Night of the Animals (44 page)

DURING THAT LONG, SCORCHING SUMMER OF THE
jubilee, Cuthbert Handley one day realized that he didn't hear voices as often as he used to. In fact, they had all shrunk down to one.

By 2053, there were far fewer animals and species of them on earth. Not since the end of the Pleistocene, when the woolly rhinos and dire wolves died out, had evolution reached such a choke point. Epically closer to home, a hot April and May had hatched swarms of midges, bringing an epidemic of a virulent bluetongue to Albion's sheep and cattle on the king's large collectives.

In London, there were even fewer moggies in the alleys, fewer dog walkers around the silenced swan ponds, and a host of unexpected, strange breeding problems at the zoo. Indigents were no longer permitted pet licenses. While the zoo was still the most precious archival repository of genomes on the planet, research and bioengineering and preservation work tended to hold primacy now. Security increased tenfold, with admission by invitation only. The exhibitions, one by one, were being shuttered, too. In all but
a few cases, genomic clones replaced the wild originals, and the London Zoological Gardens—humankind's last ark of the Animal Kingdom—had become, for the most part, a closed shop.

For reasons Cuthbert could not grasp, the animals stopped talking to him. The unexpected great quieting depressed him, and left him with agonizing guilt.

“I
can't
bring 'em in,” he would exclaim to Astrid. “I don't know what's gone wrong. Why? Why'd I have to tinker? Why? What's become of the Wonderments? Do you hear them?”

But that was a question Astrid never dared to answer again, not even to dear Cuthbert.

He'd thought, gullibly, that people would have learned after the night the animals saved them. He trusted that the bond between creatures and people would grow inviolate. That hadn't happened at all.

He decided, that summer day, that it was time perhaps that he come in off the streets of England for good.

“I've had enough, haven't I?” he thought, not without real shame. “And I've done my bit for the beasts—and for King Harry. What's the use?”

But this notion of sleeping indoors for good occurred to him as the sweet smell of baking kidneys and puff pastry wafted into his eager face. He was in Astrid's kitchen, in her flat in Haggerston, where he found himself spending more and more time. With shaky hands, he moved a piping-hot pie, still in its tin, directly to an Italian dinnerware plate painted with large red pears and golden quinces. There was a square nuplastic container of burdock greens that Astrid had sautéed with watercress and put away, and she'd made Cuthbert promise her to eat a bit of the greens if he insisted on “those unwholesome pies.”

“But the pies, they're good,” he maintained. Astrid was vegetarian, of course, just like his gran had been, and he respected that, but
he could not bring himself to denigrate a good kidney pie, could he?

Astrid was away at work that afternoon, where she'd long been reinstated and promoted to chief inspector, with Omotoso moving up to the Met, and Atwell taking her old inspectorship. She was only the second person she knew in Britain to make it past second withdrawal from Flōt, and in her FA meetings, she'd become something of an inspiration. Her own “Wonderments,” it turned out, had worked in unexpected ways. She wasn't sure she liked or trusted God, or if she even knew how to believe, but her old revulsion was gone.

Cuthbert sat down at Astrid's dark, walnut-grained kitchenette, and he dumped some of the unheated greens, straight from the container, onto the pie. A ray of piercing June sunlight shot across the tabletop, glaring a bit, and he squinted.

Cuthbert covered the whole plate with HP sauce, and he ate greedily. One hunk after another, without pause, he took enormous portions of pastry and the bright jade burdock upon his fork without bothering to spear anything with the tines. He washed it all down with a big honeyed bowl of peppermint and nettle tea, and when it was finished, with a barely concealed exuberance, he burped.

“That's a piece,”
^*
he said.

Oh, she wants me to stay here, he thought to himself. To keep out of the cold—and the heat. Why don't I then?

But could he find a way to leave the Flōt alone forever?

AGAINST THE ADVICE
of many acquaintances—for her friends knew better than to say a thing—Astrid had invited Cuthbert after the night of the animals to stay with her without apparent reservations or regrets. It was an odd arrangement, and a big gamble, she
knew, but she could not get over a feeling of wanting to protect the man, as best she could, or at least see to his creature comforts for a few years.

“He's my grandfather,” she would tell skeptics, although she hadn't known that, really. She was, for the moment, content to leave it at that. “I love him.”

In the year since, both she and he had, after all, suffered great losses. Even in an era of replaceable major organs, the endlessly patient Dr. Bajwa's cancer could not be stopped. The loss felt cruel for Cuthbert. It turned out that the extra weight and more robust voice Baj had gained on the hijacked frightcopter, right before Astrid's eyes, was an effect of Æthelstan's Bliss. A damaged timeline had somehow shrunk his tumors, added to his fat stores, and given him more months of life, which he gave to the poor of Holloway Road, treating Indigents almost to the end. Eventually, the tumors came back, and Baj died in the winter, sending Cuthbert into a panic. The same month, Astrid's mother, her mind too ravaged by the Bruta7 virus even to recognize her daughter, finally succumbed to complications brought on by it, despite receiving specially ordered NHS Legacy-level care.

AFTER HIS LUNCH,
Cuthbert decided to take a little nap. He lay atop the duvet on his plush bed, and he pulled his legs up.

He called, just as his grandmother had, “Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”

Instantly, the little golden cat came running from its hiding place and jumped onto the bed, snuggling into a ball at Cuthbert's feet. He reached down and scratched the feline behind its ears, and it allowed this, for a moment, then bucked away. It would never relax in human hands, but like many sand cats, it was semi-tamable.

“Yow smelled the pie, did yow?” Muezza leaped off the bed onto
the floor, as if signaling for a feeding. (He had to be fed frozen mice.)

After the incident in the lion enclosure, and being seen to by paramedics, Cuthbert had spotted Muezza in the hedges, very near its shattered, aquarium-like exhibit. Unknown to Astrid or anyone, the old man had managed to smuggle the sand cat out in his bundled coat, stowing him like a small melon in a grocery sack.

It was unethical. It was illegal. It was unwise. But Astrid had reluctantly let Muezza stay in the flat. For all its standoffishness, the creature clearly adored both Cuthbert and her. It rubbed against their ankles, cuddled with them on the sofa, and did what it could to destroy Astrid's £200 faux-Iranian rug. She knew, someday, the cat would need to go back to the zoo. But not today.

Muezza meowed at Cuthbert, almost provocatively.

“What is it? Use words, my brother. All the animals have stopped talking to me. Are you next? Am I not al-Khidr?”

The cat did not answer, at least not in words.

“Oh,” said Cuthbert. “Oh my brother, Muezza. Yow must talk. Or I've lost the Wonderments.”

Then they both fell asleep.

ASTRID HAD FIXED UP
the room where her mother had stayed, and she gave Cuthbert a key to the flat. There was one rule: he wasn't allowed to drink either alcohol or Flōt in the flat, under any circumstances.

But he was not, strictly speaking, quite sane, even though he didn't hear many animals.

At age ninety-one, with his CoreModded organs updated by the special dispensation from the Crown, Cuthbert might have had another decade or two of life to look forward to if he could stay away from the Flōt. He was
trying
—very hard. He'd make it weeks sometimes, and only rarely need to go, to rest a few days, to the
Whittington detox. He would vanish from Astrid's flat for a week or two, then come back, always remorseful. But he always came back. In so many ways, he still believed that Astrid was his long-dead brother, Drystan, and Astrid didn't have the heart to disabuse him of the notion.

In her own unobtrusive way, Astrid had learned much more about him in the last year—the abuse he and his sibling suffered at their father's hands, his mother's emotional neglect, the inexorable love the two boys received from their witchy gran. Above all, she discovered the deep break in Cuthbert's being that occurred when his older brother drowned.

Earlier that summer, one morning, Cuthbert had asked “for that coin,” just to see it again.

“The souvenir bracteate? The one you gave me?”

“Yes.”

She snatched the Undley Bracteate from her pocket. She'd learned that boffins at the University of Leicester had decoded the ancient Anglo-Frisian inscription on the coin. It turned out that
gagoga maga medu
meant something along the lines of “Abracadabra—to you, kinsman, a drink of mead.” The researchers said it was actually the oldest sentence in English.

Cuthbert glanced at the bracteate for a moment, as if looking for something. There were the two brothers, Romulus and Remus, drinking from the teats of a she-wolf beneath the image of Constantine.

“I've not been as good to yow, Astrid, as yow've been to me. I canna stop missing my brother, Dryst, and I'm sorry for that.”

“No,” she said to him. “Never think that way. You've helped me—you brought me through the Death, you know?”

“I've done nothing,” he said. “It's yow, Astrid. Yow're the angel.”

In the year he was with her, all this knowledge helped her come
to her own livable terms with what happened to her in second withdrawal, when she herself experienced a mystical encounter, and with what had happened since. She'd come to believe that being the Christ of Otters wasn't a supernatural event; it was subnatural. It was a deeper part of being human.

AFTER HIS NAP,
with Muezza at his toes, Cuthbert did something he'd pledged to himself that he'd never do. He snooped around the flat a bit and went where he knew he oughtn't. He tiptoed into Astrid's bedroom, looking behind himself continually, terrified she'd walk into the flat. It wasn't the London Zoo, and there was no malice or prurience, but he hated himself for doing it. He felt compelled only out of a loving, cracked desire to know more about Astrid, whom he still associated with Drystan in a way that was helplessly immovable.

So a few minutes later, the erstwhile saint stood at his Messiah's dresser, and he gazed at the small collection of things Astrid had put there. They struck him as sacred, even in their mundanity. There were the three fotolives, including the one with Astrid as a girl in a red teepee, and extra hairpins. There was a loose gangliatoxic round packed into its cylindrical bronze cartridge. There was a set of blue nuplastic swimming goggles with a precious white band. And there was a carefully folded DNA wipe with tiny number 5's all over it.

Cuthbert unfolded and flattened the wipe out. It was dated from the day before yesterday.

He'd heard of these wipes, but he'd never seen or used one. He felt curious. It felt dry and papery, yet slightly sticky somehow, too. He suddenly recalled that, the day before yesterday, Astrid had gently wiped a bit of cake from the corner of his mouth at tea, using what he thought was a serviette. He hadn't thought twice
about it until now. She
had
looked oddly uncomfortable, he realized, not herself. The wipes were used to establish or prove familial genetic relationships, and this one indicated that the chance of a direct genetic connection between whoever had been swiped was roughly 5 percent. Cuthbert began to refold it, but he couldn't keep the folds straight, and this—and the sudden dread that she would reject him—caused such anxiety, his hands shook and the refolding process failed again and again.

Such was the weakness of Cuthbert's hearing, and his distracted state, that when a scrabbling at the flat's front door began, and Astrid came in, he hadn't a clue she was behind him.

“No,” she said. “Don't look at that. Please, Cuddy.”

Cuthbert reeled back, utterly humiliated, his mouth gurning with shame.

“Oh blessed,” he gasped. “Oi'm a sorry yam-yam, I am. A'm sorry, a'm sorry. I'm so desperately sorry.” He held the DNA wipe up. It was balled and slightly torn. “I've just cocked up this important document of yours or whatnot, dear, the one with the fives all over. I just—I wanted—I was just curious . . .”

“It's all right,” she said, speaking with a shaky voice. “It doesn't matter. But come out of there, you silly old rascal. Let's have a nice tea now, shall we? Cuthbert? Cuthbert?”

But Cuthbert Handley had fallen down. His big, stupid, cardiomyopathic heart had trilled into a lethal ventricular arrhythmia.

“No!” Astrid cried. Without a moment's pause, she blinked 999 over her corneas, and sent out emergency double-orange-freqs.

Cuthbert lay on the floor, looking up at the white ceiling, struggling to breathe, but not feeling any real pain. His mind began to travel.

He and Drystan had been so perfectly happy, so rarely happy, ambling on a different scalding day in the Wyre Forest. 1968. He remembered again a little detail from that afternoon, how Drystan
quite inadvertently stepped on a young snake—an adder—and killed it—oh, they should have turned back then, Drystan had said. It was a complete accident, blameless—the snake had been totally hidden—but Cuthbert instantly saw Drystan's recognition that he had tread upon a living forest creature. Drystan had jumped in horror, drawn himself back.

“Oh no,” Drystan had said. “I hurt something, Cuddy. Oh, no.”