Chapter 23
EX HOMINE
Skotch looks up. And up and up. They all do.
The sound of shooting makes its final death rattle and goes still.
Szerky is poised, seemingly impossibly arrested in the very act of leaping, a still image of the hunter an instant before the kill.
The Gehirner, as one, shrink back. Something terrible has happened.
A clash of worlds that is—by the explicit design of the green cities—absolutely forbidden.
A human has intruded into the Chapel. Not Saint Frances, that creature of two worlds.
Another one, now standing, staring bewilderedly down at them all.
A vast tall shape, the lights above and behind it, as though it is a pillar with the commandments of Heaven written on it. And the greatest of these is Rule One.
Skotch can’t do the math, right then. Have they broken Rule One somehow, to bring this human here, or by fighting where a human might see?
Except the Chapel is behind the scenes, leftover infrastructure.
Save for the absent Saint, no human should ever be here.
A safe space for animals to murder one another.
The human takes a thunderous step forwards.
Animals scatter, squirrels dropping their guns and fleeing through the water, others cowering.
Newts squirm under stones. Rats freeze. A bright-coloured bird with a red neckerchief claps its wings and flees for the rafters, making harsh croaks as though trying to disavow its own uplifting.
The human takes another step, and Skotch sees him pause before putting his enormous foot down, carefully picking somewhere that no animals are.
Even so, everyone and everything flees the shadow of the step.
Skotch himself is caught between instincts: Look big!
fighting against Flee! Because the human is coming right for him, so he should just take to his toes and not stop running until he reaches Unterroot 93 and home.
But at the same time he’s just spent blood and fur on holding this island, and so his toes dig in and he refuses to just cede the ground.
Even to his maker. Raccoon geneware always did have a contrary streak to it, which Uzco’s brochures play down at every opportunity.
But there’s no disguising the fact that the human is coming right towards them, picking his gigantic way through waters that barely come up to the top of his loafers.
Szerky coils and recoils, never more serpentine than now.
She, too, is caught in the vise of opposing programming.
She wants to lunge for Meece. He’s right there, immediately behind Lulu’s enforcedly sedentary bulk, but that would be moving towards the titan, when all her other instincts shriek Away!
And her iron resolve prevents her from just bounding off for a hole to hide in, so she writhes backwards away from her prey, twisting and tensing and never still.
A dreadful silence has fallen across the whole of the Chapel. Only the heavy footfalls, the splash of water, and the grind of loose rubble under the human’s tread. These sounds, and their echoes. No other. A hundred animal eyes just stare.
The human steps up onto the central island, the big one, where the Saint normally holds court.
One stride, two, each as carefully positioned as the last, and it occurs to Skotch that the human, incredibly, is also nervous.
Also out of his element. A human who recognises the liminal space he has intruded into, and who might at any time flee.
And there are more than a few such chance encounters.
Moments when the overworld and underworld of the green cities cross unexpectedly.
A human, up in the small hours, discovering a half-dozen rats cleaning the corridor of their apartment building.
A moment of recoil, when the giant with all the physical and social power is skittering back in shock before remembering what their world is built on.
If Skotch stood tall and chittered at this human, then the giant might break and run in the face of his minuscule wrath.
But he doesn’t. By now he’s worked out which human this must be.
Recent events catching up with him. His fault, basically, that Rule One is in pieces just like the half-drowned rubble of the Chapel floor.
Except that, like the Saint, this isn’t quite a regular human.
This is one for whom Rule One was cracked across from the start.
The human kneels. Honestly, he’s so big that it seems a physically impossible thing, for him to let himself down to one knee without all that weight just collapsing in ruin.
And yet somehow it happens, the mighty brought if not low then lower.
Skotch, still frozen, studies him. An older human, he reckons.
Hair and beard long and somewhat in need of a groom.
Lenses over his eyes in what Skotch is distantly aware is a rather old-fashioned affectation.
The human smell, familiar from all the vacated spaces he’s been in, to pick up the trash or clean or fix.
A smell of absence and substitution, where they’ve scrubbed away their natural odours and replaced them with the floral and synthetic.
The human reaches down with huge, slightly trembling hands.
Skotch’s hackles go up and, for a second, he’s just beast. Bared teeth and warning and tail bristling out like a striped bottlebrush.
It’s not for him, though. Nobody’s trying to take a raccoon away as a souvenir.
It’s not Meece either, despite the general direction of those hands.
This is the one moment when Meece is irrelevant to what’s going on.
Instead, those hands cup, ever so gently, about Lulu.
The human lifts her, holds her close to his face.
When he speaks, his voice is low, a buzzy blur in Skotch’s ears.
He catches odd words, where Tiersprech and Austrian Deutsch connect, but he’s not sharp enough to properly translate what he’s hearing.
But the meaning comes through even though he couldn’t tell you the precise vocabulary. What have they done to you?
The human bows his head over Lulu. Skotch sees his eyes glisten.
And Lulu is talking back. Birds were always best at messing with languages.
It’s not just parrots that can do it. Something in the long avian history of making lots of varied noise translates into a gift for languages.
Lulu speaks, and she’s speaking human words, forcing them through her engineered voice box and yet still sounding like herself.
That breathless, rushed, excited tone, the pigeon on the hunt for a story or recounting one.
Not—emphatically not—pet to owner, but employee to employer.
The gatherer of tales speaking to the one who will set them down in print for his human audience.
Schreiber, whose contact details are on that ring on her leg.
To whom Saint Frances put in a call—so long ago, it seems. But here he is, just in time.
Skotch risks a look at his fellow Gehirner.
The squirrels have mostly backed off—to the periphery of the Chapel or else they’ve gone entirely, snuck off while the human’s attention is elsewhere.
They are neither continuing their war against the central island nor against each other.
Szerky alone remains on the central island, the last remaining beachhead of what had been, a moment before, an overwhelming assault.
She is waiting for her moment, her eyes on Meece, who’s right there crouching in the shadow of the human’s shoes.
The surviving defenders are mostly frozen in place.
Fischer is pretending to be a stone. Nimoy cradles her wounded arm.
Tybelle takes a dainty step forwards as though about to rub against Schreiber’s leg, then decides against it. Not, she assays, a cat person.
Schreiber is saying something again. Keeping his voice low, that rare human who understands how acute most Gehirner hearing is.
Skotch wishes that the Saint’s machine was on, to give its translation of those words.
Instead he can just about feel around the edges of what’s being said.
Schreiber will take Lulu somewhere safe, get her injuries looked at.
There are humans whose job it is to care for animals, though they usually do not practise on Gehirner.
And Lulu replies, telling him that she has stories.
She has the most amazing stories. That’s their deal, their relationship, the employment he has for her.
Schreiber is, Skotch is given to understand, a creator of tales for humans, and his chosen theme is the lives of the Gehirner.
The Little Helpers that humans distantly know are there, but have no contact with.
He relates, perhaps faithfully, perhaps fancifully, their trials and vicissitudes, struggles and triumphs.
And probably the humans who read them scoff, and see in them vastly over-fictionalised accounts of what are supposed to be simple and mechanical existences.
Instead of pastiches that Schreiber must surely dumb down to make them comprehensible to his audience, none of whom can guess at the riot of life and pain and adaptation going on in their walls and under their feet.
Schreiber straightens up with a creaking of joints.
And Lulu, cupped safe in his hands, plays her trump card.
She cranes back down towards the animals below her and, in one clawed foot, waves a little device.
Meece’s device. His notes, his secret, his completed work.
The formula and process for creating Plangent.
The revolution that will flood the Gehirner world with free thought and lasting enlightenment.