Chapter 10
HERR DOKTOR
It’s not a showdown. It isn’t just a raccoon and a mouse facing off against one another waiting for high noon.
They don’t have the space to themselves.
Over in one corner there’s a somewhat ragged-looking older parrot—a first-generation Gehirner, given how long they live—strutting back and forth before a battered e-reader, reaching out with a four-fingered foot to scroll the text from time to time.
Skotch wonders whether they’re the lucky bird who gets their Plangent on the regular, or whether they just recently emerged from years in the intellectual wilderness to catch up on their reading.
It’s human text, though, so high level stuff for a powerfully multilingual Gehirner.
Another wall of the space is given over to an art studio where class is in session.
A whole load of parrots plus a crow and a couple of pigeons are all working on little canvases.
Up above are some originals—bijou little portraits of humans, miniatures that, to the Little Helpers, are good as full size canvases.
They’re making copies, Skotch notes with a twinge of alarm.
Duplicating the lines and strokes of human masterpieces using engineered animal cunning.
He’s no judge—Skotch doesn’t know from art—but he reckons there’s some top quality knocking-off going on here.
Maybe it’s just for practice, but he has an uneasy feeling that he’s seeing the ground floor of a criminal edifice that has humans living in the penthouse.
Gehirner crime and human crime getting tangled together is a real Gordian knot for Rule One and the thought of human law turning up with animal names on their warrants is enough to make him wring his sweaty hands together.
Animals aren’t the only ones to exploit unintended opportunities.
To Skotch, with night-adapted mammal eyes, the paintings are all dull, muddy colours rising sluggishly from shadows and greys.
Bird eyes, with an entire extra set of receptors, can duplicate shades beyond the dreams of the most exacting human, and just maybe some human forging ring has picked up on that.
In a further corner two more parrots, a rat, and a pair of newts pass round a printed cardboard bottle of something, tipping the weighty thing precariously this way and that to decant sloshes of amber liquid.
Looks to Skotch like the sort of container humans use for urine, but perhaps it’s a particularly good vintage.
There is a little jack-straws stack of popguns nearby.
They’re security, and they give Skotch a sharp look when he ducks in.
It lingers, that look. He’s not one of them and he’s not welcome.
Fischer and the squirrel give them the nod, and the end result of all of that exchange is that there are far more eyes on Skotch than he’s happy with.
And then there’s Meece, and at least two-fifths of a chemistry set already set up. Some purpose-made Gehirner glassware, some small human stuff, and a few pieces cobbled together from found materials by cunning Mauler artificers. A miniature centrifuge whirs away, spinning its iotas of material.
Meece is wearing that garment he had on before, that was mostly a cape then, but which he’s buttoned up his front, fastened at his wrists and ankles, so that it’s become overalls, the tiniest item of protective gear in the world.
Or it would be, save for that even smaller pair of goggles, bulbous and insectoid about his narrow wedge of a head.
The regard he gives Skotch is alien, impenetrable.
Two wary raccoons bend and bulge in silhouette across the curved lenses as Skotch approaches.
“Herr Doktor Meece,” says Fischer from behind. “This here is Herr Bandit from Uzco, come just to talk to Herr Doktor. Herr Doktor’s safety remains guaranteed and nobody forces anyone to do anything, isn’t that right?” Goggling gaze turned to Skotch.
“Sure, talk,” he agrees. “All friends here. All just trying to make ends meet around the edge of the system.”
Meece’s alien regard doesn’t waver. The mouse is frozen in the midst of his profession, as though no amount of verbal reassurance would stand in the way if Skotch went for him.
The perennial prey species, always ready to flee.
“You almost had me,” he says. “At the eating house.” Not the most auspicious start to the conversation.
“I saved your guts at Ferdinand’s.” Skotch, attempting to establish credentials he doesn’t quite possess. “That stoat—”
Meece flinches, just at the word, just at the thought.
And mice don’t live long but, out on the farm, those brief lives are eked out in the shadow of enforcer Gehirner like Szerky.
“Herr Raccoon,” he says, “you’re persistent.
” His voice is, of course, high, thin. A mouse voice, but very exact in its diction.
The words formed at least partly by lips and tongue, like Skotch’s are.
Herps like Fischer or Benson are often sloppy speakers, and birds are too good at it—most of them capable of a far wider range of sounds than the stripped-down language of ’Sprech really requires.
It’s the mammal Strains who speak like humans intended; like humans themselves do.
“Herr Doktor,” Skotch says respectfully.
His fingers pluck at the cuffs of fur about his wrists.
He should go into his spiel now, explain why Meece is going to be so much better off with Uzco than with any of the others snapping at the mouse’s tail.
Shouldn’t even be a hard sell given players like Szerky and Murnau.
But Skotch has a nut to crack, and it’s not just getting Meece to cooperate.
It’s getting to the heart of the poisonous riddle the little squeaker represents.
So instead he asks, “What even is all this?”
The mouse makes a sound so high even Skotch’s ears can only just sieve it from the air.
A snicker. Not a happy laugh. A lot of despair in it, for a mouse who’s only had three years at most to accumulate bad karma.
“You don’t even know,” he says. “Here you are, come to lay hands on me, and you don’t even know.
” That faint thread of rural accent to him, like Szerky.
Skotch knows that, for humans, rustic means unsophisticated.
To an animal it means just the opposite.
The Farm Projects are great eco-machines designed to turn out food with the minimum of physical and chemical footprint.
They run a tight ship there. Not yokels but scientists and aristocrats.
And peasant labour whose lives are worth precisely one maus each.
“I mean, I know you’re brewing up something fierce.” Skotch jabs his snout at the glassware. “Something that meant you had to go on the lam from the Projects.”
The mouse bares his teeth—bares them further, anyway, because for a mouse they’re always partly on show. “As if I’d need a reason,” he says, “to get out.”
“And you don’t want to go back, right. I get that.
” And, again, a perfect point to fight in Uzco’s corner, but that nut is still there in his mind, defiantly unopened.
“Do they know what you’re up to?” A nod at the drinking guards, at Fischer and the red.
“They going to wake up one morning wondering why the air tastes of almonds or something?”
“This is what they are saying about me,” Meece remarks—to himself, to some invisible but judging audience of scientific posterity. “I, who seek only to bring an equality across our kind, to all Gehirner. To bring us and our creators more to a level.”
The great leveller. It’s a phrase and Skotch knows what it means.
But it’s exactly the sort of rhetoric Skotch can see working on the Maulers.
Just vague enough to sound like freedom until it turns out you’re talking about murder.
“That’s what that is, huh? You brewing up the ol’ freedom juice there?
Gonna put it in the human water supply, make sure they can taste the equality? ”
He’s watching for the guilt, or maybe it’s the triumph of it.
Seeing which way the little squeaker will jump, to tell him how close to the mark he is.
Skotch never knew either rat or mouse that could really clamp down on the thousand little tells of an agitated animal.
He never met Meece before, though. There’s barely a twitch of whisker, giving Fischer a run in the cold-blooded stakes.
And it’s to the toad he looks, saying, “I do not wish to speak to Herr Raccoon any further. I have work to do.”
“Herr Bandit has used up his opportunities,” Fischer announces. “Come now, Herr Bandit. It is time for your exit.”
Which, from a frog with a gun, sounds particularly threatening, and Skotch shrugs off his four-fingered grip.
“Meece,” he says, “this place won’t be safe for you.
” At last, and very belatedly, deciding to do what Benson actually paid him for.
“There’s more than just the stoat on your trail.
I can’t promise Uzco are only thinking of your best interests, but they’re not sending killers after you.
” Yet. “They can keep you safer than these clowns can.”
The red squirrel practically puts the end of his popgun into Skotch’s ear, hissing furiously and lashing his tail like a tiny lion.
“Herr Bandit should leave now,” Fisher says. “Or it may be his safety that cannot be guaranteed.”
“Seriously, Doctor,” Skotch insists, even as the toad gets hold of him. “How long do you think they can shield you here?”
The weird, inorganic stare of the bulging lenses bores into and around him. “How long do you think I have?” Meece asks softly. “How long do you think I need?” One little clawed hand caresses the centrifuge, now spun down to stillness. “The work is all.”