by Bill Broun
She suspected that the whole Royal Parks Constabulary that could be rousted at this hour, a corps numbering close to 150 officers, would be assigned to the traditional supporting role of creating a filtered cordon around the “incident area,” which would be no easy task at this point.
Meanwhile all looked pure chaos. Astrid knew about how the Gold-Silver-Bronze system worked, but only in the abstract. Like nearly all her colleagues on the parks force, she was right out of her depth when it came to the intricacies of the king’s new Royal Emergency Services Liaison Panel, or RESLP, plan for major incidents. Gold was strategic, Silver tactical, and Bronze ground operational level. But until a commanding officer appeared and made himself or herself known, there was little to do but, as Omotoso put it, “hold the position” and get people to safety.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Astrid, gently trying to nudge reporters aside and feeling mortified in doing so.
When she finally got to Beauchamp, she found him holding court within a scalding panopticon of direct-to-WikiNous camera lights. She felt oddly comforted to see him; Beauchamp at least was acting true to form, if nothing else in the world was tonight.
“Heya,” Astrid said, jostling beside him. She inadvertently pushed him off-center. He slipped down to his knees; he rested there for a moment like a churchgoer, blinking in surprise until she helped him up. The accident earned Astrid a prize frown.
“So, so sorry,” she whispered. Then, turning to the throng, she said: “Listen, people. Everything’s changed. A major incident has been declared.”
Not a soul seemed to have heard her. Beauchamp started smirking, and said, “What? A major what?” He was nodding his head. He leaned in close to Astrid and said in her ear. “I see your ‘support’ is here, although I should think you had nothing to do with that, did you? And now I can’t even find my squad. God bloody knows how they’ll find me in this mess.”
“Just shut it,” Astrid said in a stage whisper. Beauchamp’s expression didn’t change. He seemed content to be spoken to in this way—as if used to it.
“The public’s safety is the priority here,” she said, “followed closely by the welfare of your animals. Isn’t that what you would expect, or is there something else you’re after?”
Turning toward the reporters, Astrid cleared her throat. “Listen!” she shouted. “Right!” There was, at least, a modicum of quiet. A great array of lights immediately turned upon Astrid, making her squint. “People, I need you to please get into your gliders and other vehicles. And I would appreciate it if you didn’t quote me. The Met’s public affairs department will be handling questions from here on out.”
There was another pause, then a gruff voice, a journalist’s, called out, “On your bike, Mrs. Plods!”
Several reporters guffawed, but one of them responded to the first, saying, “Why? Why insult the officer, you lot of shite-for-brains? You’ll ruin it for all of us.” But his tone was ambiguous, even sardonic.
“Hang on,” said another. “This isn’t a restricted area, is it? I’m my own gaffer, and I’ve got a bloody press card—we all do, I should think. Not even the king can stop us.”
“Careful!” someone with a gulping, frog-like voice warned. “Sedition!” he stammered. “You’re up . . . you’re up . . . you’re up to your ears in it.”
“Shut it, you fecking royal tool,” another responded.
“Harry9 can suck my eyes!”
Astrid felt panicked by the open defiance in the air. She didn’t grasp the sense of bitter irony the reporters all seemed to possess.
“I,” she started to say. She felt her heart skip and then flutter and jerk into an awkward gallop. For a moment, the edges of her vision grew cottony and white, and she thought she was going to faint.
“God damn it,” she seethed, not quite inaudibly. She was furious at her weakness, her wilting under pressure, but unable to summon that anger and bring it out where it might have been useful to her. The rage seemed to knock her heart back into a normal if fast cadence, but she still felt overwhelmed. She could not think of a time when she felt more scrutinized.
“There are bloody animals out!” she spluttered. “Are you half soaked?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Animals shanimals. We ’eard that one already.”
“The major incident alarm’s on,” she said. She tried hard to soften her tone but felt beyond control, too, as if steering an air-bike with its handlebars abruptly pulled off. “You—you lot need to protect yourselves. There’s a mobile control room will be arriving here presently. Do you understand, people? You’re standing in the hot zone. We’re all in danger. You’ve got your press freedoms, but you’re at your own risk.”
Astrid felt, for a moment, a sense of feeble power.
“We heard you, officer,” said an older woman reporter with short white hair. “But we’ve had it with being cowed. We’re sick of it. There’s something very, very funny going on here. The Watch will be here and start neuralpiking us just as soon as the animals do anything to hurt us. We’re supposed to—”
“We can’t protect you if you stand out here,” she said.
They were looking at her more seriously now. They seemed to respect her assertiveness, inept or not, although it was clear they wouldn’t roll over for her. As her eyes adjusted to the light of the cameras, she began to see some of their faces. Many were different from what she would have imagined. The parks police rarely dealt with rank-and-file grunts behind the automedia, and Astrid never had. Their eyes gleamed with an unexpected perspicacity, and their faces wore expressions of genuine concern. It made her think of how the news supposedly used to be, in the days of “investigative reporting” (the term had fallen into disuse) and long-form magazine journalism, a kind of probing rough-literature that had vanished with the Property Revolts.
These autonewsers looked grubbier than the stereotypes. The men seemed to be wearing the same sort of stolid nuplastic-fiber jackets and organum-blend shirts that her male colleagues bought from M&S. The women reminded her of herself on her days off: hastily made up, dressed almost uniformly in off-the-shelf black crylon garments. Some wore their hair back with the same crooked multibarrettes and “living” bio-fiber-hairbands she used. Everyone appeared either just wakened or indeed, half-spiring. She had always figured that the scruffy journos from Canary Wharf who occasionally appeared at her Seamen’s Rest FA meetings were exceptions, not the rule.
A few of the reporters started glancing around, scrutinizing nearby hedges and trees. One of them, a white-haired warhorse in an old-fashioned Barbour wax coat with frayed cuffs, hunched slightly, then began lumbering around, spinning a bit, and nearly falling down until he completed a full 360-degree inspection.
“And that, my pretties, is my pirouette—en dedans!” he wisecracked.
Another journalist, a woman grasping in one hand her long autoreporter’s zoom-microphone and an opened bag of “masala-flavored” algae crisps, said, “Sorry, but I don’t feel threatened.” She was shaking her zoom-mike at Astrid as she spoke. “Looks like there are some new authorities around here anyway,” she added.
“I’m concerned,” Astrid said lamely. “I would think we should all be careful. Do we really know what’s in the zoo? What’s really there?”
“What’s there is a story. And animals. Animals extinct everywhere else on Earth.”
Then an autojournalist who seemed to be gazing, involuntarily, at the ground, his lower Hapsburg lip trembling, began to shake his head no. He said, “Yeah, piss off! Just—just—just tell us when the press—press—press conference starts! All right?” He sounded both stern and petrified. He kept flexing his fingers and making weak fists—open, closed, open, closed. He looked up and gazed into her wired eyes.
“I’m packing in the ‘automatic’ news,” he said acerbically. “It can f-f-f-fuck off. I’m going to find out what the hell’s going on, and I’m going to write about it—m-myself.”
Astrid found herself admiring his courage.
>
She wanted some of it.
an omen in the heavens
THERE WERE A FEW MINUTES OF STANDING AROUND and grumbling while an even greater—and far more dangerous—chaos seemed to encircle the media group where Astrid stood. A horde—police officers from the Met, firefighters, plainclothes officials, as well as the scruffy members of the AnimalSafe Squad who had been trickling in for rare duty—all these people seemed to be trying to figure out what to do next. There was, as yet, no sense of a command structure.
Suddenly someone shouted “Look! Bejesus! Look! Look!”
Astrid expected to see some gorilla or wild jackass galloping toward them all, but there were no animals and indeed no spatial focus of the crowd’s attention. Holding still and closing her eyes slightly, she tried to discern where the man who was shouting stood, for there were now dozens of people milling about in apparent confusion.
“Look!” the man said again, and Astrid turned and saw him. It was the old reporter in the wax coat, grinning and pointing toward the sky.
Astrid looked up. “Christ,” she said.
What the man saw was indeed shocking. Across the park, just above the tops of a line of sick elms, was Urga-Rampos. It was immense. Its tail of luminous space-dust and ionized gases spumed upward and made the comet look as if it were hurtling down, to Earth, like dying Icarus with his long lustrous hair. It shined with an intensity that Astrid found disturbing.
“Amazing!” said another voice.
“It’s bloody, bloody lovely, that is. Nice work, God.”
“God?” another said, scoffing. “I don’t think any ‘God’s’ involved.”
All the chaos of the night seemed to pause. The whole congregation grew quiet and all eyes turned to the comet. The new moon made the comet especially conspicuous, almost shameless, as if a great ball of firelight had been plucked by a giant, crushed in its hands, and wickedly smeared upon the black sky.
The old reporter in the wax coat said, quite sententiously, “‘Exhaled meteor!—A prodigy of fear, and a portent of broached mischief to the unborn times’!”
“What?” asked Astrid. “What’s that?”
The reporter didn’t answer her, didn’t even look her way. His smiling eyes were fixed on the comet.
For a few minutes, most of the WikiNous fotolive camera operators trained instinctively on the comet itself. The crowd’s reactions gradually muted. There was a flurry of “OptiDips” and messages to editors, with autonews crews running back and forth to their satellite vans. Soon the autojournalists, all clumped on the eastern edge of the zoo, looked unsure of what to “capsule,” as fotolive filming was often called. Many chewed on their lips and fidgeted their toes, taking deep, anxious breaths. News that more animals were on the loose and outside the zoo had trickled in. Cornered, the autojournalists reverted to blinkered form, with several grabbing footage of other autojournalists videoing and fotoliving other autojournalists, and so on. Some aimed 3D cameras and lobbed fotolive lens-bots uncertainly toward the zoo, taking in hedges and partially obscured enclosures with animals mostly in the dark. The density of the hedges and detritus along the fence was such that none of the low-budget lens-bots could make it into the zoo. A few floating lens-bots made it in, but something—or someone—kept downing them. Even in the day, there was little one could see of the zoo from without. A great pall of unease spread across the scene, and inevitably, the autoreporters once again stared at the comet.
“It started off pretty,” said one of them. “Now it’s filling me boots. I don’t like it.”
“Something bad’s going to happen,” said another.
“Please, people,” Astrid called to them, but no one was listening. She had never felt quite so impotent in her job. “For your own safety, please get into your gliders.”
But only the old reporter heeded her, and even he seemed more motivated by fatigue than any desire to comply. He slouched back to his glider, which was, as it happened, surrounded by other gliders and immovable. He got inside, broke open an orb of Flōt, and spired away.
ASTRID THOUGHT she should go back to the pandaglider and check on Atwell and Mr. Dawkins. Because of the major incident tumult, the Paladin was now well out of the center of things, located on the northern tip of the gathering in a comparatively dark, quiet grove where the Broad Walk seemed—it was an illusion of landscape architecture—to narrow to an arbor. As she walked toward the Paladin, she came upon a rather overweight fotolivographer with a smartly dressed TV autoreporter. They stood there, the reporter banging an apparently broken torch on his knee. He was being illuminated by the blazing light attached to the videocamera. There was an illicit air about them, somehow, and Astrid felt wary.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“Oh, how you can!” said the autoreporter. “We’re looking, as it were, for the—front? The main entrance? To the zoo? We understand there’s a sign there.” He stood up more erectly. “We need an establishing shot?”
Reluctantly, Astrid explained how to get there.
“You see, we also need—” the autoreporter said. He waved toward the fotolive camera. “That’s not on, not at all.”
“You really shouldn’t risk it,” Astrid said. “We’ve not at all got the area secured.”
“Of course,” said the reporter, scratching his chin, but the two then just silently walked off toward the entrance, as if Astrid simply had ceased to exist.
All at once, again, there was a great human scream from the zoo. “DRYS! STAN! DRYS! STAN!”
“Jesus! Listen! Listen!” the reporter said.
A new flurry of noises seemed to reply, and the call became only one of hundreds of feral clamors in the cooling air.
“Fucking hell,” said the reporter.
More and more squeals, chitterings, and yowls came. To most of the emergency workers, zoo staff, and journalists gathered, it sounded as if all twelve thousand of the zoo’s residents had been freed and now beset one another. In fact, fewer than fifty were out, and most were simply petrified. But that was about forty more than the metropolis could manage with all its powers assembled in the best case.
As the TV news crew walked away from Astrid, dozens of so-called blue-freqs—the main class of message on the all-London emergency tactical channel—began crackling softly in her ears. Their pale, zinc-tinted hue filled her eyes. The night had gone all metal: Bronze 7, Bronze 7, this is Silver 2, orders from Gold. New orders from Gold, subdue animals by any reasonable means. Orders from Gold to Red Watch. Repeat, orders from Gold: Red Watch should neutralize intruders. Astrid saw that she seemed to have been passed over, operationally. Events were hurtling forward, and she had become an onlooker.
But she felt, for reasons she couldn’t work out for herself, that she could not let it stay that way. The man inside the zoo had brought her here tonight, and now she needed to get stuck in. She didn’t feel great clarity about this, but rather an inexplicable urge to bring something, if only her self, and to “take a place at the table,” so to speak. And there was the matter of Dawkins’s sister, Una, too. There was a practical problem. Una needed help. But why on earth had a man calling “Drystan” snuck into the zoo? Who was he, and why this dawning feeling of a need to see him. Why her? Was it because she was, very simply, out of her mind with withdrawal insanity? Or was there something else—something that couldn’t so easily be dispatched? There was a pragmatic problem with him, too, she thought. The Red Watch would kill him, and she felt she must find him and, somehow, try to protect him before they swooped in. The man’s very vulnerability felt vast to her, like a whole new country, a world of very hard-won innocence, and she, if for no other reason than the kindness of strangers, had been called to it.
relieved of duty
AS ASTRID REFLECTED ON THESE THINGS, THE corners of her eyes began flashing purple—a regular, nonsecure audio Opticall. It was Omotoso again.
“Dear Astrid—I have some . . . strange news. But where are you?”
“Prob
ably less than a hundred meters from you, sir.”
“Oh, yes—oh, Astrid, I can actually see you. We’re south of you, dropped onto the bloody Broad Walk like clumsy squirrels. It’s bunged up with autoreporters.”
Astrid spotted Omotoso, dressed in his civvies, waving at her. He wore a tight red and black leather jacket, which meant he’d ridden his cycle-glider, and incongruous navy and close-fitting elegant dress trousers. It felt funny to speak to her superior via optical and auditory neutral interface, standing so relatively close in the distance. But there was a certain intimacy about it.
“Astrid,” he said. “We are getting . . . intelligence . . . reports from some local psychiatrist—I don’t know the fellow, a Dr. Bajwa, and that’s confidential—that anyway, there’s . . . he is concerned the person inside the zoo may be a very old, rather helpless patient of his. The doctor’s himself apparently quite distraught about it all. The patient’s name, it’s Cuthbert—Cuthbert Handley. He’s a serious Flōter, we’re told—and certainly not in any stage of recovery, like you. Totally nonviolent. But this Bajwa chap, he says Mr. Handley thinks he hears animals at the zoo, and he says this fellow might believe they’re asking him—and I mean the animals—to release them. The doctor had heard from Mr. Handley tonight, via Opticall, and it was clear the NHS Twelve Code ‘danger to one’s self or others’ proviso was met, but the doctor, as I said, he’s upset. Mr. Handley’s very intelligent and evidently well meaning. But very dangerous in this circumstance, I might add. And, surely, he’s got that very English—you know—sadness. He claims to have ‘special powers’—don’t we all? But Mr. Handley, we think, is at the bottom of this whole mess. An old Flōt sot. Astrid?”
Omotoso, surrounded by swarms of people, was looking meditatively up into the sky as he spoke, as if stars were the only clear phrases he had to choose from.
Astrid thought of the grandfather she’d never met. He was, her mum said, ancient, caring, crazy, and Flōt-addicted. And there was the murky resemblance between her and Mr. Handley that Dawkins had alleged. She knew Cuthbert Handley couldn’t be him—that was impossible, right? There were tens of thousands of crazy old Flōters, weren’t there? Yet she didn’t feel even remotely less spellbound by this man for knowing it.
