Page 13 of Green City Wars
So Springer’s dead, and it leaves a scar in his mind.
He dropped in on Sly before dragging his feet all the way home. The fox had a dog with a camera collar-tag look over the little scraps of filmy he got from the lab—Meece’s lab, where who knows what was being done. Sly will put out some feelers, do some analysis, get back to him. And Skotch could just have gone straight home and then sent some images via Ikarios’ illicit terminal, but he has a bad feeling about those notes. He doesn’t know chemistry—never worked a job where it was part of the package—but he knows a little chemical notation from Gehirner basic ed, and Meece was working up some powerful-looking molecules if he’s any judge. You start sending the formula for a water-soluble neurotoxin over the public network, some system’s going to clock it. So it’s all on the hush-hush, just between him and Sly, the fox that Skotch hopes he can trust—a sentiment that so seldom works out well in folk tale and story.
In his nook he considers, and reckons he’s now the proud owner of more questions than before he set off into Graycoat territory, and the answer drawer is just as empty as before. Benson wants the mouse alive for Uzco. Szerky wants the mouse dead for the Country Clubs. That alone is quite enough of a tangle, except that either Meece, in his brief time in the city, has made some wild allies, or his fame has spread through other channels. Because those beasties with the red neckers are full-on outsiders. A group—a movement—Skotch has never had an in with, because they are very dangerous animals indeed. Animals who don’t necessarily care about Rule One. Full-on anarchists looking to bring the system down by dynamiting the bottom floor and seeing how everything else thinks it’s going to stay up after that.
Or maybe not quite that. That’s how they talk, sure, but thus far they’ve not actually, say, poisoned a high-profile human or set an actual bomb somewhere. Just some Gehirner graffiti in human areas that probably looks like spilled paint to human eyes, just some light industrial espionage, and beyond that mostly infighting or squabbling with other animal factions. But dangerous, because they claim not to be bound by the usual cast-iron lines other Gehirner won’t cross. And Skotch has always reckoned they’re full of BS when it comes down to action. But right now they’ve got Meece and maybe Meece has some really nasty little piece of chemistry homework they can help him finish. Maybe the Maulers are about to up their game.
Maulers is what they call themselves, those red-neckerchief movement types. On account, Skotch suspects, of “rednecks” sending the wrong message. And probably the name is meant to be clever, but as most Gehirner never heard of Chairman Mao the name is wasted. It’s the maw, though, the teeth and tongue, the maul in ’Sprech. Along with the hands, it’s the part of the beast where the human is most obviously imposed. The symbol of the halfway thing they’ve been made into.
Skotch has a lot of contacts. He’s a personable raccoon. Give him a district of Neuwien, a service sector, a cult or social club or closed shop society, he’ll know someone who knows someone who can get him an interview. It’s that kind of sociability hack that led him to take up this freelance investigative schtick in the first place. Not even something raccoons have, because in nature his old kin are feisty and territorial same as most animals. Maybe some capybara genestock in him. He’s heard there’s a Strain from Peru that’s so chill they give them to hostage negotiators as icebreakers.
Now’s the moment he goes back to Uzco, basically. Now’s the point where he holds up his little raccoon hands and tells Benson, Sorry, chief, he got away. Takes the down payment, waives the rest. That would be the sensible thing to do. Given Springer and Szerky and all the other complications this job has already thrown up.
One thing most Gehirner Strains are engineered for, though, is a certain task-centred sense of duty. An incomplete job is like a splinter in the mind. Part of the package that has them actually doing the work they’re designed for. And this transfers even to self-determined tasks, as Skotch well knows. A lot of Strains, a lot of individuals, they have an almost ADHD facility for being unable to hold focus on anything except for the task right in front of them, which they tunnel obsessively into until they’re faint because they forgot to eat. Pigeons, especially, and a lot of the other bird Strains, but Skotch has a touch of it.
More than that, though, the Gehirner engineering gives animals a more human sense of time. Meaning they can regret the past and fear the future, two facilities that Skotch feels aren’t exactly great quality of life upgrades from his base species’ state of natural innocence. Skotch has a bad feeling about the future that is inextricably bound up with Doctor Meece being out there in the city, especially in the hands of dangerous anarchists. Maulers who were all talk yesterday, but now might have some trousers to back it up. And as for reporting to Uzco anyway, just as a matter of being a conscientious contractor, Skotch doesn’t really want to hand his former employers anything until he has a better handle on just what the hell is actually going on. Because he trusts Benson as far as he could throw the old hundredweight of turtle, plus tank.
The other reason he doesn’t just walk away, of course, is that if Meece is cooking up something nasty, then it could end up being Skotch’s problem whether he sticks with the job or not. As well as a problem for just about everyone he knows and maybe the entire city.
All of which means he’s going to have to go outside his comfort zone.
It’s not like he can go tip Ikelos’ hardware a button and open a channel to the anarchistas. If it were that simple then they’d be well on their way to being just regular archistas and a functioning part of society. It’s also not like he can just shimmy up to their regular haunts and hand over a business card. Best scuttlebutt has them based out of Madparrot Alley and that’s a chaotic and dangerous district for a stray and friendless Gehirner to find himself in.
But he’s who he is, and that means even if he doesn’t have a chain of connections he can climb up, he knows where to go to get one forged.
The city is short of proper neutral areas, safe zones where you leave your allegiance at the door, and which the armies have, to date, respected even at times of open war like now. Where a freelancer or Guild-Gehirner or even a mad anarchist can show their snout and not have the end of it bitten off. Hard to enforce that level of safe passage and equity. Who has that kind of respect? Who is there, that some faction or group won’t try to knock off their pedestal?
It’s time for Skotch to pay a visit to a saint. A singular answer to a question that very seldom even needs asking: What happens if a human doesn’t respect Rule One?
She’s not always there, of course, and when she’s not there the place isn’t safe in the same way. When Skotch makes his way down to Saint Frances’ Chapel, however, she’s at her usual post, and that means sanctuary is in session.
This space is low in the city, root level and then some. Not somewhere humans go, except this human does a lot of things most humans don’t. It’s one of the unintended spaces. Water drains in, and drains out slower unless the levels rise past the ring of outlet grates that generations of Gehirner averse to drowning have installed of their own notion. It’s a bit like living inside a fountain, Skotch thinks. Because that kind of associative imagery is also something that the engineering of his brain has made room for. It’s a big space, too. A good eight metres across at least, and green. Not green in the planned way the city is, but green where nature has colonised. There’s moss, and sprays of ferns that have caught some errant geneware and now throw up new growth year-round in the Chapel’s constant warmth. There are vines and creepers climbing the walls, odd species left over from the city’s engineering, not found flourishing in the wild beyond these walls. Strange flowers bloom here that aren’t seen anywhere else in the world: the result of forbidden unions between the engineered and the natural taking place outside the purview of science.
The place is busy. Probably over seventy Gehirner, by Skotch’s quick count. Some relaxing in the pools, some gathered on the higher ground—discarded cob rubble and organocrete from the early stages of the city’s founding, left over in this place beyond the notice of the architects and construction crews, or thrown down here by some irresponsible workers. Now it’s all bonded together, levelled off. A series of irregular little plazas and patios for the Gehirner to sit out at, talk, drink, trade. Beast business outside the regular services of the guilds. Anyone welcome, leave your grudges at the gate. Not to make trouble, that is the law—the one law of Saint Frances’ Chapel.
Saint Frances herself is at her accustomed place. She has other business sometimes. She sleeps up above in the human city, and sometimes her order calls her to account. She is, if not an actual saint, a genuine honest-to-God nun. Skotch understands what that is because the Gehirner have religion like they’ve got all sorts of other snips and snaps of human ideas, infesting their engineered brains like fleas. From speaking with Frances, he has the vague idea that her order isn’t actually delighted with her self-determined mission to the Gehirner. It’s not as if human churches are looking for converts from the beasts of the field, after all. That this one errant sister has decided it’s her God-given calling to provide for the Gehirner is, he suspects, a bit of an embarrassment for her superiors. But also, it was on the human news. Quite against her wishes, Saint Frances was a bit of a celebrity for a while. It would have been bad publicity for her order to rap her knuckles over it, so they’ve done their best to ignore her instead. Hence she keeps coming down to this sump that the Gehirner call her Chapel. She brings a basket of food—not the SLG ration bars but human food: bread, vegetables from her windowbox garden, soy protein, all the good stuff. The most desperate and friendless of animals, cut off from guilds and kin, can get a simple meal at Saint Frances’ kitchen. Not quite enough to keep body and soul together, of course. You need Plangent for that. But it’s hard to score some of the good stuff on an empty belly.
Saint Frances does not dress like a nun, who Skotch understands normally cosplay as penguins for some reason. She’s down here in sensible boots and hard-wearing denim dungarees, a long faleather coat and a broad-brimmed hat to ward off the constant drip-drip-drip of water. Rather than wading up to his hackles, Skotch takes a water-taxi, a raft poled by a rat gondolier, across the flooded central space of the Chapel. Water mists about him, beads on his fur, drops on his head and makes him shiver. The rat, wearing a poncho made from a scrap of tarpaulin, grins at him.
“Bring your umbrella next time, Herr Washbear,” he suggests with a flash of incisors. Skotch, who never liked that particular slang for his Strain, ignores him.
Saint Frances is dispensing. Food, yes, but she’s also just about the only pharmacist a lone Gehirner can access. There are pills and ampoules in her basket, sourced from charitable veterinarians, and she has a little electronic weighing scale and a pestle. Chopping up tablets into powder like she’s a dealer for the whole animal kingdom. Razor-blading the dust into little lines and decanting it into bottle-top cups. Doing her best with what Skotch suspects is a very limited medical knowledge given the range of species she’s trying to tend to. You have to be somewhat desperate to throw yourself on the mercy of the dispensary of Saint Frances, but there’s a lot of desperation about.
He waits his turn, passes the time in talk. Hears how it shook out at Franz-Ferdinand’s after he left, which is to say bloodily for all parties but the Grays held and the Reds backed off. Probably not the last clash over that remunerative turf, is the word. But everything was cleaned up before the human breakfast shift arrived, and nobody put a little clawed toe over the line of Rule One. Doesn’t matter how many squirrels got offed overnight so long as there’s not a speck of rodent blood on the kitchen floor come morning.
He drops a few questions about his projected destination. How are the lords of Madparrot Alley these days? Upswing or downswing? Nobody has a clear answer for him, just about the least helpful situation. It’s in flux. But then it’s always in flux, down Madparrot Alley ways.
Then the Saint has a moment to spare him, before the next of the genuinely needy.
She speaks, but it’s the real Austrian Deutsch, not Tiersprech, and spoken softly because regular human voices are over-loud to Gehirner ears. From beside the basket, a wavering artificial voice translates the words into passable ’Sprech. And it’s not as though that’s a standard piece of kit, because the whole point of having the Little Helpers is that you don’t need to remember you have them. But the engineers and developers responsible for them needed tools for when they were testing the capabilities of their creations, and somehow Saint Frances was able to secure a prototype. When Skotch speaks back to her—or mostly to the actual device—it feeds a crooked translation into her ear. And ’Sprech is a crunched and simplified Germanic language, so most of the time they can understand one another through the magic of technology.
“This penitent who comes before me,” she says, “I recognise as Skotch.” Or that’s what comes out of the machine. Her voice rumbles overhead like a distant thunderstorm. Quiet, because she’s being quiet, but Skotch can feel the vibration of it, the potential for volume. She’s huge. You forget how big humans are, when you’re looking down on them eating their fancy food at the tables in Franz-Ferdinand’s or drinking cognac in Casa de Alphonse. If Skotch concentrates really hard and has had a recent hit of Plangent, he can just about follow the regular Deutsch. What she’s actually said is, “Es ist Skotch, nicht wahr?”—It’s Skotch, isn’t it?—but whoever did the gubbins of her translator had an ear for ritual. It adds to the untouchability of her, the weight of sanctuary that keeps everyone from one another’s throats.
Skotch has hopped up on her workbench, like most of her petitioners do, and she, seated, towers over him. Looks down with a face as big as the whole of him. Saint Frances, Our Lady of Breaching Rule One.
She is a holy terror, in a way. She Is Not Supposed to Be Here. She is intruding into a stratum of the city that is supposed to explicitly exclude humans. And it’s not like she couldn’t be in danger, theoretically. Those popguns the armies make could put out a human eye. A good set of teeth could bite the hand that feeds. One of the big, discontinued carnivore Strains, a fox or a badger say, could do a lot of damage. But that would be breaking Rule One from their side. A dead human on their patch would be the end of the world for a great deal of what the Gehirner have going on. Even the armies, greedy for territory, understand that. Even the Rattenkönige.
Even anarchistas like the Maulers. Saint Frances is often their last resort, when they’re starving or sick or they get injured after some anti-establishment prank of theirs backfires. Hypocritical of them, to keep a human in their back pocket? Well, then let nobody tell you anarchists can’t be hypocrites.
