Chapter 23 #2
Szerky shrieks. To Skotch, it’s a deafening keen of frustrated rage.
To Schreiber, it’s too small and high to even register in his hearing.
The stoatweasel makes a sudden dash for his shoes, as though she’s going to run up his trouser leg and along his sleeve and snatch that device from Lulu’s triumphant grasp.
She looks mad enough to do it, and for a weird moment Skotch is almost wishing she would.
To see Rule One finally brought down. To have Gehirner teeth in human flesh.
To break something huge, just to see what might happen.
But then raccoons always did have some capricious geneware.
She doesn’t quite have it in her, the great hunter, the warrior elite. Faced with the gods, she won’t be bringing Gotterd?mmerung any time soon. Szerky’s window for action closes and she’s left frustrated, and furious, and behind.
Skotch finds that there’s a spiker at his feet, and he picks it up.
Maybe lost by a stricken gangster, or some squirrel, or any of the combatants, but it’s in his hands now, and loaded.
Szerky’s right there. And the arc of Schreiber’s vision has passed away from him as the man turns ponderously to go.
Leaving them all in the dark of human ignorance, where murderous deeds might be done.
She killed Springer. She killed Fitch. She killed Sly, and then Maria, though the last was at least in open fight if that makes any difference at all.
If there’s any Little Helper in Neuwien right now who needs a little help to cross the life-death boundary, it’s surely Szerky.
The killer, the predator, the Country Club assassin.
She looks at him, sees the weapon. He expects a sudden explosion of violence or escape, but she’s quite still.
All that coiling wrath clenched in the vise of the moment, waiting.
A bitter eye, knowing that either he presses the trigger or she goes back to the farms to report failure.
And probably the first is the kinder fate, from her point of view.
He’s aware of Meece—still there, after all, even though his work has gone.
Meece, the old mouse, not so many months left in him.
Meece, whom all the world wanted to extinguish or possess just a moment ago, and who is now just the emptied chrysalis, his subversive moth flown.
If Meece told him to shoot, maybe he’d shoot.
The mouse just looks worn out, though. Victorious but not celebrating.
A prey animal whose long run has finally come to an end.
“Just go,” Skotch tells Szerky.
“Go?” she hisses. “Do you have any idea what they will do to me, if I go back a failure?”
Skotch makes a cavalier gesture with the spiker, to indicate it’s more a her problem than a him problem. The mistake there is that it involves taking his aim off her, and she’s quick enough that he can’t get the weapon back in line before her teeth meet in his throat.
They don’t, although they actually catch some of his fur between them as they snap abruptly shut.
Because Tybelle is that quick, and bears grudges that deeply.
And doesn’t really care about fair fights as much as just being the animal still breathing after the blood’s shed.
Skotch sees the grey blur of her, and Szerky is ripped out of his sight.
When he works out where she’s gone, Tybelle is batting the long, loose body back and forth on the shore, three pats that look playful and break bones.
Then the cat lunges, and the high sound of a broken stoat neck comes to Skotch clearly.
Just as well, he decides. He doesn’t know what the mausgelt is for a stoat, but probably he couldn’t afford it.
Later, Skotch sits with Fischer and Nimoy and the gangster, Loui, at the edge of the island.
Not exactly looking out at the sunset reflected in the waters, given their underground location, but the scene has that kind of a feel to it.
Reflective. Melancholic. Across the Chapel, the crows are at work.
The guild from the Separation Plant, collecting the fallen like black-winged Valkyries.
Save that all the slain are chosen, and what they’re chosen for is a return to the circle of life.
Not a great mead hall, but feasting is involved.
Going back into the food chain, because the green cities are nothing if not big on recycling.
Unless the Separatist sect is correct, and there’s some elusive part of the Gehirner that doesn’t just get ground up and reconstituted into SLG bars.
Skotch found the whole proposition profoundly unconvincing when he was in actual danger of being fed into those jaws.
Now he’s got time to be reflective, he decides it’s quite an attractive fancy.
The idea that some Essence of Skotch might survive his demise, if he can think his way into disentangling it from his mortal existence and remains.
We try to find ways to become more than they made us, he considers.
And that’s the Separatist way, on a mystical plane.
It’s the Jeffist way, in a more pragmatic sense.
The idea that it’s a positive duty of every Gehirner to better their lot.
Individually, as most Jeffists see it, as Mother Murnau and Loui would claim.
Communally, as the Maulers see it, or the schismatic Jeffists of Ratlabs.
And Meece is going to end up with them, Skotch reckons.
All the different paws scrabbling about to get hold of him, and most likely Nimoy will win the prize.
Because Meece has done in practice what Nimoy devoutly believes in theory.
He’s made a discovery that will make every animal’s life better.
Nimoy’s confirmed that Lulu has done what she needs.
Meece’s research is out there now. The pigeon has used Schreiber’s own devices—human ones, impeccably connected without limit—to post it all up on several different sites, many of which are accessible to Ratlabs, to the Rattenkonige, to the anarchists even.
All those groups with shadowy connections that touch the human world.
And yes, it will need a bit of a chemistry set to start producing the improved long-life Plangent, but not such a challenge that any halfway organised collective won’t be able to do it.
What was the great limiter for Gehirner lives will become common as clean water.