He heard voices from a squawky loudspeaker. He turned toward the park. An approaching patrol from the Red Watch, out on the Broad Walk, was calling rough sleepers out of Regent’s Park. They did it every night, but Cuthbert had completely forgotten. He held still, trying not to breathe. In the grotto, he was well camouflaged, but if a Watchman or his array of peripatetic Eye3’s on his mantle gazed carefully in this direction, or used their infrared screeners, he might be caught.
“Watch, here! Indigents have five minutes to leave! If found in the park after this reasonable deadline, Indigents will be referred to EquiPoise.” Cuthbert’s hands shook with fear; finally, he could see their red and gold mantles, through the shrubbery. He held his breath.
There were two—very close. They were laughing, distracting themselves.
“Fucking beautiful, I tell you,” one was saying to the other. “Really, very loovly.”
After a few more minutes of anxiety, they ambled away. Cuthbert felt he would start crying with relief. The bolt-cutter handles were slippery with his sweat.
The cutters were in fact monsters—large, awkward, and horrifically powerful. He found himself imagining how all the small work-related apparatuses normally carried by London’s dwindling middle classes—face-adjusting discs, energy satchels, Vespa hand-scooters, rain-sphere sticks—could be sliced apart by the cutters, like crepes.
The cutters seemed wonderfully industrial to him, from a fading world of huge, steaming engines and sweating, hammering men. The B&Q clerk claimed they could exert two thousand pounds of pressure onto a fine point, and handle high-tensile steel up to 9 mm thick. Cuthbert had drawn a black line on his index finger with a permanent marker, to denote 9 mm, and he meant to check it against a few different fencing gauges he might run across.
Because its space was initially fixed, the zoo’s landscape architects had at first been partial to mild-steel mesh-fencing and glass rather than seminatural barriers, and the material had propagated across the zoo like a kind of mold for more than a century. The inflexible, unnatural steel mesh was one of a long list of stupidities that had hastened the zoo’s decline in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unlike later zoos, there were few faux rivers, moats, or invisible barriers at the London Zoo. Steel mesh bounded most of its various strolling spaces and animal enclosures. For that reason, the zoo was a bolt cutter’s paradise, and Cuthbert was about to become its most faithful angel. Feigning a limp, he had taped the device to his leg a few days before and stowed it in the grotto. As an Indigent, getting caught with them would have been considered incriminating ipso facto, and the Watch would have hauled him before an EquiPoise committee. Risks aside, for Cuthbert, bringing bolt cutters to the grotto had felt like returning some arcane healing object to its rightful place, like a key brought to the door of a sacred labyrinth.
He quickly dusted off the implement. He liked it and felt competent with it, a feeling he wasn’t used to.
He took a deep breath. That walking-on-silken-stilts feeling and the usual quivers in his cheeks and eyelids, all telltale signs of Flōt withdrawal, had stopped. He felt a comfortable buzz, and the wonderful elongation of his legs. How much patience and, for himself, discipline he had shown these past few days, he thought. A spark of dignity flashed inside him, and he tried to get his head around it like a child cupping a firefly with bare hands. But just as he reached for it, it fizzled out.
I can’t stand much more of this, he thought to himself. He grabbed the orb again, and the Flōt glugged into his mouth violently. A wave of disgust hit him, and it wasn’t because the Flōt was cold. He felt sick, instead, at himself. He should have contacted Baj, he thought. He shouldn’t have come here.
“I wanted to be sober for you,” he said aloud, to no one in particular.
But how tall he felt! As ever, Flōt shot you up to the stratosphere where you strode like Atlas with wings of a giant purple moth.
what the jackals said
A FEW TROPICAL GENOMIC COPIES OF EXTINCT birds—hyacinth macaws—were now visible in blue snatches through the bushes. Lined up in their long, grid-lattice cage, motionless and imperious on a thick perching rod, the clones seemed devoid of wildness or even natural agitation. He felt he knew these birds intimately; each time he’d come to his cave in the hedges he watched them purposefully. They never spoke, never made any sound. Their long sapphire tail feathers hung down as smooth and poised as the Italian silk ties he saw sometimes when wandering near Savile Row. A dozen or so London pigeons roosted atop and around their cages, and the more Cuthbert rustled in the bushes, the more they began to coo. But the few people he could see passing by in the zoo—it was twenty minutes before closing—had no sense of being watched from beyond the perimeter fence.