Page 61 of Green City Wars
The human takes another step, and Skotch sees him pause before putting his enormous foot down, carefully picking somewhere that no animals are. Even so, everyone and everything flees the shadow of the step. Skotch himself is caught between instincts: Look big! fighting against Flee! Because the human is coming right for him, so he should just take to his toes and not stop running until he reaches Unterroot 93 and home. But at the same time he’s just spent blood and fur on holding this island, and so his toes dig in and he refuses to just cede the ground. Even to his maker. Raccoon geneware always did have a contrary streak to it, which Uzco’s brochures play down at every opportunity.
But there’s no disguising the fact that the human is coming right towards them, picking his gigantic way through waters that barely come up to the top of his loafers.
Szerky coils and recoils, never more serpentine than now. She, too, is caught in the vise of opposing programming. She wants to lunge for Meece. He’s right there, immediately behind Lulu’s enforcedly sedentary bulk, but that would be moving towards the titan, when all her other instincts shriek Away! And her iron resolve prevents her from just bounding off for a hole to hide in, so she writhes backwards away from her prey, twisting and tensing and never still.
A dreadful silence has fallen across the whole of the Chapel. Only the heavy footfalls, the splash of water, and the grind of loose rubble under the human’s tread. These sounds, and their echoes. No other. A hundred animal eyes just stare.
The human steps up onto the central island, the big one, where the Saint normally holds court. One stride, two, each as carefully positioned as the last, and it occurs to Skotch that the human, incredibly, is also nervous. Also out of his element. A human who recognises the liminal space he has intruded into, and who might at any time flee. And there are more than a few such chance encounters. Moments when the overworld and underworld of the green cities cross unexpectedly. A human, up in the small hours, discovering a half-dozen rats cleaning the corridor of their apartment building. A moment of recoil, when the giant with all the physical and social power is skittering back in shock before remembering what their world is built on. If Skotch stood tall and chittered at this human, then the giant might break and run in the face of his minuscule wrath.
But he doesn’t. By now he’s worked out which human this must be. Recent events catching up with him. His fault, basically, that Rule One is in pieces just like the half-drowned rubble of the Chapel floor. Except that, like the Saint, this isn’t quite a regular human. This is one for whom Rule One was cracked across from the start.
The human kneels. Honestly, he’s so big that it seems a physically impossible thing, for him to let himself down to one knee without all that weight just collapsing in ruin. And yet somehow it happens, the mighty brought if not low then lower. Skotch, still frozen, studies him. An older human, he reckons. Hair and beard long and somewhat in need of a groom. Lenses over his eyes in what Skotch is distantly aware is a rather old-fashioned affectation. The human smell, familiar from all the vacated spaces he’s been in, to pick up the trash or clean or fix. A smell of absence and substitution, where they’ve scrubbed away their natural odours and replaced them with the floral and synthetic.
The human reaches down with huge, slightly trembling hands. Skotch’s hackles go up and, for a second, he’s just beast. Bared teeth and warning and tail bristling out like a striped bottlebrush. It’s not for him, though. Nobody’s trying to take a raccoon away as a souvenir. It’s not Meece either, despite the general direction of those hands. This is the one moment when Meece is irrelevant to what’s going on. Instead, those hands cup, ever so gently, about Lulu.
The human lifts her, holds her close to his face. When he speaks, his voice is low, a buzzy blur in Skotch’s ears. He catches odd words, where Tiersprech and Austrian Deutsch connect, but he’s not sharp enough to properly translate what he’s hearing. But the meaning comes through even though he couldn’t tell you the precise vocabulary. What have they done to you?
The human bows his head over Lulu. Skotch sees his eyes glisten. And Lulu is talking back. Birds were always best at messing with languages. It’s not just parrots that can do it. Something in the long avian history of making lots of varied noise translates into a gift for languages. Lulu speaks, and she’s speaking human words, forcing them through her engineered voice box and yet still sounding like herself. That breathless, rushed, excited tone, the pigeon on the hunt for a story or recounting one. Not—emphatically not—pet to owner, but employee to employer. The gatherer of tales speaking to the one who will set them down in print for his human audience. Schreiber, whose contact details are on that ring on her leg. To whom Saint Frances put in a call—so long ago, it seems. But here he is, just in time.
Skotch risks a look at his fellow Gehirner. The squirrels have mostly backed off—to the periphery of the Chapel or else they’ve gone entirely, snuck off while the human’s attention is elsewhere. They are neither continuing their war against the central island nor against each other. Szerky alone remains on the central island, the last remaining beachhead of what had been, a moment before, an overwhelming assault. She is waiting for her moment, her eyes on Meece, who’s right there crouching in the shadow of the human’s shoes. The surviving defenders are mostly frozen in place. Fischer is pretending to be a stone. Nimoy cradles her wounded arm. Tybelle takes a dainty step forwards as though about to rub against Schreiber’s leg, then decides against it. Not, she assays, a cat person.
Schreiber is saying something again. Keeping his voice low, that rare human who understands how acute most Gehirner hearing is. Skotch wishes that the Saint’s machine was on, to give its translation of those words. Instead he can just about feel around the edges of what’s being said. Schreiber will take Lulu somewhere safe, get her injuries looked at. There are humans whose job it is to care for animals, though they usually do not practise on Gehirner. And Lulu replies, telling him that she has stories. She has the most amazing stories. That’s their deal, their relationship, the employment he has for her. Schreiber is, Skotch is given to understand, a creator of tales for humans, and his chosen theme is the lives of the Gehirner. The Little Helpers that humans distantly know are there, but have no contact with. He relates, perhaps faithfully, perhaps fancifully, their trials and vicissitudes, struggles and triumphs. And probably the humans who read them scoff, and see in them vastly over-fictionalised accounts of what are supposed to be simple and mechanical existences. Instead of pastiches that Schreiber must surely dumb down to make them comprehensible to his audience, none of whom can guess at the riot of life and pain and adaptation going on in their walls and under their feet.
Schreiber straightens up with a creaking of joints. And Lulu, cupped safe in his hands, plays her trump card. She cranes back down towards the animals below her and, in one clawed foot, waves a little device. Meece’s device. His notes, his secret, his completed work. The formula and process for creating Plangent. The revolution that will flood the Gehirner world with free thought and lasting enlightenment.
Szerky shrieks. To Skotch, it’s a deafening keen of frustrated rage. To Schreiber, it’s too small and high to even register in his hearing. The stoatweasel makes a sudden dash for his shoes, as though she’s going to run up his trouser leg and along his sleeve and snatch that device from Lulu’s triumphant grasp. She looks mad enough to do it, and for a weird moment Skotch is almost wishing she would. To see Rule One finally brought down. To have Gehirner teeth in human flesh. To break something huge, just to see what might happen. But then raccoons always did have some capricious geneware.
She doesn’t quite have it in her, the great hunter, the warrior elite. Faced with the gods, she won’t be bringing Götterdämmerung any time soon. Szerky’s window for action closes and she’s left frustrated, and furious, and behind.
Skotch finds that there’s a spiker at his feet, and he picks it up. Maybe lost by a stricken gangster, or some squirrel, or any of the combatants, but it’s in his hands now, and loaded. Szerky’s right there. And the arc of Schreiber’s vision has passed away from him as the man turns ponderously to go. Leaving them all in the dark of human ignorance, where murderous deeds might be done.
She killed Springer. She killed Fitch. She killed Sly, and then Maria, though the last was at least in open fight if that makes any difference at all. If there’s any Little Helper in Neuwien right now who needs a little help to cross the life-death boundary, it’s surely Szerky. The killer, the predator, the Country Club assassin.
She looks at him, sees the weapon. He expects a sudden explosion of violence or escape, but she’s quite still. All that coiling wrath clenched in the vise of the moment, waiting. A bitter eye, knowing that either he presses the trigger or she goes back to the farms to report failure. And probably the first is the kinder fate, from her point of view.
He’s aware of Meece—still there, after all, even though his work has gone. Meece, the old mouse, not so many months left in him. Meece, whom all the world wanted to extinguish or possess just a moment ago, and who is now just the emptied chrysalis, his subversive moth flown. If Meece told him to shoot, maybe he’d shoot. The mouse just looks worn out, though. Victorious but not celebrating. A prey animal whose long run has finally come to an end.
“Just go,” Skotch tells Szerky.
“Go?” she hisses. “Do you have any idea what they will do to me, if I go back a failure?”
Skotch makes a cavalier gesture with the spiker, to indicate it’s more a her problem than a him problem. The mistake there is that it involves taking his aim off her, and she’s quick enough that he can’t get the weapon back in line before her teeth meet in his throat.
They don’t, although they actually catch some of his fur between them as they snap abruptly shut. Because Tybelle is that quick, and bears grudges that deeply. And doesn’t really care about fair fights as much as just being the animal still breathing after the blood’s shed. Skotch sees the grey blur of her, and Szerky is ripped out of his sight. When he works out where she’s gone, Tybelle is batting the long, loose body back and forth on the shore, three pats that look playful and break bones. Then the cat lunges, and the high sound of a broken stoat neck comes to Skotch clearly.
Just as well, he decides. He doesn’t know what the mausgelt is for a stoat, but probably he couldn’t afford it.
Later, Skotch sits with Fischer and Nimoy and the gangster, Loui, at the edge of the island. Not exactly looking out at the sunset reflected in the waters, given their underground location, but the scene has that kind of a feel to it. Reflective. Melancholic. Across the Chapel, the crows are at work. The guild from the Separation Plant, collecting the fallen like black-winged Valkyries. Save that all the slain are chosen, and what they’re chosen for is a return to the circle of life. Not a great mead hall, but feasting is involved. Going back into the food chain, because the green cities are nothing if not big on recycling. Unless the Separatist sect is correct, and there’s some elusive part of the Gehirner that doesn’t just get ground up and reconstituted into SLG bars. Skotch found the whole proposition profoundly unconvincing when he was in actual danger of being fed into those jaws. Now he’s got time to be reflective, he decides it’s quite an attractive fancy. The idea that some Essence of Skotch might survive his demise, if he can think his way into disentangling it from his mortal existence and remains.
We try to find ways to become more than they made us, he considers. And that’s the Separatist way, on a mystical plane. It’s the Jeffist way, in a more pragmatic sense. The idea that it’s a positive duty of every Gehirner to better their lot. Individually, as most Jeffists see it, as Mother Murnau and Loui would claim. Communally, as the Maulers see it, or the schismatic Jeffists of Ratlabs. And Meece is going to end up with them, Skotch reckons. All the different paws scrabbling about to get hold of him, and most likely Nimoy will win the prize. Because Meece has done in practice what Nimoy devoutly believes in theory. He’s made a discovery that will make every animal’s life better.
Nimoy’s confirmed that Lulu has done what she needs. Meece’s research is out there now. The pigeon has used Schreiber’s own devices—human ones, impeccably connected without limit—to post it all up on several different sites, many of which are accessible to Ratlabs, to the Rattenkönige, to the anarchists even. All those groups with shadowy connections that touch the human world. And yes, it will need a bit of a chemistry set to start producing the improved long-life Plangent, but not such a challenge that any halfway organised collective won’t be able to do it. What was the great limiter for Gehirner lives will become common as clean water.
He wonders if the parrots will suddenly all start taking advantage of it, or whether they will continue their long lives of phasing in and out of intellect, for the mystical insights it brings. Madparrot Alley becoming sane would change the landscape a great deal. Weirdly, he feels he’ll miss the chaos of it, if it goes.
The newt with the eyepatch left a while ago with its remaining cohorts, after a few words with Nimoy. The Baron of Waste Sector Three will, Skotch judges, be pleased with the result. He has a sense of a shadowy conclave that’s going to be guiding Gehirner Neuwien through the changes the near future will bring. The Baron, Nimoy, maybe Mother Murnau. Those who speak for the lowly, pushing back against the armies and the Country Clubs and the most exploitative of the guilds. Raising the bar on a minimum standard of Gehirner life. Smuggling Plangent—and the means of its manufacture—out to the Farm Projects. Skotch has a feeling that the iron hold of the Country Clubs is going to start rusting pretty soon.
“I mean, going to be a laugh if it all comes down,” Loui says philosophically.
