Page 56 of Green City Wars

“Sure there was a fight,” he says. “Maybe even still is. Not one that I had much part in. Two folk like that get into a tussle, you just leave ’em to it, I say. As to the mouse, though…”

Apparently Herr Doktor Meece has a sense of drama, because that’s when he pulls back the cultist hood that was draped over his snout. And of course Lulu never really saw him before, or not to recognise, so there’s a moment of uncertainty when the Maulers are congratulating him on his continued existence, and she’s just bobbing her head in puzzlement. Then she says, “Wait, that’s him?” and Skotch gets to make the introductions. “Doc Meece, this here is Lulu. She’s a … recorder of things.”

Meece eyes the pigeon. “Recording,” he says, “is what is required.”

“Yes!” Lulu’s eyes glow with enthusiasm. “Tell me your story, Doctor Meece! Tell me everything, what all this is about.”

“No,” he says primly. “That is not what is meant. I require a device, a facility, on which to complete my work. I require a channel, by which to transmit it.”

“Sure, sure,” Skotch says. “I mean, let’s fend off two whole armies first. I mean, priorities, Doc.”

But Meece understands priorities better than he does. “Now,” he says. “Because there are many soldiers out there, and soon they will come over here. We will not survive this. But my research can survive. I have completed the work. I must record it.”

“Completed the…” Skotch didn’t remember seeing the interior of Ikelos’ shell scrawled with equations or anything. It’s in Meece’s head, he realises. The entire complex madness of it, contained in that one mouse’s little knot of grey matter. A genius, like Nimoy said. A fluke where the enhanced learning ability that the Gehirner were engineered for had just never stopped. For a moment the sheer concept makes him feel weak, at how much brain this one mouse has stuffed into his little bullet skull.

“I had something…” He’d had those scraps of notes he retrieved from Franz-Ferdinand’s, the first brief time the pair of them met. The notes he copied for Sly, that got the fox killed purely because of what he might or might not have worked out.

No, Skotch remembers the desperate note his friend sent, to come and talk. Sure Sly had worked it out, even just from those scraps. Skotch feels a stab of grief and guilt at the thought.

And even those scraps he lost, he realises. Taken from him by the Grays, or was it the Reds, or the crows at the Separation Plant, or someone. He’s lost track of just who got what off him, in his recent rough ride through the city.

“Yes, yes, recording.” A new rat is pushing into the conversation. Skotch glances, double-takes, recoils. It’s not one of the Maulers, but a neat, somewhat plump rat in overalls, silver-furred, and the top of its head just a curved metal plate extending down to a glass lens of an eye. In its hands it has a device that’s cumbersome for a rat, enormous for a mouse; manageable for Skotch, tiny for a human. Hard to standardise your tech given the spread of species in the Gehirner project.

“Nimoy,” he names the unwelcome apparition. And there are a dozen other rats backing her up, laden down with tools and bandoliers and kit. Some of them are assembling things from parts even now, working with a hyperfocused absorption that’s either the good rat drugs or maybe just a genetic quirk of Ratlabs heredity. A rodent neurodiversity they’ve made work for them.

“I, yes, indeed, myself,” Nimoy confirms, words like a machine gun. “Doctor, an honour, yes, your acquaintance, finally, we make it, yesno?”

Skotch looks across the lumpy fallen masonry that makes up the central island. Big enough for Saint Frances to set up shop on, when she was actually present. Now she’s gone, a lot of open space, a lot of topography.

He looks over the Gehirner there present. A dozen Maulers, decently armed. Around the same number of Ratlabs technicians, not conventionally beweaponed and what they’re setting up could be a death ray or a fancy coffee percolator as far as Skotch knows. There are some other rats there too, who look like they’re out of Murnau’s stable of bruisers, or the property of some other Rattenkönig. Maybe two dozen all told, though they’re wiser to the environment so aren’t just standing out in the open to be counted. Plus half a dozen Kit Kat Cultists whom he doesn’t reckon are going to weigh in much when it comes down to the fight. Perhaps a dozen other miscellaneous Gehirner who waded out to the centre, got some sense of what’s about to go down, and didn’t wade straight back. Plus Meece, plus Lulu, plus him.

“Get him down low,” he tells Nimoy. “He’s going to be writing his memoirs, maybe he does it some place he’s not in line of sight of a gun?”

“Yes, indeed, ballistics, angles of fire, perspicacious, yes,” the chrome-pated rat jabbers, and they get Meece in a hollow with the device propped up in front of him. There’s a touch screen to it, Skotch sees, and the mouse is already starting to draw out strings of chemical equations and molecular diagrams, tiny hands working with a desperate frenzy as all that pent-up knowledge rises to the surface.

There is a definite stirring amongst the two camps of squirrels, but they’re still waiting. Small mercies, Skotch thinks, but he has a real sense of a rubber band under tension, about to snap at any given moment even as it pulls tauter and tauter.

“So, Herr Bandit finally does the right thing.” Fischer has come up under his elbow, resting the barrel of his popgun on a shelf of stone ahead of him, squinting out across the water at the soldiers.

“So someone finally told me what the hell it was Meece actually had. Amazing what can happen, when people actually start being straight with one another,” Skotch points out. “Just think how much of a mess we could have dodged if someone had actually thought of that before.”

“Herr Bandit thinks so?” the frog asks. His bulbous gaze doubts. “And yet we are all here because those who did know were very quick to decide they wanted Herr Doktor dead. And the more who knew, the more there were who decided that dead was best, where Herr Doktor’s continued health was concerned. Do you blame Herr Doktor for not sharing his purpose with Herr Bandit? Do you blame us?”

Skotch thinks about how Benson’s goals changed, from live mouse to dead mouse, and knew it was because the old turtle must have discovered the full truth about why the farms were so keen to hunt Meece down. He grunts, conceding the point.

“No, what changed was that Herr Bandit earned Herr Doktor’s trust,” Fischer says. “Herr Bandit kept him safe, underwent trials. Did not reveal his whereabouts. Herr Fischer is glad that Herr Bandit has come down on the side of the angels.”

“I don’t get it, though,” Skotch admits. “I mean, the farms, they’re all crazy there. But wanting to murder the little squeaker…”

“Control, yesno?” Nimoy puts in. The wan light falling into the Chapel from above gleams on her skullplate. “Since he was young, we hear. Of Meece, in the farms. At first, their pride. The smart mouse. Improvements and efficiencies. Yields up, costs down. When he is young. Does what they want, yes.” Meaning, by Skotch’s calculations, last year. When Meece, now old, was young. Burning twice as brightly, because he was only ever going to get half as long. “In those days, with Ratlabs, much sharing. Correspondence. The science, yes. What they had, then, yes, they did not know. Did not know to stop him sharing with us, yes. The mouse-hole always bigger than the trap was good, yesno?” And even though rats lived longer, it would still have been a good chunk of Nimoy’s lifespan ago, as well. Perhaps back when she’d still had the eye and the cranium she’d been born with. That dizzy sense of differential time between Strains. And not as though Skotch had that many years in him, either. He wondered what the world must look like to the truly long-lived. To parrots, to turtles, to humans.

“Later, less word from him, yes, indeed,” Nimoy says. She’s setting up something that looks like a little meteorological station, spinning balls and vanes and things, and maybe a satellite dish. It makes Skotch’s fur prickle with unease. “But the word, sneaking out to us, such thoughts, yes! Such ideas. Questions. Unhappiness. Why this, why that? Why our lives, so short, our lot, so mean, yesno? What is it, keeping us down. To follow the Divine Jeff, in the farms, is not allowed. But from us he has heard, the creed, the hope. To find a way, to exceed limitations, to achieve! And he achieves. Beyond us, Meece is. The greatest mind. To us, he is brought. By you. Our thanks, yes. A great thing has been done, by you.”

Skotch pauses to disentangle that big old heap of words. It’s not like Nimoy can’t speak like a civilized Gehirner, more that her words are constantly being dragged along behind her racing thoughts like cans on a string. In the gap, Lulu shoves some words of her own.

“So someone tell me what’s so great that this mouse has done!” she demands plaintively. “Only I see a lot of fuss and just, what, he’s writing his life story. He’s got an exposé about life in the Farm Projects?”

“Oh, I could,” comes Meece’s thin voice. “You don’t know, here in the city. You don’t know how it is for us, in the farms. Under the whips of the stoats, slaves in all but name. And that is an injustice that must be visited, but it is not the prime injustice. That is what I am rectifying. That is the knowledge that must be set out and disseminated.”