The frightcopter stopped above the zoo now, with a slight shudder, and it began hovering quietly on top of the lion enclosure, where the earlier deadly confrontation had taken place.
“We’re here,” said the doctor. “As for your story, I can only suspend my disbelief. But this is all very, very strange!”
“Shite!” Nigel yelled. “Look out the window, where we just was—that fucking thing!”
And that’s when all the passengers glimpsed the source of the earlier draconine noises—it was King Henry’s rumored ?thelstan’s Bliss. It was as big as a small cathedral, and just as tall. Its main platform crawled on massive titanium caterpillars, crushing everything in its path. Only its glowing pink tentacles, waving and screeching and erasing clusters of Neuters and anyone else it came close to—and playing a very risky game with time—were visible to the copter passengers.
Trained on enemies within its grasp, the Bliss was at once folding and scrubbing timespace of members of the suicide cult. It not only killed, it nullified a human being’s moment in the universe while, simultaneously, mopping up the dimensional residue of her or his existence.
For every cultist the Bliss “unexisted,” there was the potential for any animals “exited” by a cult member to be restored. The problem was the staggering “collateral damage.” Each time a whipping rose-colored tentacle even brushed the back or forearm of an innocent bystander, that person’s entire identity—in the flesh and online—dissolved. Worse, all the lives connected to that person would be smacked by ripples of alternate timelines. Whole families could be wiped out. If a boy who would one day pull a fire alarm at his school was accidently touched by a tentacle, droves of burn victims might appear.
“If that’s what I think it is, anything can happen tonight,” said Mason. One of the tentacles—they were actually “fired” from the base of the apparatus—nearly hit the frightcopter, which it veered to the right violently.
“Fuck!”
“We need to land,” said Baj. “It will destroy us!” Astrid noticed that the pilot-physician sounded a little different, his voice more sonorous and low. Strangely, too, he looked considerably heavier than he had earlier, as if he had gained two stone.
The frightcopter plunged again, sprang up, and shimmied side to side for a moment, but then Baj got it back.
“We’re OK,” he said. “Perfectly OK.”
“Your king is a fool,” Mason said to the Watchmen. “You don’t fuck with time.”
“Piss off,” said Nigel. “You can fuck right off, Yank. You fucking Americans, you—” And with that, Nigel disappeared.
“No!” cried Lawson. “Holy fuck!”
Mason shook his head. He said, “Not good. I guess the Bliss just erased someone in some way tied to the life of your poor friend, and when he was cleaned from time, he went, too.” He sighed. “But there’s a chance he’s not dead, too. He could have just been moved. I guess we’ll find out.”
Astrid said, “Any one of us could be next?”
“Yes,” said Mason.
“Not Cuthbert, I hope. Not poor Cuthbert.”
“The gorilla—the thing he said: ‘Gagoga.’ We’ll say it. Say it. What can it hurt?”
Nothing. So they did, again and again, and the two Watchmen left in the frightcopter looked at them as if observing two mental patients.
When the group disembarked and approached the lions’ enclosure, they came to a huge crowd of others standing around it, looking on helplessly.
Astrid pushed her way to the wall around the enclosure, just above the moat, and there was Cuthbert, out of the water now, a giant ursine mess of a man, stumbling quickly toward the halted lions, bolt cutters in hand.
“Cuthbert,” she called. “Come back. Come back!”
As the lions themselves had predicted earlier in the evening, this was where the night of the animals would end, in their strict orbit.
Locomotion still felt gluey and slow to Astrid. When she turned around, for a moment, she thought she saw Atwell and Omotoso in the dimness, far behind her, sprinting, but the tenebrous figures didn’t seem to move nearer, oddly. She felt a panicked sense of clarity: it was all Flōt withdrawal. Everything and everyone—figments!
But she could not stop herself now. She beelined for a red alarm box that stood just outside the lions’ enclosure. It had not once, in the zoo’s history, been used. And despite the fact that one of the largest and fastest assemblies of police and public safety forces in British history now ringed the zoo, with sirens blasting, solarcopters thumping, whirling yellow and blue lights in inferno mode, Astrid nonetheless felt compelled to punch out the glass and pull down the emergency lever, which no one, oddly, had deigned to consider.
Astrid noticed the peculiar sign above the box:
ALARM BELL
IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS
When she did so, a great, uncanny horn sounded out. It was like the sound of all animal voices synthesized into one snarling caterwaul, or the way thunder would sound if clouds were not water but living creatures.