by Bill Broun
ONE CHILLY SATURDAY, at the end of January, three months after the animal voices had begun, Cuthbert finally visited the zoological gardens as a paid visitor. He was, at last, going to observe living otters firsthand, paying for the privilege as other citizens had since 1828.
After passing through the turnstile at the main gate, Cuthbert began to trot feebly toward the otters in the northern part of the zoo. The exertion drove his heart into a jumble of premature contractions, and he had to stop. He stood there, gasping, beside a statue of Tony Blair that had been erected, as a diversionary tactic, during the Second Restoration. The former prime minister’s aged, pinched face held a distant gaze, made all the more disconnected by the lurid bronzecast’s slightly cut-price look.
“Ow am yow, Sir Tony?” asked Cuthbert. He felt he ought to be polite. “You know, I day* always vote, but I always liked your wife—so lovely.” But the stiff party leader, with his hollow mind encased in bargain alloys, seemed nonetheless to look above and beyond Cuthbert.
Once at the otters’ enclosure, at first Cuthbert merely watched the mustelids plunge in and out of their green-water rock pool, yinnying and playing, as he continued to catch his breath. Seeing the otters, in the flesh, wasn’t so much disappointing as unnerving.
And he began to doubt, freshly, as he often did, whether he possessed the so-called Wonderments or not. It was easy to believe that Drystan had got them. “If I’d really got them,” he ruminated, “I wouldn’t have ended up a sot who can’t put down the bottle, would I?”
“Is that yow, trying to gab?” he asked the otters. “Or just my brain, like Baj says?”
It was right before a feeding, so they were frisky. One of the otters, a big female, as if responding to his query, regarded Cuthbert specially, standing still while another female and her whelps smashed up against her. The big female was in a delicate state of “almost pregnancy,” filled with implanted sperm. Embryos would begin to gestate in a month or two. Meanwhile, the whelps kept trying to bite the other mother’s neck. They wanted to nurse.
The otter habitat seemed too small, Cuthbert thought. It seemed little more than a couple of store-bought aquaria set into a mortar-and-rock faux riverbank. The otters’ hair was a rich sludge color, yet iridescent, too, smoothed back by the force of a thousand dives, with light sloping off at all angles. Cuthbert had only seen such a fascinating creature once before. The female was like all the muddy moisture of England gathered into one supermuscular cat shape. She was a Sufi creature, he thought to himself, reaching back to his cannabis and acid-addled days of bad dabbling in sophomoric esoterica which began years ago at university. Neither wholly of earth nor of water, neither entirely real nor imagined, the otter occupied an eerie in-betweenness, one of the Sufi dimensions between the Absolute of the Absolute and Cuthbert’s ugly life.
“’Ello, muckers,” he had said. “Am I safe now, am I? Do you remember me? From back in the owd days? With Drystan and what?”
He felt a sudden stab of longing for Drystan.
“Are one of you Drystan? Are you?”
No spoken word, per se, emanated from them, but Cuthbert was emotionally and mentally overwhelmed with a sense of being singled out for otterspaeke. He still felt unsure if it was the Wonderments at work, but he felt Drystan’s minty presence.
“Dryst,” he whispered. “Please.”
His rare bout of semisobriety had intensified the experience tenfold, too. He looked into the big female otter’s eyes, colored as brown-black as a river bottom. A craving seemed to concentrate in her. Or was it his craving? Who could know? There was, in any case, a desperate need in her dark eyes, from which these words emerged:
Gagoga gagoga gagoga
Miltsung miltsung miltsung
Any passing observer on the zoo’s path would have noticed little more than a fat-tummied ogler of otters hunched over the display’s barricade. But inside Cuthbert the worlds of nature, history, supernature, and memory had all burst and commingled.
The female otter rose upon her haunches, leaned forward toward Cuthbert, and took in the grassy-oily-boozy human scent emanating from him.
Miltsung, she said, in a squeaky mewl, then gagoga, gagoga, gagoga.
Cuthbert didn’t know what gagoga gagoga gagoga was, but it was not Flōt and it wasn’t the Whittington and it wasn’t even the words of Dr. Bajwa; it was something new, he was sure, a guttural alphabet gurgling in his head like water off rocks. It sounded risky, too, and it sounded urgent. Above all, it sounded like “Let us out!”
And it seemed weirdly familiar to him, too, an incantation from long ago. He wondered if his vanished brother would have understood their meaning, or if he and his loss and his return were their meaning.
Gagoga!
Cuthbert often recalled the blue veins faintly visible on his brother’s pale neck as a child, like tiny unborn rivers, dormant and perfect. He was a beautiful boy, and his loss was ugly and palpable—it roiled Cuthbert’s abdomen, and over his lifetime, it had grown harder and sicker and larger, not unlike his dying liver. Lately, when he cast around his mind for more memories of the boy, he felt increasingly blank, and the unborn rivers ran dry. And yet, as he stood, leaning against the diatom-stained glass barrier, before this once most English of English beasts, there was a sure sense to him of Drystan’s presence. Somewhere in the otters’ dark, slick hearts, in their round tomcat heads, in their webbed claws, as a poet once wrote, “of neither water nor land,” a kind of redemption lived.
There was a tap on Cuthbert’s shoulder. As soon as he saw the scarlet from the corner of his eye, he knew he faced unspeakable danger.
“You don’t look well, Indigent,” said the Watchman coarsely, and with the usual snide undertone. He had a boxy jaw and eyes like dull blue pellets. He wore one of the less bulky mantles of the Watch, red and embroidered with gold orphreys, all with a large eye in their centers. The Eye3 devices belonged to a class of biotech barred from Indigent use. These optical devices—and several dozen glared from every Watchman’s cloak—possessed the red-rimmed sclera of hound eyes. They roved. They accused. They rolled with a dim quasi intelligence. Crowded onto Watchmen cloaks, they created a grotesque effect, like draperies jeweled with eyeballs, and, along the trademark golden neuralwave pike the Watch all carried, the effect terrified the powerless.
“You paid?” the Watchman demanded.
“Ar, sir,” said Cuthbert. “I did.” He wasn’t as high as usual on Flōt, but he wasn’t sober either; the slight buzz let him speak with a touch of composure. He still possessed the illusory proprioception of long legs as well as the self-satisfaction typical of a Flōt high. But the Red Watch were trained to watch for Ingall’s Sign, the slight stooping forward and loping gait that Flōt normally caused in longtime addicts.
“Have you noticed there aren’t Indigents here? This is a place for quality families. That’s what the king wants.” The Watchman ran his hand up and down his pike. “I think it’s time you went home.”
“But, sir, I paid. It’s a medical issue. My doctor’s sent me here. A’m a loyal subject.”
The Watchman frowned at him, nodding. “You leaning forward, mate?”
“I’m just tall,” said Cuthbert.
“Yeah, tall. That’s a coopy* way of putting it.” Then he smiled acidly. “Oh, I’m sorry, a medical problem, is it? You need a hood? Shall I put a call into the P-levs?”
“That’s not right,” said Cuthbert. “I hear animals. You ought not! That’s not —” Before he could get it out, the Watchman tapped him with his pike. His knees buckled and he dropped like a sack of onions. Cuthbert sat on the ground, an old man stunned, rubbing his fat temples and trying to get his bearings.
“Are you thick as pig shit?” asked the Watchman, speaking in a hushed voice. “Get the fuck up and go wash back down the urinal you crawled from. You’ve no idea how miserable I could make your life, you badger’s arse. Want to spend your golden years wanking in a Calm House? You one of them cultists?”
The Watch was recruited from other Indigents, and notoriously sadistic, and Watchmen acted with special pitilessness toward other Indigents. Cuthbert was in real danger, and he knew it now. It was not uncommon to hear stories of Indigents neuralpiked to death, especially if they were accused cultists or high on Flōt.
A small crowd, mostly milky-skinned women with small children in strollers, had gathered. They glared at Cuthbert with curiosity and contempt. There were no Indigents among them, from what Cuthbert saw.
“Leave him alone,” a younger woman with a long lilac skirt said to the Watchman. “He’s just a poor old man who eats too many biscuits. He’s allowed at the zoo.”
The Watchman quietly made a sheeh sound, snorting a little. “Just keeping the zoo safe, ma’am. This man was, erm, loitering. It’s a tactic I associate with that Heaven’s Gate lot. Or ’e’s a dangerous Flōt addict.”
Cuthbert picked himself up. He patted himself for the sphere of Flōt under his coat, and he felt relieved to feel it intact.
“Take it easy,” he said to the Watchman. “I’ll go. I’m not in any bloody cult.” He glanced toward the otters for a moment, but they had disappeared, sensing a threat. He whispered to them, “Good-bye, you good creatures.” He would see them again, he thought—somehow—and he would see them go free.
As Cuthbert exited through the zoo’s main turnstile, an old anger erupted in him. He trudged north with heavy steps. He knew nowhere to put his ire, so he waved his arms, calling attention to himself in the streets, which was danger in itself. Like millions of others, he had tasted the wrath of an evil and reckless new monarchy’s power structure. But by the time he made his way to Camden Town, halfway home, he realized his anger was gone. It was replaced with a plan: before summer, he was going to break into the zoo and free all the animals—and especially the otters.
“Gagoga,” he had said, almost laughing. “Ga-bloody-goga!”
the secret patient
DR. BAJWA JUST HAD NO IDEA HOW DRAMATICALLY unhinged things were about to get. When he’d learned of Cuthbert’s introductory debacle at the zoo, he’d merely asked Cuthbert to visit at least twice a week, “off the books,” late in the day, without signing in, for Cuthbert’s own protection from EquiPoise. He was perceptive enough to sense a kind of formless, escalating catastrophe on the horizon—one that seemed to have glomped onto his own life—but he felt it more as a broad-spectrum anxiety than a specific worry.
They sat in Baj’s familiar consultation room, after hours. “I reckoned you’d be fed up with me by now.”
Dr. Bajwa said, “I haven’t minded our talks.”
The long dark days of the English winter, and a worsening cough, had made the doctor morose. He found himself glad to see Cuthbert and looked forward to a resumption of their sessions, yet he sensed a subtle impatience in Cuthbert. It took him by surprise, and it seemed to mirror a mounting, recent prickliness in himself.
Cuthbert seemed especially tired and shaky this evening.
“Looks like you’ve been in the wars.”
“Why waste your time with a wode-wode mon* as lives in doss-housen*?” asked Cuthbert, almost confrontationally.
“It’s not a waste.”
It was half past four o’clock, and black outside. The crack of old-tech small-arms fire outside—handguns—as well as the horrible hissing of microwave explosives filtered through the window. It all made Baj uneasy.
Cuthbert looked unfazed by the nightly sounds of north London violence. At times, he tilted his head to hear the noise outside better, then resumed conversation ebulliently.
It was said that the most prominent of the English republican terrorists, called the Army of Anonymous UK, or AA-UK for short—and engendered by the long-outlawed hacktivists, Anonymous—were amid a winter offensive in southern England, but accurate news was almost impossible to obtain these days. The flesh—the only transmitter of WikiNous—often told lies.
“Enough of this chaos for long enough, and you see why people start running to the cults,” the doctor said. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about their promises.”
Cuthbert nodded sadly and clasped his hands together, as if preparing to pray for them both.
“We’re running out of options, aren’t we?” the doctor said to Cuthbert. “I guess you could say that Windsors are making good health mandatory.”
“Then I’m in luck,” said Cuthbert, grinning. “I’m as bloody fit as a butcher’s dog.”
“I don’t know what a butcher is, but you aren’t, I’m afraid, healthy, not in the least,” Baj said. He tried to speak in an ariose, teasing manner, not wanting to offend his charge. “If you stopped the Flōt—”
Cuthbert interrupted, “If I’m not healthy, then why don’t you ’av me sign in properly?”
“I have my reasons,” said Baj.
The truth was, the Ministry of Mind automatically scanned office records for what it termed “excessive support,” and Dr. Bajwa’s compassion had seriously endangered both of them. Hypochondriacs, Flōt addicts, and the otherwise mentally ill inevitably ended up before the Ministry’s EquiPoise inquisitors, whom Dr. Bajwa considered little more than psychological versions of Red Watch thugs.
“I’m telling you,” said Baj. “You’ve got to keep a low profile. Please, Cuthbert. Do it for your old mate.” He raised his brows and tried to affect an accent from the recently declared All-Indigent zone of Bethnal Green, where he’d grown up. “Look me in me mincies, mate—I wouldn’t tell you a cherry!”
Cuthbert sat puzzled, blinking. East End slang always sounded preposterous to him. It certainly wasn’t yam-yammy Black Country talk, he thought, and it wasn’t otterspaeke. But he did value the joviality, more than Baj realized.
“We’re friends now?” asked Cuthbert.
Baj coughed a couple times. He worked to clear his throat of both phlegm and his strained Cockney. “Well . . . yes. Why not?”
“Fact is,” said Cuthbert, “I’m goin’ to let all the animals out of the zoo. But I dunna want to see you scragged by any Red Watch for my animal business.”
Baj laughed. He simply did not believe Cuthbert was serious.
“No,” said Baj. “You can’t do that. It’s quite impossible anyway. You’d have the whole bleedin’ RAF bearing down on you. It’s the last zoo on earth, isn’t it? I’ve heard that underground they’ve thousands of complete gene-maps for every animal known. It’s the ark.”
“I will,” he said.
“Cracking,” said Baj, still not believing Cuthbert had the intention—or the means—to do so.
IN THE NEXT, final week before things turned grim for Baj, he pressed the idea of a Flōt detox at the Whittington, but gently. Cuthbert would bring in copies of old scientific journal articles, meticulously scissored out and somehow printed—and almost no one printed anything these days—onto ivory paper, a passé resource hard to come by for anyone, let alone an Indigent.
The articles all came from the sober but tiny subset of psychology researchers who studied animal cognition. “Cats Shatter Applied Rules Barrier,” read one title from the 2010s. Another asked, “Do Bees Have an Imagination?”
The doctor began to wonder whether his secret patient was as crazy as he let on.
“Really, I’m not sure you’re quite as ill, at the end of the day, as you may be officially,” Dr. Bajwa found himself pronouncing at one point.
“Yes? S’that mean I oughn’t worry about the otters?”
“No,” said the doctor. “There’s a problem there—in not worrying at all, I mean. And I’ve been wanting to ask you, what—er, what do they—the otters—actually say? To you?”
“Oh, they’re complete sixes and sevens,” said Cuthbert. “Just mad and yampy as paper tigers in the rain—ha-ha. Things like ‘blah blah blah’ and so on. And let us out, or what.”
“I have a feeling you’re not being entirely frank now.”
“I am. But as I told you before, and it didn’t seem to make a differe
nce. I told you: ‘gagoga.’ That’s the key.”
“But you see, it’s you who give their words meaning. The otters—or your brother, who is most likely dead—aren’t actually talking to you, are they? It’s more that you’re thinking about them talking to you, right?”
“Ar.”
“So I believe we may be getting somewhere.”
“I do, too. Somewhere.”
Still, each vaguely sensed that the other had a very different destination in mind.
TOWARD THE END OF JANUARY, Harry9’s newly empowered Privy Council asked that Parliament study another series of social reforms, this time regarding what it called “quality of life” and “national civility” issues. It was said to be motivated by the continued spread of the most powerful of the new suicide cults—Heaven’s Gate—but it sent a chill through the NHS Élite and its harried GPs. This particular cult, which practiced ritual mass suicide along with mass animal sacrifices, had begun to infiltrate the Indigent populations, who had heretofore seemed immune to its promises of human transcendence to a “Next Level.” There were suspicions, too, that Heaven’s Gate was secretly behind the spread of Flōt addiction, and this was beginning to panic the rising British aristocracy (and, indeed, ruling classes around the world). The voteless Indigents were, after all, Britain’s new workforce par excellence.
The homeless, seen as especially vulnerable, were to be moved assertively toward controversial, unproven Nexar treatments if they wanted to keep their benefits. All provisions for any kind of free psychotherapy, except for something called “Family Integrity Counseling,” were to be abolished. Among the most powerful aristocrats, only a very young former Earl of Worcester, a callow thorn in Harry9’s side and distant cousin, promised to fight the proposals. Dr. Bajwa himself felt furious over the proposals, but powerless.
