Chapter 9 #3
“You’re not the only one after him, Amerikaner,” says Wizzo.
He’s put the clockwork together now. Sets it moving under the power of a coiled and naked spring, each wheel moving spasmodically to its own beat, yet all together.
And achieving nothing, just bleeding out its mechanical energy into the air.
Possibly it’s a metaphor for something but Skotch isn’t the watchmaker to work out what.
“We all saw that at Franz-Ferdinand’s. And here am I, asking nicely and being such a reasonable Gehirner. You saw that stoat in action. She won’t ask and she isn’t reasonable.”
“Fuck the Country Clubs!” the parrot announces fiercely. Maybe a heartfelt sentiment, maybe just something she heard and is repeating.
“Well quite.” Skotch pirates the sentiment.
“And it’s not just them. And word will get out.
I’m here ahead of the crowd, but if I worked it out, the others will be sniffing round already, parrots or no parrots.
You let me take him off your hands then you can get back to philosophising, rather than defending your patch against every hired killer and ratcatcher in the city. ”
He tries to read them. They’re all abristle with fervour, but he catches a few nervous sidelong looks: the squirrels, Wizzo, Fischer, all aware he’s right and not wanting to admit it.
“Why’d you even grab him, anyway?” Skotch presses.
“Fuck the Country Clubs!” the parrot repeats.
“Like the bird has said,” Fischer puts in.
“The Maulers have contacts in the provinces. Word came to us that Brother Meece was making a run for it, and could some sympathetic friends maybe catch him in his fall and get him on his feet in the big city. Some spirited debates, they are happening in these rooms, regarding what parts of the system need fixing, and what parts need burning down. The Farm Projects fall into the latter.”
“You don’t like to eat?” Skotch asks innocently.
“No animal legitimately ate anything that came out of there,” Wizzo puts in. “That’s human foods only. And those Rattenkonige and the rest who load their tables with farm produce are playing lickspittle species traitors, complicit in the exploitation of our rural siblings.”
“That’s a lot of long words,” says Skotch. “Me? I just want the mouse.”
“For your fellow Amerikaners in Uzco,” Wizzo notes.
“I mean the little squeaker probably only has nine months left on the clock,” Skotch points out, “but I reckon with Uzco he at least gets use of them without them being cut short.” He is very definitely clinging to the idea that Benson still left him the option of bringing Meece in alive, and screening out the fact that dead was also on the table.
They exchange glances, narrow, excluding him. Squirrels to rat, rat to parrot, parrot to toad.
“If it helps—” starts Lulu brightly, about to damn Skotch with a glowing character reference. The anarchists’ disparate glower comes together to focus on her and she stops talking, aware that, no, it doesn’t help.
“Herr Doktor Meece,” says Wizzo, “goes nowhere he doesn’t want.” And, when Skotch shifts footing and opens his mouth to try a new tack, “You can convince him to go with you, of his free will? You go right ahead and try. But you can’t sell him on the idea, Amerikaner? Then he stays right here.”
It’s plainly further than any of the others want to go, but Wizzo quells each one of them with a look.
“What? He doesn’t go where he doesn’t want, but that means we don’t get to keep him here if he doesn’t want to stay.
We keep no prisoners here. But just you,” he adds, as Lulu takes a deep breath.
She lets it out in an exasperated warble.
“I only want to—”
“You, sister, get to talk to me,” says Wizzo.
“On account of how I feel the work to which you contribute could use some education in anarcho-socialism.” Human words that can’t even be constructed in Tiersprech.
Something sad, Skotch reckons, about this pack of would-be system-smashers having to borrow the vocabulary of those they see as their oppressors to even express dissatisfaction with their lot.
Fisher and the anglo red squirrel lead him out and down a couple of levels through the shaggy overgrowth of the building.
Whoever has the service contract to prune the greenery here is probably being kept from a neat job by the attentions of all the parrots higher up, but it serves the Maulers too.
Gives them a nice covert thoroughfare between all the little nooks and crevices they’ve claimed.
Toad and squirrel go ahead, look back to make sure he’s following, then disappear into what turns out to be quite a large space.
Some big piece of plant that sufficient poundage of parrots tore out of its mountings.
In its place, a gap you could have fit Benson’s tank into with room to spare, if you could have hauled it this high up the building.
A space with hanging greenery for walls on two sides, and ready access to electricity.
And here, in the midst of a new chemistry set partly assembled, Skotch comes face to face with Meece once again.