Page 41 of Green City Wars

“A conundrum, yesno?” Nimoy says. “You have him. You don’t have him. Not certain, Skotch?” And she’s off again, and apparently that’s all the medicine he’s getting, but if it keeps the wounds from going bad he’ll take it.

The tunnels he squeezes himself down have the plastic tubes along the side, the roaches a constant back-and-forth patter. Then Nimoy has stopped, and below them he’s looking down on a chamber where …

“Lulu!” he spits out. The pigeon is there, laid out, wings spread, one whole, one mangled. Eyes closed. “What—?” To his eyes, the three rats around her are scavengers, about to tear into this prime piece of meat he brought to them. A moment later he sees they have gear, Gehirner-scale medical, which means big in rat hands but tiny by human standards.

“What we can, we do,” Nimoy says. “Bona fides, ours, see? No guarantees. Ill used, she was. Redcoats, barbarians. Grays and pigeons no better. Brigands, vandals, yahoos, extortionists.” Suggesting relations between Ratlabs and the armies are rocky right now.

“Let me guess,” Skotch says darkly. “You get hold of Meece’s secret, you’d show them all.”

“We would rid ourselves of their shadow, yes. Change the world,” she says, and so blithely it chills him. A rat world, perhaps. A plague world. All the old stereotypes of her Strain.

“Okay, so you’ve got her, and you’ll take care of her if I play along. I get the gameplan.”

“For her, we care. What can be done. For you, also. In return? What can be done for us. Come.” And she’s off again, but only a brief hop, then they’re in another roach-lit chamber. Here, the tubes have gone mad like they were vines left to grow wild. Knots of them reach into the space, twine around one another, meet, exchange complements of insects, part and fan out again. A half-dozen rats are in here, apparently measuring or studying the activity of the roaches like they can see the future in it. On one wall there’s a big Jeffist shrine, and that’s no surprise. If there’s one thing Skotch has heard about the Ratlabs crowd it’s that they’re all massively into the Jeffist creed of self-improvement.

“City heart, yes?” Nimoy prompts him. “Way of the future. The work, yesno? See?”

“What?” He doesn’t see, or even really follow the broken patter of her speech. “I see a lot of bugs. This what you do when you’re not making the services run?”

She snickers at him, that high rat chitter that has always grated on his nerves. “The work, yes. This is the work. This that you see, yesno?”

“Listen, doc, you’re going to have to use more words. Small ones for preference. I’m just a dumb trash disposal boy from Uzco.”

“Hard work, that, yes?”

“Good work when I had it.” Right at this moment he’s almost nostalgic for the days when he wore a collar and cleaned the streets.

“They do that work,” she says. “Also fix wiring. Also diagnose faults. All in the brain-hacking.”

“They? They who? The bugs?” Ludicrous. She’s making a joke.

“Yes.” She isn’t. “Our work. Guild work. Our services. The bugs, yes, they do it. Gives us time to think, make, do. We made them. Hacking roach brains. Easy, really.”

“Wait, the bugs … do your work for you?”

“Do yours too, if you want.” She shrugs. “Only here, so far. Tomorrow, who knows? Whole city maybe, yesno?”

“You’re going to replace the other guilds with bugs?” Skotch demands, and she chitters derisively at him.

“Offer bugs to other guilds, yesno? Labour saving devices, green city style, yes.”

“But the work…” The basic reason for them, for Gehirner existing at all. That they maintain the infrastructure of the cities.

“Gets done,” she says, a twitch of her whiskers dismissing all such concerns.

“But you can’t just … not do the work!” He’s surprised to find how invested he is in the thought.

She leads him over to the shrine. The icon of Divine Jeff there, his holy motto arcing over him. “See there, see him?” And it’s the usual depiction: a male human in his prime, lying back, chest bared, radiating confidence and virility. Across the city—across the whole Gehirner world—he’s a symbol of success through endeavour, a promise that you can always better your lot. That motto, the mantra that there’s always a path to where you want to go, if you work hard enough at it.

“So many of the faith,” Nimoy says, “believe it is just them, yes? Their rise, another’s fall, zero sum. Ratlabs, we see all boats lift, if the tide rises. We are the tide, not the boat, yesno?”

“That’s how people drown,” Skotch says.

“Look at him.” Nimoy sniffs at the shrine. “See how he is? Does he slave? Does he sweat? No. Relaxed, so handsome! Enjoying just rewards. Jeff wants our lives easier, better, yesno? He wants us to find ways—his holy words—to improve our lot. Sacred duty, always.”

It sounds like the kind of dogma that’s very convincing until it isn’t, Skotch reckons. He’s still reeling from the idea that the rats have outsourced their actual work to bugs, leaving themselves free to … do science, he supposes. The perfect hothouse for whatever Meece might cook up, if the little squeaker gets to them. For a moment he teeters on an almost existential abyss, seeing Ratlabs devoid of walls and rules as much as the Mauler anarchists, but with so much more potential to do harm. Or good? Maybe, but based on his experiences with any given sect or cult or faction of Gehirner, what are the odds?

Nimoy’s in something of a rodent rhapsody, though: turning on the spot as her hands, nose, and tail all point out random points of the great insect conurbation. “Skotch, raccoon, the future, yes? Ratlabs, yesno? It is not written that we must sweat with work. Only that the work must be done.”