But Cuthbert was plenty Sikh already.
A STRONG BREEZE AROSE, cooling Cuthbert’s face. He held still in it for a moment; he could feel his trouser legs, rippling. The wind made him feel a bit better. He closed his eyes—the easiest way for most Indigents to turn nighttime Optispam bursts completely off—and he watched glowing shapes and swirls on his eyelids, all shadows of optical adverts and headlines that would normally light up if he opened his eyes (though Cuthbert’s brain had learned to bypass much Optispam “noise”).
Keep your hair on, he thought to himself. Play it cool, now. Such self-therapy, he knew, was hopeless: he might as well have been fire, telling itself to become orange gummy worms.
He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. He saw floating gray crescents that stretched into scimitars. Drifting discs metamorphosed into skulls. The longer he watched the patterns on his eyelids, the more ornate and creepy they grew. There were tiny scrimshaw designs now, needle-etched in marine bones, with dead sailor faces painted in tobacco juice, afloat in his head. He snapped his eyes open. Was it a siren he heard? Was that the otterspaeke gagoga maga medu? Was that the song of St. Cuthbert, the otter song of exoneration, or the sound of seawaters smashing into this island nation? Were his prayers being answered, in an otter-language peculiarly well suited to the middle of the twenty-first century? If that was so, he mused, he had gained a wonderful ally against the false Heaven’s Gate. He would gain absolution for his childhood evil. And perhaps, yes, a cure for his Flōt addiction. There would be much to be happy about, really. When the otters slipped into the Regent’s Canal, a great greenness would explode over Britain, a verdant bubble-shield against the death cult. And would he see his brother? Would he get to give Drystan a kiss and a cuddle, and tell him how sorry he was to have failed to save him, so many, many, many years ago?
For a moment, Cuthbert felt a bit of plain, golden-green delight. No state of mind would seem less appropriate for a well-adjusted human being in Cuthbert’s circumstances; it was another bad sign. Were his EEG available at that moment, the high spikes and shallow valleys of euphoria would be unmistakable: it was Flōt withdrawal—a very bad case. The feeling of joy jarred him to the soul, but it soon passed.
“Don’t feel like meself,” he said aloud. “Where’s Cuthbert?”
Where indeed. He did not even resemble himself—he was standing tall, and sucking in his stomach. Instead of his usual fearful, parted lips, his weak, wrinkled, nonagenarian grimace, he glared ahead and scowled. He felt strong and anguished and ready to act. If madness and sanity sat upon opposite ends of a seesaw in Cuthbert’s head, madness could be lifted no longer, and the old Cuthbert was gone, launched into the lunatic sky.
a way out for animals
CUTHBERT NOW FELT, WITH A CERTAINTY ONLY A psychotic, withdrawing Flōter could muster, that he would get the jackals out of the zoo. But he also understood, if hazily, that unless the animals found the comparably small and well-concealed hole he’d earlier cut in the perimeter fence, which seemed unlikely, they would be stuck. He hadn’t considered this detail, and he felt irritated, and worried—though not nearly as worried as he ought to have been.
To Cuthbert, the problem of his personal safety with jackals on the loose seemed minor, though it was far more real than he knew. (As late as the 2030s, in Cyprus—where the last wild population had lived—jackals still dragged the occasional child or old woman off to her death.) A defenseless Flōter, shaky on his illusory stilt-legs, would pose little challenge to a few of them. In any case, he needed a safe way to guide the jackals, and all the animals, out into the city. Meanwhile, the jackals had dissolved, gone liquid brown, and the night had drunk them in. They seemed not just part of the dark now; they were darkness itself, tearing blue flesh from the day and secreting it in their bodies with howls. The vistas around Cuthbert were dominated by canid colors and crass shadows that concealed all light and all graceful things. He felt he had undoubtedly done right to liberate as many of them as possible. Yet he could not expunge the sounds—murderous, gash-filled, so close by—from his head, and in this they were like all things that gnashed his soul.