Chapter 21 #2
“No, what changed was that Herr Bandit earned Herr Doktor’s trust,” Fischer says. “Herr Bandit kept him safe, underwent trials. Did not reveal his whereabouts. Herr Fischer is glad that Herr Bandit has come down on the side of the angels.”
“I don’t get it, though,” Skotch admits. “I mean, the farms, they’re all crazy there. But wanting to murder the little squeaker…”
“Control, yesno?” Nimoy puts in. The wan light falling into the Chapel from above gleams on her skullplate.
“Since he was young, we hear. Of Meece, in the farms. At first, their pride. The smart mouse. Improvements and efficiencies. Yields up, costs down. When he is young. Does what they want, yes.” Meaning, by Skotch’s calculations, last year.
When Meece, now old, was young. Burning twice as brightly, because he was only ever going to get half as long.
“In those days, with Ratlabs, much sharing. Correspondence. The science, yes. What they had, then, yes, they did not know. Did not know to stop him sharing with us, yes. The mouse-hole always bigger than the trap was good, yesno?” And even though rats lived longer, it would still have been a good chunk of Nimoy’s lifespan ago, as well.
Perhaps back when she’d still had the eye and the cranium she’d been born with.
That dizzy sense of differential time between Strains.
And not as though Skotch had that many years in him, either.
He wondered what the world must look like to the truly long-lived. To parrots, to turtles, to humans.
“Later, less word from him, yes, indeed,” Nimoy says.
She’s setting up something that looks like a little meteorological station, spinning balls and vanes and things, and maybe a satellite dish.
It makes Skotch’s fur prickle with unease.
“But the word, sneaking out to us, such thoughts, yes! Such ideas. Questions. Unhappiness. Why this, why that? Why our lives, so short, our lot, so mean, yesno? What is it, keeping us down. To follow the Divine Jeff, in the farms, is not allowed. But from us he has heard, the creed, the hope. To find a way, to exceed limitations, to achieve! And he achieves. Beyond us, Meece is. The greatest mind. To us, he is brought. By you. Our thanks, yes. A great thing has been done, by you.”
Skotch pauses to disentangle that big old heap of words. It’s not like Nimoy can’t speak like a civilized Gehirner, more that her words are constantly being dragged along behind her racing thoughts like cans on a string. In the gap, Lulu shoves some words of her own.
“So someone tell me what’s so great that this mouse has done!” she demands plaintively. “Only I see a lot of fuss and just, what, he’s writing his life story. He’s got an exposé about life in the Farm Projects?”
“Oh, I could,” comes Meece’s thin voice.
“You don’t know, here in the city. You don’t know how it is for us, in the farms. Under the whips of the stoats, slaves in all but name.
And that is an injustice that must be visited, but it is not the prime injustice.
That is what I am rectifying. That is the knowledge that must be set out and disseminated. ”
“So what?” Lulu demands. “Come on, it’s like everyone here knows what’s going on but me!”
Skotch takes a deep breath, but bottles it in the end.
Can’t actually bring himself to say the words because they really are that big.
That dangerous. World-ending, maybe. Even here, even now, he has a sudden twinge of perhaps being on the wrong side.
He looks to Fischer; Fischer looks to Nimoy.
Or maybe Fischer just looks at everyone, frog physiology being how it is.
For a second there’s a general and unspoken conspiracy that says nobody’s going to spill the beans and Lulu will go frustrated to her grave, but then Nimoy’s words leak out.
“Doctor Meece,” the rat says, “the secret, artificial fabrication, the formula. Plangent.”
It’s Lulu’s turn to fight with the cryptic utterances of Ratlabs. She blinks, head going back. “Wait…”
“He’s worked out how to make Plangent,” Skotch decodes. “Not just get it from humans, actually make it ourselves, cheap and easy. And make its effects last.”
“Last?” Lulu echoes.
“Tenfold, at least,” Meece puts in. “One dose a month. To be improved. One dose a year. For short-lived strains, one per lifetime, intellect gifted at birth? Who can say. Efficient, affordable, a low-resource catalysed sequence of reactions. Universal access, security of mind, is it so bad? Perhaps, if it means they cannot keep us dumb and down.”
Lulu makes some fairly disarticulate noises, eventually coming out with, “Who’s even going to…?”
“Ratlabs,” Nimoy says. “We offer. At first. Facilities being already available. Later, whoever. Plangent for all. Like water.” The great limiter, the brain-fuel that activates all the complex neuro-engineering that the Gehirner are inheritors of.
The stuff that makes the connections fire, without which they’re just dumb beasts. The cruellest economy.
“But what happens … when we don’t need…” Lulu looks stunned.
And Skotch went through this self-same shock when he found out.
When Meece finally told him, there in Uwe’s tech shack.
The end, he’d thought. The collapse of that pyramid of needs and obligations.
Who’d ever work, if Plangent was just being handed out for free on every street corner?
Who’d ever do what needed to be done, to keep the city running for the humans that had made them?
He’d come perilously close to deciding to grab Meece and throw him at the feet of Szerky, right then.
Seeing the end of his whole world in that one mouse.
Suddenly the farm’s pet killer, the orders of Benson, all of it had seemed perfectly reasonable.
Of course animals had to labour in conditions of want and need, or else it would all fall apart.
Idleness and indolence and the end of the world.
But he’d sat and thought, with the good brain that engineering and Plangent together had given him.
The work didn’t get done because everyone was a slave to their dependencies.
It got done because that was what the Gehirner did.
Because the space that they occupied existed solely on the basis of that work being done.
And even though Skotch had opted out to go freelance, that hadn’t been because the work was onerous or repugnant or gruelling.
Just because he was a loose cog that had never quite fit.
Honestly, most days he felt hauling trash had been more fulfilling than running his investigator racket.
It was just that his particular raccoon neurology pushed him to go his own way.