by Bill Broun
“I saw that Earl of Worcester on the TV,” Baj was telling Cuthbert. “They’ve said he’s secretly in deep with the Army of Anonymous, and some of the Irish Underground, but I don’t know. What do you think, Cuthbert? He sure doesn’t like Harry. Of course, Harry makes hatred very easy. But if it weren’t for Worcestershire, they say, Harry would have taken over every mind in Europe. He’s afraid. He’s still afraid of going too far—thank heavens.”
Cuthbert pursed his lips. “All these powerful people—none of them are really listenin’—not to me, not to anyone anymore. Not really. Not hard. If they were, they’d hear what’s coming—and it’s not good. But I don’t mind the king. I’ve not much use for this Earl of Worcester bloke.”
“What’s coming, my friend?”
“The end.”
ONE DAY, soon after this, Dr. Bajwa found himself wheezing badly after taking a run in Finsbury Park. He needed to bend over in his sky-blue training jacket and magnetic running shoes to gasp for breath. He coughed, and he noticed a few bright flecks of blood on his hand. A homeless man with an oily brown beanie hat and no upper front teeth saw him and put his hand on Baj’s back.
“Easy, mate,” the Indigent said. “You’re awright.”
“Right,” he said. “Fit as a fid—” He coughed again. “Fiddle!”
The doctor had no history of asthma or bronchitis, and he had never used tobacco, so he mostly felt unworried. Still, it was strange.
A few days later, Baj visited his own NHS Legacy GP, a white-mustachioed internist on Harley Street.
Dr. Peter Bonhomme was an even-tempered pragmatist who had survived the paroxysms of the new monarchy by feigning sentimentality when it came to politics. He always wore an old commemorative House of Windsor badge pin issued to mark Elizabeth II’s death. He was short, round, and strong, and apart from his shaky hands, looked not unlike his pin’s squat, stolid depiction of the Tower of Windsor. He was a kindly man, and Baj considered him a heartening presence if not quite a friend.
Dr. Bonhomme never wasted time. He drew blood, listened to Baj’s chest with a mediscope, and gave him a cloudy plastic cup for urinalysis.
“Right,” he said, with a characteristic firmness. “So how are you doing otherwise?” he asked.
“All is well,” Baj said. He felt anxious to talk, but he couldn’t bring himself to say much. An old indisposition to show weakness held him back. He almost would have felt more comfortable sharing with a social lesser—even Cuthbert.
“I’m all right,” he added. “You know, ‘getting on with it.’ Are you well?”
“I’m glad to be working still.”
“You call this work, on Harley Street?” Dr. Bajwa teased. At one time, such a quip between professionals would have seemed more amusing, he realized. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist.”
“No worries, Baj!” said Dr. Bonhomme, grinning, and looking at his mediscope’s floating holographic readout, which plotted a colored ball—in this case red—onto a shoe box–size three-dimensional quadrangle that the doctor analyzed. “We’re lucky to be working at all these days,” he said.
“Yes,” said Baj. Were he to say any more, he knew, the conversation would be edging toward treason. He left it there.
Dr. Bonhomme slid a white ultrasonic camera out of a small plastic case and dimmed the lights. The older doctor smiled gently at Baj for a moment, but then seemed lost in trying to work the camera.
“Hold still now,” he said, “and raise your arms up.” Baj complied. Four faint hums ensued—and it was over.
The aged Dr. Bonhomme could barely hold the heavy camera steady as he guided it onto a wet-titanium gooseneck base. Two lurid blue-white biometric eyes awakened above the lens. He rubbed the top of the camera for a moment, as if petting a baby white shark, and the camera instantaneously projected four-dimensional pathological extrapolations of Baj’s insides on the wall.
Baj looked at white petals of a neoplasm, unfolding on the wall. There it was—a pale flower of death in the right lobe of his lung.
Dr. Bonhomme’s face had fallen. He glanced nervously at Baj.
“But I don’t smoke,” said Baj. “This can’t be.”
There was a pause. Dr. Bonhomme said hoarsely, “We can do a lot these days—even with lungs.” He appeared to collect himself for a moment. He stood up a little taller, then spoke confidently: “Right now. These are but ‘shadows of things to come,’ as they say. But you’re going to need an oncologist. And you might consider a day or two of Nexar—just to destress, right?”
“I don’t use the hoods,” said Baj, in a tone of subdued annoyance, and Dr. Bonhomme nodded.
There was another pause. Dr. Bonhomme nodded and put his hand on his peer’s shoulder.
“Look, I won’t claim to understand how you feel,” he said. “I’d react the same way, honestly.” He switched off the ultrasonic camera, and the screen popped off with a tiny shriek. “But it’s not like the twentieth century, is it? I’m sorry, Baj. But it’s not a death sentence. And just thank bloody god you’re in Legacy.”
“God couldn’t give a fuck about me,” said Baj.
Dr. Bajwa had an incipient lung tumor. Treated, it wasn’t necessarily terminal, he knew, but the five-year survival rate was still only 50 percent. Whole new metastasizing cancers and newly aggressive viral syndromes remained significant medical foes, even in this era of 120-year-plus life spans. The problem was, for the rich, the development of a variety of new, improved, salable BodyMods—especially CoreMods (through which most major organs, apart from brains, could be easily refurbished), and EverConnectors (synthetic, fibrous connective tissue-sleeves)—as well as new cartilage chemotherapies—had long supplanted the search for cures in terms of much research. For everyone else, and especially Indigents, Nexar hoods as well as ordinary intoxicants—even Flōt—made cancer less menacing.
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 conten
t,” 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 break-in, 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.
He blinked three times, and the texts began to crawl across his eyes as he walked down the pavement, wading through a red and blue sea of the rain spheres people wore.
First, he learned that the neoplasm in his right lung was, so far, isolated and “eminently treatable.” The fancy Legacy oncologist he’d seen wrote with the tired, all’s-well tone of one who had simply chosen white and blue instead of red and black for their new yacht spinnaker and jib sails. “Long story short: you’re absolutely fine, etc. etc., and I’ll see you next month for a routine follow-up. And there’s a pill, as you must know.” Dr. Bajwa laughed aloud at the news. He had been quite worried.
A great number of Indigent children dressed in dirty T-shirts and denims, all sopping wet (none ever wore rain spheres), seemed to be jostling around him on the pavement.
“Spare a fiver, sir,” they kept asking.
As he tried to read the next Opticall, and shove his way toward the Underground entrance, he managed to pull a few pounds from his pocket.
“You’re a great man,” a little girl with an eye patch told him. She looked thin, with a pasty-gray pallor. “Truly, sir.”
“No I’m not,” he said, leaning down and scrubbling the girl’s thick black hair. “But I am happy, sweet one.”
When he opened the other Opticall, his happiness collapsed. As the awful words passed over his corneas, he began, instantly, to weep. It had been years since he had cried, and it strained his body. He crossed his strong arms, trying to stifle the hurt, and keep quiet. The little Indigent girl hugged his legs.
“Don’t cry,” she said.
His salty tears played havoc with the electro-photoreceptors in his corneal readers, turning the message script into tall, reedy, scary lettering. Nonetheless, the distressing bit was clear enough, and Dr. Bajwa scrolled it over his corneas a few times, taking it in: NHS Élite Patient No. 87229109, Handley, Cuthbert Alfred. Arrest Notification. Offence: Drunk (Flōt) and Incapable, High Street, Camden Town. Result in Lieu of Fine and/or Detention: Compulsory Form B-810 Report, Mental Hygiene Exam, Ministry of Mind. Date: 1 March 2052 via SkinWerks Bond. Examiner: Dr. George Reece, 2nd Viscount Islington, 1st Psyalleviator (EQUIPOISE), Home Counties Region.
It was all that Baj had been fighting to prevent, and it almost certainly meant that his elderly patient would end up institutionalized—and, soon enough, dead.
“You can come home and live with us,” the little girl said. “You won’t be sad with us. I’ve got a mother, you know.”
Baj leaned down, and kissed the girl on the forehead, and walked away. He smelled the street in her hair—rain, spit, the earthy acridity of coal dust from a century ago.
He realized at that moment that he had no choice but to cooperate with EquiPoise when it came to Cuthbert, or risk his own medical registration. While the Watch might not have been unleashed on Cuthbert yet, one deviation from the Ministry of Mind’s examination procedures and detention was inevitable—should he survive the arrest itself. The next day, he was able to break the news to Cuthbert, who seemed completely and rather pitifully unfazed. It was the one reaction Baj feared most.
“You need to respect EquiPoise,” he pleaded with Cuthbert. “Oh god, Cuthbert. You don’t understand. They will want everything from you.”
“I’ve no worries,” he answered. “There’s a ‘force that through the green fuse,’ Baj, drives everything, and it’ll never let us down. And no EquiPoise will get their grubby donnies* on my otters, I’ll tell you that.”
Cuthbert had just as well, the doctor thought bitterly, handed his pureed brain to EquiPoise in a disposable jar. It was over.
CUTHBERT’S FATEFUL EXAM with Dr. Reece lasted forty-five seconds, over a scent-enabled SkinWerks screen, during which Reece put a mere two questions to Cuthbert: Do you hear voices? and Do you dedicate yourself to the King? Cuthbert answered, respectively, “Of course, don’t you?” and “More than you’ll ever know.”
Dr. Reece didn’t like him. Reece’s rather minor new Islington viscountcy, for which he outbid a few B-list media celebrities and paid the Windsors £130,000, hadn’t quite bought him the respect he felt he deserved.
An NHS Élite First Psyalleviator who kept tabs on several thousand other destitute mental cases, Reece calibrated medications on bulk database screens and, in short, superintended thousands of unwell brains. At the start of the exam, Cuthbert’s marshy smell of Flōt and old clothes so bothered him, Reece had immediately activated his high-priced olfactory CoreMods (as he often did with Indigents), an insult clearly visible to Cuthbert with the Psyalleviator’s telltale swipe of his nasal septum.
Like many of the aristocracy, his face looked weird, showing signs of various rejuvenating mods with telltale “cracks” in the facade. In the Viscount Reece’s case, his blue eyes had the watery, dull look of a man obviously older than 110 or so, which wasn’t particularly old by today’s standards, but the rest of his face belonged, cosmetically, to a twenty- or thirty-year-old man’s.
Cuthbert kept staring and smiling at the man, ruffling him mightily.
Animal conversationalist that he was, he also informed Dr. Reece that “your cat told me you bore him stiff.” The First Psyalleviator sniffed a little and stiffly tapped something into the SkinWerks skin-panel now glowing from the back of his officious hand.
Upon receiving Reece’s report and the accompanying documentation, Dr. Bajwa was forced to code Cuthbert as “severely mentally ill” as stipulated by NHS Élite digi-form B-810, or his patient would lose all public benefits, including housing.
Reece was also insisting Cuthbert be quickly “databased,” and Cuthbert, who had ended his encounter with
Reece by singing what he called “My Song to Mice,” gave the Psyalleviator no reason to rethink the categorization. A databasing sanction would immediately slash his dole to £25 a week and end public transport privileges. Institutionalization, in an NHS Élite–approved Calm House, was next.
With Dr. Bajwa’s help, Cuthbert could try to appeal the decision, but he would have to be off Flōt completely for at least a month or two, and he would need to shut it when it came to hearing bloody animals and toe the Ministry of Mind’s lines.
It all struck Baj as impossible. Cuthbert, it seemed, was doomed.
Dr. Bajwa felt that he had betrayed his patient, too. The vile Reece, in an Opticall, indicated he could easily secure a bed for Cuthbert in the ill-famed old St. Clements Hospital in the Bow Road, in East London, and Baj didn’t immediately reject the idea. What had he done for Cuthbert, after all?
“It’s not like it used to be,” Reece claimed. It was now a dedicated Grade I mental hygiene facility, and every resident wore Nexar hoods for two hours a day. Through the hoods, Dr. Reece and a small team of other First Psyalleviators from EquiPoise attended to the brains of hundreds of thousands of mental patients—a whole British sea of pathogenic alpha waves.
This use of bioelectronic stimuli had saved taxpayers millions of pounds and provided a certain comfort to the sufferers themselves. It was for this reason, ostensibly, that King Henry IX, and even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Jessica Mackenzie, were always on the broadcast news to promote Nexar treatments.
“No one in our kingdom need ever suffer again,” a red-faced Harry often intoned before cameras, his eyes hard as sapphire and his neck bulging like a ripped rugby ball.
