Page 26 of Green City Wars

“Until next time, Herr Washbear,” she says, and he feels a wretched flood of relief pour through him. “Or until Mother Murnau gives me more explicit orders, concerning your fate. I’ll be watching you. I’ll be your shadow. When you lead me to the mouse next time, we’ll finish our dance.”

Szerky, he can understand. The stoatweasel is just like a hyper-carnivorous version of him, really. Part of the system, working for a living, even if she clearly enjoys that her work involves hunting and killing prey animals. Tybelle is like an alien monster, though. She has a food bowl and a human home to go back to. She’s out here killing Gehirner because it’s her hobby.

“Until next time, Tibbles,” he agrees. He’d hoped the nickname would annoy her but her tail crooks in amusement, and then she’s gone, leaping away into the green.

Skotch sags back. There will, he has no doubt, be a next time.

PART

THREESEPARATIONS

11THE BARON OF WASTE SECTOR THREE

Skotch should probably go home, catch some shut-eye. He’s been pushing himself too hard. Gehirner engineering bestows a bit more of an energy reservoir than a natural beast might have, efficient fat reserves and a little anaerobic boost, but that just means that when the Tired hits, it really bites. But the last raccoon who closed his eyes down in Unterroot 93 woke up dead, and that’s not a precedent Skotch feels like following. Honestly, what he really should be doing is checking in on Ikelos the tortoise in the nook above, given everything. Seeing if that Do Not Disturb sign on his shell has been disturbed. But maybe not the best idea to parade his big raccoon body around those parts just yet, in case it draws too much attention.

Instead, it’s Rootspace Central 38 he pitches up at, drops some buttons for a little nutshell of coffee with an extra shot. Iggy’s obviously struggling right now. Mistakes Skotch for three different raccoons while he’s serving, two of whom exist only in Iggy’s Plangent-deprived imagination. When he talks, his barista’s patter is made up of clippings from the last two years, events that happened, some that didn’t, the names of the dead. His rat eyes are wide and desperate. The Gehirner behind them knows he’s screwed, can’t source new Plangent, because freelancers always pay through the nose for it. Going dumb.

His chatter makes Skotch bleakly depressed. Yes, all very There but for the grace of Jeff go I. But the point of Jeff, of Jeffism, is that you can have anything in the world, but things only happen through your own efforts, and if things don’t work out for you, you obviously didn’t try hard enough. It’s not a particularly philanthropic—or philzoologic—creed. Some other animal is failing, that’s not your problem, Jack.

Skotch slides the buttons over, wondering if Iggy can even count them right now. Most animals come hardwired with numbers up to three, but that’s not exactly a good basis for an expansive economy. He wonders just how screwed up the geneware engineers were, when they decided to wire empathy into their creations. Or maybe they never did. Maybe, you make a thing that comes with two whole sets of instructions, the animal side that knows survival and maybe kin; the human side that knows a whole other set of priorities which may or may not fit with those. You mash those things together and somehow empathy is one of the things that comes out of the mix. In the wild, Skotch might meet another raccoon and understand, from how it stood, from its smell, from the sheen of its fur, how it was doing. What it was feeling, thinking. To the extent that feeling and thinking is a thing unaugmented raccoons do. Skotch the Gehirner can look at most of his fellow triumphs of engineering and get a sense, inside his head, of what it’s like to be them. An idea of what they want, how they’ll act, what they think of him. A complex social network that maybe parrots and pigeons and rats came better wired for, but that they shoved into raccoon-ware 3.1 anyway, and somehow it took.

Iggy’s pain, even unspoken, even just sitting behind the rat’s mad eyes, becomes Skotch’s pain. Like a hook in him. Hating himself, feeling keenly the offence to divine Jeff’s self-improving creed, he slides an ampoule over to Iggy with the buttons. It’s one he got from Benson and it’s looking less and less likely he’s really earning that advance, given his misgivings. Why not share the love?

Iggy twitches, a whole body convulsion like only rodents are capable of. He almost fumbles the ampoule, almost snaps the end off and squeezes it onto the floor. Then he’s necking it—no eyedrops for the rat Strains. It’ll take a while before it kicks in, and anyway Skotch wouldn’t know what to do with either thanks or lack of thanks. He takes his coffee and drags his feet over to Uwe’s tech booth.

“Need a news digest,” he tells the pigeon. A little haggling, but it’s not exactly a premium service. “Need mouse news,” he says. While Skotch gets to rest his feet and drink his coffee, the cyborg bird trawls Neuwien-Grunstadt’s informal channels and grapevines for anything involving a mouse, the farms, a handful of other useful search terms. Most of it is dross. Skotch filters through it on one of Uwe’s screens, deleting left and right. Always plenty of farm news and most of it entirely aboveboard. A big part of the whole green city project, after all. The big challenge: keeping that many human people fed in a way that’s both efficient and doesn’t cost the Earth. The rural projects, gated and fenced and run with military precision, are the heart of the new low-impact lifestyle. Because there are a lot of humans, and it’s the lazy man’s utopia that rests on a convenient mass die-off of the population. Instead, there are the farms, where the old mass-injections of ’cides and steroids and antibiotics that had the old agriculture poisoning the world have been replaced by an intricate network of biological controls. Not killing everything off but inviting everything in. A tailored virus or fungus or parasitic wasp for every occasion. And, industriously making sure it all runs smooth, the mice.

So naturally there’s just regular farm news, and he works out how to filter that out. Beyond that, though, a subtle little spiderweb of rodent-related threads has expanded out through the city. Lots of little backroom chats, message boards, anonymous notes. The animals in the marginalia of human communications, all of them asking, Have you seen this mouse? He can see the little fingerprints of the Rattenkönige there, and Uzco’s rather blunter attempts to squeeze usable data from the city. Nothing direct from the farms, but half the loose queries out there are probably freelancers like him but with farm buttons in their supers. And others he can’t immediately identify. Definitely a big current in the rat-heavy sectors. Word of mouth passed on through Jeffist cells and working rodents’ associations. Even the Kit Kat cults, he sees grimly. The rodents who’ve made a fetishistic religion of worshipping cats like the pyramids never went out of fashion. Doubtless Tybelle’s own coterie of toxoplasmosis-ridden votaries are even now trying to track down where Meece went when he left Skotch’s shadow back on Madparrot Alley.

Nobody’s mentioning Meece by name. Nobody’s publicly joining the dots: rogue mouse, Farm Projects, chemistry doctorate, potential anarchist-backed terrorism … But it’s there for those who know. Lots of threads and they all lead to the same place.

All of which boils down to one strand of good news. If they’re all still looking then nobody’s found him yet. Skotch is still ahead of the game.

As to what might happen, the mouse in his clutches and nobody else breathing down his neck, that’s a problem for tomorrow’s Skotch.

“All good, Skotch?” comes the fuzzy voice from Uwe’s speakers, because the rub of his raccoon hands has gone from anxious to eager. Always good to find that everyone else is as stumped as you. Then Uwe goes still, and Skotch turns to see Old Tekki the ratsnake peering into the tech-booth. And raccoons would count as a very big prey item for a non-venomous snake of Tekki’s size, but the old reptile has laid out plenty of mausgelt in his time. If he wants to take Skotch on then he’ll do it, though probably not by announcing himself politely like this.

“There is a dog.” The vocal generation of a snake is all the way down its belly, in Gehirner. Honestly they had to do a lot of messing about to make it work. Tekki speaks very clearly and politely and the voice comes mostly from about halfway down him, like Skotch is being addressed by his lunch. “A dog has presented itself.” Tekki doesn’t like dogs—well, most Gehirner don’t like dogs, but a lot of dog breeds will attack snakes on sight.

Something clicks in Skotch’s head, a late connection that suggests he needs to re-dose on Plangent himself. Of course there’s a dog. Sly’s dog. The old fox wants to see him.

True enough, it’s one of the most diminutive of Sly’s pack, with a message in the capsule on its collar. Still need to speak, V. important. The words printed in a mangle of Furze and Anglot because Sly’s speech-to-text is glitchy. How’s your credit with the Baron? She knows M.

Old Tekki is still glowering at him and the dog, as though Skotch is lowering the tone of the neighbourhood. He scratches the dog behind the ears. He needs to see Sly, but apparently first he needs to see the Baron. It’s been a while. He hopes she still remembers him fondly. Visitors that she finds objectionable have a habit of ending up sleeping with the fishes.

He scrawls an affirmative reply and replaces it in the little screw-up canister. Its job done, the dog bolts. They don’t much like being on dedicated Gehirner turf, Sly’s pack. Skotch turns. Old Tekki, barely mollified, turns. The pair of them freeze. Utterly motionless. Still life with snake and raccoon.

Szerky is there. He didn’t smell her, and mustelids are traditionally a smelly lot. She’s had her scent glands doctored, he guesses. Not a whiff of her to tip off prey when she’s on the hunt. The heady musk of dangerous, beautiful predator she was exuding at their first meeting is absent, and just as well. There’s enough blundering about in Skotch’s skull that he doesn’t need the complications.

He froze because he’s seen Szerky in action, and she’s got another one of those bee guns hanging off a strap, weird enough that half the city Gehirner probably don’t even make it as a weapon. Old Tekki’s probably frozen from ancestral mongoose memories, or maybe just because yesterday’s predator recognises today’s update. When it’s plain the stoatweasel is watching Skotch, the old snake slithers away double time, probably to crawl into a bottle of the hard stuff and not come back out for a week.

Szerky isn’t really built to swagger. She’s a mammal carnivore that parallel evolution tried to turn into a serpent so she could go after little squeakers like Meece on their home turf. Right now she’s looking at Skotch as though she’s ready to expand her ecological niche to larger prey. Only, you know, not in a mean way. Acknowledging you as an interestingly challenging prey item is probably high praise in her world view. Probably as close as she comes to really acknowledging most other animals outside the Country Club.

She’s abruptly far closer than she was an eyeblink ago, that effortless, oily grace. Very different from the poised balance of Tybelle, which is backed with the force and mass of a particularly beefy augmented cat. Szerky is like the tenth muse, celebrating elegant murder. Tybelle would make a mess of her, but the killer cat would have to catch her first. And Tybelle, for all her engineering and casual attitude to murder, is a talented amateur. Skotch has heard that the stoatweasels of the Farm Projects are mad for fighting, duel each other every day, hold hunts. Release dangerous engineered animals, even captured city Gehirner. Lives spent honing their skills until they can dodge bullets and walk through the rain without getting wet. And probably that’s all a cultivated exaggeration coming out from the Country Clubs, but he doesn’t want to try her.

“Herr Skotch,” she says softly, and his fur bristles at her tone, her teeth, her proximity. “You smell of mouse.”

“I was just about to wash,” he says. A bit of a joke, on the local nickname for his Strain. She isn’t laughing.