Chapter 7 #2
“We know the old shell-head at the Uzcogeb?ude put you on his trail,” Mother Murnau says. “We know you caught up with him at Franz-Ferdinand’s, Herr Washbear.”
“You got it all then.” Skotch might hate that particular piece of slang for his Strain, maybe even more than “bandit,” but right now he swallows it right down.
“Herr Washbear, you’re known. Sometimes, these things you do to make a living, they are an irritation, like a flea,” Murnau tells him.
“Sometimes, they are like scratching the flea. Some action of yours removes some little parasite trying to get its beak into us. And so we tell ourselves, that Washbear, Skotch, he’s all right.
No need to have a word with him. Just let him get on with his life. ”
“That’s mighty good of you,” says Skotch, although he can feel the other conversational shoe about to stomp on his tail.
“Where’s the mouse, Herr Washbear?” Mother Murnau says again. “Because, as you can see, now you’re here and we’re having words.”
And Skotch has some obvious options here: outright denials, evasions, spilling his guts—figuratively, he hopes.
Instead, some part of the mess of his geneware decides turning the questioning tables is the best gambit.
“What’s this mouse to you, Mother?” And, because him piping up like that is unexpected enough that Eddi doesn’t go for him with the knife, “What’s this mouse to everyone?
” The unspoken question: Is Herr Doctor actually the monster?
“Why’s he so important?” Because the Rattenkonige are dirty with all kinds of crime but he’d have thought they’d stay clean of the sort of filth Meece might be cooking up.
Tell me it’s just drugs or some damn thing. Please.
“Eddi,” Mother Murnau says, after a reflective pause. “Herr Washbear has a lot of fingers. So many. I think they must be distracting him. Maybe one less would help him focus.”
Eddi moves in, and so do his two friends and about half a dozen other rats who’ve just slithered into the barrel.
Enough to overcome one raccoon. Skotch tries to back off but there aren’t many places to back off into when you’re in a barrel.
Then Lulu has strutted between him and the rats. Head ducking forwards and back.
“You can’t!” the pigeon announces. “I won’t let you treat Skotch like that. He’s my friend.”
It’s news to Skotch, honestly. He isn’t really sure what Lulu is, but pain in his raccoon ass is probably closer to the mark. Here she is, though, apparently in the belief she can defend him.
“Eddi, what is this?” Mother Murnau asks, sounding weirdly fascinated. “Is it chicken we’re having, for dinner? Shouldn’t you have plucked it already?”
“Mother.” Eddi hunches, twists, then actually rolls over, exposing his belly to Murnau as though she might jump down from that seat and put her steel teeth into him. “Mother,” Eddi says from that submissive posture, “she’s the pigeon. The pigeon. The one who works with the Schreiber.”
Murnau’s glass eyes peer at Lulu, at the ring on her proudly presented foot. “Is that so.”
“That is so, thank you very much,” Lulu confirms. “And I would love to talk to you, about whatever you want. This is such an opportunity for me, and you must have such incredible stories to tell. But you can’t hurt Skotch.
He’s just a raccoon. He’s doing his best.” And honestly Skotch would rather go back to the Washbear stuff because this is embarrassing, has the rat thugs snickering into their whiskers.
Patronised by the liberal pigeon literati.
“And what,” says Murnau, “do you propose to do, should I decide that I just have to hurt Herr Washbear, regrettable as that might be?” She speaks very pleasantly, hunched forwards, watching Lulu strut like the pigeon’s some precocious rat two-week-old who’s learned a trick.
“Well I’d have to stop you,” Lulu says earnestly. Another two steps of strut, that ring presented very prominently. Her guarantee of safe conduct.
“What’s the mausgelt on a pigeon, Eddi?” Murnau asks softly.
“But Mother,” Eddi manages, half-twisted up from his prone position, caught between desperate options.
“I asked you a question, Eddi.” Her voice still smooth as poison.
“Seven maus, Mother,” the rat bravo gets out, “but Mother—”
“But she’s the famous pigeon,” Murnau agrees.
“She’s the Schreiber’s pigeon. Oh my, whatever will we do?
Worth more than all our pelts together if we so much as ruffle a single one of her feathers, yes.
My oh my, what an impasse we are in. What a fool I was to think I could pit my little might against such a luminary of the city. ”
Honestly, Tiersprech wasn’t ever really designed for that level of sarcasm—one more feature the genetic engineers didn’t think their diminutive creations would have any use for. Murnau manages magnificently, however.
“Loui,” she tells one of the other rats. “Go ring the bell, will you?”
The rats all go still. Skotch, by dint of base animal instinct, goes still too. Lulu keeps strutting, because she doesn’t do well with sarcasm. Maybe pigeons don’t use it.
Loui the rat skulks out, plainly not happy to be the one tasked with ringing the bell, whatever the hell that signifies. Mother Murnau sighs, scratches at her belly, shakes her head at the foolishness of the world.
“I do not hold,” she says, “with all this trafficking across the boundaries of Rule One.” As the human-made medical machinery beyond the barrel labours to prolong her unnaturally protracted life.
“When we meddle with that border, we take pains to be circumspect, you understand? We do not just stride around telling everyone that we’re working directly for some human, some individual human, and expect that to make us invulnerable. ”
Distantly a bell rings, high and tinny. Skotch’s ears twitch, and so do those of every rat present save Murnau herself.
“Herr Schreiber places a great deal of value on my services,” Lulu says proudly.
“I’m very important to him. If any Gehirner laid a foot on me, it wouldn’t be a matter of mausgelt.
” She looks around, judges herself in control of the situation.
“But Mother, it doesn’t have to be like this.
I’m a great admirer of yours. It’s an honour to be in your presence.
I’m sure that you and Skotch and I can just sit down and be friends and talk. Without anyone needing to lose—”
That’s when it happens, under cover of her babble.
A flash of grey, a suggestion of motion simultaneously big and swift.
Lulu’s chatter ends in a hoo! Just an astonished bird noise.
Skotch is just starting to react. The sense of it, the experience of it, seems to come to him not through eyes or nose or the bristle of his fur but some part of his brain that predates the bioengineering.
Raccoons aren’t pure prey. They hang about the waist of the food chain.
But being small in a world with wolves and dogs and bears has given him a slice of it, and that’s what’s screaming at him now.
Lulu shudders. Those feathers—a moment ago a serious diplomatic incident to even ruffle—are all awry, several scattered about the floor of the barrel.
A single grey paw keeps her pinned. Skotch sees the claws arching from it, extended just enough to prick at her breast. Her eyes are wide.
For a moment he thinks she’s died, just the shock of it, but some Strains have this reaction to stress.
They overload. They play dead. Not the cunning stratagem of a clever beast, but a blankness rising up from the deep wells of their being to overwhelm every other instinct.
Be still. Be dead. Live ones are more fun for them. Maybe they’ll get bored.
A cat. A lean grey cat, here in the rat’s nest. Cocking her head at Mother Murnau—the ancient rodent surely just a chewy mouthful. Not a hungry look, though. A querying one.
“Do I kill her now, or what?” the cat drawls.
A slight slur to the words, but words, still.
No trained animal. Not a Gehirner, either.
There are no Gehirner cats because Gehirner are service animals, the busy workers of the green city’s infrastructure.
Who ever heard of a cat doing an honest day’s work?
Skotch hears the faintest of sounds come from Lulu, just a panicky little judder from inside her ribs.
The cat’s head shifts to peer down at her, and the tiny bell on her collar tinkles merrily.
Didn’t make a sound as the monster approached.
Didn’t rattle the slightest warning when she pounced.
But she can make it jingle when she wants, knows exactly how to move.
“Tybelle, my dear,” says Murnau, and Skotch can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.
The rat matriarch, so calm in claw-swipe range of the cat.
And maybe she’s not really that calm. Maybe amongst the anxious rat-stink rising from Eddi and Loui and the rest there’s a tiny streak of Murnau’s own fear.
But she didn’t get to sit in the tin cup by not facing her fears, and that’s why her gang has a cat on the payroll.
And not just some ragged stray that would be fair game for every gang of Gehirner vigilantes.
Tybelle has a collar. A human owns her. The worst thing.
Engineered cats were a fad. Some of those who worked on the Little Helpers were cat people.
As in people who liked cats, not cats that thought like people, though the one led to the other.
Engineered cats are something of an amateur effort.
They make very challenging pets because you can push a lot of boundaries with an enhanced brain and thumbs.
Some studies claim some sort of hyper-toxoplasmosis was behind the engineering venture, but since nobody’s really established that even the regular kind has any effect on humans that’s probably just fantasist-talk.