Chapter 13 #2
“Mister, they put a soul in you, but you wasted it,” Craw tells him urgently, like it’s in any way her business and like she really cares.
Some serious sincerity in that raspy crow voice of hers.
“Running around chasing buttons, never anything in your head but the task at hand. Well now you got yourself some thinking time. That’s what these cells are for, you see?
Some time to put your head in order. When they designed your Strain, they made a space for you to grow a soul, Mister.
And soon enough you’re going back to the cycle of life, every part of you pulled apart and put to use.
Each individual component of this sack of earthly remains,” peck, peck, “put back into the system the way it’s supposed to be.
But what happens to the part that’s you, Mister?
You think there’s any part of the machinery out there can repurpose it?
You think that, unless you commit it to a greater purpose now, it won’t just get wasted and lost? ”
“You, sister, are crazy,” Skotch tells her.
“You think about it, Mister. You tell me, when I come for you the next time—that’s going to be the last time—that you don’t want to commit yourself to a greater duty.
Because let me tell you, your time is come, and unless you let go of that little kernel of you that you’re hoarding, it’ll go to nothing, and it’ll be just the meat getting separated out and put to use.
You have it in you to be more than meat, Mister.
But you got to want to be something better.
You got to believe. That way the part of you that’s spirit gets to move on, cut loose of these here bonds.
Take wing, Mister, like you never did in life. ”
She leaves him them, probably judging that time alone with his deteriorating thoughts will be more incentive than her preaching.
Separatists, they call themselves. And he still thinks they’re mad, honestly.
It’s just that, sitting there in the dark with death over his shoulder, madness feels a mighty comforting option.
And what is the part of him that is Skotch, exactly?
Where is it located? When you’ve put him through the process this place specialises in, which bucket does it end up in?
The Separation Plant looms large in the mind of every Gehirner.
It’s a part of the green city infrastructure, just one more cog in that vast machine of sustainability the humans planned out.
It’s where every Gehirner goes, in the end, when their lifespan—short, long, indeterminate—is run out.
Feeding the city one way or another, nothing wasted.
The guild that runs the Separation Plant has, over the generations and the years, begun to have odd ideas.
Because when your life is spent watching the mortal remains of other Gehirner stripped down to the basics, you start to ask questions.
Specifically, Where do we go? Because, once the process is done, there’s nothing left in any of those buckets that is the me every Gehirner feels they have.
Nothing of it is bequeathed to the city.
It isn’t recycled. Such an important element, the self, yet where is it when the separation process is done?
Sister Craw would tell him that if Skotch acknowledges that invisible part of himself he’ll go on still.
As though he’s accepting a contract with some angelic guild in an invisible city of souls.
Maybe human heaven has a divine infrastructure that the spirits of the Gehirner tend. As above, so below.
And if he denies his immortal nature, then nothing. Oblivion. No more Skotch.
And Skotch strongly believes that No more Skotch is how things are going to go.
With a dose of Plangent in him and a rationalist wind at his back he’d say the self was no more than the emergent property of all that neurological complexity they put into him.
That a native raccoon probably even has some dull nubbin of it, which the engineers built on.
But right now it seems a cost-free choice to bow the knee to the Separatist ideology, given he’s going to go into the teeth of the machine anyway.
Why not pay lip service to the idea in case it’s true?
Pascal’s wager, if Pascal had been a desperate, dumbed-down, imprisoned raccoon.
He’s heard it said that the sublime truth of the Separatist creed is how animals in the utmost of their need, death hanging over them, throw aside a lifetime of scepticism to sign up.
From Skotch’s point of view, at this moment, it’s like saying that information exacted under torture is more valid than that given calmly and freely.
At this moment he’d claim a belief in anything if there was any chance it would help him out.
But the only help the Separatists are offering is strictly post mortem.
They come for him soon after. He’d thought they’d let him stew with his morbid thoughts to soften him up but when he comes out on the separator floor he sees it’s because there’s quite the select guest list for this execution.
The Graycoats, for sure. His gun-toting escort and a dozen more scattered about. From the way they’re just loitering, bored and fidgety, he reckons this still isn’t their fight. Hired muscle, if you can describe a squirrel as muscle.
He sees Szerky there, though. The look she gives him, the coiling line of her body, still suggests butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
Maybe it wouldn’t. He reckons there’s enough cold blood in her to make the Baron blink.
Country Club donations have bought her a bodyguard of Grays, but it seems this is bigger than just her.
He sees Eddi and Loui there too, and a clutch of other gangster rats from Mother Murnau’s brood, plus a couple of knots of other rodents that—from the mutual distance they’re keeping—are out of some other Rattenkonig retinues.
Big, sleek rats, easily as beefy as the Graycoats, but mostly armed with blades and spikers for close, nasty work.
Under the watch of the popguns they’re playing nicely, for now.
And Maria, he sees with disappointment. The possum, hunched there with her Uzco collar on. Giving him a look like What ya gonna do?
The crows pass through and between them, just going on with business.
And their business is reclamation of a very particular kind.
Humans designed this place, of course, just like everything in the Gehirner world is built on human designs.
Built up in chaotic heaps and weird directions sometimes, but the skeleton it all hangs from was born in human minds.
This is where the bodies come. The mortal remains of every Gehirner that dies—and they die: naturally, in industrial accidents, in violent clashes with one another.
But humans had just known that they were mortal, and so provided their Little Helpers with this multi-purpose mortuary facility.
Every small corpse is brought here for disposal in the separators.
There’s a chute with a conveyor belt, constantly turning.
As Skotch watches, a couple of squirrels go in.
A Red, a Gray, locked together like they’re still fighting.
Or like they made up after death. A lesson there, that Skotch reckons none of the onlookers are going to learn.
Strive how you want, it’s all just meat. None of your differences matter.
The pair of corpses drop into the maw of the separator.
There are metal teeth there and they grind fine.
It’s a ghastly sight. Skotch, no stranger to them, tries to flinch away but his escort won’t let him.
The Grays prod him and shove him towards those endlessly meeting teeth.
For a moment he thinks about grabbing a popgun, holding the room to ransom.
But the problem with a popgun is there’s only one pop.
It means that advantage of numbers counts for a hell of a lot.
Perfect tools for keeping one raccoon in line, not so much for assaulting a crowd.
They get him up on the platform of the separator with a bit of wrangling, practically shoving a barrel up his nose at one point. A little street theatre for the crowd in the cheap seats. From up there, it’s all downhill to the teeth.
He looks down into their constant grind.
The crows give him sidelong, almost sympathetic looks.
Accessories, but not really involved. The ministers of small deaths.
Some of them are croaking a kind of hymn together as they check over the machinery, or pass by, towing little wheelie bins of dead flesh.
Skotch knows the tune. Meant to be cheery but amongst the Gehirner it’s become a dirge, the thing you hear at memorials.
“All Small Beasts,” it’s called, sung in Finnish or some such so that the perfectly pleasant lyrics become something hallowed and strange.
Looking into those teeth, where the last twists of squirrel fur are disappearing, he understands the Separatists.
Because to see this, day in, day out, and have nothing to cling on to, that would be terrible.
How much better to believe that the grinding, tearing maw liberates some part of the beast that goes free from the industrial processes below.
That ascends to some further place where things like this are not done.
The maddest and most extreme—heretics even amongst the Separatists—claim that the separated part of you, the invisible part, can be born human, if you live your life a certain way. Though no two ever agree just how.
The teeth go still. Just these. Across the rest of the Separation Plant a dozen other grinders are still at work, but this mouth stops chewing. What descends is far from a hush, but he can hear Szerky when she speaks.
“Herr Skotch,” she says. “We are all gathered eagerly to hear your confession.”