Page 23 of Green City Wars

He tries to read them. They’re all abristle with fervour, but he catches a few nervous sidelong looks: the squirrels, Wizzo, Fischer, all aware he’s right and not wanting to admit it.

“Why’d you even grab him, anyway?” Skotch presses.

“Fuck the Country Clubs!” the parrot repeats.

“Like the bird has said,” Fischer puts in. “The Maulers have contacts in the provinces. Word came to us that Brother Meece was making a run for it, and could some sympathetic friends maybe catch him in his fall and get him on his feet in the big city. Some spirited debates, they are happening in these rooms, regarding what parts of the system need fixing, and what parts need burning down. The Farm Projects fall into the latter.”

“You don’t like to eat?” Skotch asks innocently.

“No animal legitimately ate anything that came out of there,” Wizzo puts in. “That’s human foods only. And those Rattenkönige and the rest who load their tables with farm produce are playing lickspittle species traitors, complicit in the exploitation of our rural siblings.”

“That’s a lot of long words,” says Skotch. “Me? I just want the mouse.”

“For your fellow Amerikaners in Uzco,” Wizzo notes.

“I mean the little squeaker probably only has nine months left on the clock,” Skotch points out, “but I reckon with Uzco he at least gets use of them without them being cut short.” He is very definitely clinging to the idea that Benson still left him the option of bringing Meece in alive, and screening out the fact that dead was also on the table.

They exchange glances, narrow, excluding him. Squirrels to rat, rat to parrot, parrot to toad.

“If it helps—” starts Lulu brightly, about to damn Skotch with a glowing character reference. The anarchists’ disparate glower comes together to focus on her and she stops talking, aware that, no, it doesn’t help.

“Herr Doktor Meece,” says Wizzo, “goes nowhere he doesn’t want.” And, when Skotch shifts footing and opens his mouth to try a new tack, “You can convince him to go with you, of his free will? You go right ahead and try. But you can’t sell him on the idea, Amerikaner? Then he stays right here.”

It’s plainly further than any of the others want to go, but Wizzo quells each one of them with a look. “What? He doesn’t go where he doesn’t want, but that means we don’t get to keep him here if he doesn’t want to stay. We keep no prisoners here. But just you,” he adds, as Lulu takes a deep breath. She lets it out in an exasperated warble.

“I only want to—”

“You, sister, get to talk to me,” says Wizzo. “On account of how I feel the work to which you contribute could use some education in anarcho-socialism.” Human words that can’t even be constructed in Tiersprech. Something sad, Skotch reckons, about this pack of would-be system-smashers having to borrow the vocabulary of those they see as their oppressors to even express dissatisfaction with their lot.

Fisher and the anglo red squirrel lead him out and down a couple of levels through the shaggy overgrowth of the building. Whoever has the service contract to prune the greenery here is probably being kept from a neat job by the attentions of all the parrots higher up, but it serves the Maulers too. Gives them a nice covert thoroughfare between all the little nooks and crevices they’ve claimed. Toad and squirrel go ahead, look back to make sure he’s following, then disappear into what turns out to be quite a large space. Some big piece of plant that sufficient poundage of parrots tore out of its mountings. In its place, a gap you could have fit Benson’s tank into with room to spare, if you could have hauled it this high up the building. A space with hanging greenery for walls on two sides, and ready access to electricity. And here, in the midst of a new chemistry set partly assembled, Skotch comes face to face with Meece once again.

10HERR DOKTOR

It’s not a showdown. It isn’t just a raccoon and a mouse facing off against one another waiting for high noon. They don’t have the space to themselves. Over in one corner there’s a somewhat ragged-looking older parrot—a first-generation Gehirner, given how long they live—strutting back and forth before a battered e-reader, reaching out with a four-fingered foot to scroll the text from time to time. Skotch wonders whether they’re the lucky bird who gets their Plangent on the regular, or whether they just recently emerged from years in the intellectual wilderness to catch up on their reading. It’s human text, though, so high level stuff for a powerfully multilingual Gehirner.

Another wall of the space is given over to an art studio where class is in session. A whole load of parrots plus a crow and a couple of pigeons are all working on little canvases. Up above are some originals—bijou little portraits of humans, miniatures that, to the Little Helpers, are good as full size canvases. They’re making copies, Skotch notes with a twinge of alarm. Duplicating the lines and strokes of human masterpieces using engineered animal cunning. He’s no judge—Skotch doesn’t know from art—but he reckons there’s some top quality knocking-off going on here. Maybe it’s just for practice, but he has an uneasy feeling that he’s seeing the ground floor of a criminal edifice that has humans living in the penthouse. Gehirner crime and human crime getting tangled together is a real Gordian knot for Rule One and the thought of human law turning up with animal names on their warrants is enough to make him wring his sweaty hands together. Animals aren’t the only ones to exploit unintended opportunities. To Skotch, with night-adapted mammal eyes, the paintings are all dull, muddy colours rising sluggishly from shadows and greys. Bird eyes, with an entire extra set of receptors, can duplicate shades beyond the dreams of the most exacting human, and just maybe some human forging ring has picked up on that.

In a further corner two more parrots, a rat, and a pair of newts pass round a printed cardboard bottle of something, tipping the weighty thing precariously this way and that to decant sloshes of amber liquid. Looks to Skotch like the sort of container humans use for urine, but perhaps it’s a particularly good vintage. There is a little jack-straws stack of popguns nearby. They’re security, and they give Skotch a sharp look when he ducks in. It lingers, that look. He’s not one of them and he’s not welcome. Fischer and the squirrel give them the nod, and the end result of all of that exchange is that there are far more eyes on Skotch than he’s happy with.

And then there’s Meece, and at least two-fifths of a chemistry set already set up. Some purpose-made Gehirner glassware, some small human stuff, and a few pieces cobbled together from found materials by cunning Mauler artificers. A miniature centrifuge whirs away, spinning its iotas of material.

Meece is wearing that garment he had on before, that was mostly a cape then, but which he’s buttoned up his front, fastened at his wrists and ankles, so that it’s become overalls, the tiniest item of protective gear in the world. Or it would be, save for that even smaller pair of goggles, bulbous and insectoid about his narrow wedge of a head. The regard he gives Skotch is alien, impenetrable. Two wary raccoons bend and bulge in silhouette across the curved lenses as Skotch approaches.

“Herr Doktor Meece,” says Fischer from behind. “This here is Herr Bandit from Uzco, come just to talk to Herr Doktor. Herr Doktor’s safety remains guaranteed and nobody forces anyone to do anything, isn’t that right?” Goggling gaze turned to Skotch.

“Sure, talk,” he agrees. “All friends here. All just trying to make ends meet around the edge of the system.”

Meece’s alien regard doesn’t waver. The mouse is frozen in the midst of his profession, as though no amount of verbal reassurance would stand in the way if Skotch went for him. The perennial prey species, always ready to flee. “You almost had me,” he says. “At the eating house.” Not the most auspicious start to the conversation.

“I saved your guts at Ferdinand’s.” Skotch, attempting to establish credentials he doesn’t quite possess. “That stoat—”

Meece flinches, just at the word, just at the thought. And mice don’t live long but, out on the farm, those brief lives are eked out in the shadow of enforcer Gehirner like Szerky. “Herr Raccoon,” he says, “you’re persistent.” His voice is, of course, high, thin. A mouse voice, but very exact in its diction. The words formed at least partly by lips and tongue, like Skotch’s are. Herps like Fischer or Benson are often sloppy speakers, and birds are too good at it—most of them capable of a far wider range of sounds than the stripped-down language of ’Sprech really requires. It’s the mammal Strains who speak like humans intended; like humans themselves do.

“Herr Doktor,” Skotch says respectfully. His fingers pluck at the cuffs of fur about his wrists. He should go into his spiel now, explain why Meece is going to be so much better off with Uzco than with any of the others snapping at the mouse’s tail. Shouldn’t even be a hard sell given players like Szerky and Murnau. But Skotch has a nut to crack, and it’s not just getting Meece to cooperate. It’s getting to the heart of the poisonous riddle the little squeaker represents. So instead he asks, “What even is all this?”

The mouse makes a sound so high even Skotch’s ears can only just sieve it from the air. A snicker. Not a happy laugh. A lot of despair in it, for a mouse who’s only had three years at most to accumulate bad karma. “You don’t even know,” he says. “Here you are, come to lay hands on me, and you don’t even know.” That faint thread of rural accent to him, like Szerky. Skotch knows that, for humans, rustic means unsophisticated. To an animal it means just the opposite. The Farm Projects are great eco-machines designed to turn out food with the minimum of physical and chemical footprint. They run a tight ship there. Not yokels but scientists and aristocrats. And peasant labour whose lives are worth precisely one maus each.

“I mean, I know you’re brewing up something fierce.” Skotch jabs his snout at the glassware. “Something that meant you had to go on the lam from the Projects.”