Page 21 of Green City Wars

Frances looks over her shoulder—looks massively, distantly, far over Skotch’s head. He tries to follow her gaze but can’t even approach the angle. Then she’s back to her ministrations, handing out food. Grinding up a pill for a sick rat. Our Lady of the Minuscule Mercies.

Skotch sags. Soaked, tired, still hearing Lulu’s yattering but knowing she can’t keep Maria sidetracked for more than a minute longer. No pigeon’s that annoying. Then he jumps, because a stubby hand tries to yank on his ankle.

He looks down. There’s a pair of eyes. Bulbous, yellow, protruding from the water. A single thick arm reaches for him. Three thick fingers and a wrinkled thumb. A toad. Not just a toad. The toad. The one from Ferdinand’s, last seen holding Skotch at gunpoint. The knot of his red necker can just be seen jutting from between folds of warty flesh.

“Herr Bandit,” says the toad, broad mouth sitting at the very meniscus of the water. “You have an urgent wish for freedom.”

Skotch is about to agree to that, and then deny it, and then guesses it’s some damn fool ideological anarchist thing the Maulers say to one another when they want to feel they’re being clever.

“You got the mouse?” Skotch asks.

“Herr Bandit is feeling larcenous perhaps,” the toad says. “Wants to steal something we have worked hard to secure. Perhaps we don’t want that so much.”

“Listen—” Skotch starts, eyes rolling left and right as he looks for Maria.

“Herr Bandit is vouched for by the Saint, though,” the toad notes. Its eyes move in towards one another as though each finds itself on a different side of the debate. “It is enough to get him in. Is it enough to get him out? Herr Fischer does not know.”

“Who the hell,” Skotch demands through his teeth, “is Herr Fischer?”

The toad regards him reproachfully. The toad is, Skotch clicks, Herr Fischer. Amphibians were a more ambitious engineering project than mammal or bird stock. They tend towards linguistic quirks and clannishness. And, apparently, anarchy.

“You got somewhere to take me,” Skotch tells Fischer, “you better lead on, or else there’ll be more to the party than you’ll like.”

“Herr Bandit is impatient,” says Fischer reproachfully. He bobs there and, for a moment, Skotch thinks he’s about to offer for Skotch to get on his back like the old story. Even a big engineered toad is around a fifth Skotch’s size, though. They’d not exactly get far. Instead Fischer kicks off, startlingly swift and graceful in the water. No anarchist water taxi arrives to collect him. It looks like he’s in for another ducking just as he’s begun to dry out.

The toad could have lost him a dozen times in that swim, but he keeps circling back and waving his big flat feet in Skotch’s face to make sure the raccoon stays on course. They come out at a grating, around the Chapel’s edge. The water runs down and down, there, gurgling into the abyss of the city’s drainage and reclamation works where another dozen Gehirner guilds hold sway. The grating’s pushed out, though, and inside there’s a ledge and the toad is squatting on it. Narrow, but Skotch can make it if he shuffles on two feet.

He looks around. No sign of an angry possum charging over to make an unwelcome third. And then from third to fifth wheel because a pair of squirrels—one red, one gray—loom up to shove the grating back into place. Both of them wearing the neckerchiefs of the Maulers, neither of them associated, presumably, with their original crews.

He thinks he’s come away clean from the Chapel, but he’s not so lucky. Just as they’re trying to lever the grating closed against the flow of the water there’s a sudden flurry of motion at its edge. The squirrels flinch back, and into the gap that makes, a feathered body forces itself with undue enthusiasm and a paean of praise for its own cleverness.

“How was that, Skotch?” Lulu demands. “I did well, didn’t I? I made sure she didn’t see! And here I am!” And there she is, on decidedly the wrong side of the grating after the squirrels have closed it up and clasped it shut.

Skotch waits to see if any of the Maulers feel that the presence of Lulu is too much of a security risk for their secret society. Apparently they know the pigeon’s reputation, though, and they’re not as anarchistic as all that. More than happy to talk about overthrowing the status quo, but none of them ready to start pulling feathers.

So it is that Skotch travels to the den of the Maulers in Madparrot Alley with Lulu keeping up a constant patter of questions in his ear.

9WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

The parrots had been a mistake. That was the conclusion the genetic engineers had come to, and it was a thought shared by most of their other creations.

Parrots—parakeets, arguably, but the distinction lacks taxonomic force—weren’t native to Wien, old or new. However, colonies had been finding homes in southern Europe since long before the green cities, formed from coteries of escaped domestic pets and slowly moving their range northwards as the world warmed. Being smart and opportunistic birds, they’d become a fixture of human landscapes, more than capable of adapting their tricks to the novel opportunities to feed and nest. They were a familiar sight in old Vienna by the time the first prototype Gehirner were being worked on. Clever, social, dexterous, and resourceful, they seemed an obvious choice. What wasn’t to like?

What wasn’t to like, as it turned out, was the parrots not wanting to Work for the Man. No matter how smart humans engineered the birds to be, they couldn’t ever instil the sort of dutiful nature a Gehirner needed. In fact, the smarter they made them, the more the parrots found ways to shirk their responsibilities. There is, Skotch reckons, a lesson one might learn from that.

The trip to Madparrot Alley—as the district of the city where the parrots flocked was known—is by raft, and in the dark. There’s a whole buried webwork of subterranean waterways, quite apart from sewage and reclamation and even the clean water supplies that lead into every human dwelling. It’s the supply that feeds the green of the city itself, pumped up from deep aquifers or desalinated from the sea, husbanded and recaptured so that the reservoir barely needs topping up, a masterpiece of conservation. And here they are, bobbing about on it like jolly animals in some human child’s book. A raft made of wooden slats over bottles, poled by the two squirrels while Fischer crouches at one end and regards their two passengers doubtfully. Both at once, given the enormous scope of his protruding eyes.

From above, through precisely designed cracks in the ceiling of the pipeways, shrouds of roots descend. That’s why these pipes aren’t full and pressurised, because you need to leave gaps for the trees to reach in and slurp out their share. There’s a whole Gehirner crew of frogs and newts who go through these tunnels on a constant yearlong cycle, pruning it all back to make sure the flow isn’t too choked, checking the roots for disease and damage. And clearing out the bodies, because these waterways are prime territory for Rattenkönige to sink their failures in. You wouldn’t think anyone made concrete shoes small enough.

Skotch, being the biggest piece of ballast on the raft, keeps to the centre and looks right back at Fischer. He’s run out of conversational gambits by then, mostly because there’s only so many times you can ask, “Where’s the mouse?” before a lack of response becomes awkward. And in other company he’d start to talk about the danger of some mad rodent escaped from the unknown conditions of the farm with a head full of chemical equations. But these are anarchists, and he doesn’t have a solid handle on where the Maulers really stand. A rare thing, for a Gehirner to go completely off the rails and out of the system, and when they do, they all have their own particular trajectory, from those who just want to tinker with the nuts and bolts with a spanner, make things better in some loosely defined way, to full-on doomsday cults who’ll burn the green cities down and render the entire concept of Gehirner extinct if they can.

Lulu’s still talking, of course. She tried to get all three of the raft crew going about their life and history, gathering more information. Then she tried to get them to open up on their ideology. Lulu’s wide-eyed interested act—not even an act, really; she genuinely is interested—hasn’t ever failed before, but these three stay shut up as clams, staring at her. They do not trust her, Skotch guesses. Probably they don’t trust anyone. You get paranoid enough just as a freelancer, with no social group there to watch your back and reassure you as to your place in the world. How much worse that must be for the genuinely lost and outcast?

Then Fischer’s tying up the raft, and the two squirrels—who haven’t offered names—scurry up ratlines leading vertically into the dark. Skotch is a fair climber himself, and Lulu has wings, but he assumes this is the last contribution Herr Fischer will be making to their journey. When he looks back, though, the toad is right at his tail. Just crawling up the wall like a damned spider, some piece of tree-frog inheritance worked into his geneware and giving his toes rough adhesive pads.

Then the squirrels shift a metal cover up above and the sun slices down at him like sword blades. Even before he blinks it away his ears are telling him exactly where he is. No mistaking the soundscape of Madparrot Alley.

The parrots fell off their service contracts quickly enough, so that other guilds moved seamlessly in to take up the slack and pick up the rations and the Plangent that went with the work. Unlike more organised overgroups like the Redcoats or the Rattenkönige, the parrots don’t just apply themselves to a kind of organised protection racket. The sheer idea of being organised in that way turned out to be anathema to the parrots. Highly social, yes. Hierarchical and stratified amongst themselves, yes. Fitting into anyone else’s idea of a grand system? Absolutely not. The parrots, through innate orneriness or flawed geneware, flat-out rejected the role that the engineers had set out for them. And yet, at the same time, attempts to eradicate them met with technical failure and a surprising resistance from Neuwien’s human population. In those early days of the project, there had apparently been a sense that, once you’d made these things, uplifted your Little Helpers, they weren’t just something to stamp out. You had to live with it, after you’d made them to live with you. Or that’s the story. Skotch reckons it was more that the parrots were way too smart to get poisoned or trapped, and nobody’s fool enough to start throwing parrot-specific diseases around because that kind of thing can get out of hand really quickly. So these days, there’s an invisible and somewhat shifting line of tolerance, and so long as the nuisance value of the parrots stays below that, the humans live with it. The soiling and noise and petty vandalism of the engineered parrots is no worse than the equivalent behaviours of their natural forebears, as it turns out. And when the parrots push things beyond that hard-to-define boundary? Well, there’s a reason that, while the fox and badger Strains have been officially retired and aren’t being updated any more, owl and hawk Gehirner are very much a thing. A haughty, aristocratic elite in their high eyries above the city, waiting for the call to go ply their murderous trade where the parrots live. Or to cull the pigeon army forces, if they’re getting too plump. Or maybe the squirrels. The raptor Strains are nobody’s friends, animals made entirely for killing, like Szerky the stoatweasel, like Tybelle the cat.