But as the autonews reports went out, in the weeks and months that followed, and WikiNous started sizzling with wild rumors about what had happened that night—with tales of mass murder and leopard attacks, outraged reports about the catastrophe of ?thelstan’s Bliss, rumors of a subsequent UK-USA diplomatic row over terrorism—officialdom began, slowly at first and then quite aggressively, to suppress the truth. Harry9, for his part, even feared that his indiscipline with the ?thelstan’s Bliss had endangered his own throne. He was, for now, a king humbled—but not entirely.
Harry9 still ran a massive disinformation operation. Soon, the facts of the night of the animals became as elusive as the otters of the Severn. Timelines seemed to get artificially resewn. The AnimalSafe Squad’s ambitious David Beauchamp led the effort among the zoo officials to downplay and to understate, and in some cases to erase, the evidence. The Met played its part, too, and with the cowed, impoverished automedia at historically weakened levels of investigative nous, the story soon began to evaporate. Still, the Crown instructed EquiPoise’s Psyalleviators to steer clear of both Astrid and Cuthbert. The authorities saw Astrid, privately, as a kind of selfless minor hero, and Cuthbert as a chaotic messenger. They were marked as a kind of special case, a Flōt-related aberration, and the night, officially, as a sort of subterranean watershed dividing what could be tolerated from the cults and terrorists, and what threatened the English at their core.
It wasn’t, as Cuthbert wanted, all about all the animals.
There hadn’t been many animals on the loose—not really, it was said. No one but a few soft-headed cultists actually died. SCARE hadn’t actually lost any soldiers. Only a few suspect people saw anything like a “green being” near the American Embassy. And apart from a small number of animals hurt or temporarily escaped, nearly all the animals were captured and returned to their enclosures to resume their happy jailed lives.
BY THE NEXT SPRING, in 2053, a year blessedly free of comets, the night of the animals was largely forgotten, and the big news on everyone’s corneas was, of course, King Henry, for 2053 marked his silver jubilee. In the monarch’s official portrait for the year, Arfur appeared, in the background, prone on a settee of purple velvet brocades and ermine, his muffin-paws in front of him, and wearing an expression of impossible contentment.
nine
incantation in a new tongue
DURING THAT LONG, SCORCHING SUMMER OF THE jubilee, Cuthbert Handley one day realized that he didn’t hear voices as often as he used to. In fact, they had all shrunk down to one.
By 2053, there were far fewer animals and species of them on earth. Not since the end of the Pleistocene, when the woolly rhinos and dire wolves died out, had evolution reached such a choke point. Epically closer to home, a hot April and May had hatched swarms of midges, bringing an epidemic of a virulent bluetongue to Albion’s sheep and cattle on the king’s large collectives.
In London, there were even fewer moggies in the alleys, fewer dog walkers around the silenced swan ponds, and a host of unexpected, strange breeding problems at the zoo. Indigents were no longer permitted pet licenses. While the zoo was still the most precious archival repository of genomes on the planet, research and bioengineering and preservation work tended to hold primacy now. Security increased tenfold, with admission by invitation only. The exhibitions, one by one, were being shuttered, too. In all but a few cases, genomic clones replaced the wild originals, and the London Zoological Gardens—humankind’s last ark of the Animal Kingdom—had become, for the most part, a closed shop.
For reasons Cuthbert could not grasp, the animals stopped talking to him. The unexpected great quieting depressed him, and left him with agonizing guilt.
“I can’t bring ’em in,” he would exclaim to Astrid. “I don’t know what’s gone wrong. Why? Why’d I have to tinker? Why? What’s become of the Wonderments? Do you hear them?”
But that was a question Astrid never dared to answer again, not even to dear Cuthbert.
He’d thought, gullibly, that people would have learned after the night the animals saved them. He trusted that the bond between creatures and people would grow inviolate. That hadn’t happened at all.
He decided, that summer day, that it was time perhaps that he come in off the streets of England for good.
“I’ve had enough, haven’t I?” he thought, not without real shame. “And I’ve done my bit for the beasts—and for King Harry. What’s the use?”
But this notion of sleeping indoors for good occurred to him as the sweet smell of baking kidneys and puff pastry wafted into his eager face. He was in Astrid’s kitchen, in her flat in Haggerston, where he found himself spending more and more time. With shaky hands, he moved a piping-hot pie, still in its tin, directly to an Italian dinnerware plate painted with large red pears and golden quinces. There was a square nuplastic container of burdock greens that Astrid had sautéed with watercress and put away, and she’d made Cuthbert promise her to eat a bit of the greens if he insisted on “those unwholesome pies.”