Chapter 9
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
The parrots had been a mistake. That was the conclusion the genetic engineers had come to, and it was a thought shared by most of their other creations.
Parrots—parakeets, arguably, but the distinction lacks taxonomic force—weren’t native to Wien, old or new.
However, colonies had been finding homes in southern Europe since long before the green cities, formed from coteries of escaped domestic pets and slowly moving their range northwards as the world warmed.
Being smart and opportunistic birds, they’d become a fixture of human landscapes, more than capable of adapting their tricks to the novel opportunities to feed and nest. They were a familiar sight in old Vienna by the time the first prototype Gehirner were being worked on.
Clever, social, dexterous, and resourceful, they seemed an obvious choice. What wasn’t to like?
What wasn’t to like, as it turned out, was the parrots not wanting to Work for the Man.
No matter how smart humans engineered the birds to be, they couldn’t ever instil the sort of dutiful nature a Gehirner needed.
In fact, the smarter they made them, the more the parrots found ways to shirk their responsibilities.
There is, Skotch reckons, a lesson one might learn from that.
The trip to Madparrot Alley—as the district of the city where the parrots flocked was known—is by raft, and in the dark.
There’s a whole buried webwork of subterranean waterways, quite apart from sewage and reclamation and even the clean water supplies that lead into every human dwelling.
It’s the supply that feeds the green of the city itself, pumped up from deep aquifers or desalinated from the sea, husbanded and recaptured so that the reservoir barely needs topping up, a masterpiece of conservation.
And here they are, bobbing about on it like jolly animals in some human child’s book.
A raft made of wooden slats over bottles, poled by the two squirrels while Fischer crouches at one end and regards their two passengers doubtfully.
Both at once, given the enormous scope of his protruding eyes.
From above, through precisely designed cracks in the ceiling of the pipeways, shrouds of roots descend.
That’s why these pipes aren’t full and pressurised, because you need to leave gaps for the trees to reach in and slurp out their share.
There’s a whole Gehirner crew of frogs and newts who go through these tunnels on a constant yearlong cycle, pruning it all back to make sure the flow isn’t too choked, checking the roots for disease and damage.
And clearing out the bodies, because these waterways are prime territory for Rattenkonige to sink their failures in.
You wouldn’t think anyone made concrete shoes small enough.
Skotch, being the biggest piece of ballast on the raft, keeps to the centre and looks right back at Fischer.
He’s run out of conversational gambits by then, mostly because there’s only so many times you can ask, “Where’s the mouse?
” before a lack of response becomes awkward.
And in other company he’d start to talk about the danger of some mad rodent escaped from the unknown conditions of the farm with a head full of chemical equations.
But these are anarchists, and he doesn’t have a solid handle on where the Maulers really stand.
A rare thing, for a Gehirner to go completely off the rails and out of the system, and when they do, they all have their own particular trajectory, from those who just want to tinker with the nuts and bolts with a spanner, make things better in some loosely defined way, to full-on doomsday cults who’ll burn the green cities down and render the entire concept of Gehirner extinct if they can.
Lulu’s still talking, of course. She tried to get all three of the raft crew going about their life and history, gathering more information.
Then she tried to get them to open up on their ideology.
Lulu’s wide-eyed interested act—not even an act, really; she genuinely is interested—hasn’t ever failed before, but these three stay shut up as clams, staring at her.
They do not trust her, Skotch guesses. Probably they don’t trust anyone.
You get paranoid enough just as a freelancer, with no social group there to watch your back and reassure you as to your place in the world.
How much worse that must be for the genuinely lost and outcast?
Then Fischer’s tying up the raft, and the two squirrels—who haven’t offered names—scurry up ratlines leading vertically into the dark.
Skotch is a fair climber himself, and Lulu has wings, but he assumes this is the last contribution Herr Fischer will be making to their journey.
When he looks back, though, the toad is right at his tail.
Just crawling up the wall like a damned spider, some piece of tree-frog inheritance worked into his geneware and giving his toes rough adhesive pads.
Then the squirrels shift a metal cover up above and the sun slices down at him like sword blades. Even before he blinks it away his ears are telling him exactly where he is. No mistaking the soundscape of Madparrot Alley.
The parrots fell off their service contracts quickly enough, so that other guilds moved seamlessly in to take up the slack and pick up the rations and the Plangent that went with the work.
Unlike more organised overgroups like the Redcoats or the Rattenkonige, the parrots don’t just apply themselves to a kind of organised protection racket.
The sheer idea of being organised in that way turned out to be anathema to the parrots.
Highly social, yes. Hierarchical and stratified amongst themselves, yes.
Fitting into anyone else’s idea of a grand system?
Absolutely not. The parrots, through innate orneriness or flawed geneware, flat-out rejected the role that the engineers had set out for them.
And yet, at the same time, attempts to eradicate them met with technical failure and a surprising resistance from Neuwien’s human population.
In those early days of the project, there had apparently been a sense that, once you’d made these things, uplifted your Little Helpers, they weren’t just something to stamp out.
You had to live with it, after you’d made them to live with you.
Or that’s the story. Skotch reckons it was more that the parrots were way too smart to get poisoned or trapped, and nobody’s fool enough to start throwing parrot-specific diseases around because that kind of thing can get out of hand really quickly.
So these days, there’s an invisible and somewhat shifting line of tolerance, and so long as the nuisance value of the parrots stays below that, the humans live with it.
The soiling and noise and petty vandalism of the engineered parrots is no worse than the equivalent behaviours of their natural forebears, as it turns out.
And when the parrots push things beyond that hard-to-define boundary?
Well, there’s a reason that, while the fox and badger Strains have been officially retired and aren’t being updated any more, owl and hawk Gehirner are very much a thing.
A haughty, aristocratic elite in their high eyries above the city, waiting for the call to go ply their murderous trade where the parrots live.
Or to cull the pigeon army forces, if they’re getting too plump.
Or maybe the squirrels. The raptor Strains are nobody’s friends, animals made entirely for killing, like Szerky the stoatweasel, like Tybelle the cat.
The way Skotch’s luck is going, he’s vaguely surprised not to emerge out into a whole raptor convention up there, but it’s just the parrots.
Up overhead, in the lower branches of the trees and the organic cladding of the buildings: a riotous, bright-coloured madcap whirl of noise and motion, flying feathers and territorial squabbling.
Flocks of them flurry back and forth to unseen triggers, and every one of them keeps up a constant heckling at every other one, renewing their precise standing within the wider parrot polity.
Some of what’s said is ’Sprech, words that Skotch’s ears can separate from the din and assign meaning to.
The rest is just parrot-noise, the sublingual cawing and cackling that they’d evolved long before primates started monkeying with their genes.
Lulu’s eyes are wide, her head tucked into her puffed-out neck. Perhaps the noise conveys a whole extra level of meaning to another bird, probably that she isn’t welcome. Certainly if she wants to get some interviews from the locals she’ll have her work cut out for her.
Not participating in the human-designed Gehirner system means the parrots have a problem, of course.
No regular consignments of Plangent are bestowed on them from on high, and they aren’t extorting it from harder-working animals in the sort of cheerfully ruthless way the armies do.
Instead, they just grab it where they find it, neck it when they have it, live without it when they don’t.
At any given time, maybe three-quarters of the parrot population of Neuwien hasn’t had its regular dosage and has fallen back into dumbness, all that advanced geneware just ceasing to make the proper connections in their heads.
And then, at some point, another parrot feeds them an ampoule of the good stuff, and they wake up, remember their words, start acting with that extra level of smarts the Gehirner are supposed to have. Until they run out again.