Chapter 15 #3
“I mean, I was thinking … poison gas? A plague? Apocalyptic stuff,” Skotch says. “Was a moment, in the Alley, where I had my hands on him and I thought, I could just snap his skinny little mouse neck myself, you know?”
She nods. “But you didn’t. Because you’re a good Gehirner.”
“I mean it’s just one maus worth but maybe I can’t afford the gelt.” A wretched chuckle from him. “Or maybe it’s that I’d have to pay it to those farm bastards, as his guild. Even though they’re trying to kill him themselves.”
“You let him go,” Lulu says.
“You think that was the smart move?” he asks her.
“Half the humans drop dead, or some Gehirner Strain suddenly goes extinct, I’m going to know I was wrong, aren’t I?
Except…” His hands clutch at one another as though desperately trying to keep hold of his train of thought.
“The Baron should be the first one panicking about anything getting into the water, and she was pro-mouse. And Sly … Sly could just have sent a message ‘Kill Meece On Sight.’ And didn’t.
Told me the Baron had an angle. Told me he needed to speak to me.
Not spreading an alarm. Keeping a secret.
Said … save Meece, at the end. But what did he know, honestly?
A mad old fox on the way out.” He clutches his fingers together so hard it hurts. “I can’t make it make sense, Lulu.”
She just makes a noise. No contribution, but telling him she’s still alive.
And all the pieces of what’s going on are just floating away from one another in his head, the little well of Plangent all run dry.
He can’t think, certainly not the high level of problem-solving that this kind of thing needs.
“Hey!” he calls for the squirrels. “Hey, we going to get fed in here?” Just in case dinner comes with a side order of ampoules.
A squirrel sticks her rusty head past the tarpaulin, looks from him to Lulu, then ducks back out.
Dinner doesn’t manifest, not even a corner of an SLG ration bar.
And Skotch reflects bleakly that he’s seen how the sausage is made, and it’s made of other Gehirner like Lulu.
And maybe that’s what the squirrels reckon she’s good for, and they’re going to save their rations for actual soldiers.
There’s a darkness growing in his brain.
It’s made of ignorance and forgetting. Forgetting the complex chain of events that brought him here.
Forgetting the niceties of being a Gehirner.
Forgetting what Skotch is and why it’s important.
It’s the old animal soul inside him, that all the engineering couldn’t quite crowd out.
Always waiting for when the chemical supplements dry up.
For the moment the bio-engineered neurology that makes Skotch a person ceases to link to the raccoon brain his ancestors evolved.
For the lights to go off, so that he, the nocturnal predator and scavenger hanging in the middle of the food chain, can get off the bench and just act as nature intended.
And here he is, right next to a delicious plump pigeon, trying desperately to remember that she’s got a name. That she’s a person too.
Fatigue is catching up on him too. All those escapades, so little sleep. He fights it. He pinches himself and grips his knuckles and grinds his teeth together, trying to stave off oblivion. Because he’s very worried about what might wake from that sleep. He’s worried it won’t be Skotch.
He’s worried that, by the time Skotch reasserts himself, he won’t be hungry anymore.
He puts as much distance as he can, in that little space, between himself and Lulu. As though it will help.
He wakes up held down. Fighting instinctively, snapping, snarling.
No Skotch in him right then, just raccoon, clawing with all four feet, growling and screaming at the whole world.
The instinctive push back against restraint, imprisonment that no animal can brook.
There are what feels like a dozen squirrels wrestling with him, holding him still.
They have his head. They tie a strap about his muzzle.
They pry open his eyes. Skotch screams, a muted, squealing sound from between his teeth.
The Plangent goes in. Drop, drop, drop, icy cold against his naked eyeball. The instinctive buck and twitch against it, even though he’s done it to himself a hundred times.
Clarity returns. The fight doesn’t exactly leave him, but it goes back to its corner and waits for the next bell. He stares out at them, the mob of squirrels.
Lulu’s gone from there. There’s no great mess of blood and feathers, no taste of death in his mouth, but she’s gone. A terrible wrenching feeling grips him, as though a taloned hand had reached in through his gut.
There’s a rat there, amongst the squirrels.
A pale silvery-furred critter with a bandolier of what look like medical or bioscience tools, scaled for clever little hands.
He thinks at first she’s wearing a metal skullcap, flat and sleek across the top of her head.
There’s no cap to it, though. A rat with a metal cranium, which reaches down and around one eye.
That eye is glassy, and there are a couple of jacks and what looks like a tiny antenna behind one pink ear.
“Skotch, PI, gumshoe, investigator? Yesno?” she says, the words coming out in a kind of machine-gun rattle.
“I, what? Yes?” Skotch manages. The Plangent is a potent batch. His mind is spinning its wheels like a revving car, desperate to go somewhere but without a map.
“Good, acceptable, excellent,” she says, like it’s a multiple choice. “I, this one, Nimoy, me.” She raps a nail against the steel over her eye, tik tik tik. “You, Skotch, accompanying, coming with me, yesno?”
“What? No.”
“What, yes,” she corrects. “Purchased, bought, paid for. Also to your advantage, benefit, yesno, but coming with me if you like it, if not, in either case. Nimoy, me, of Ratlabs. Ratlabs has you now.”