As Baj left Dr. Bonhomme’s office and headed toward his parking spot, he found himself silently running through part of a prayer from his childhood. Gaavai, kotaan. Havai kisai taan, he remembered. Some sing of his power. Who has that power?
An advert for Lucozade suddenly appeared on his corneas—the usual unwanted Opticalls you got walking through central London. There were dozens of grades of freedom from daytime Optispam bursts (after dark, the burst-rates fell considerably). You had to pay a huge monthly fee to keep all the adverts off your eyes, and even with his comparatively good income, he couldn’t afford the top service (although in recent years, many brains had adapted to Optispam and begun, partially, to block it out—a neurological “anomaly” the authority’s tech teams remained unable to defeat). A nude, dark-haired woman with absurdly large breasts and a startled look was shaking a Lucozade bottle in an obviously raunchy manner. “Great performance is easy to get into your hands,” she cooed. The images broke Baj’s attention, of course, and with that came a ferocious urge to bite out his own eyes.
And the king wonders why the suicide cults grow? he thought to himself.
He did not feel sad about the cancer—not yet. He felt unholy rage, and this, in turn, drove him to tamp down the full range of his emotions, as if intense feelings and the confusing thoughts accompanying them were cellular mutations to be understood, controlled, and dissolved. He felt a sudden, fierce urge to get to the Philip K heliport in Kent where he took, as time permitted, Saturday solarcopter lessons. If he could get above the earth, he imagined, and get strapped into a copter’s fleshy bio-seats, he would shoot through Britain’s raw blue air, working his thoughts and his hands at the solarcopter controls, and maybe, just maybe, he would begin to rule this new foe.
Cuthbert, on the other hand, seemed to have no interest in regulating his mind or body; Baj felt he needed to do it for them both.
For as long as he could, Baj told himself, he would try to keep Cuthbert and his bright blooms of psychosis from EquiPoise, whose psychologists showed little patience for good-hearted GPs or citizens carrying what it termed “unhygienic content,” a phrase kept menacingly vague by His Majesty’s Government. (Flōt was legal, but EquiPoise’s functionaries were well known for their special hatred of Flōters, who were viewed as little more than socioeconomic parasites.)
He would not give up on this old man. Here was a chance to bring back, in some tiny measure, a simple faith in the goodness of the world that his own brother Banee’s overdose and the regime had stolen.
And was Cuthbert really so far off? Everyone thinks about animals, Dr. Bajwa told himself. He himself greatly admired tigers. He still remembered a story told to him as a child about a Brahmin who spoke to jackals, buffaloes, lions, and even peepal trees. Do not half the books of little ones, he mused, contain talking animals? On any given afternoon, does Hyde Park not contain at least one old man who speaks to his terrier with verbosity, real intimacy, and even erudition?
“You aren’t,” the doctor was saying to Cuthbert, a few days later, “quite as mentally off as I think you want us all to believe, are you? You’re a Flōter who likes animals. That’s the overview, innit?” He’d sunk into his chummy Bethnal Green tongue.
Cuthbert smiled dejectedly. “But I’m not ‘on,’ at least not to you, am I?”
“You just need to stop drinking Flōt. That—and stubbornness—is ninety percent of the problem. Please, man.”
Dr. Bajwa began coughing uncontrollably, this time with horrifying, papery wheezes and rales. Cuthbert toddered to his feet, trying to force himself to put his arm around this man who was, after all, his only human friend in the universe.
“I’m OK,” Dr. Bajwa protested, clearly not, trying to smile in abject denial. A few tiny dots of blood spattered onto Cuthbert’s forearm. “Come on, man. I’ve just gone for a bloody burton.”
the arrest notice
IT WAS A WARM, DARK, DRIZZLY AFTERNOON IN late February, a February oddly free of the winter tornadoes that had stalked England in recent years. It was still two months before the comet Urga-Rampos appeared in the Northern Hemisphere and the zoo breakin, and Dr. Bajwa still felt he could (just) manage Cuthbert’s illness. He was leaving his office in the Holloway Road for the day. He noticed the dim purple glow in his peripheral vision that indicated a new Opticall text (flashing purple signified incoming audio calls). There were two Opticalls—one with happy news, and the other devastating.