Home > The Expert System's Brother (Expert System #1)

The Expert System's Brother (Expert System #1)
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

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.

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