Chapter 6 #3
Skotch knows that favours are like grain.
You cast yours on fallow ground and hope to reap the harvest. Saint Frances doesn’t only recognise him because there aren’t that many raccoons in Neuwien.
He’s been around the Chapel before. Sometimes she’s had petitioners who could use a freelance investigator.
He’s made sure that he’s offered his help publicly a few times, just to get his name in the book of the virtuous. Now it’s time, he hopes, to collect.
He tells her, as circumspectly as possible, that he’s really keen to get into the Alley without getting all his whiskers pulled out, and that in particular he needs to speak to the Maulers.
All hedged about with as many qualifiers as he can wedge into the sentence, to indicate his good faith.
He’s not trying to sting them for some faction.
Just would really appreciate a relaxed chat with them about a case he’s working.
Just a little info, one Gehirner to another.
And he knows they pitch up here at Saint Frances’ door often enough, so could she perhaps put in a word, or…
? Wording it as highfalutin’ as functional Tiersprech allows.
“Your words have been heard,” she says, or her machine says.
Her eyes weigh him—about seven kilograms give or take—as though she can read sincerity or otherwise in his body and the way he holds his tail.
And probably she can’t, human limitations being what they are, but she certainly gives the impression that she can.
That calm, slightly creased gaze would look into Skotch’s soul if there was any consensus over whether he had one.
Most of the human religions—Frances’ order included—say no.
Of the Gehirner creeds, only the Separatists are really vocal on the idea that some part of the engineering process grafts a soul into the body and descendants of each Gehirner.
Skotch himself, defiantly agnostic, doesn’t even speculate.
“Return to this place upon the morrow,” decrees the Saint’s machine.
Up above, she murmurs, “Kannst du morgen wiederkommen?” It’s not like she’s got a handy anarchist in her back pocket, after all.
It means she’ll ask, though. Either direct to their faces, or to animals who’ll pass the word on.
Say that Skotch the raccoon wants to talk, under the stamp of Saint Frances’ neutrality.
And though that neutrality is a commodity that decays rapidly away from the Chapel, it’s better than nothing.
Because going into the Alley without some kind of armour gets throats slit on a daily basis.
That’s all he’s going to get from the towering icon right now, and the actual currency of her help can be as ephemeral as genuine divine intervention.
She is, as they say, only human. But she’ll try.
That’s really the thing the Gehirner believe—have faith in—when it comes to Saint Frances.
She means well. She has decided, for religious reasons of her own, that the wellbeing of her diminutive congregation is her primary concern.
She is, in her vague, vast, inscrutable way, on their side.
That done, Skotch hops down from her table and is instantly accosted by an Annoyance, capital A.
“You were at Franz-Ferdinand’s!” calls a cheery voice like nails on a chalkboard—considerably more of an annoyance when you have Skotch’s keen ears. “What was it like? What happened? What went down?”
A flurry of wings and there’s a pigeon beside him.
Not the regular somewhat tatty Gehirner who have their own army and their own turf out in the wider city, jockeying with the Reds and the Grays or else beholden to this guild or that.
A plump, well-fed pigeon, the sort that would have Sly’s mouth watering, if the old fox was so impolitic.
Skotch winces. So much for slinking away unnoticed.
Now the whole world wants to know his business.
The sleek bird struts behind him as he heads towards the water’s edge and the gondolier rat.
On one of her ankles a metal ring glints.
Because of course where there’s one human who breaks Rule One, there’s at least the shadow of another.
A ring about the leg. Back in the old days when humans were humans and pigeons were pigeons, that symbolised ownership.
A complicated concept for the Gehirner. Technically, they’re owned.
By corporate bodies like Uzco; by the civic authorities.
Except the whole point of the Little Helpers is that they do their multitude of jobs without needing human oversight.
Part of the infrastructure. It is, Skotch knows, something that lunatic fringe groups like the Maulers talk about a lot, and something most Gehirner—him included—think about not at all.
The collars of the Uzco employees or the guild members signify belonging, to those who wear them and those who see them both.
Any suggestion of property and owner is sufficiently diluted by the fact that the Gehirner just get on with things behind the scenes, and no human is standing over them with a whip.
They have their world and the humans have their own, and the two aren’t supposed to have much of a permeable boundary.
Then there’s Saint Frances, who’s blithely crashed through that wall leaving a nun-shaped hole.
And there’s this pigeon, Lulu, and her human.
Human singular, no company nor religious sect or government department.
And the ring on Lulu’s leg really is a great deal like an Uzco collar in one respect.
It doesn’t signify ownership so much as protection—that messing with this otherwise delicious-looking pigeon would have repercussions.
“I’m working,” Skotch throws over his shoulder.
“I know! That’s why I want to talk to you!” Lulu says, fluttering about behind him so her wingtips are constantly at the edge of his vision. “Franz-Ferdinand’s! What went down, Skotch? Himself needs to know! Come on, cut me some slack, my good friend the raccoon! Give me the dirt!”
At the water’s edge, Skotch rounds on her, mouth open for a devastating put-down.
This pampered, overweight bird who has a full feeder to go home to, and a human who will personally source off-the-books Plangent and geneware hacks for her, just for the asking.
And she wants the dirt, and last night Springer died in Skotch’s arms.
He stops before the sharp words get past his teeth. Luluhead cocked, is eyeing him sidelong. The plumage of her breast is dolled up, a sheen of iridescent green and blush pink. Which means all sorts of complicated things to pigeons that Skotch is entirely excluded from.
She wants the dirt. She wants the sensation.
For a very specific reason. Because it’s her job.
What keeps her in birdseed and Plangent.
And for that, he should absolutely give her the cold shoulder until she gets bored and goes to bother someone else—about five minutes, in his experience.
Except if he sits down with her and tells her the real deal of the story, then something of Springer will pass from him to her, and end up where all the dirt does. Immortalised, in a way.
Against his better judgment, he ends up on one of the Chapel’s rubble islands, spending half an hour of his remaining lifespan telling over the events to Lulu.
And her head bobs and her eyes stare past him on either side, but she’ll remember.
Most of the engineered pigeon Strains have incredible memories, expanding inherited spatial and navigational faculties into a space where the seen and heard can be held eidetically, to be recounted once and then erased even in the act of speaking.
A living recording device, through accidental over-engineering.
And Lulu is, for all her irritatingly upbeat personality, one of the best in the business.
He tells her about the night, and is surprised to feel a lot of echo-adrenaline, so that his hands shake and his fur bristles with the memories.
The clash of the armies, the chase, Szerky’s teeth, Springer.
He hadn’t realised it had got to him so much.
Trauma and stress aren’t even something that came with the Gehirner geneware.
It’s part of life’s baggage, long predating humans or their interference.
He tries to scrub his account clean of the actual case he’s working, but his mouth runs on without a firm hand on the tiller. There was a mouse, he had a satchel. Skotch was giving chase. The stoat. The teeth. The gun.
Lulu takes it all in. And she’s not going to gossip his business all over the city. Her words are for one market only.
“So this mouse,” she says, after he’s done. After he’s just sitting there, feeling the fight-or-flight of it all wash back and forth inside him, trying to calm his breathing.
He cocks an eye at her, resentful and yet grateful. Catharsis isn’t something you often get for free in his line of work.
“That’s who you’re tracking. That’s who you’re going to the Alley after?” Bird eyes still bright with story.
“It ain’t your business, Lulu,” Skotch tells her.
“Could be. I could help. They know me there.”
One animal doubting another is a very engineered thing. Not something your basic raccoon really needs in the wild, a bit of social scepticism. It’s front and centre in Skotch’s eyes and body language, though, and the set of his whiskers.
“They do!” Lulu insists. “Himself loves it. The parrots. Local colour, you know.”
“I don’t need a sidekick,” Skotch tells her shortly.
“Sure you do. Let’s meet here tomorrow. When are you coming back?”