Chapter 11 #2
“Do I take it that your having returned to my old haunts means you’ve lost the trail, Fraulein Szerky?” he asks her. “Poor country girl got herself lost in the big city?”
He waits for the insult to land but it misses her, as so many attempts at injury doubtless have in the past. Her look of devilment only increases.
“I confess, Herr Skotch, that you are not the lumpen oaf I took you for. You have a certain skill set that doesn’t come from your engineering.”
High praise, really. You’ve made something of yourself.
The Divine Jeff, smiling down from His notional cloud, congratulating you for finding a way beyond your inbuilt limitations.
And it’s easy to think about her Strain as no more than killers, and the farms as prison camps, but that’s where the cutting edge of the science is.
Forget the rural accents, they’re sharp as tacks out there.
Hence why Meece’s game, whatever it is, is such a problem.
Skotch had been about to make some serious inroads into finding out just what that game was, but he doesn’t want to do that with Szerky looking over his shoulder, or maybe under his armpit given their difference in sizes.
Which means it’s time to follow up Sly’s lead, because if his path takes him down to the Baron’s domain then Szerky will find that fortress more than ready to hold her off.
Clannish lot, down there. Skotch is only lucky that—as with so many of his contacts—he was of service to them a year back, and he’s hopefully still in the good books.
“Yeah, well,” he says to Szerky, preparatory to going, “I’m for hire, once this job’s done. You and your Country Club pals are more than welcome to come press buttons into my hand.”
“What about before this job is done?” she asks. Her hand, lifted, pricking the longest hairs of his coat, arrests his turn.
“You care to clarify?” he says carefully, retreating from Uwe’s booth and lowering his voice in the probably vain hope the cyborg pigeon won’t overhear.
“Herr Skotch, whatever they’re paying you, I’m sure they’re not recognising your true worth. Not mausgelt worth. You, the skilled investigator. How lucky that my employers at the Clubs have deep pockets.”
“That so?” he asks, as neutrally as he can, what with the instinct overload of her being within snap of his throat and the whole cross-species appeal of all that boneless elegance.
“I bet they just scattered a few tabs of Plangent and a fistful of buttons in front of you, and expected you to put the collar right back on,” Szerky says.
“You’re not far wrong,” he admits.
“How long have you got, Skotch? Eighteen months, two years, three tops. It’s six to eight years for your Strain, isn’t it, before the engineering and the neurology fail.”
“If you’re offering to cut my suffering short, Fraulein, I’m happy to let nature take its course,” he says, and she finds the sentiment funnier than he’d meant it.
“Bring Meece to us, or bring us his corpse, and you need never get dumb again. My people have deep pockets. We can afford to keep a raccoon in deep thoughts for the rest of his natural life. It wouldn’t even put a dent in the Projects’ operating budget.
Our surplus stocks are the stuff of dreams, Herr Skotch.
You’d not believe how much we have just … lying around.”
“My whole life, huh?”
She tilts her sharp snout, giving him an exasperated look. “Natural life, Herr Skotch. We don’t need to, if you’ll forgive the pun, weasel with our words. No sudden and unexpected end for Herr Skotch after his faithful service. We pay for value received.”
“Well, that is a profoundly generous and unexpected offer,” he admits.
“Even so.” And she gathers herself to slide away from him, considering it a done deal.
Residual honesty—and maybe he doesn’t like her looking so self-satisfied—has him adding, “Only a shame that old Benson got to me first, Fraulein. I’m just a simple service Gehirner at heart. I can’t carry that many jobs in my head at once.”
She stops still for just a second, as though she can’t quite believe where he’s taking this. “Uzco?” she asks acidly. “Really?”
He lets his stance—which had become a bit puffed-up and tall-standing with the threat of her—sag into What you gonna do?
“I know,” he confirms. “But I did say.” And he’s as mendacious as any stoat right now because he was halfway to throwing Uzco out of bed, given he trusts them almost as little as he trusts her.
But some glitchy part of his neural architecture understands loyalty even if he’s freelance now.
Screw over Benson for his own conscience?
Sure. Do it for this tempting piece of murder? Not so much.
“Herr Skotch, Uzco will come and go. They’re foreigners, short on friends, intruders into our little ecosystem here in Neuwien,” she tells him.
“Maybe they’ll be gone even before your own time is up.
And certainly, if you planned to find a little raccoon hausfrau and raise some kits, then those kits will more than likely grow up in a city where the logo on Das Uzcogeb?ude has changed, but the Country Clubs are well and truly still in control of the food.
Do you understand me, Herr Skotch? We will persist, and you and yours will always be in our shadow. ”
“Ah, now this I do know what to do with,” he tells her, mumming relief. “You see, when it was all sweet nothings you had me confused. But we’re back to threats now. Play to your strengths. I get that. Threats against kids I don’t even know I’m going to have. That’s class.”
Her look is steely. “You and yours, Herr Skotch. That old shellback aside, nobody of your acquaintance wants us as an enemy.”
“Fraulein, I would live my whole life with no enemies except fleas and intestinal parasites, and probably I could even come to an accommodation with them. But life’s not like that.
I’m just some poor freelancer making a living.
You decide that makes me your enemy then I reckon it brings you down to the mud and doesn’t much alter my chances. If you’ll excuse me.”
He has no hat to doff. He just shuffles off, every hair of his pelt prickling as he braces for the strike.
She doesn’t go for him—too public, maybe—but there’s a reckoning in the cold gaze he feels on him.
She doesn’t tail him, either. Or at least, if she does, he doesn’t mark her.
Not by sight or sound, and of course there’s no scent.
He has to hope that his next port of call still has appropriate security. Before rendezvousing with Sly, he’s off to see the Baron of Waste Sector Three.
A city full of humans uses a lot of water; a city full of humans and Gehirner a lot more.
Clean water. Clean enough that the delicate intestines of humans can process it without getting sick.
Clean enough that the Gehirner—otherwise a bit more robust—can drink it without something messing up their engineered neurology.
During peak global industrialisation, water was in the top three causes of wars.
Water processing was an enormous energy sink, and as more people fled for the cities, the load grew until systems broke.
Epidemics, water-borne plagues, filth-dwelling bacteria cleaning up, so to speak.
Part of what gives the green cities such a negligible environmental footprint includes bio-efficient means to process and clean water.
Not exactly glamorous. Not the poster child for the future.
But absolutely essential. That and keeping the lights on are every green city’s top priorities and, frankly, fewer people catch cholera if the bulbs flicker.
The earliest green cities used engineered reedbeds, an updated model of old, old tech.
The drawback being that the reedbeds themselves used up disproportionate space because the reeds needed access to sunlight.
Space that the cities also needed for agriculture and living space and recreational parks and …
all the different competing drives that the initiative is still trying to juggle.
Plus the smell. Human civilization is nothing if not an attempt to get away from reminders of what life is all about.
So it is that later projects like Neuwien have next-gen sewage works that nobody needs to look at.
All underground, buried in the dark but still doing the reeds’ work.
The water falling down from the city above—the used water, from washing, from cleaning, from commercial and automated processes, and that vast amount of bodily waste that living things must constantly rid themselves of—that water passes down into the unlit, dank domains that are the Waste Sectors.
Instead of green reedbeds and tales from the riverbank, it’s fungus, now.
A sieve of busy mycelial hyphae, just desperately hungry for all the nasty stuff that humans put into the system.
Foul water in, clean water out, happy hyphae, and the whole grand cistern system overseen by a special class of Gehirner.
For when someone has to get into the water and sort things out.
Skotch descends into the underworld to the sound of funnelling water and the smell of organic waste.
At first just open walkways alongside rushing channels, the sky above boxed in by organocrete walls.
Then closed tunnels, and the constant vibration of thousands of litres of water thundering all around.
Like a storm, like a tide, the unending backdrop to the lives of the Wastewater Gehirner.
They have a whole town here, a community of specialists only loosely connected to the rest of the city.
Gasthofmund, a place most non-residents have no intention of ever visiting.