The Expert System's Brother

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And perhaps it would be easier for me to know I was beyond help. Perhaps I would be able to accept what I had railed at for so long, for surely the possibility of a cure had just sharpened the edge of my hurt. I had fought against becoming the village’s scapegoat and reject. Perhaps accepting my lot would give me at least the veneer of belonging, a role to play even in negative. And I would still have Melory.

  So we sat there on the floor, cross-legged. Melory leant against the curved wall of the house; our knees were touching. Her face was cast slightly downwards as she concentrated, while I hunted her features for that resemblance to me that seemed harder and harder to find.

  The ghostlight rippled within the swollen part of her face as the ghost answered her call, tireless in its service to the village even as it wore my sister down with its demands. Her lips parted and the words came out in that weird affectless voice that was still half hers. Some people said the ghosts sounded almost as though they were singing, when they spoke, but if so, it was a joyless song I never cared for.

  “Partial decontamination detected. Analysing,” said the ghost and Melory together, and I had no idea what the words meant.

  She reached out with that abrupt impatience the ghost brought to her hands. Her thumb moved to press against my palm, and I felt a stab of pain as though she had driven a thorn into me. I welcomed it. I had seen that wince from so many of her patients. I was getting what the others got, being treated as someone who belonged for the first time in years.

  “Diagnostic link established,” she announced. The ghost liked to tell everyone what it was doing even though nobody understood its meaning. It made me wonder what sort of a world it believed it was visiting, when it rolled out its complex half nonsense for us. Nobody in Aro cared so long as the pain stopped or the fever broke. Did the ghost think us so clever, or was it just in love with its own cleverness?

  She had let go of my hand now, head bowed as the ghost consulted its memories to track down what was wrong with me and how to fix it. If it could be fixed.

  “Melory?” I pressed, after she had been silent for a good count of two hundred. “Mel?” A sudden stab of horror went through me. I thought somehow I’d banished the ghost, driven it away and cursed the village even more, just because I was me and even the ghost couldn’t bear to be near me. I thought it had taken Melory, too, that any moment her body would just slump sideways. I had ruined everything. I was a blight to anyone and anything near me.

  It was not Melory that answered me. I saw her jaw clench, as though she was trying to stop the words. The voice still sounded like hers when it came out, but it had nothing of my sister in it.

  “Irrevocable deterioration of antihistaminic biome.” I could see her muscles twitch and writhe beneath her skin as though she was fighting, wrestling with the ghost to try and stop the next words. It was strong, though, that ghost. It was as old as Aro, born with the first houses, with the first blistering of the wasp hive in the fork of the tree. It had seen us come and go in our brief lives and it knew what was best for us. Not for me, not even for any one individual, but for us as a group. That was its concern; that was what all the ghosts cared about.

  The words “Prognosis negative,” forced their way from her. “Incompatible with ongoing community placement,” and then she squealed and spasmed away from me, kicking out at nothing, beating her fists against the walls of the house. One eye stared at me, the ghostlight dancing and stuttering behind the other. I went to comfort her, but she threw me off so hard the breath whuffed out of me as I landed on my back.

  “No!” she got out, in her own proper voice and full of anguish. “Handry, it wants the Lawgiver!”

  “I’ll get her.” I started up but she grabbed me and almost threw me down again. I could feel the conflicting signals jolting through her body to her hands. Her grip left fierce red bruises against my skin.

  “It wants to tell the Lawgiver,” she stammered. “It wants. It wants. Progression of decontamination irreversible. It wants me to—No! Recommend expulsion. Stop it!”

  I was frozen, feeling horror clench my innards, because her voice was raw with grief and fury but the ghost was serenity personified.

  Expulsion, it had said. I didn’t understand at first.

  Then with a great effort Melory threw the ghost off, grabbing me by the arms and practically shouting into my face. “Handry, run away! Get out of here! It wants, it wants to—! I won’t, you hear me? I wonnnnnnnn.” She put her hands to the bloated, ridgy skin where the ghost lived, as though she was trying to rip it open. I fought with her, but right then she was stronger than me, shoving me towards the door. I saw blood drip from her good eye and the corner of her mouth.

  “Go now!” she insisted. “It wants you cast out. It’s trying to tell the Lawgiver. Handry, the ghosts can speak to each other. It wants you held. It’ll make me Sever you for real, and then you’ll die. You’ll die like Sethr. Handry, please!”

  I could already hear odd voices across the village: sleepy, irritated people woken by all the shouting. Any moment one of those voices would be Elhern’s, or rather not hers but the flat, authoritative tones of the Lawgiver ghost that lived inside her. It would be calling for me to be taken, like Sethr was taken. I was not just incurable, I had been judged an enemy of the community, and they would cut me off completely.

  In my mind was Sethr’s twisted corpse, starved thin, dying in poisoned agony as his body rejected all the good things the world had in it, as the world rejected him.

  I stumbled out into the night, looking up at the utter dark where the tree’s spread of branches obscured the stars. The only constellation I could see right then was made of the lamps people were lighting as they woke up and went out to see what was happening. When the Lawgiver finally got the message from the doctor ghost, there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t seize on it greedily. Hadn’t they known I was no good? Hadn’t there been some part of them insisting that I was trouble, a threat to their children and their lives, no matter what I did or how hard I worked? Before, perhaps they would have been able to reason their way out of the conclusion, but the moment my nature had the Lawgiver’s official stamp on it, why would they even try?

  Only Melory had ever stood up for me, since the accident. She wouldn’t be able to, anymore. The ghost wouldn’t let her. It hated me. No—worse even than that. Hate was a human thing, something you could at least spit in the face of. The ghost had just judged me not fit to live, of insufficient benefit to Aro, not worth keeping around. I was like a pest to be killed in the fields, a predator to be driven from the herds, out into the wilderness to die.

  I wanted to go back into our house, the house we had lived in with Ma, that we had shared since Ma’s death. I wanted to crook my fingers and gouge away at Melory’s face as if I could carve the doctor out of her until only my sister was left. I knew it was useless, though. The doctor was part of her, it went all the way into her mind and her bones. When the tree had chosen her, she had become something more than human but something less than my sister.

  With the increasingly angry sounds of the villagers in my ears, I fled Aro, blundering blindly into the night.

  IV.

  I THOUGHT I WOULD DIE.

  I kept running until I was past the further fields, outside anywhere that Aro and its ghosts claimed. In my head the villagers were on my trail, coming with slings, spears, with lanterns and righteous anger. I could picture all those familiar faces twisted by the same emotion, as though they had all kept a ghost inside them, all this time. I could remember them before the accident, that was the worst thing. If I had been born to this, surely it wouldn’t be so raw? But I’d been one of them, once. And no doubt if this had happened to someone else, I’d be with the mob, a cudgel in my hand and no doubts in my head.

  Looking back, now, I don’t know if they even stirred themselves beyond the outer ring of houses. The pursuit was in my head by then, driving me on. I heard my own hoarse, desperate breathing and took it for the r
oar of the mob. I only knew that I must get clear of any part of Aro. If I was discovered in the furthest corner of the furthest field then they would kill me or drag me back for Melory—expressionless and with the ghostlight unbearably bright in her face—to paint with the Severance and complete my casting out.

  I only stopped running when I saw there were trees all around me. I was out in the forest, where only the hunters and the boldest of travellers went. Ma had died out here, and so had plenty of others, because the world was a harsh and hostile place and we could only survive by leaning on each other. Everyone knew it.

  I knew it. I stood there alone, knowing it. All around me the trees creaked faintly as they grew, their branches sawing against one another and their leaves whispering. I heard the sharp cry of a Jibbit from far off, then an answering call from closer by, picturing their low-slung bodies sliding through the dark, hand-like mouths reaching out to hunt grubs and worms amongst the roots. Jibbits wouldn’t hurt people, but they were prey for things that would. Every time one called to its neighbours I wanted to find it and shush it in case it brought down an Arraclid or worse on me.

  I had come out into the forest with the hunters sometimes, mostly to help them bring back a big catch. Never at night, though. Never beneath that starless expanse, the dark sky swallowed up by the darker canopy. I found a hollow between roots and tried to tuck myself into it, arms and legs drawn in to stop me inadvertently feeling some unseen moving body out there in the blackness. As well as the familiar jibbit jibbit jibbit, I heard a dozen other sounds I could not identify, and each in my mind was a nocturnal killer hungry for human flesh. Once, something crashed between the trees, surely no more than twenty feet away, sounding larger than anything and bending the tree trunks back with its progress. I knew I would never sleep. I thought I wouldn’t even live to see the morning.

  And of course I slept. I was exhausted. I had run and stumbled a long way, and my heart was broken. When a little time had taken the edge off my terror I wept wretchedly, unable to stop myself sniveling like a little kid. It was too much for me. Everything I ever knew was lost, and worst of all it was still there, just a short walk in a direction I could no longer travel. I felt as though I had died in every way but the actual. Any predator making a meal of me would just be setting right an unaccountable error in the tally of the world.

  And at some point I can’t remember, that grizzling wore me down into sleep. What I do remember is the waking up, because there was an Arraclid standing over me.

  They were a big problem for Aro. Every year there was a new nest near the community somehow, and they never learned not to go after people, mostly because they were big and strong and fast enough that they often got away with it. Other places I’ve been, you barely saw Arraclids from one year to the next, or people had never even heard of them, and there was some other local monster that Aro had never had to find a name for.

  Arraclids, then. Like most big animals, they have six legs, each with more joints than yours or mine. Their broad, flattened body is kind of slung between them, and with a big one—like the one I was staring at right then—it hangs at around head height, with the legs arching up almost half again as high. Big enough to carry off a choice animal from the herds, then, or a herdsman for that matter, and yet they can squeeze down and force themselves through narrow gaps if they have to, and they’re strong enough to break down a barred door. They have four main eyes, like most beasts—above and below, and either side. The eyes go forwards, though, rather than just staring outwards or weaving around on stalks, so when they turn your way it’s as though they’re really looking, like a person looks. Worst of all are their mouths, which are like an eight-fingered hand, big enough to grab you about the waist and make off with you easily. And in the palm of that hand they have a couple of curved fangs to hold you still while their other barbed parts tear strips away to get at what’s inside.

  I had a good look at that mouth from where I lay. It was crouched right over my hollow, canted at an angle, and the lower eye, a fist-sized black lens like still deep water, was staring right at me. The jointed fingers of its mouth flexed slightly, as though it were a man cracking his knuckles before getting down to work. Below them, I saw its teeth move. I watched in fearful fascination, seeing that each one was ridged like a flint knife and positioned on its own stubby little knuckle so that, when it finally got to apply them to my body, it would be grating away with them, grinding inexorably through my flesh and guts and slurping up all the tiny shreds it would turn me into. I lay there and wondered, with a calm born of helplessness, just how long it would take before I actually died from it.

  It moved, just a little. When Arraclids attack they come in very fast and sure, a flurry of limbs and reaching fingers that’s the nightmare of anyone who’s seen them. Before that, though, they have an odd swaying motion to them, as if they could just be branches hunting the sun, not a threat at all. It’s easy to miss them in the wild, as they let themselves drift close enough to go for you. Perhaps this one had painstakingly spent the night inching closer and closer, not realising that I had been dead to the world.

  Its lower eye shifted slightly—it was on a little knuckle-finger of its own, I saw, a stumpy version of the stalks Jibbits and some other animals had. No lids, of course. Only humans have eyelids.

  I stared back at it. What else could I do? As though surprised by my effrontery, it said, Kak kak kak, that deep knocking noise they make. I felt as though I had disappointed it.

  It shifted again, and I realised it was carefully bringing its mouthparts towards me so that it could murder me with a minimum of effort. I tensed, knowing that I should be kicking out, shouting, yelling. Except who would I be yelling to, now? Who would come at my call? Instead I was just very still, waiting for the end.

  I had ripped my leggings in my mad flight, torn them open on a branch and bloodied my leg as well. Now the Arraclid extended its fingers and touched me there. I felt the rough calloused pads like sand on my skin, and then the softer, rubbery hide around them. That one eye continued to pin me with its contemplative gaze. Kak, it said again and pushed and pried at my skin, sending a shock of pain through me as it reopened the wound. It dabbled its rough fingertips in my blood as though about to draw something in it.

  Then, just as terror had me wound so tight that I might have done anything, it was moving off, those deceptively slow and swaying strides more than compensated for by the long reach of its legs, at first on the ground, then climbing, reaching from trunk to trunk and ascending into the canopy. I lost sight of it after it had put three trees between us.

  The Arraclids weren’t the threat that would kill me. They would approach me several times in the few days when I wavered, close to Aro. The third and last time, when the biggest of the monsters I ever saw squeezed its flexible body between two trunks to stare at me with all four eyes, I just stood there and stared right back, finding that I didn’t care whether it killed me or not. The fingers of its mouth flexed, half reaching for me and then drawing away. At last it backed off, and a shudder rippled across its grey-blue hide, as though it was disgusted by what it had found.

  What looked certain to kill me was hunger, and I wondered if, when I finally dropped in my tracks, my body would just lie there forever, untouched even by agents of decay. I was not Sethr, to be poisoned and bloated to bursting by what I ate, but everything sickened me. I felt as though my stomach was a tight-clenched fist inside me, shrivelled until there was barely room for a seed or a grub in it. And yet I ate. I found berries that were bitter as acid on my tongue and that gave me fierce cramps. I winkled trackworms from beneath the scales of tree bark and crunched their writhing bodies between my teeth, fighting not to retch. I killed a Jibbit, beating its frantically undulating body with a branch until it burst open, and then I ate its grey, chewy flesh raw because I was no hunter and didn’t know how to start a fire. And I threw up some of it, but then I kept eating the rest because I was so, so very hungry. I found that I
could keep myself just one step ahead of starvation if I varied my diet daily, but that a second or a third meal of anything would be too much, toxins building up inside me to gift me with a night of hurling and convulsions, aching joints and violent bowels and a throat burned raw with vomit. And yet I wouldn’t die.

  Then there was the cold: no fire, no walls, nobody to share body heat with. Once I found a herd of Raikers huddled up together, each of them bigger and heavier than me, plated and bristling. I tried to hunker down amongst them; surely I was too trivial for them to worry about. And yet I smelled wrong or I moved wrong, and the whole herd just upped onto their many legs and lumbered off, hooting at each other through the vents in their sides, and taking their warmth with them. The best I could do was tear down branches and cover myself with a blanket of foliage that the wind would tear away half the time, while the other half I’d wake with a rash across my skin that matched the radiating veins of the leaves. And so I froze each night, and some days, too, because the cold season was coming on, but that didn’t kill me, either. It was as if even death found me repellant.

  It was the loneliness that came closest to ending me. On the fourth day of loitering close to Aro, I finally understood that this was real, this was my life now. I had lived all my life in a community of hundreds, and one of them Melory who had always been there. That fourth morning, waking up before the dawn, starving and cold, I finally accepted that things were not going to change. I would never have it back, not even the half-life I’d clung to after my accident. I got up in the dim grey light and thought about gashing my veins open with a stone, or going to pick a fight with an Arraclid until it would have to kill me in sheer self-defence. I thought about finding a height to throw myself off. Even a drawn-out death seemed better than this drawn-out life.