Abruptly, all he felt was that it was time for a slash. He unzipped hurriedly, where he was, and geysered into a sprig of wild mint growing along the brink of the Green Line path. The gibbons began again. “What’s that song all about now?” he asked them aloud. As the urine streamed, some other animal howled—a guttural, chittering sort of howl. It was not duet-like; it seemed martial and masculine. Cuthbert felt a little shiver, partly anxiety, partly a pee-shiver, and he looked straight ahead, self-consciously, just as if he were before a public gents’ urinal.
He gazed into the sky again for that comet, but a thick, fleeting tuft of cloud again had obscured it. Those culters, Cuthbert thought, arr, they must be gathered inside it now, out of their containers and all, looking down upon the Animal Kingdom, that Neuter Applewhite fellow getting his instructions from Luciferian cabin-mates. Cuthbert wondered what would happen when the craft landed on Earth. The pictures on BBC/WikiNous had shown dramatic tails of high-velocity ice-dust behind the comet. Only dream-skies held such objects, he felt, along with pinwheel galaxies and dripping supernovas. Such things didn’t land on planets—they inhaled them.
He considered this Applewhite chap. Creepy bloke—no question. But Cuthbert reckoned that the man in some way connected to NASA, which would account for his confident speeches about space travel in his WikiNous videos. Cuthbert had seen in the Evening Standard/WikiNous how Applewhite, who called himself “Ta,” had met his middle-aged woman partner, “Do,” in Houston “We-Have-a-Problem” Texas. Couldn’t be coincidence, Cuthbert figured.
Applewhite’s attack on the animals grew from his scatty concept that animals “Below Human” existed as earth’s most existential threat to the Luciferian soul. Animal bodies were spiritual voids into which the alien soul could, with an erroneous trajectory, sink like an eight ball. While humans had completed much of Heaven’s Gate’s goal of the extinction of animals through the destruction of ecosystems, the London Zoo and its connected research facilities remained as the world’s most concentrated vector of animal diversity. For Luciferians, it was like a giant dish of smallpox germs would be for peoples.
Earth’s Animal Kingdom, for its part, knew more about space than Applewhite gave credit, Cuthbert knew. Laika the Sputnik 2 space dog, Little Joe, Felix the Cat—all had been forced into spaceships, as disposable lives, to guide their countrymen into the stratosphere. He pictured the jackals being led into some canine-engineered spacecraft of their own dogingenuity, shepherded by a Wolf Angel up a great ramp. Cuthbert would have asked the jackals to eat him before they left. He would be like the sacrificial goat, or the architect Tecton who had been turned into seagulls, to become a million pieces of himself, floating in space.
“I’d be a sort of space saint!” he shouted. He kept pissing. It was ecstasy, to let it flow openly here. A crushing shame rapidly came into him. He thought, once again, of how cruel he had been to that mongrel, as a child. At least the Russians gave Laika’s travails a purpose. He wasn’t worthy of Wonderments. But, perhaps, he could work toward them.
He spotted, for a moment, a long, tapering knot of light, to the west, which he thought just might, perhaps, be Urga-Rampos; then it vanished. Was he only going to get one glimpse in his life? He tried to examine the sky more closely. He did not know the stars, their names and such, but why, he thought, should that matter? There was only one celestial object that mattered now, for him and for all the world. The Heaven’s Gaters, he speculated, were somehow going to “switch on” an eternal death mechanism once the cometcraft landed, and all trapped spirits, great and small, human or not, would be sucked in as if into a Hoover.
It was a war. Cuthbert sniffed and turned around, and he pulled up his zipper. That seemed like a good defensive move, for starters. And he needed some sauce, he did. Where in the zoo, he thought, does a man get tipple?
He picked up the pace a bit, walking briskly northwest. Another set of motion detectors snapped on. He heard the same man as earlier, this time as distinctly as if he were standing across the street. “Help me! Bloody help me!” He heard another round of carnal barks and growls. Cuthbert bit down on his index finger. He felt worried. All his decisiveness had disappeared with the cat. He didn’t know what to do, what to say, or whether to say anything. But the zoo was looking a bit more familiar. He believed he was heading toward the main entrance gate.
He turned around for a moment, and looked back. It was then that he realized he had wandered off the Green Line.
He caught a glimpse of the old historic BT Tower, sponging up and vomiting a trillion Opticall beams. It looked like the capped top of a great lager bottle. Wasn’t far from UCL, really. Was it, he wondered, another mechanism of the death cult?
“No,” he shouted at himself. “Stop, bloody stop—stop!”