A few years before, after the closings of both the Beijing and Bronx zoos, a short flurry of patriotic stories about the London Zoo had memed across WikiNous, most along the lines of “the first and last standing,” although the “first” bit wasn’t entirely true. Still, almost no zoo animals existed in the wild anymore, and thousands upon thousands of species were newly extinct. Polar bears, giant pandas, as well as most large marine species, wild ferrets, and cranes, survived only as genomic software that the children of the rich used to print miniature cuddle and bath toys as well as living mobiles.
Cuthbert had never been inside a zoo, even as a child, and the doctor wanted to keep it that way.
“But you’re still visiting the park,” the doctor noted. “You’re asking for trouble. You don’t realize. A drowning man isn’t bothered by rain. Didn’t we say we should avoid the whole of Regent’s? I thought we’d got a sort of understanding, my friend.”
“Ar,” said Cuthbert. “But the otters—and the jackals and a few others—they’ve got their own little ways, haven’t they? Where am I to go, if I ignore them?” He averted his gaze and looked through the window. “I nipped into the library at Finsbury Park, but I fell asleep at my table, and this skinny library bloke with one of them fuckin’ Eye3 pendants ’round his neck, he said he’d hand me over to the Watch to be nicked if he saw me in there again. At least in the parks, and with the animals, I won’t get nicked.”
The threat of the Red Watch was real, Dr. Bajwa knew. Unlike most public spaces, the royal parks normally weren’t patrolled by the Watch, but instead by the old, lenient constabulary. Being detained by the Watch could prove catastrophic for someone as powerless as Cuthbert, and the thought of ridiculous, feeble old Cuthbert getting dragged away by the red-suited Watchmen with their neuralwave pikes horrified him. Cuthbert would be warehoused with other mentally ill Indigents and shoved under a Nexar hood. He’d probably suffer cardiac arrest.
The doctor coughed a few times—a dry, barking hack that surprised him in its power. “Oh,” he said, reeling a little. “This dry air.” He took a deep breath and gulped. “I am just beginning to wonder,” he said, recovering, his voice still croaking, “if a visit to the zoo might not actually calm you down a bit?” He coughed twice more.
“Ar,” said Cuthbert, in an overplayed Black Country dialect he sometimes slipped into when feeling weary, fearful, or especially close to someone. “Now yam onto summat,* cocker. If I could just see the otters—just once. I’d, loik, discuss about a few things, roight?” He pulled out a purple sphere of Flōt and held it toward the doctor, who was coughing again. It wasn’t hotted up, but it would do. “Yow alwroight, mon? Yow want a snort?”
“Stop it,” said the doctor. “It’s nothing. And put that away!” For a moment, he felt real anger toward Cuthbert. “Can we just get one thing sorted? If you go, can we keep in mind that the animals really aren’t speaking to you? And you’ll stay off your Flōt?”
Cuthbert gave him a vexed smile, the edges of his lips paled with pressure.
“And you’ll have to pay for it yourself,” the doctor added. “Can you do that?”
“It depends what you mean by ‘pay,’” Cuthbert said. “There’s more than money at stake. There’s the boy.” He spoke with dry matter-of-factness. His eyes, normally a Brythonic russet-brown, and as spongy as Anglesey soil, seemed newly hard and clear. “Oi’ve paid with my heart—for decades.”
The screeching color-charge compressors of a passing bosonicabus—probably the No. 29—could be heard outside in the Holloway Road.
Cuthbert added, sounding distant: “When your brother becomes an animal, it makes you think.”
“Sure, sure,” said Dr. Bajwa. He felt the long blade of pity jab into him. He hated it. He despised pity’s utter uselessness. But there it was—a dolor for the shredded stems of flowers never to touch the earth. Dr. Bajwa puckered his lips a bit, trying to subdue his emotions.
Cuthbert seemed to have sunk down into his chair. He was sniffling a bit.
“Why am I going to the zoo?” There were tears in Cuthbert’s eyes. “What’s the matter with me?” He stared dazedly at the ceiling. He said, “When my mother and father have forsaken me, the Lord will take me up.” He gazed directly at Dr. Bajwa, and repeated, more frantically, “What’s the matter with me?”
“I don’t . . . know,” said Dr. Bajwa. “Not exactly. But it seems you need these . . . voices. That’s all I know.” He plucked a sky-blue sticky note from his desktop and wrote his WikiNous cryptograph on it, as he had many times before, and gave it to Cuthbert. “You can message me if anything dire happens. But I really hope it won’t. Just go see those otters. And don’t do anything foolish,” he said, already regretting his advice somewhat.
“I’ll get the dosh,” Cuthbert said, feeling atingle. “Any road up* I can.”
“I know you will. I know it.”
The doctor reached across the desk and squeezed Cuthbert’s hand as hard as he could, and that was very hard indeed. He put a ￡10 coin in the dry hand—any less seemed cruel, and any more unwise.