Chapter 8 #2
Of course Maria wants to know what he’s about, the next morning.
Simultaneously she wants to stay in the background in case he’s being watched.
Or maybe she fondly thinks she’s so inherently stealthy that he’ll forget that his pelt now comes with an extra tail.
The fork of that particular dilemma keeps her out of Skotch’s hair until he’s almost at the Chapel, way across town.
He rides most of the way there. The walk to where Saint Frances hands out the benedictions cuts through the turfs of a dozen different guilds and a hundred tiny parasite polities.
Rattenkonig gangs, Jeffist sects, Separatist churches, and just random packs of thrown-together Gehirner.
His ride pierces the thorny political landscape: an automated mini-train shuttling human-required goods around, part of a great silver spiderweb buried beneath Neuwien.
Engines in darkness, powered by photoelectricity from the great green above.
Not intended for Gehirner use, but the animals figured it out as an energy efficient way to cross the distances within the city.
Official and unofficial business mean a lot of animals have a need to get from outskirts to civic centre and back, and so the little goods wagons have become the standard safe way for just about any beast to take the weight from their four feet.
Maria must read in his stance that he’s about to hit his stop, because she scrabbles over the cardboard of the packing crates to put her snaggle teeth in Skotch’s face.
“I get it,” he says, waving her breath away. “You’re watching. Benson’s faithful sentinel, vigilant until death, sure.”
“I haven’t forgotten Fitch,” she tells him.
“Again with this?” Wondering if he can get her in some conversational bind that will see him continuing on foot and her still trying to think up an argument on the train. It seems unlikely. “You want to get your gelt out of that business, you’re watching the wrong animal.”
“You’re deep in it,” she snarls at him. “I keep watching you, you’ll take me right to them.
Or else they get you and I tell Benson he’s got a second dead body on his hands.
” She’s vibrating with rage, not rage at him especially but there’s nobody else here.
Like raccoons, possums aren’t the most stable Strain.
A long way removed from the rest of the mammal stock, so a lot of the tweaks don’t quite take properly.
Skotch heard they update possum-ware on a weekly basis and it still doesn’t fix the bugs.
“Leave it,” he tells her. “I don’t want some jumpy poucher going rabid just when I’m doing something delicate.” Like talking to jumpy anarchists.
Her mean button eyes don’t let up on him. When he gets off the train at Chapeltown station, she’s his shadow again. Not close enough to trouble the corner of his vision, but the whiff of angry possum most definitely in the back of his nose.
The Saint is in her accustomed place in the centre of the sump, a line of ragged petitioners come to tweak the nose of Rule One by begging human help, save that Frances has recused herself from her position of privilege.
One of these days, Skotch thinks morosely, some mad animal will go for her.
Something big and wild with corrupted geneware will decide that she really isn’t categorised as human, and that makes her fair game.
Because, sure, everyone loves Saint Frances the open-handed, but there’s always someone, right?
And yet it hasn’t happened, and he’s seen her put a hand on a wounded, fight-crazy badger and calm him somehow.
Like her own belief in her sanctity is a kind of magic.
Sanctity as far as the animal kingdom goes, anyway.
Skotch hears her relations with her own sororal organisation lacks the same protections.
He does not go take his place in the queue.
He does not go sit somewhere obvious and wait for the Maulers to pay a visit.
Instead, he plays a weird little game, crossing from rubble island to rubble island and back, making the rounds.
He greets individuals and groups, where there’s a name or a scent he knows.
He spreads old news around and scrapes up some new.
He stays visible and in motion. And, he suspects, eyes follow him and, because he keeps going back and forth, they note he’s being followed.
Skotch tenders his compliments to the Maulers and will do them the honour of not bringing this damn possum to their doorstep. If only he can find a way to shake her.
And then he becomes at least nine times as conspicuous because Lulu descends on him in a flurry of words and feathers, just about proclaiming to the whole of creation that he’s there. He can almost hear Maria laughing at him.
“Skotch! You’re here! You have to tell me what’s happening!”
“I don’t.”
“You promised me an interview!”
“I didn’t.”
“Not now. After.” Apparently her gratitude for saving her from the cat hasn’t survived the night, and now he’s the one being called on to do the favours.
Except, if it’s favours …
Skotch makes a big show of being hounded by the pigeon.
The famous pigeon. Famously annoying. Everyone knows it, Maria included.
Lulu is a law unto herself, literally. A personality recognised—and often avoided—across the city.
The possum is probably snickering through her jagged teeth at her old pal Skotch getting mobbed like this.
He plays up to the impression. Probably half the Gehirner at the Chapel are enjoying a laugh at his expense.
In the midst of all of that reputation-shredding stuff he gets to tell Lulu, “Fine.”
“What?”
“Interview. After. Fine. All the beans I can, spilled for you and your employer.”
“Skotch, my good friend, that’s—”
“But you shut up about it right now,” he hisses at her. “And you do something for me. Otherwise there’s no story because I don’t get to go do anything, got me?”
“What do you need me for?” she asks, delighted to be a part of the action.
“You notice there’s a possum skulking about over there. Got her beady eye on me, you see that?”
And, despite the general empty-headed air to her, pigeons boast a sharpness of vision that’s second only to the raptor Strains. She doesn’t tip him the nod—from a pigeon it doesn’t mean much—but she clicks her beak at him. She’s made Maria, sure enough.
“Believe it or not she’s got a really unique life story, just desperately interesting.
She’s real keen to get it off her chest to an enquiring bird such as yourself,” Skotch says.
“So how about you go bother her for it and don’t stop until she’s told you every last memory from when she was a joey, or you can’t see me any more. ”
“You’re going to run out on me,” Lulu accuses reproachfully.
“Yes, I am,” he confirms, “but only so I can go do stuff I can tell you about later. Otherwise you get a chapter full of me sitting here dangling my tail in the water and hoping to catch a fish.”
She looks like she doesn’t trust him, which is fair enough because maybe Skotch doesn’t take her seriously enough to stick to the letter of any agreement he makes with her.
At the same time, she’s simultaneously insatiably curious and steered by whatever the last thing was that got put into the narrow cavity in her skull where her brain sits.
Seeing as this is now the idea Skotch has pitched her on, a moment later she lifts off from bothering him and skims over towards Maria.
The possum tries to evade, but Lulu stoops like a sparrowhawk and starts bombarding her with questions. Skotch only catches the edge of them but he knows from personal experience exactly how distracting the verbose pigeon can be. Now, time to put his part of the plan into business.
He dives in. No water taxi for Skotch this time.
Dives in and goes underwater as long as he can.
Not natural behaviour, every instinct screaming at him, but overriding instinct is what the geneware’s for.
He comes out of the water, sopping wet, shrunk thin where his sodden pelt clings to the skinny critter that lives inside every prosperous-seeming raccoon.
Comes out of the water on the far side of the Saint from where he last saw Maria, anyway, and hopes that’s enough, with Lulu’s incessant pestering.
There’s a line, and he’s cutting in, but he’s on the clock now. Bad manners, and he can only hope the powers that be have some idea of just what’s at stake.
Saint Frances glances briefly down at him, when he squelches up to where she’s sitting.
Tugging at the hem of her woollen sweater, even, as daring as any animal ever was.
But she’s helping her petitioners, of course.
She can’t just let some scoundrel like Skotch muscle in.
And Maria will get free of her incumbrances soon enough and spot where he’s got to and …
“Sister, please,” he says, and knows the bead in her ear will be translating the ’Sprech into the more elaborate human words his own are a mockery of.
“I don’t know what’s up but it’s bad. Two animals are dead over this already.
There’s a mouse I need to find and if I don’t, maybe a lot more.
” And more than two are dead, given the territorial wrangling between the Reds and the Grays, but Springer and Fitch both died over the mouse, of that much Skotch is sure.
And maybe this mouse means trouble to more than just animals, with his chemistry set.
But that’s more than he is willing to put into words.