The Expert System's Brother

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Then he had her head in his hands, fingers digging into her flesh. I twisted from the slack grip of the men who held me and stumbled towards him, dragging at his arms. His slap was contemptuous, but it sent me back to the floor, head ringing. Melory was fighting him—both with her hand and in her mind. I saw the ghostlight stutter beneath his prying fingers. Hadn’t I wanted to do just that, after the doctor ghost had turned against me? Hadn’t I wanted to tear it out of her and leave just my sister behind? I lunged for him again. There was no strength in me but I just blundered against him like some flying thing blundering near a fire. He broke off from Melory, but only to take me by the throat.

  “Handry.” His face was full of rage and betrayal. “It’s not your sister, boy!” But I could see he didn’t care whether she was or wasn’t. He just wanted to claw out what he needed from her skull. He saw my resolve in my face, and in his face I saw the moment that final string snapped—the last cord binding me to him. Abruptly I was Severed twice over, an outcast amongst outcasts. There was only one way that went, and I’d seen Sharskin’s hard justice in action.

  If it hadn’t been for Melory, probably he’d have beat me to death there and then. I wasn’t his priority, though. I could wait. He thrust me at the congregation, ordering them to hold me.

  Sharskin’s followers were suddenly moving, though, scattering in all directions as though terrified to be near me. I stared blearily about, trying to understand what was happening.

  It wasn’t me they wanted to avoid. Of course it wasn’t.

  The articulated figure of the metal servant was moving. Moss and rust exploded from its joints as it turned its body towards Melory, the dome of its head showing everyone their own face, distorted by ruin and time. From the warts and nodules on either side, the ghostlight sputtered and flared in time with Melory’s heartbeat.

  It lumbered forwards, leaving two perfectly clean footprints on the metal floor where it had stood for so long. Sharskin presented his staff to it and commanded it to stop, conjuring it with the nonsense words of ghosts and ancestors. “Deactivate!” he ordered it. “Initiate shutdown protocols! Sleep, curse you!” Even though nothing he said even slowed the metal servant’s advance, he never stopped believing in his destiny, his right to sway the workings of the world.

  The servant reached forwards and he thrust his staff at it to skid harmlessly from its skin, leaving only a bright streak. It gripped him by the chest with exaggerated care—if he had not been so insistent that it was his to command he could have slipped from its hands easily.

  “Executing protocol,” said the ancestors and their metal servant crushed Sharskin’s ribs like a fistful of sticks. A shock of blood burst from his mouth, a single last cry of outrage.

  Abandoned on his dead face was an expression that owed far more to indignation than to pain.

  Everyone froze. The servant was still as a statue with Sharskin’s mauled body hanging in its grip. His congregation just stared, and any moment they might have descended on us, in the shadow of the servant or not, and torn us limb from limb.

  Melory returned to herself slowly, feeling at the bruised skin where Sharskin had gripped her. Her eye blinked and she stared at the congregation, and as she did, the servant turned and cast its eyeless gaze over them in perfect tandem. In their alcoves along the wall, the other servants shivered slightly, all at the same time, surrounded by a faint haze of dust. The congregation chose that moment to begin backing out of the room. Some would leave the House entirely, fleeing into a world that only wished to poison them. Most just hid in the buried rooms, in alcoves and nooks. We found them later.

  “Handry,” Melory said and the House said, echoing her. She frowned in annoyance, and when she named me again the ancestors were silent. When I helped her up, she leant into me just as she had when she was my sister.

  “Why did you come here? What have you done?” I asked her, glancing fearfully up at the metal servant. A little leftover ghostlight was still dancing about its head.

  “I fought the ghost,” she told me. “I stopped it talking to the Lawgiver. I told it to find another way. It kept saying where you were, when you were hungry, when you were hurt. Which was all the time. Handry, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  We were alone then. Or no, not alone. We were the only humans in the room, insofar as either of us qualified.

  “And I couldn’t stand it, so I left. I hope the Electors chose another doctor when I was gone. I couldn’t bear knowing every day that you were in pain. And when I found you, I would make it help you, un-Sever you, something.” She looked up at the metal servant, then around at the time-scarred metal walls, as though she had never properly seen them before. “What is this place?”

  Sharskin would have howled at the sacrilege, but I told her. I taught her the ancestor stories he had taught me, but without his fiery conviction I kept stumbling over the holes and the contradictions: the wise and the foolish ancestors, and what more proof than that the voices of the House had known the ghost, and bowed to it. They were not opposites or enemies but all part of the same continuum.

  I thought of the dead communities that surrounded the House; somehow before they had just been a sign of the nebulous Bad that our destiny would correct, but now I considered them all over again. They were failed villages, early experiments of the ancestors as they sought to find a stable way of life in this hostile land. I thought of wise men and women getting older and worrying about how their children would survive. And they did survive. We have survived, even though the nature of this place, this planet, is to poison us in every way. There are scores of villages spreading further and further into the forest under the protection of the ghosts and the hives. If they had not changed us as they did, perhaps there would just be this dying House, speaking in sightless voices with no ears to hear. Sharskin was wrong.

  X.

  MELORY SAYS THAT SHE could help me by sharing her blood, transferring it to my veins by some means—means the House can provide, she says. Her ghost counsels against it, but she and Iblis have both shown me that the ghosts—the expert systems—were meant as servants and not masters. They do not make people their puppets or their slaves, unless people consent to it.

  But I am not sure I want to be helped in that fashion, to be changed back to the way I was, because Sharskin was right, too.

  Five hundred years, he said. I have asked the House—Melory showed me how and told the House to answer me when I spoke to it, sharing command access as she says. The House does not remember how long it has lain here, though its condition suggests Sharskin’s claim is realistic. And I think of Aro, and how we lived there like our people had always lived there, and nobody remembered when we had come there or what village we had budded off from. And certainly nobody remembered that our ancestors had crossed the night sky in a silver dart, from one floating ball to another. A small space of that second ball is all we have ever known. We hardly ever travel, and then only from one village to the next, and count ourselves great voyagers for the trip. Our ancestors were the greatest of voyagers, but we have forgotten them. Only the House remembers, and its memory is piecemeal.

  Our people do not need to think about the world or struggle with it, because our ancestors cared for their children and gave them what the House calls artificial ecosystems to protect them. Not just the wasps, but the lice and fleas, all the crawling and jumping and flying things that bite and sting us, and change our bodies so we can survive the world. And, incidentally, allow us to recognise each other. They are part of a system, and because they live on us and inject us with their gifts, we are part of that system, too, and when one of us is Severed from that system, everyone knows it. No wonder my friends abandoned me. I must have seemed a walking corpse, a monster wearing a mask of human skin.

  Our ancestors feared that their children would die on this poison world, and so they gave their children ghosts to advise and guide them. The ghosts were not meant to decide for them, but if you came into the world with
a wise voice always telling you the best way, would you not grow accustomed to doing what it said? A voice to tell you how to run your lives and a voice to tell you how to build and plan, and a voice to tell you how to get well. And others. The hives hold many ghosts most villages never see, like the smithy ghost that Ostel spoke of. Our ancestors made sure that we would never lack for advice, but they did not realise that meant we would forget to find things out for ourselves. As Sharskin said, we are less than we were. I think our ancestors were desperate because this land kept killing them, and so perhaps they made the ghosts more insistent than they might have been, more heavy-handed in their wisdom, stricter in their sentences, because life here was fragile and all they had built was in danger of being eroded away. Or perhaps the ghosts were milder once, and with each generation’s unquestioning obedience they have grown to fill the space of command and self-determination that we came to abandon.

  Sharskin’s mistake was to go to war with the world. Our ancestors realised the world was too big, and living with it was preferable to fighting it. But that does not mean we cannot change it, piece by piece. That does not mean we cannot try to understand it, or even question the ghosts and the voices of our ancestors. Our ancestors did not know everything.

  I have spent a long time in conversation with the House. Sometimes it speaks my voice back to me, at other times it uses Melory’s or Sharskin’s. I let it make the choice, or else it is faulty and does not know how it makes me the heart of an invisible convocation of conflicting points of view. I like it that way. I don’t want it to tell me I’m right, or that anyone else is wrong.

  Many of the brothers stayed. Probably they were angry with me to start with, but the House obeyed me and the metal servants, too, and nobody was bold enough to risk their wrath or a future where the House listened to nobody. They came out in ones and twos when they were hungry and I ensured the House provided food for them. The House told me how much food it had—it will last us for a long time but not forever, and that is a problem we will need to solve.

  I sat down with them and with Melory and introduced one to the other. By this time I had spoken to the House and to Melory, and we had made a plan. It is not exactly the plan Melory intended when she abandoned Aro to come save me. I am not for saving, I have decided. Instead, she and I can try and save everyone else from the past.

  We will go to the villages. Melory will play ambassador at first. Where we find them amenable to thinking and change, we will open the hand of friendship. The House has a lot to offer, after all, and every village’s ghosts will recognise it. We will go to Orovo, first of all, because I think Iblis will understand all this far better than I do. I think the knowledge of our heritage will fire her up with thoughts and ideas that she can browbeat her ghost into accepting. For her, and those others who can see past their instinctive revulsion at our otherness, we will teach them what the ghosts cannot. And we will learn and grow and become more with each generation.

  For the House says that the night sky is full of places we might go, if we can only change ourselves enough to live there.

  Acknowledgments

  A big thanks to my agent, Simon; my editor, Lee; and most of all my ever-supportive wife, Annie.

  About the Author

  Photograph by Kate Eshelby

  ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the epic science fiction blockbuster Children of Time. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British Fantasy Society Award, and been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer, and amateur entomologist.

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  Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Children of Time

  Guns of the Dawn

  Dogs of War

  Spiderlight

  Ironclads

  ECHOES OF THE FALL

  The Tiger and the Wolf

  The Bear and the Serpent

  The Hyena and the Hawk

  SHADOWS OF THE APT

  Empire in Black and Gold

  Dragonfly Falling

  Blood of the Mantis

  Salute the Dark

  The Scarab Path

  The Sea Watch

  Heirs of the Blade

  The Air War

  War Master’s Gate

  Seal of the Worm

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE EXPERT SYSTEM’S BROTHER

  Copyright © 2018 by Adrian Czajkowski

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image by Raphael Lacoste

  Cover design by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Lee Harris

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-250-19755-9 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-250-19756-6 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: July 2018

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