Chapter 9 #2
It seems a horror, to Skotch. Losing yourself, regaining yourself, long periods when the only name you answer to is the cackle-call that parrots give each other.
Lose all your understanding of the world, memories locked away and Plangent the only possible key.
But then parrots live longer than any other Strain—actually live longer than most humans, even.
He heard one of them speak about it once—some spaced-out-sounding parrot in a span of Plangent-induced lucidity, talking about the coming and going of mind entirely equably, as though each side of the coin has its advantages.
As though it’s a mystical experience too transcendent for some poor unimaginative beast like Skotch to understand.
Gave him the creeps to hear it. The thought still shivers his fur.
He looks up now, trying to flatten his ears against the cacophony.
The air is bright with parrots chasing one another back and forth, bolting in and out of nests, staring down at him with round, mad eyes.
Mindless, mindful, a spectrum of awareness from the smart animal to the wise Gehirner, and who knows whether they go beyond even that?
As though, in the raucous air between them, some unseen avian jester god exists, made up of all their sounds and colours and movement, simultaneously idiot and savant.
The secret religion-philosophy that the parrots don’t so much follow as embody from moment to moment.
Certainly the presence of the parrots, and the fact they’re more than willing to meet violence with violence when pushed, means the armies and the other domineering Gehirner factions are kept out of parrot country.
Nobody’s running a racket here. Which, for the actual service guilds, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all bouquets and parties.
Instead, they end up leaving out offerings to the parrots just like they’d pay up to the army provisioners or the Rattenkonig enforcers, in the hope that the birds will take what’s given, rather than taking everything apart.
And it works, just about, give or take. As though that notional parrot god really does exist, in the form of the entire parrot community, and it can be appeased by votive worship.
But the key thing is that, because of this peculiar freewheeling arrangement, the outcast amongst the Gehirner also creep out here.
To live in the chaotic shadow of the parrots, where they can follow their own stray paths without the guilds and the armies cracking down on them.
Cults and sects, lone fugitives and dissident political groups.
Like the Maulers. Because the parrots don’t care if you’re an anarchist. In the moments when they even understand what one is, probably they approve.
“I know you, Amerikaner,” says the rat with the bandolier.
“You work for the Man.” The bandolier is of actual bullet casings, human ones, antiques, little point 22s.
Some trinket they stole from the wrong side of Rule One to show how daring they are.
It must weigh the rodent down so much he probably doesn’t go on the rafts much.
Or move about much. This is obviously his pad, though.
He introduces himself as Wizzo, which is not a name off of the approved rat list. He’s making clockworks, obsessively fitting the wheels together even as he talks, the brass of his adornment scratching at the brass of the cogs.
“I work for myself,” says Skotch. “I went freelance an age ago.” A rat’s age, certainly.
The parrot—the one in the red necker who’s in with the Maulers, and maybe serves as their ambassador to wider parrotdom—shrieks at a pitch that sets Skotch’s ears ringing.
“We know you!” she calls. “We know you, Herr Uzco! Still on the company tab, eh!” And Skotch knows her, too.
She’s the one who snatched up Meece over in Franz-Ferdinand’s.
Meaning that, yes, he is at least talking to the right pack of anarchists.
Shame they’re not really talking to him.
They’re in a round space in a wall where something probably ought to be.
Loose wiring and bio-electric tendrils suggest it was pried out, likely by the parrots.
There’s a design painted up on one wall: an animal in a red necker—some sort of mammal but it’s crudely done, so hard to tell precise species—with its hands outstretched as though imploring.
Written above and around it are the words, A plague on you for teaching me your language.
Which, presumably, means something to someone.
Means this is Mauler territory now, Wizzo the Rat’s clock shop.
Skotch hopes against Jeff that these idiots in the red neckers haven’t got their little hands on any explosives or all this gear ratio stuff will start to look way less innocent.
“Where’s the mouse?” he tries. Didn’t work on the raft. Maybe the rules are different here.
“What mouse?” Wizzo says.
“You don’t get to see the mouse,” the parrot squawks simultaneously, and one of the squirrels, the gray one, says, “The mouse don’t want to see you, Bandit,” suggesting they haven’t gotten their stories straight ahead of time.
The red squirrel sees all of that obfuscation and raises them a “We should just off the pair of ’em,” with a broad Anglot accent.
Fischer, who incredibly is looking like the most stable of the lot, sits in a pool of warty skin and boggling eyes.
He’s got his popgun back, stubby hands stripping the spring mechanism and checking it over, every bit the hard-bitten revolutionary.
“Saint Frances has vouched,” he says. Like Benson, the words ripple up through his throat and out the gape of his open mouth.
“That gets Herr Bandit here as a guest. Herr Bandit is not to be offed.” His gaze somehow strays to indicate Lulu without the focus of his glassy eyes really moving. “Her, though…”
“She’s that pet one,” says the punchy Red.
“Lapdog of the human institution,” Gray puts in, not to be outdone.
“We should—” they both get out, then glower, each determined to out-revolutionary the other.
“Ain’t nobody getting offed,” says Wizzo the Rat, not looking up from his clockwork. “Some of us like Schreiber’s stuff.”
There is some dissent on this point, which degenerates into a heated debate about whether it’s ideologically permissible to consume the products of the system and whether anything produced by a human can be repurposed to have revolutionary merit.
Which, given that each one of them was produced by a human, and here they are with their little red scarves on, makes Skotch wonder why their heads don’t just explode.
And then Wizzo shuts them all down because, although they’re all egalitarian siblings of the revolution, he’s still in charge.
“You don’t know, Amerikaner, why your paymasters want the mouse?”
“They pay me less the more questions I ask,” says Skotch, knowing simultaneously that it’s a good line and that Lulu is eagerly memorising it for later appropriation.
“Look, I get you guys. You don’t want to work the services, I get that.
You aren’t just leeches like that army lot.
I respect it. You chart your own course.
Gets hard to scrape together the Plangent required for cogent political argument I’m sure, but plainly you manage. ”
Wizzo shoots him a narrow and unfriendly look like he’s reconsidering the no-offing rule. He says nothing, though. The parrot even laughs. Or, at least, makes parrot noises that are maybe a laugh and maybe a sign that Polly wants an ampoule.
“And you’re right, they don’t tell me anything,” Skotch goes on.
“But I see enough to work out the mouse is going to be bad news for anybody who has him. Anybody who’s near him.
Look, you guys know how it is, with anti-system outfits like yours.
Just because you’re all against the system, doesn’t mean you’re all in bed with each other.
You ask yourselves honestly who you hate most, and tell me it’s not those guys two floors down who want a slightly different set of changes to you. ”
The two squirrels and the parrot fall over themselves to tell him he’s wrong. Wizzo applies himself to his clockwork. Fischer—and maybe Fischer’s older than most here, and has seen more—inflates and deflates, a froggy sigh that perhaps acknowledges Skotch’s point.
“This mouse isn’t your sort of people,” Skotch tells them. “I get a very bad feeling about this mouse. I mean, there are enemies of the system,” he leaves off wringing his paws together to indicate this noble gathering of activists, “and there are just enemies.”