Page 57 of Green City Wars

“So what?” Lulu demands. “Come on, it’s like everyone here knows what’s going on but me!”

Skotch takes a deep breath, but bottles it in the end. Can’t actually bring himself to say the words because they really are that big. That dangerous. World-ending, maybe. Even here, even now, he has a sudden twinge of perhaps being on the wrong side. He looks to Fischer; Fischer looks to Nimoy. Or maybe Fischer just looks at everyone, frog physiology being how it is.

For a second there’s a general and unspoken conspiracy that says nobody’s going to spill the beans and Lulu will go frustrated to her grave, but then Nimoy’s words leak out.

“Doctor Meece,” the rat says, “the secret, artificial fabrication, the formula. Plangent.”

It’s Lulu’s turn to fight with the cryptic utterances of Ratlabs. She blinks, head going back. “Wait…”

“He’s worked out how to make Plangent,” Skotch decodes. “Not just get it from humans, actually make it ourselves, cheap and easy. And make its effects last.”

“Last?” Lulu echoes.

“Tenfold, at least,” Meece puts in. “One dose a month. To be improved. One dose a year. For short-lived strains, one per lifetime, intellect gifted at birth? Who can say. Efficient, affordable, a low-resource catalysed sequence of reactions. Universal access, security of mind, is it so bad? Perhaps, if it means they cannot keep us dumb and down.”

Lulu makes some fairly disarticulate noises, eventually coming out with, “Who’s even going to…?”

“Ratlabs,” Nimoy says. “We offer. At first. Facilities being already available. Later, whoever. Plangent for all. Like water.” The great limiter, the brain-fuel that activates all the complex neuro-engineering that the Gehirner are inheritors of. The stuff that makes the connections fire, without which they’re just dumb beasts. The cruellest economy.

“But what happens … when we don’t need…” Lulu looks stunned. And Skotch went through this self-same shock when he found out. When Meece finally told him, there in Uwe’s tech shack. The end, he’d thought. The collapse of that pyramid of needs and obligations. Who’d ever work, if Plangent was just being handed out for free on every street corner? Who’d ever do what needed to be done, to keep the city running for the humans that had made them?

He’d come perilously close to deciding to grab Meece and throw him at the feet of Szerky, right then. Seeing the end of his whole world in that one mouse. Suddenly the farm’s pet killer, the orders of Benson, all of it had seemed perfectly reasonable. Of course animals had to labour in conditions of want and need, or else it would all fall apart. Idleness and indolence and the end of the world.

But he’d sat and thought, with the good brain that engineering and Plangent together had given him. The work didn’t get done because everyone was a slave to their dependencies. It got done because that was what the Gehirner did. Because the space that they occupied existed solely on the basis of that work being done. And even though Skotch had opted out to go freelance, that hadn’t been because the work was onerous or repugnant or gruelling. Just because he was a loose cog that had never quite fit. Honestly, most days he felt hauling trash had been more fulfilling than running his investigator racket. It was just that his particular raccoon neurology pushed him to go his own way.

He’d sat there, and he’d thought, and come to the conclusion that free access to Plangent might not actually be the end of civilization after all. It would just be the end of a certain flavour of misery. The end of fearing the encroaching fog of dumbness that came with running out. The chance for a great many animals to be that much more secure and comfortable with their existence. And, for some, maybe the chance to find a better way to live, just like the Divine Jeff encourages them to do. Like Ratlab roaches doing their creators’ job for them, so they can concentrate on science. Not bugs, but features. Improving the world one tiny rat step at a time.

“I think,” he tells Lulu slowly, “that it’ll be fine. Just better.” A bit optimistic, because the soldiers are still mustering, a good thirty or more in each camp so far, and Meece is still feverishly working, showing no signs of drawing to a triumphant close. Right now the maybe-bright future he’s envisaging exists only in the head of one mouse.

“Trouble,” Fischer says shortly, and Skotch jerks his head up. The frog is sighting down his gun at a large figure that leaps from island to island, fastidiously trying to keep its paws out of the water.

“Wait,” he says. “She’s with us.”

“Herr Bandit is mistaken,” Fischer says, but Skotch pushes the popgun barrel aside. Tybelle pauses on the nearest island, looking down at the water with distaste, and then pads her way through it, lifting each foot and shaking it.

She’s seen better days. One ear is torn and there are cuts across her muzzle and swollen stings on her flank, though her upgraded physiology has avoided the anaphylactic response to the bee gun’s stings. The bell about her neck is dented enough that it probably won’t ring again. Skotch would really like her to turn up and say, You should see the other guy, but he reckons he knows this cat well enough by now. As much as he ever wanted to know any cat, honestly. The victorious strut he’d have expected is absent. This is not a cat who’s notched up a dead stoat in the recent past.

Her cultists swarm over her as soon as she makes landfall, bringing out unguents and bandages from within their robes, chittering their dismay. She rests her head on her paws, watching Skotch.

“That weasel,” she says, “is fast.” Confirming his fears.

Skotch sits down before her, though far enough that she’ll have to stretch if she wants to get a bite of raccoon as a restorative. “Tell me, Tibbles, since when were we on the same side? Only I reckoned you were out to kill me and the squeaker both right up until you pulled that stunt at Ikelos’.”

Tybelle snickers, then winces. “Oh, Mother Murnau only ever wanted the mouse alive. Alive and in her hands, for preference, but alive most of all. The lot of all rats and mice is to live lives nasty, brutish, and short. She wants to change that, just like these do.” A flick of her tail towards Nimoy’s people. “If she can change it by controlling Meece and what he knows, all to the good. But next best after that’s just letting Meece live and do what he wants.” She rolls her eyes as though the whole business bores her. “For me, Herr Washbear, I’m not on your side. I’d hunt you in an instant. Maybe I will. You’re fun.”

“But right now?”

“Right now, Mother’s paying me enough to keep me on message.” She stretches, not quite as fluidly as before, working around the discrete pains. “And besides, I want a rematch.”

“Your owner’s going to have a fit, when they see you next.”

Tybelle gives him a sly look. Flicks her bell with her claws, though it just makes a dull clonk noise. And he wonders, then. Wonders if this collared cat actually has an owner. Or if she’s just a stray with a bell, taking advantage of the whole myth of pets and humans and Rule One. And she won’t say and so he’ll never really know.

There’s some more splashing then, and Skotch looks over in case it’s an amphibious squirrel assault. It’s one more lost soldier coming in from the cold, though. A drenched possum shaking the water from her coat. Regarding him with a flat, unfriendly gaze.

“Maria,” he names her.

“Skotch,” she says. She’s got a spiker slung from a bandolier, and a couple of knives as well. And her teeth, if it comes to that.