DR. BAJWA JUST HAD NO IDEA HOW DRAMATICALLY unhinged things were about to get. When he’d learned of Cuthbert’s introductory debacle at the zoo, he’d merely asked Cuthbert to visit at least twice a week, “off the books,” late in the day, without signing in, for Cuthbert’s own protection from EquiPoise. He was perceptive enough to sense a kind of formless, escalating catastrophe on the horizon—one that seemed to have glomped onto his own life—but he felt it more as a broad-spectrum anxiety than a specific worry.
They sat in Baj’s familiar consultation room, after hours. “I reckoned you’d be fed up with me by now.”
Dr. Bajwa said, “I haven’t minded our talks.”
The long dark days of the English winter, and a worsening cough, had made the doctor morose. He found himself glad to see Cuthbert and looked forward to a resumption of their sessions, yet he sensed a subtle impatience in Cuthbert. It took him by surprise, and it seemed to mirror a mounting, recent prickliness in himself.
Cuthbert seemed especially tired and shaky this evening.
“Looks like you’ve been in the wars.”
“Why waste your time with a wode-wode mon* as lives in doss-housen*?” asked Cuthbert, almost confrontationally.
“It’s not a waste.”
It was half past four o’clock, and black outside. The crack of old-tech small-arms fire outside—handguns—as well as the horrible hissing of microwave explosives filtered through the window. It all made Baj uneasy.
Cuthbert looked unfazed by the nightly sounds of north London violence. At times, he tilted his head to hear the noise outside better, then resumed conversation ebulliently.
It was said that the most prominent of the English republican terrorists, called the Army of Anonymous UK, or AA-UK for short—and engendered by the long-outlawed hacktivists, Anonymous—were amid a winter offensive in southern England, but accurate news was almost impossible to obtain these days. The flesh—the only transmitter of WikiNous—often told lies.
“Enough of this chaos for long enough, and you see why people start running to the cults,” the doctor said. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about their promises.”
Cuthbert nodded sadly and clasped his hands together, as if preparing to pray for them both.
“We’re running out of options, aren’t we?” the doctor said to Cuthbert. “I guess you could say that Windsors are making good health mandatory.”
“Then I’m in luck,” said Cuthbert, grinning. “I’m as bloody fit as a butcher’s dog.”
“I don’t know what a butcher is, but you aren’t, I’m afraid, healthy, not in the least,” Baj said. He tried to speak in an ariose, teasing manner, not wanting to offend his charge. “If you stopped the Flōt—”
Cuthbert interrupted, “If I’m not healthy, then why don’t you ’av me sign in properly?”
“I have my reasons,” said Baj.
The truth was, the Ministry of Mind automatically scanned office records for what it termed “excessive support,” and Dr. Bajwa’s compassion had seriously endangered both of them. Hypochondriacs, Flōt addicts, and the otherwise mentally ill inevitably ended up before the Ministry’s EquiPoise inquisitors, whom Dr. Bajwa considered little more than psychological versions of Red Watch thugs.
“I’m telling you,” said Baj. “You’ve got to keep a low profile. Please, Cuthbert. Do it for your old mate.” He raised his brows and tried to affect an accent from the recently declared All-Indigent zone of Bethnal Green, where he’d grown up. “Look me in me mincies, mate—I wouldn’t tell you a cherry!”
Cuthbert sat puzzled, blinking. East End slang always sounded preposterous to him. It certainly wasn’t yam-yammy Black Country talk, he thought, and it wasn’t otterspaeke. But he did value the joviality, more than Baj realized.
“We’re friends now?” asked Cuthbert.
Baj coughed a couple times. He worked to clear his throat of both phlegm and his strained Cockney. “Well . . . yes. Why not?”
“Fact is,” said Cuthbert, “I’m goin’ to let all the animals out of the zoo. But I dunna want to see you scragged by any Red Watch for my animal business.”
Baj laughed. He simply did not believe Cuthbert was serious.
“No,” said Baj. “You can’t do that. It’s quite impossible anyway. You’d have the whole bleedin’ RAF bearing down on you. It’s the last zoo on earth, isn’t it? I’ve heard that underground they’ve thousands of complete gene-maps for every animal known. It’s the ark.”
“I will,” he said.