Chapter 21
GREY MATTER
Skotch looks out at the troops as they file in. Squirrels, in the majority, but he sees a badger out there with the grays, and the reds have a fox. Those remnant carnivores, those discontinued models, making rent the best way they can by turning mercenary.
“Where,” he demands, “is Saint Frances?” Because there should be a huge figure at his back right now, forbidding by its very presence the possibility of violence. Instead of which there’s an absence as big as the Chapel itself.
“She left!” Lulu bursts out. “Skotch, we were all sitting here waiting, and all these others coming in to escape the fighting, and then suddenly the Saint, she gets a call on her device, the little one she carries. I tried to listen in but all the talk was on the other side. All she was saying was ‘yes’ and ‘okay’ and she didn’t seem happy with any of it, but she listened and she listened.
And then she was up on her feet, and she gave over the food and medicines to us, told us to give it out to whoever needed, and she left!
She left, Skotch. Just walked away. Walked up.
” Meaning she went up the metal ladder to the one human-sized exit the Chapel had, the one that led up to a metro station for humans, and thence to all the other human spaces of the city.
The exit that Gehirner didn’t take, because it led to where they weren’t supposed to be.
Skotch looks around, matching gazes with Wizzo, with Fischer. Nobody’s any the wiser. Saint Frances just up and left them in their hour of need and that’s mighty inconvenient, because that need is just ramping up the more soldiers filter in.
No fighting yet, just that gradual buildup.
Wizzo has a little telescope, probably self-made, and he hands it to Skotch wordlessly.
The Reds and the Grays have at least as many eyes on each other as they do on anyone else.
No love lost nor trust given, over that way.
But they’re not doing what nature intended and just popping away at the opposite side.
He sees the more decorated squirrels going round, curbing the keen of the others.
Brass-Shirt is sitting on a tiny fold-out stool sipping at that damn goblet.
On the Gray side there’s some scarred veteran Skotch doesn’t know, wearing a cloak of sewn-together leaf shapes.
The material looks like that tough vegetable faleather stuff that can probably stop a popgun bullet at sufficient range.
Not fighting each other, but not advancing on the centre of the Chapel, nor just randomly brutalising the refugees. Waiting for something. Which in the short term is obviously preferable, but it gives Skotch a bad feeling about the long term.
“So tell me!” Lulu shoulders into him and he almost loses the glass into the water. “What happened? Did you get the mouse? Was there a fight? What’s the story, Skotch?”
“Did nobody prescribe you some bedrest?” he complains.
“You owe me, Skotch! You owe me the story!” And they’ve obviously been feeding her the right drugs because, while she still sounds a bit weak, there’s the annoying pigeon he knows and—if you twist his arm enough to make him admit it—is at least a little bit fond of.
“Sure there was a fight,” he says. “Maybe even still is. Not one that I had much part in. Two folk like that get into a tussle, you just leave ’em to it, I say. As to the mouse, though…”
Apparently Herr Doktor Meece has a sense of drama, because that’s when he pulls back the cultist hood that was draped over his snout.
And of course Lulu never really saw him before, or not to recognise, so there’s a moment of uncertainty when the Maulers are congratulating him on his continued existence, and she’s just bobbing her head in puzzlement.
Then she says, “Wait, that’s him?” and Skotch gets to make the introductions.
“Doc Meece, this here is Lulu. She’s a … recorder of things.”
Meece eyes the pigeon. “Recording,” he says, “is what is required.”
“Yes!” Lulu’s eyes glow with enthusiasm. “Tell me your story, Doctor Meece! Tell me everything, what all this is about.”
“No,” he says primly. “That is not what is meant. I require a device, a facility, on which to complete my work. I require a channel, by which to transmit it.”
“Sure, sure,” Skotch says. “I mean, let’s fend off two whole armies first. I mean, priorities, Doc.”
But Meece understands priorities better than he does. “Now,” he says. “Because there are many soldiers out there, and soon they will come over here. We will not survive this. But my research can survive. I have completed the work. I must record it.”
“Completed the…” Skotch didn’t remember seeing the interior of Ikelos’ shell scrawled with equations or anything.
It’s in Meece’s head, he realises. The entire complex madness of it, contained in that one mouse’s little knot of grey matter.
A genius, like Nimoy said. A fluke where the enhanced learning ability that the Gehirner were engineered for had just never stopped.
For a moment the sheer concept makes him feel weak, at how much brain this one mouse has stuffed into his little bullet skull.
“I had something…” He’d had those scraps of notes he retrieved from Franz-Ferdinand’s, the first brief time the pair of them met. The notes he copied for Sly, that got the fox killed purely because of what he might or might not have worked out.
No, Skotch remembers the desperate note his friend sent, to come and talk. Sure Sly had worked it out, even just from those scraps. Skotch feels a stab of grief and guilt at the thought.
And even those scraps he lost, he realises. Taken from him by the Grays, or was it the Reds, or the crows at the Separation Plant, or someone. He’s lost track of just who got what off him, in his recent rough ride through the city.
“Yes, yes, recording.” A new rat is pushing into the conversation.
Skotch glances, double-takes, recoils. It’s not one of the Maulers, but a neat, somewhat plump rat in overalls, silver-furred, and the top of its head just a curved metal plate extending down to a glass lens of an eye.
In its hands it has a device that’s cumbersome for a rat, enormous for a mouse; manageable for Skotch, tiny for a human.
Hard to standardise your tech given the spread of species in the Gehirner project.
“Nimoy,” he names the unwelcome apparition.
And there are a dozen other rats backing her up, laden down with tools and bandoliers and kit.
Some of them are assembling things from parts even now, working with a hyperfocused absorption that’s either the good rat drugs or maybe just a genetic quirk of Ratlabs heredity.
A rodent neurodiversity they’ve made work for them.
“I, yes, indeed, myself,” Nimoy confirms, words like a machine gun. “Doctor, an honour, yes, your acquaintance, finally, we make it, yesno?”
Skotch looks across the lumpy fallen masonry that makes up the central island. Big enough for Saint Frances to set up shop on, when she was actually present. Now she’s gone, a lot of open space, a lot of topography.
He looks over the Gehirner there present.
A dozen Maulers, decently armed. Around the same number of Ratlabs technicians, not conventionally beweaponed and what they’re setting up could be a death ray or a fancy coffee percolator as far as Skotch knows.
There are some other rats there too, who look like they’re out of Murnau’s stable of bruisers, or the property of some other Rattenkonig.
Maybe two dozen all told, though they’re wiser to the environment so aren’t just standing out in the open to be counted.
Plus half a dozen Kit Kat Cultists whom he doesn’t reckon are going to weigh in much when it comes down to the fight.
Perhaps a dozen other miscellaneous Gehirner who waded out to the centre, got some sense of what’s about to go down, and didn’t wade straight back. Plus Meece, plus Lulu, plus him.
“Get him down low,” he tells Nimoy. “He’s going to be writing his memoirs, maybe he does it some place he’s not in line of sight of a gun?”
“Yes, indeed, ballistics, angles of fire, perspicacious, yes,” the chrome-pated rat jabbers, and they get Meece in a hollow with the device propped up in front of him.
There’s a touch screen to it, Skotch sees, and the mouse is already starting to draw out strings of chemical equations and molecular diagrams, tiny hands working with a desperate frenzy as all that pent-up knowledge rises to the surface.
There is a definite stirring amongst the two camps of squirrels, but they’re still waiting. Small mercies, Skotch thinks, but he has a real sense of a rubber band under tension, about to snap at any given moment even as it pulls tauter and tauter.
“So, Herr Bandit finally does the right thing.” Fischer has come up under his elbow, resting the barrel of his popgun on a shelf of stone ahead of him, squinting out across the water at the soldiers.
“So someone finally told me what the hell it was Meece actually had. Amazing what can happen, when people actually start being straight with one another,” Skotch points out. “Just think how much of a mess we could have dodged if someone had actually thought of that before.”
“Herr Bandit thinks so?” the frog asks. His bulbous gaze doubts.
“And yet we are all here because those who did know were very quick to decide they wanted Herr Doktor dead. And the more who knew, the more there were who decided that dead was best, where Herr Doktor’s continued health was concerned.
Do you blame Herr Doktor for not sharing his purpose with Herr Bandit? Do you blame us?”
Skotch thinks about how Benson’s goals changed, from live mouse to dead mouse, and knew it was because the old turtle must have discovered the full truth about why the farms were so keen to hunt Meece down. He grunts, conceding the point.