Chapter 6 #2
This space is low in the city, root level and then some.
Not somewhere humans go, except this human does a lot of things most humans don’t.
It’s one of the unintended spaces. Water drains in, and drains out slower unless the levels rise past the ring of outlet grates that generations of Gehirner averse to drowning have installed of their own notion.
It’s a bit like living inside a fountain, Skotch thinks.
Because that kind of associative imagery is also something that the engineering of his brain has made room for.
It’s a big space, too. A good eight metres across at least, and green.
Not green in the planned way the city is, but green where nature has colonised.
There’s moss, and sprays of ferns that have caught some errant geneware and now throw up new growth year-round in the Chapel’s constant warmth.
There are vines and creepers climbing the walls, odd species left over from the city’s engineering, not found flourishing in the wild beyond these walls.
Strange flowers bloom here that aren’t seen anywhere else in the world: the result of forbidden unions between the engineered and the natural taking place outside the purview of science.
The place is busy. Probably over seventy Gehirner, by Skotch’s quick count.
Some relaxing in the pools, some gathered on the higher ground—discarded cob rubble and organocrete from the early stages of the city’s founding, left over in this place beyond the notice of the architects and construction crews, or thrown down here by some irresponsible workers.
Now it’s all bonded together, levelled off.
A series of irregular little plazas and patios for the Gehirner to sit out at, talk, drink, trade.
Beast business outside the regular services of the guilds.
Anyone welcome, leave your grudges at the gate.
Not to make trouble, that is the law—the one law of Saint Frances’ Chapel.
Saint Frances herself is at her accustomed place.
She has other business sometimes. She sleeps up above in the human city, and sometimes her order calls her to account.
She is, if not an actual saint, a genuine honest-to-God nun.
Skotch understands what that is because the Gehirner have religion like they’ve got all sorts of other snips and snaps of human ideas, infesting their engineered brains like fleas.
From speaking with Frances, he has the vague idea that her order isn’t actually delighted with her self-determined mission to the Gehirner.
It’s not as if human churches are looking for converts from the beasts of the field, after all.
That this one errant sister has decided it’s her God-given calling to provide for the Gehirner is, he suspects, a bit of an embarrassment for her superiors.
But also, it was on the human news. Quite against her wishes, Saint Frances was a bit of a celebrity for a while.
It would have been bad publicity for her order to rap her knuckles over it, so they’ve done their best to ignore her instead.
Hence she keeps coming down to this sump that the Gehirner call her Chapel.
She brings a basket of food—not the SLG ration bars but human food: bread, vegetables from her windowbox garden, soy protein, all the good stuff.
The most desperate and friendless of animals, cut off from guilds and kin, can get a simple meal at Saint Frances’ kitchen.
Not quite enough to keep body and soul together, of course.
You need Plangent for that. But it’s hard to score some of the good stuff on an empty belly.
Saint Frances does not dress like a nun, who Skotch understands normally cosplay as penguins for some reason.
She’s down here in sensible boots and hard-wearing denim dungarees, a long faleather coat and a broad-brimmed hat to ward off the constant drip-drip-drip of water.
Rather than wading up to his hackles, Skotch takes a water-taxi, a raft poled by a rat gondolier, across the flooded central space of the Chapel.
Water mists about him, beads on his fur, drops on his head and makes him shiver.
The rat, wearing a poncho made from a scrap of tarpaulin, grins at him.
“Bring your umbrella next time, Herr Washbear,” he suggests with a flash of incisors. Skotch, who never liked that particular slang for his Strain, ignores him.
Saint Frances is dispensing. Food, yes, but she’s also just about the only pharmacist a lone Gehirner can access.
There are pills and ampoules in her basket, sourced from charitable veterinarians, and she has a little electronic weighing scale and a pestle.
Chopping up tablets into powder like she’s a dealer for the whole animal kingdom.
Razor-blading the dust into little lines and decanting it into bottle-top cups.
Doing her best with what Skotch suspects is a very limited medical knowledge given the range of species she’s trying to tend to.
You have to be somewhat desperate to throw yourself on the mercy of the dispensary of Saint Frances, but there’s a lot of desperation about.
He waits his turn, passes the time in talk.
Hears how it shook out at Franz-Ferdinand’s after he left, which is to say bloodily for all parties but the Grays held and the Reds backed off.
Probably not the last clash over that remunerative turf, is the word.
But everything was cleaned up before the human breakfast shift arrived, and nobody put a little clawed toe over the line of Rule One.
Doesn’t matter how many squirrels got offed overnight so long as there’s not a speck of rodent blood on the kitchen floor come morning.
He drops a few questions about his projected destination. How are the lords of Madparrot Alley these days? Upswing or downswing? Nobody has a clear answer for him, just about the least helpful situation. It’s in flux. But then it’s always in flux, down Madparrot Alley ways.
Then the Saint has a moment to spare him, before the next of the genuinely needy.
She speaks, but it’s the real Austrian Deutsch, not Tiersprech, and spoken softly because regular human voices are over-loud to Gehirner ears.
From beside the basket, a wavering artificial voice translates the words into passable ’Sprech.
And it’s not as though that’s a standard piece of kit, because the whole point of having the Little Helpers is that you don’t need to remember you have them.
But the engineers and developers responsible for them needed tools for when they were testing the capabilities of their creations, and somehow Saint Frances was able to secure a prototype.
When Skotch speaks back to her—or mostly to the actual device—it feeds a crooked translation into her ear.
And ’Sprech is a crunched and simplified Germanic language, so most of the time they can understand one another through the magic of technology.
“This penitent who comes before me,” she says, “I recognise as Skotch.” Or that’s what comes out of the machine.
Her voice rumbles overhead like a distant thunderstorm.
Quiet, because she’s being quiet, but Skotch can feel the vibration of it, the potential for volume.
She’s huge. You forget how big humans are, when you’re looking down on them eating their fancy food at the tables in Franz-Ferdinand’s or drinking cognac in Casa de Alphonse.
If Skotch concentrates really hard and has had a recent hit of Plangent, he can just about follow the regular Deutsch.
What she’s actually said is, “Es ist Skotch, nicht wahr?”—It’s Skotch, isn’t it?
—but whoever did the gubbins of her translator had an ear for ritual.
It adds to the untouchability of her, the weight of sanctuary that keeps everyone from one another’s throats.
Skotch has hopped up on her workbench, like most of her petitioners do, and she, seated, towers over him. Looks down with a face as big as the whole of him. Saint Frances, Our Lady of Breaching Rule One.
She is a holy terror, in a way. She Is Not Supposed to Be Here.
She is intruding into a stratum of the city that is supposed to explicitly exclude humans.
And it’s not like she couldn’t be in danger, theoretically.
Those popguns the armies make could put out a human eye.
A good set of teeth could bite the hand that feeds.
One of the big, discontinued carnivore Strains, a fox or a badger say, could do a lot of damage.
But that would be breaking Rule One from their side.
A dead human on their patch would be the end of the world for a great deal of what the Gehirner have going on.
Even the armies, greedy for territory, understand that. Even the Rattenkonige.
Even anarchistas like the Maulers. Saint Frances is often their last resort, when they’re starving or sick or they get injured after some anti-establishment prank of theirs backfires.
Hypocritical of them, to keep a human in their back pocket?
Well, then let nobody tell you anarchists can’t be hypocrites.
“With the greatest of respect to your position, Your Holiness,” he tells her translator.
What that title—a ’Sprech neologism because surely the bioengineers didn’t code for popery—actually ends up translated as, he has no idea.
“I humbly beg your blessing and your favour. And a favour.” The way her translator outputs its speech has led to a tradition of petitioners trying to match its awkward and overblown manner.