“And that, my pretties, is my pirouette—en dedans!” he wisecracked.
Another journalist, a woman grasping in one hand her long autoreporter’s zoom-microphone and an opened bag of “masala-flavored” algae crisps, said, “Sorry, but I don’t feel threatened.” She was shaking her zoom-mike at Astrid as she spoke. “Looks like there are some new authorities around here anyway,” she added.
“I’m concerned,” Astrid said lamely. “I would think we should all be careful. Do we really know what’s in the zoo? What’s really there?”
“What’s there is a story. And animals. Animals extinct everywhere else on Earth.”
Then an autojournalist who seemed to be gazing, involuntarily, at the ground, his lower Hapsburg lip trembling, began to shake his head no. He said, “Yeah, piss off! Just—just—just tell us when the press—press—press conference starts! All right?” He sounded both stern and petrified. He kept flexing his fingers and making weak fists—open, closed, open, closed. He looked up and gazed into her wired eyes.
“I’m packing in the ‘automatic’ news,” he said acerbically. “It can f-f-f-fuck off. I’m going to find out what the hell’s going on, and I’m going to write about it—m-myself.”
Astrid found herself admiring his courage.
She wanted some of it.
an omen in the heavens
THERE WERE A FEW MINUTES OF STANDING AROUND and grumbling while an even greater—and far more dangerous—chaos seemed to encircle the media group where Astrid stood. A horde—police officers from the Met, firefighters, plainclothes officials, as well as the scruffy members of the AnimalSafe Squad who had been trickling in for rare duty—all these people seemed to be trying to figure out what to do next. There was, as yet, no sense of a command structure.
Suddenly someone shouted “Look! Bejesus! Look! Look!”
Astrid expected to see some gorilla or wild jackass galloping toward them all, but there were no animals and indeed no spatial focus of the crowd’s attention. Holding still and closing her eyes slightly, she tried to discern where the man who was shouting stood, for there were now dozens of people milling about in apparent confusion.
“Look!” the man said again, and Astrid turned and saw him. It was the old reporter in the wax coat, grinning and pointing toward the sky.
Astrid looked up. “Christ,” she said.
What the man saw was indeed shocking. Across the park, just above the tops of a line of sick elms, was Urga-Rampos. It was immense. Its tail of luminous space-dust and ionized gases spumed upward and made the comet look as if it were hurtling down, to Earth, like dying Icarus with his long lustrous hair. It shined with an intensity that Astrid found disturbing.
“Amazing!” said another voice.
“It’s bloody, bloody lovely, that is. Nice work, God.”
“God?” another said, scoffing. “I don’t think any ‘God’s’ involved.”
All the chaos of the night seemed to pause. The whole congregation grew quiet and all eyes turned to the comet. The new moon made the comet especially conspicuous, almost shameless, as if a great ball of firelight had been plucked by a giant, crushed in its hands, and wickedly smeared upon the black sky.
The old reporter in the wax coat said, quite sententiously, “‘Exhaled meteor!—A prodigy of fear, and a portent of broached mischief to the unborn times’!”
“What?” asked Astrid. “What’s that?”
The reporter didn’t answer her, didn’t even look her way. His smiling eyes were fixed on the comet.
For a few minutes, most of the WikiNous fotolive camera operators trained instinctively on the comet itself. The crowd’s reactions gradually muted. There was a flurry of “OptiDips” and messages to editors, with autonews crews running back and forth to their satellite vans. Soon the autojournalists, all clumped on the eastern edge of the zoo, looked unsure of what to “capsule,” as fotolive filming was often called. Many chewed on their lips and fidgeted their toes, taking deep, anxious breaths. News that more animals were on the loose and outside the zoo had trickled in. Cornered, the autojournalists reverted to blinkered form, with several grabbing footage of other autojournalists videoing and fotoliving other autojournalists, and so on. Some aimed 3D cameras and lobbed fotolive lens-bots uncertainly toward the zoo, taking in hedges and partially obscured enclosures with animals mostly in the dark. The density of the hedges and detritus along the fence was such that none of the low-budget lens-bots could make it into the zoo. A few floating lens-bots made it in, but something—or someone—kept downing them. Even in the day, there was little one could see of the zoo from without. A great pall of unease spread across the scene, and inevitably, the autoreporters once again stared at the comet.
“It started off pretty,” said one of them. “Now it’s filling me boots. I don’t like it.”