by Bill Broun
“Jesus,” he said. “I’m fucked.”
When the Nandroid floated away like a great pink hot-air balloon carrying its gondola, and no one else appeared on the path, he moved in closer to the jackals. There were five, he saw, and he gave them a pained smile.
“What are your exact names, now, eh? Are you lot gonna say something now?”
He squinted at them. They were dirty and weird—real animals, and not genomic clones. They were not like the wavy-haired spaniels he saw on Sundays at the park. They had short, tawny hair and narrow skulls. Their large, sharp ears were filled with white hair. A cape of black hair spread down their backs. Their oddest trait was their lean, elongated legs. They looked like foxes on stilts. The placard on the fence read: GOLDEN JACKAL (CANIS AUREUS), TANZANIA.
Of course, a jackal hadn’t been seen in East Africa for thirty years. Much of the region was entirely given over to colossal biomesh and “green fuel” farms.
He tapped the fence. Cuthbert said aloud, quietly, “’Allo-allo, chaps. Don’t want to talk now?”
One of the jackals rolled over and yawned. Cuthbert got out a piece of his diatom-cinnamon chewing gum. He rolled it into a hard little nut and pushed it through the cage. It fell onto the ground. Like magic, and wraithlike, the jackals all stood up and faced him. A young, lean one thrust its head forward and picked the gum off the dirt with its fore-snout, then jerked its head back to take the gum deep into its maw. The animal backed a few steps away from the other four jackals. It began to chew. It was obviously a strange, difficult food for the jackal. The movement of its jaws scared Cuthbert. It was too rapid and repetitive, and it seemed as if the jackal couldn’t make the process stop. He regretted giving it. The chewing jackal’s eyes stayed on the other four jackals, who looked interested and apprehensive. Cuthbert put his palms against the cage. A larger, fatter jackal gazed up at him, panting with a “happy” face. Its mouth was partially open and its glistening long tongue quivered. A sudden, lively feeling, a kind of élan, pushed up from Cuthbert’s abdomen, into his neck. He felt his cheeks grow warm and tingly.
“Hi, hi,” he said to the animal.
He decided to have a go at setting his marked finger on a strand of fencing, and the black 9 mm mark he’d scored, he noted, was at least five times the width of the thin fencing. It was evident that his bolt cutters could free the jackals easily—and take on much thicker-gauge fencing, too.
A yellow isosceles triangle on the fence displayed a black silhouette of a hand with an orderly half-circle cut out of its palm. It read:
These
Animals
May Bite
“Better not hold my donnies in the cage,” he said to himself; but he felt that he probably could keep his finger there and no harm would come to him.
“You’re only a dog, aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve been off my head, puppy!”
After a few minutes, the jackals began to lurk around their long enclosure, except for the one still chewing the gum. They moved with an awkward grace, as if they might fall off their own legs and yet make it look purposeful. One animal held its head low to the ground, trotting around like a police sniffer dog. It seemed disturbed by something. Much of the grass inside their prison was worn away, exposing long tracts of dirt patted shiny by paws. A few coarse, raw roots sprung from the soil, like the pale elbows of underwater swimmers in a dark lupine lake.
Cuthbert knew the Red Watch was after him, but he hadn’t noticed what the jackal had: one tall, unmantled Watchman striding in their direction, from near the hyacinth macaws.
Some of the jackals began barking in their high-pitched, melodious yaps.
Cuthbert realized that he hadn’t moved for a long time. It was time to get going.
As he began stumbling along, he stopped to steady himself with his hand on a short brick wall, then lurched against a small elm tree. There was supposed to be a line painted on the walk somewhere for a self-guided tour, but he couldn’t see it. If he tried to follow a line painted on the path, anyone with sense would see instantly that he was stewed. He began berating himself for succumbing to the impulses that had brought him here. “Fuck me,” he said. “Fuck me!”
The lone Watchman bumped against him hard and scowled; he carried his golden neuralwave pike, but he seemed distracted and rushed.
“Stay the fuck to the side of the path,” the Watchman hissed, stopping for a moment. “Indigent shite!”
“Ay, sir! Sorry, sir!”
“Haven’t you heard? The whole bloody country’s on fucking King’s Alert tonight. What’s the matter with you? You look like a slapped arse, mate.”
The jackals snarled at the Watchman, who sneered at them, “Dirty dogs—is this your little filthy mate?”
One of the jackals, a large male, hurled itself toward the Watchman and smacked against the fence. The Watchman jumped back, reflexively.
“Shite dogs,” he said, shaking his head. “Should be exterminated.”
The Watchman walked away, apparently not interested in further abusing any creature for the moment. Such a painless departure was unusual and lucky, since Cuthbert was surely on the Red Watch List. At best, the Watch List meant arrest and internment; at worst, an Indigent on the list could be neuralpiked to death if she or he met the wrong Watchman. Officially, Indigents not databased or indentured had no restrictions on movement in Britain, but unofficially, the Watch sometimes beat them away, on sight, from places where the upper-middle classes and the new aristocracy congregated, and this almost always involved checking their compliance status. Whatever negligible power and dignity an Indigent ever held, the Watch List instantly crushed them.
HAVING ESCAPED THE WATCH once again, Cuthbert didn’t feel relief so much as curiosity. Why was England on alert this time? Was the Army of Anonymous on the attack again? He thought, then, that he heard distant sirens, but he wasn’t sure.
On the far side of the jackal enclosure, a few zoo workers in loose, pine-colored spawn-ball shirts had shown up. They were beginning to work their way through the series of chain-link fence walkways and double gates that led into the jackal enclosure. One of the keepers, a woman with a short brown ponytail, was staring at Cuthbert. He almost felt she was appraising him as a fellow animal, both absentmindedly and indulgently, like a bosonicabus passenger gazing at the face of another passenger in a passing bosonicabus, then glancing away.
Cuthbert decided that he should leave the zoo immediately. He felt certain that he was about to be found out. That last Watchman may have already put in a call. He needed to come back, but only in the deep of night. Or maybe he could get an Opticall to Dr. Bajwa, tell him he was ready for the Whittington, ready to detox.
Cuthbert strolled down footpaths. They sagged and veered with such wide egressions, and offered so few forks, they seemed designed for people easily bewildered. He felt a little more relaxed, simply moving, but this calm would wear out fast, he knew. Oh, god, he could use another good pull off that Flōt orb in the grotto.
He came to a capsule-shaped white sign that hung on black metal tubing. In black lettering, it read: GREEN LINE TRAIL: FOLLOW THE GREEN LINE—YOU WON’T GET LOST AND YOU WON’T MISS A THING! There was an arrow pointing to the ground and a set of paws, but Cuthbert saw no green line. He suspected somehow being tricked by the zoo. The idea that the zoo had merely placed a reference sign poorly did not occur to him. He clipped along but kept pausing at footpath intersections to read cryptic signposts. A taloned claw denoting Birds of Prey; a single long-necked antelope for the Arabian Oryx’s lonely zone; a crescent and stars for Moonlight World. Another sign had the zoological society’s initials in animal-skin prints: ZSL—for Zoological Society of London—in zebra, snake-scales, and tiger stripes, above its long-used phrase “Living Conservation.” Cuthbert did not grasp the meaning of conservation, really, but he took it as an article of faith. It had to be somewhere, in some tiny hidden cage or test tube in a back office. Unlike the rest of Britain after the Second Restoration
, the fifteen-hectare scalene triangle that housed the London Zoo hadn’t slid back to an almost pre-Victorian ethos where the poor, the animals, and the non-English were to be worked, caged, and subtly subjugated. After the Property Revolts, conservation outside the zoo had ended in all but signage and laboratories, and if not for a dedicated and well-connected core of ZSL scientists, the zoo would have shuttered in the 2020s.
CUTHBERT FINALLY REACHED one of the two main exits and headed out like a satisfied punter. As he pushed the timeworn, clicking, cage-like turnstile around, a sudden lump of terror seemed to expand in his throat in that bad spot he could never see with his eyes—and just as quickly disappear.
He was out—and free to return, as long as the Watch didn’t nick him. He shuffled away from the gate now, and stood there, amazed at what he had done. He savored the feeling, glancing around himself. He hadn’t released any animals yet, but he’d done something rather nonpareil, and all his slipshod planning and grotto-making and crawling and Flōt-guzzling had somehow led to it.
to be worse than animals
OUTSIDE THE MAIN ENTRANCE, SEVERAL AFFLUENT families had begun to regroup on the pavement. The zoo was closing, and anywhere one glanced, a fraught child yearned for something. Cuthbert should have left then.
One red-faced toddler shook a fist for a pseudoapple-ice. A dapper boy in a sky-blue morning suit, surrounded by a tiny herd of holographic zebras he’d escorted from the gift shop, averred that his sprog-juice gorilla lolly wasn’t as good as last time. A little girl with wispy blond curls damp from her own sweaty distress screeched for an expensive “living-leather” elephant, which simulated the beast’s 37.5˚ C body temp but retracted in chill air. Another brandished a long, giraffe skin–design cloud-doodle pencil, a recent fad item with which a child could scribble on the local sky. At one point, an old-fashioned stuffed King Penguin—nothing like the zoo’s own South African birds—was hurled hopelessly toward the street in a tantrum.
Cuthbert, an isle of relative calm, observed a fat boy next to him, savagely ripping apart a nuplastic bag containing an owl kite and waving its unassembled pieces through the air until a sheet with a pair of yellow eye stickers fell to the ground. The boy’s mother scolded him, and Cuthbert moved to pick the eyes up for the boy, but the boy pounced on them covetously and gave him an impish grin. Several white nuplastic pieces of the old-fashioned kite assembly and its pine sticks had fallen to the ground and bounced around. Cuthbert backed off.
“Tell that gentleman thank you, Nelson,” the mother said. Her pristine waffle-textured green demi-cape, her flawless blanched skin, her air of confident ease—all signified the conventions of the new aristocrats. She regarded Cuthbert with a distanced but authentic compassion. He felt exposed and didn’t know quite what to do. So he waved at the woman, and she smiled at him. He and the mother then watched the boy deal with his kite mess.
Cuthbert thought of his own mother, who had died in 1994, and his father, who lived until 2014—just shy of the era of BodyMods (Cuthbert hadn’t spoken to him since his mother’s funeral). He felt anguish and some disgust. They were both the offspring of country people, and each had endured a kind of poverty nearly forgotten in England for almost a century, one that was now returning with grievous force.
His mother had been born in Bewdley, a pretty little medieval market town, but by age seventeen, she had moved to the larger Kidderminster, a bit closer to Birmingham. It was supposed to have been her big move out of the blighted countryside to the west. It wasn’t. She lived in a noisy women’s rooming house and plucked chickens at a small poultry plant. Her roommates made fun of her Wyrish dialect, her melodious accent, her love of ale and fear of hard spirits. The Black Country and Birmingham was where the real fun was—dances, cars, silk dresses, Quality Street chocolates in pink and gold cellophane. When Hitler started sending over his deadly Heinkel 111s, she ran against the refugee traffic and moved to bomb-targeted Brum. As she saw it, death by mustard gas or shrapnel was preferable to pulling hanks of cold feathers off hundreds of dead roasters a day. She moved to West Bromwich and got a job making bullets.
Cuthbert’s father, Henry, who was a few years younger than Mary, had come to West Brom soon after the war. Like many of the new residents of the Black Country, he too hailed from the red sandstone and coal-sweetened countryside immediately to the west. He had grown up in a tiny farmhouse in Far Forest, just a few miles to the west of Bewdley, and right on the Wyre’s edge. There was no running water, no electricity, no gas—only a coal stove with a big hob.
He met Mary in a dance hall, in Handsworth, in 1949. They married, and gradually turned themselves—and were turned—into Brummies of a cold, acquisitive, routine-led nature. Henry liked to think of himself as a tough “gutter Tory.” He’d been a lorry driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, and eventually came to fancy himself a kind of Enoch Powell without the Cambridge degree. He had seen horrors in Egypt during the Suez emergency. He spoke of the fedayeen as “animals,” and his children as one step above them, as if they were always slipping toward an ungovernableness that required a stern taking-in-hand. He had killed two Egyptians, “and enjoyed it,” he would sometimes say. “It doesn’t affect me as it does some blokes.”
One cold day, the winter before Drystan died, he and Cuthbert were breaking icicles off the eaves of the house and licking the long dark spikes. Cuthbert remembered the bumpy-scratchy feeling of the ice on the tongue, how it tasted like rotten poplar wood.
Drystan had said that he thought that children must be considered worse than animals to parents in Birmingham—at least in their case.
“They don’t care,” he’d said. “The most they ever touch us is to hit us—they never give us anything nice, never give us cuddles or smiles, never kiss us, never pat our hair or say they love us. They’d put us in boxes if they could, I’m sure.”
The little chubby boy Cuthbert was watching gathered up the kite pieces on all fours, then sat down on the ground, swami-style, and flattened the kite across his knees. All the kite’s bits and bobs were spread around him on the pavement in front of the zoo. A few other bystanders had taken notice of the scene, and one of them, a man with a new sort of sunshades with a hovering red vapor bulbed around his eyes, now stared at Cuthbert with open suspicion.
“You,” the man said to Cuthbert, who pretended to ignore him.
The boy removed the adhesive backing from the eyes, and held them as carefully by their edges as a surgeon might hold actual organs. Cuthbert wished he could help the boy, but he knew that the boy didn’t want his help. So he just stayed where he was, gawping, and risking the attention of the Watch.
The boy was now smoothing the eyes onto the microthin nuplastic wings of the kite, pushing hard with his knuckles. His mother stood over him, beaming. She was a compact woman with straight red hair and an elegant waffle-cloth capelet whose loden color clashed with her hair: seen up close, she reminded Cuthbert a bit of some of the smart middle-class women he used to see getting on the train at New Street back home, back when more women worked, but her cool poise marked her out.
She said to Cuthbert, “You see, these old-fashioned toys—kites!—they’re still better than all these poly-D games, don’t you think?” The question was strictly rhetorical, and Cuthbert didn’t dare answer.
He did nod, tentatively. He asked, shyly, “Is he going to have a go with it here and all?”
The man with the red-smoke sunshades approached the woman.
“Is this . . . man . . . is he bothering you?”
“Heavens, no,” said the woman.
“So sorry—I offer ten tall tanks of apologies,” the man said, sniffing at Cuthbert. The man withdrew but peered around, as if searching for a Watchman.
“Is he going to fly the kite now?” Cuthbert asked again.
The boy faced his mother scornfully, and she smiled tensely around the vicinity. The bystanders who had been paying attention to the boy turned away.
“No,” she said
to Cuthbert. Then she addressed the boy: “Roll it up into the bag, Nelson. Right away.” The bag was already destroyed, so the boy just folded the kite into a little, puffy trapezoid and jammed it into his trouser’s front pocket. The woman grabbed some of the nuplastic joints and sticks and the paper-curl of instructions off the walk, and she and the boy made to go.
She said, “He’ll actually get to fly it. In Spain, next week. Hols for us—again.”
“Why not just go to Hampstead Heath?”
The woman said, “Oh, that’s a nice idea.” She glanced around for a moment, took a pair of £5 coins from beneath her demi-cape, and forced them nervously into Cuthbert’s willing, filthy hand.
“You be careful,” she said. “The Watch is around. You’re asking for trouble, sir.”
Then the mother and son walked away, the boy still fiddling with the kite in his pocket.
Because the zoo had been unusually busy that day, a sluggish queue snaked toward a half-door set into a gate building where day-rental nuplastic strollers could be returned. The zoo was curiously authoritarian about the strollers, its staff checking in each one, sweeping an open hand underneath them, like customs officers, and creating the kind of queue one normally only saw Indigents standing in.
“Probably a neural bomb threat, from the usual suspects,” a red-faced man in the queue scoffed. “Bloody last-gaspers.” It was commonplace in central London for the republican terrorists to ring in phony bomb threats, except sometimes they weren’t faked. They had killed civilians, all right, but their hypothetical neural devices created confusion for effect.
