Chapter 1 #4
Embassy Plaza is not in the rootways. It is in the centre of human Neuwien-Grunstadt, overlooking the marina and the blue, blue waters of the lake.
Blue blue, because of all the decontamination work they did last decade, when the corner got turned on the whole deindustrialisation wars.
This is where the city’s human governance goes on, and where a handful of foreign interests are, and—because all of those humans are wealthy even above the universal provisions of the green cities—a lot of restaurants and theatres and other fancy places.
Most of the foreign interests—not actual political embassies but the holdings of various major tech corporations—have their own in-house Gehirner staff, and the B?renhaus is a unique place where they can go, that’s upstairs, in sight, revealed to the sun and to human gaze.
Here, a handful of extremely well-behaved animals can have teddy bears’ picnics, sitting on the floor at low human-style tables, drinking tea from little cups.
Human tourists from less green places love it.
The B?renhaus belongs to HengZeico, a Japanese group specialising in Gehirner design—Henge as they call them, over there.
HengZeico were a major partner in green city projects across the world, and part of the price was a permanent embassy building in the best part of town.
In Neuwien this includes the B?renhaus and, in the B?renhaus, Skotch spots his good old friend Shojen.
Shojen probably doesn’t have any work for an itinerant racoon, but Shojen owes Skotch for extrication from a spot of bother.
A foreign model getting lost in the wrong part of town, a pack of leery locals.
Skotch turning up and the regular Gehirner assuming that the raccoon and the tanuki were pals because they had the same face markings.
An association that was rather less complimentary to Shojen than to Skotch, honestly, but they’d come out of it on good terms. And Shojen owes him—and also, somehow, is something like a friend—and if Skotch gets a temping contract with HengZeico that would keep the company off his back.
He doesn’t know how late he is. Not by much, certainly.
If he’d got the lowdown from Uwe an hour beforehand, maybe it would have made all the difference.
The truth is in Shojen’s body language, though.
The stiffness to the tanuki. That stare—the black-banded eyes that every other Gehirner species sees as identical, but to Skotch and Shojen both are worlds apart.
Get out, those eyes say. Not hostile, warning.
But Skotch is at least three-quarters away in his own head and he only registers the unspoken caution as he’s on the point of joining Shojen at the little low table.
The human thing, fit for humans to see their Little Helpers at, like the animals are playing dress-up here in the front window of the B?renhaus.
Skotch turns on his heels, front and rear, then rises to his haunches, feeling resigned. They’re right there, a raccoon and a possum with collars on, their tags showing the Uzco logo just as Shojen’s shows the spiral of HengZeico.
“If it isn’t our old pal Skotch,” says the other raccoon, the company raccoon, whose name is Fitch.
The possum, designated Maria, nods and bares a lot of sharp teeth, though that’s par for the course with possums. The speech is the US argot, which some human joker somehow got away with calling Furze.
Shojen stands up—tanuki are bigger, so that’s a lot of up. The two American animals aren’t intimidated.
“Siddown, Tom,” says Fitch, the talker. The old slur name for tanuki models, coined by some recidivist human way back when and passed into animal parlance because no human really watches what they say in front of the Gehirner.
Shojen is maybe about to make a scene, because he’s a good sort and takes debts seriously.
And the last thing Skotch needs is to be cause célèbre for some sort of international incident here in green city turf, because Uzco and HengZeico are commercial rivals, and the boardroom and stock price friction tends to filter down to hackles and scraps here at the animal level.
“It’s cool,” Skotch tells Shojen. “I reckon these two gents just want to talk about outstanding paperwork.”
“Sure,” says Fitch.
“Something like that,” snickers Maria, because apparently she can talk too. Lispy, because possum dentition screws with the diction.
“I’ll be back for that meeting we talked about,” Skotch says, in the hope that a sudden absence of Skotch in the world now has a stink attached to it, and maybe that’ll stay someone’s paw if the question of whether or not to off him reaches edge-case status.
“I will look forward to it,” Shojen says in precise Furze, giving Fitch and Maria the hard look, which they return in spades.
The pair don’t quite frog-march Skotch out of the B?renhaus. But then, given that a whole class of Gehirner models are amphibians, the phrase is reckoned bad taste. There’s a definite impression that, even though Skotch’s four feet are taking him the right way, his consent is not being asked for.
This is how Skotch returns to the bosom of the company that made him.