Chapter 6
OUR LADY OF brEAKING RULE ONE
Back at his nook, Skotch takes stock. And it has to be back at his nook because, after Meece made his exit—or was forcibly exited, no way of knowing—things were getting a bit hot, chez Franz-Ferdinand. And Springer was dead.
Skotch has had plenty of time to think of that, going back down the hard way, back to the root levels where the Gehirner mostly live.
And it’s not like he and Springer were Best Friends Forever.
And friendship is a tricky thing, anyway, for the Little Helpers.
The engineered part of them, that drags them far enough towards the human to be useful to humans, makes room for it.
The innate part of them that existed beforehand isn’t so accommodating.
You have kin, basically. There’s a place in Skotch’s head for family.
Mate, kits. There’s a broader and less-welcoming space for conspecifics.
Then there are other categories that include Prey, Predator, Not Predator But Dangerous, Irrelevant, that kind of thing.
And also Oddity, because his species is curious and investigative by nature.
But the engineering is like a hook into the low ceilings of those spaces in his head, lifting them up, making room.
So that, over the course of a protracted association, animals of other species can end up slotting into those categories where they wouldn’t normally belong.
He can know a squirrel, for example, and when that squirrel gets gunned down by a stoat he feels it.
It plucks the same string a lost mate would, or offspring gone down the gullet of an owl.
Not as keenly, but interacting with the same neural and hormonal architecture.
So Springer’s dead, and it leaves a scar in his mind.
He dropped in on Sly before dragging his feet all the way home.
The fox had a dog with a camera collar-tag look over the little scraps of filmy he got from the lab—Meece’s lab, where who knows what was being done.
Sly will put out some feelers, do some analysis, get back to him.
And Skotch could just have gone straight home and then sent some images via Ikarios’ illicit terminal, but he has a bad feeling about those notes.
He doesn’t know chemistry—never worked a job where it was part of the package—but he knows a little chemical notation from Gehirner basic ed, and Meece was working up some powerful-looking molecules if he’s any judge.
You start sending the formula for a water-soluble neurotoxin over the public network, some system’s going to clock it.
So it’s all on the hush-hush, just between him and Sly, the fox that Skotch hopes he can trust—a sentiment that so seldom works out well in folk tale and story.
In his nook he considers, and reckons he’s now the proud owner of more questions than before he set off into Graycoat territory, and the answer drawer is just as empty as before.
Benson wants the mouse alive for Uzco. Szerky wants the mouse dead for the Country Clubs.
That alone is quite enough of a tangle, except that either Meece, in his brief time in the city, has made some wild allies, or his fame has spread through other channels.
Because those beasties with the red neckers are full-on outsiders.
A group—a movement—Skotch has never had an in with, because they are very dangerous animals indeed.
Animals who don’t necessarily care about Rule One.
Full-on anarchists looking to bring the system down by dynamiting the bottom floor and seeing how everything else thinks it’s going to stay up after that.
Or maybe not quite that. That’s how they talk, sure, but thus far they’ve not actually, say, poisoned a high-profile human or set an actual bomb somewhere.
Just some Gehirner graffiti in human areas that probably looks like spilled paint to human eyes, just some light industrial espionage, and beyond that mostly infighting or squabbling with other animal factions.
But dangerous, because they claim not to be bound by the usual cast-iron lines other Gehirner won’t cross.
And Skotch has always reckoned they’re full of BS when it comes down to action.
But right now they’ve got Meece and maybe Meece has some really nasty little piece of chemistry homework they can help him finish.
Maybe the Maulers are about to up their game.
Maulers is what they call themselves, those red-neckerchief movement types.
On account, Skotch suspects, of “rednecks” sending the wrong message.
And probably the name is meant to be clever, but as most Gehirner never heard of Chairman Mao the name is wasted.
It’s the maw, though, the teeth and tongue, the maul in ’Sprech.
Along with the hands, it’s the part of the beast where the human is most obviously imposed.
The symbol of the halfway thing they’ve been made into.
Skotch has a lot of contacts. He’s a personable raccoon.
Give him a district of Neuwien, a service sector, a cult or social club or closed shop society, he’ll know someone who knows someone who can get him an interview.
It’s that kind of sociability hack that led him to take up this freelance investigative schtick in the first place.
Not even something raccoons have, because in nature his old kin are feisty and territorial same as most animals.
Maybe some capybara genestock in him. He’s heard there’s a Strain from Peru that’s so chill they give them to hostage negotiators as icebreakers.
Now’s the moment he goes back to Uzco, basically.
Now’s the point where he holds up his little raccoon hands and tells Benson, Sorry, chief, he got away.
Takes the down payment, waives the rest. That would be the sensible thing to do.
Given Springer and Szerky and all the other complications this job has already thrown up.
One thing most Gehirner Strains are engineered for, though, is a certain task-centred sense of duty.
An incomplete job is like a splinter in the mind.
Part of the package that has them actually doing the work they’re designed for.
And this transfers even to self-determined tasks, as Skotch well knows.
A lot of Strains, a lot of individuals, they have an almost ADHD facility for being unable to hold focus on anything except for the task right in front of them, which they tunnel obsessively into until they’re faint because they forgot to eat.
Pigeons, especially, and a lot of the other bird Strains, but Skotch has a touch of it.
More than that, though, the Gehirner engineering gives animals a more human sense of time.
Meaning they can regret the past and fear the future, two facilities that Skotch feels aren’t exactly great quality of life upgrades from his base species’ state of natural innocence.
Skotch has a bad feeling about the future that is inextricably bound up with Doctor Meece being out there in the city, especially in the hands of dangerous anarchists.
Maulers who were all talk yesterday, but now might have some trousers to back it up.
And as for reporting to Uzco anyway, just as a matter of being a conscientious contractor, Skotch doesn’t really want to hand his former employers anything until he has a better handle on just what the hell is actually going on.
Because he trusts Benson as far as he could throw the old hundredweight of turtle, plus tank.
The other reason he doesn’t just walk away, of course, is that if Meece is cooking up something nasty, then it could end up being Skotch’s problem whether he sticks with the job or not. As well as a problem for just about everyone he knows and maybe the entire city.
All of which means he’s going to have to go outside his comfort zone.
It’s not like he can go tip Ikelos’ hardware a button and open a channel to the anarchistas.
If it were that simple then they’d be well on their way to being just regular archistas and a functioning part of society.
It’s also not like he can just shimmy up to their regular haunts and hand over a business card.
Best scuttlebutt has them based out of Madparrot Alley and that’s a chaotic and dangerous district for a stray and friendless Gehirner to find himself in.
But he’s who he is, and that means even if he doesn’t have a chain of connections he can climb up, he knows where to go to get one forged.
The city is short of proper neutral areas, safe zones where you leave your allegiance at the door, and which the armies have, to date, respected even at times of open war like now.
Where a freelancer or Guild-Gehirner or even a mad anarchist can show their snout and not have the end of it bitten off.
Hard to enforce that level of safe passage and equity.
Who has that kind of respect? Who is there, that some faction or group won’t try to knock off their pedestal?
It’s time for Skotch to pay a visit to a saint. A singular answer to a question that very seldom even needs asking: What happens if a human doesn’t respect Rule One?
She’s not always there, of course, and when she’s not there the place isn’t safe in the same way. When Skotch makes his way down to Saint Frances’ Chapel, however, she’s at her usual post, and that means sanctuary is in session.