Night of the Animals (6 page)

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 accom
panying 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 content,” 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.”

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 cer
tainly 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.

These days, the Sovereign always made such pronouncements from his bunker at Hampton Court Palace, ten miles west of cen
tral London, and far away from his psycho-dungeons like St. Clements, and surrounded by his heavily armed Yeomen of the Guard “Beefeaters.”

In their updated flat black helms and glossy red body armor, all clasping red pike-like medulla wave-guns, which could stop the heart and respiration instantly, the Beefeaters typified the reconfiguring of Britain's turn-of-the-century Tourist Monarchy into a functional beast. Tudor roses, thistles, and shamrocks in gold paint decorated their breastplates and gunstocks. The Beefeaters no longer bothered to work inconspicuously. HRH Henry IX, long rumored to be responsible for the bombing of his elder brother King William's personal jet in 2028, which killed the weak ruler and all his direct heirs, was all about aggression.

“Our Realm is compassion, and it is life,” the regicidal king liked to say, “and Nexar is a very clever way to dispense them both—it's that simple.”

No one, including Dr. Bajwa, would question such notions openly and hope to get ahead professionally in the Britain of the 2050s, where it never paid to question the House of Windsor's love of manipulating alpha waves. The suicide cults and British republicans were openly hunted, but apart from them, just one infamously rebellious former lord, the erstwhile Earl of Worcester, only nineteen years old and reportedly hiding underground on the Welsh border (he had sent mass Opticalls against the king's power-grabs, until he was pushed off WikiNous's optical nerves), seemed willing to risk a public confrontation. The king, for his part, laughed the boy off.

“We need our earls,” he liked to say plaintively. “I can't be in the business of autocracy. Worcester needs to come out to Hampton for din-dins.”

It was said the young former earl, who had abdicated his ances
tral seat, sent word that he would indeed accept a meal, but only “in
front
of the Banqueting House,” a defiant reference, of course, to the execution site of Charles I.

Hampton Court Palace was no longer home to flower shows and chubby Belgian tourists. The decision to turn it into the Sovereign's heavily fortified seat of residence, and to give Buckingham Palace over strictly to England's dying sightseer trade, was all based on Henry's sometimes paranoid calculations about the exercise of, and defense against, military force. The maze and real tennis court were still there, but the palace's perimeter was practically upholstered in powerful weaponry. There were advanced neural cannons, blood-gas beams, various sophisticated EMP emitters, and a rumored pièce de résistance—a dangerous, identity-wiping mobile mortar called Æthelstan's Bliss.

This device, which purportedly resembled a sort of giant sea anemone with pink tentacles and, it was said, screeched like the golden dragons of ancient Wessex, entirely dissolved all traces of one's existence, in both corporal and digital form.

ST. CLEMENTS'S REPUTATION
was well known. Nexar-hooded or not, its patients almost never recovered. It was a grim, yellow-brick house of dread, built as a workhouse, and eventually one of the last Victorian asylums. A passé NHS Trust placard still appeared on its inevitable squeaking iron gate. It was, in Baj's view, a national disgrace. The last time he had visited, it had been filled exclusively with crazy Indigents.

Out of a sense of responsibility, Dr. Bajwa decided to have another look at St. Clements after receiving Dr. Reece's report. Perhaps it wasn't quite as bad as he remembered. From the outside, surrounded by lime trees and pavements heavily trod by all man
ner of daydream carvers, roast pigeon sellers, house-bot repairers, etc., there was a sense of happy bustle. But once past the iron gate, Baj saw a familiar awfulness he associated with decrepit buildings where Nexar patients were usually warehoused.

An old caretaker with a pinched brow smiled as Baj approached the main doors.

“Lovely day,” the man said.

Baj looked up at a nearly cloudless cerulean sky, as if for the first time that year. Apart from a few cloud-doodles of elongated cats and crooked letters (“mums!”) by children, the sky was a happy blank.

“Yes!” he said. “It is lovely, isn't it?”

Inside, he ambled slowly along. A few patients with simpering grins came up to him and shook his hand. The main common area of the hospital had a strange, nicotine-stained cornice molding—(yellowed) acanthus leaves and all—along the tops of the walls. Some well-intentioned staff member had allowed one of the patients, obviously, to decorate the molding. In delicate blue, yellow, and red hand-painted lines, all the way around the room, was a constellation of mathematical gibberish—direct sum-of-module symbols, various integrals, Euclidean distance marks—interspersed with the silhouettes of lions and some other, vaguer creature—a weasel or ferret or indeed
otter
or something?

How very odd, Dr. Bajwa had thought, that Cuthbert also often mentions otters, and here they are at St. Clements? The doctor tried to work out the cornice molding formulae and realized they (or it?) made utterly no sense, unless, somehow, lions and otters were ascribed mathematic value. Perhaps there was, he pondered, to people like Cuthbert, some undisclosed dimension in which
otter ˜ 2.983
¹¹
or where the curves of mustelid tails followed the precise bends of timespace as they folded upon themselves?

Just then, a short, tubby orderly carrying a Nexar hood greeted Baj in a less than friendly manner.

“I wouldn't hang around here, mate. All the joy'll rub off on you.”

Baj started coughing. He felt utterly breathless. He had begun a regimen of light chemotherapy. The bloody coughing had nearly vanished, but he felt weak and sick to his stomach.