the only one, either. Pits and pockmarks opened up around it, as though she’d need more eyes or senses than the rest of us, to do her new job. She twitched and turned, and the blankets were drenched with sweat no matter how fast I changed them. She would mutter numbers or meaningless fragments of words, and I think everyone was terrified that she’d be another Corto, that it had been the ghost that was senile, and not just the man. As she lay there, sometimes her right eye would open wide and she’d stare up at me as though begging for help. We had always been alike: So people said and our reflections in still water confirmed it. We shared our mother’s straight dark hair, sharp chin and narrow eyes—like and unlike each other, just as we two were like and unlike the rest of Aro. Now the mirror was breaking. I would never look into Melory’s face and imagine my own. That was the first way the ghost took her from me, even before it came to live in the house it was building.

  And sometimes, later, there would be the ghostlight in her empty socket and deep inside the pits of her face. It flickered and flared ever more frequently as her convalescence went on, a spectral white fire that was the ghost making itself at home in my sister’s head.

  * * *

  Then, mid-morning after a sleepless night when Melory’s body had twisted itself over and over as though each limb was trying to wrench itself free, I started awake at her clasping my hand back. I’d held on to her for so long, her fingers limp in mine, but now she squeezed them, she, Melory, my sister. I opened my eyes and she was looking at me, or half of her was. The rest wasn’t her anymore.

  I’d only known worn old Doctor Corto in my lifetime. I’d been terrified that whatever awoke from that transformation would not be my sister anymore, but just a vehicle for the ghost. But when I looked at her, at that first waking, I knew her smile. I knew the way the skin crinkled about her remaining eye. The rest didn’t matter. She was still Melory and the ghost could not make her otherwise. But it could make her more.

  By the time she could get out of bed there were plenty of people who needed the skills of a doctor. Some had been living with pain and disability for a year or more, and there was scuffling and bartering over who would go before the ghost first. I was at the back, of course. I was nobody’s priority.

  I lie. I was Melory’s priority. If I’d insisted, she would have turned the ghost’s cold light on me right away. But I’d had plenty of time to think about things, as I sat by her bedside. I had been in a frenzy of excitement waiting for the Electors to choose the new doctor, but as I waited out the long watches of the night, that had given way to a looming dread. I had pinned so much hope on a new doctor. What if the ghost looked at me and gave me up for a lost cause? What if the ghost wouldn’t even look at me, like half of Aro wouldn’t? How terrible to have that one chance snatched from me, to be ignored by the one entity that could heal me. And how much worse, if that entity lived within Melory’s skull and shared our roof, always at the edge of my consciousness, battened on to my sister like a parasite. I thought all of these things as she changed and twisted, and so I did not insist she see me. I waited for my moment and told myself all manner of lies about why I did so, that did not revolve around my fear.

  The waiting made things worse, though. I got to see the doctor ghost working, and each sitting I witnessed only compounded my anxiety.

  At first she did not call up the ghost; it simply came when someone asked for aid or when she saw a patient in need. Later she was able to conjure it a little, learning its ways and what inner rituals might draw it near. When it came to her, she would go still; mostly she would sit down, because otherwise her legs would go weak and the ghost would lose control over them and drop her to the ground. All expression would flee from her and the ghost would light her face up from within, the fire rising slowly in her eye socket and the surrounding burrows and marks as though it had come from far, far away in some direction we had no name for.

  Sometimes she would just speak, where the affliction was something familiar. The ghost had seen generations in Aro come and go. It remembered epidemics and poisons, allergies and wounds. What remedy had sufficed before would be dredged up from that long and perfect memory and Melory would diagnose and prescribe with absolute assurance and accuracy. When she spoke, or rather when the ghost spoke through her, it was with her voice but without her character to shape it. I shivered every time I heard it, so like, so unlike my twin. />
  Where the ailment’s cause or nature was less clear, Melory would take the hands of her patient, who would flinch as though stung. She would bow her head, the ghostlight guttering low, then flaring back up as the doctor sifted through what it had discovered and came to its conclusions. At the start, it seemed that the doctor was groping its way, and there were several people Melory could not help. People began to whisper that Corto’s decline had only been the start of the doctor’s decline. Soon after, though, we could see that the problem began and ended with Corto, and those she could not help were mostly those who would have needed Corto’s aid earlier if they were to recover. All the others, those more recent sufferers, she spoke to and laid hands on and divined unerringly the best way to mend them. Sometimes it was plant extracts, prepared and treated in meticulous ways. Other times she would bind wounds and splint limbs, her hands moving with a jerky precision as the ghost manipulated her borrowed muscles. Still more needed no more than rest, sympathy, the care of their kin.

  I watched all of this. I sat in as often as I could, when the ghost was conjured from my sister to tend the sick. Every night I had a moment of crisis, knowing that the more I put things off, the less likely it was that the ghost could help. And yet, if I never asked, I could believe in some notional future cure that would come as soon as I did ask. It was fear of certainty that held me back. I did not want to put myself at the ghost’s mercy and be refused.

  But all things end, even my reticence. Thirty-one days after Melory became Aro’s doctor, I knelt before her and asked for the ghost’s help.

  This was after dark, after she had played doctor for everyone else in Aro who needed her. I didn’t want witnesses if the ghost snubbed me or pronounced me incurable. I told myself that Melory and I would lock that shame up between us, nobody else need know. I would just go on with my painful, sickly, hungry life for as long as I could. And if I couldn’t, only Melory would mourn, and only that part of her which was not a house for the ghost.