Night of the Animals (42 page)

AND NOW THE EMBASSY'S “EAGLE” WAS PULLING
Astrid deeper under its wings, and dragging Mason and Suleiman upward, too, as the Shayk of Night battled on in the square. Astrid felt herself rising into the sky, and she wondered if this journey, this spiriting away by an eagle, would finally—
finally
—be the end of second withdrawal.

Saved by an eagle. That's how good fantasies always end, she mused darkly. Perfect.

But it wasn't an eagle. The creature had doors, and the doors had sprung open, and human arms had emerged to yank her inside.

The “eagle,” it turned out, was merely another, larger frightcopter—a troop transport—with a very ill, grinning Dr. Bajwa piloting it. The good GP had come to rescue them from the square. He sat working the holo-controls with an expert's ease and comfort, and a weekend pilot's lavish joy.

In the cargo area of the frightcopter, the three unhelmeted, regular Red Watchmen who had lifted Astrid, Mason, and Suleiman into the copter were trying to help them into their seats.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” said Mason, drawing his neuralzinger from under his blazer, and rolling himself in front of Astrid and Suleiman like a giant, awkward jelly roll. He waved his pistol at the Watchmen, holding his arm out stiffly, but he was still lying prone.

“Hey, jeez, jeez, jeez,” one of the Watchman said. “Keep your hair on, mate. We're awright.”

“It's OK,” Bajwa assured everyone. “People, sit down. You are safe. Inspector, the Crown has . . . for now . . . seen the error of its ways. These gents—Jake, Nigel, and Lawson—they're on our side. The Watch is fighting the cultists.”

“You can count on old 'Arry,” said the one named Nigel. “'E'll get these suiciders. I hear that 'e's even brung Æthelstan's Bliss out for this do, yeah? That's the noisy sort of mortar what toys with time? With those pink arms?”

“I've heard the . . . tales,” said Mason, slowly holstering his sidearm. “I thought you might be more of . . . those people.”

“The cultists?” asked the doctor. “It's unprecedented. They've finally gone too far. Even the English republicans—and the Earl of Worcester!—have allied themselves, for now, with King Henry.”

“I can't believe it,” Astrid said to the doctor. “But the Neuters want to destroy us all. It's the animals they want most.”

“Erm, yes,” Dr. Bajwa said vaguely, as if not quite grasping what she meant but wanting to show politeness.

“The suicide cult,” said Mason. “They're not human.”

“What?”

“He's right,” said Suleiman. “I saw them. They all look exactly alike.”

The most senior-looking of the Watchmen, Lawson, abruptly turned to Astrid and said, in a stone-mouthed, sea-blasted West Country accent: “I've just had a new freq, miss. Incredible.” He blinked his eyes a few times, clearly reading his corneas carefully.
“His Majesty 'Arry9, I've been asked to relate, says he's sorry for any misunderstandings, m'om. And you needn't
warry
about any re-class-ifi-cation. And we're getting
hope
for yar mum with her Bruta7, ar-right? You'll not need to
warry
about the P-Levs, either. Right? Oh, and EquiPoise 'as been told their off yar case. And, erm . . .” He paused for a moment, glancing above himself, and tapped his eyebrows a few times. He was reading off his corneas. He scratched his chin. “I think that's it. M'om.”

“Well,” said Astrid. “Thank bloody God.” Out the window, she could see the great white quarkbeam sizzling across the sky. Despite the light pollution, the comet Urga-Rampos wasn't actually any harder to see. Indeed, it was now luridly luminous, as if it had lowered itself toward Earth.

“Thank His Highness,” said Nigel, who sounded more local—perhaps from south London.

“Whatever,” said Mason.

“We need to hurry,” said Astrid. “The longer the beam runs, the more species we lose—forever. To the zoo!”

“I'm one step ahead of you,” said the doctor. “Just two minutes, and we'll be above the lions.”

“But the beam, it's a kind of energy weapon,” said the local Watchman. “What do you mean, ‘species'?”

“Animals,” said Astrid.

At this, Dr. Bajwa turned around from his holo-controls and looked at Astrid quizzically.

“I don't understand,” said the doctor. “You're sounding, Inspector, like—my patient. Cuthbert.”

“St. Cuthbert.”

Dr. Bajwa peered closely at Astrid's face. He asked, “Did you do whatever it was you needed to do . . . to humor . . . to help, you know, our friend, Cuthbert?”

“I didn't need to humor him. Something happened to me, some
thing that made me understand Cuthbert better, but it's something I may never understand myself. I was ‘the Christ of Otters,' as Cuthbert might say. And I can hear animals speak now.”

Dr. Bajwa felt so startled, his manipulation of the holo-controls slipped, and the frightcopter dipped down hard.

“Oh no,” he said. “Cuthbert's delusional. It's got to be Flōt withdrawal. This is classic Flōt. You're in second withdrawal?”

She said. “Yes. It may be the Flōt, but others saw it, too.”

“Others
saw
it?”

“We saw it, too,” said Mason. “The inspector—she turned into . . . some . . . being. And, I think—I think—it was almost like I heard the gorilla.
Speaking.
”

“Huh,” said Suleiman, his lips trembling. “I saw the woman, too. She was like a kind of forest, come to life. She held the
sokwe
in her arms as he died, and he looked into her face as if looking at his own mama-
sokwe
. But I did not
hear
him.”

The frightcopter stopped above the zoo now, with a slight shudder, and it began hovering quietly on top of the lion enclosure, where the earlier deadly confrontation had taken place.

“We're here,” said the doctor. “As for your story, I can only suspend my disbelief. But this is all very, very strange!”

“Shite!” Nigel yelled. “Look out the window, where we just was—that fucking
thing
!”

And that's when all the passengers glimpsed the source of the earlier draconine noises—it was King Henry's rumored Æthelstan's Bliss. It was as big as a small cathedral, and just as tall. Its main platform crawled on massive titanium caterpillars, crushing everything in its path. Only its glowing pink tentacles, waving and screeching and erasing clusters of Neuters and anyone else it came close to—and playing a very risky game with time—were visible to the copter passengers.

Trained on enemies within its grasp, the Bliss was at once fold
ing and scrubbing timespace of members of the suicide cult. It not only killed, it nullified a human being's moment in the universe while, simultaneously, mopping up the dimensional residue of her or his existence.

For every cultist the Bliss “unexisted,” there was the potential for any animals “exited” by a cult member to be restored. The problem was the staggering “collateral damage.” Each time a whipping rose-colored tentacle even brushed the back or forearm of an innocent bystander, that person's entire identity—in the flesh and online—dissolved. Worse, all the lives connected to that person would be smacked by ripples of alternate timelines. Whole families could be wiped out. If a boy who would one day pull a fire alarm at his school was accidently touched by a tentacle, droves of burn victims might appear.

“If that's what I think it is, anything can happen tonight,” said Mason. One of the tentacles—they were actually “fired” from the base of the apparatus—nearly hit the frightcopter, which it veered to the right violently.

“Fuck!”

“We need to land,” said Baj. “It will destroy us!” Astrid noticed that the pilot-physician sounded a little different, his voice more sonorous and low. Strangely, too, he looked considerably heavier than he had earlier, as if he had gained two stone.

The frightcopter plunged again, sprang up, and shimmied side to side for a moment, but then Baj got it back.

“We're OK,” he said. “Perfectly OK.”

“Your king is a fool,” Mason said to the Watchmen. “You don't fuck with time.”

“Piss off,” said Nigel. “You can fuck right off, Yank. You fucking Americans, you—” And with that, Nigel disappeared.

“No!” cried Lawson. “Holy fuck!”

Mason shook his head. He said, “Not good. I guess the Bliss just erased someone in some way tied to the life of your poor friend, and when he was cleaned from time, he went, too.” He sighed. “But there's a chance he's not dead, too. He could have just been moved. I guess we'll find out.”

Astrid said, “Any one of us could be next?”

“Yes,” said Mason.

“Not Cuthbert, I hope. Not poor Cuthbert.”

“The gorilla—the thing he said: ‘
Gagoga
.' We'll say it. Say it. What can it hurt?”

Nothing. So they did, again and again, and the two Watchmen left in the frightcopter looked at them as if observing two mental patients.

When the group disembarked and approached the lions' enclosure, they came to a huge crowd of others standing around it, looking on helplessly.

Astrid pushed her way to the wall around the enclosure, just above the moat, and there was Cuthbert, out of the water now, a giant ursine mess of a man, stumbling quickly toward the halted lions, bolt cutters in hand.

“Cuthbert,” she called. “Come back. Come back!”

As the lions themselves had predicted earlier in the evening, this was where the night of the animals would end, in their strict orbit.

Locomotion still felt gluey and slow to Astrid. When she turned around, for a moment, she thought she saw Atwell and Omotoso in the dimness, far behind her, sprinting, but the tenebrous figures didn't seem to move nearer, oddly. She felt a panicked sense of clarity: it was
all
Flōt withdrawal. Everything and everyone—figments!

But she could not stop herself now. She beelined for a red alarm
box that stood just outside the lions' enclosure. It had not once, in the zoo's history, been used. And despite the fact that one of the largest and fastest assemblies of police and public safety forces in British history now ringed the zoo, with sirens blasting, solarcopters thumping, whirling yellow and blue lights in inferno mode, Astrid nonetheless felt compelled to punch out the glass and pull down the emergency lever, which no one, oddly, had deigned to consider.

Astrid noticed the peculiar sign above the box:

ALARM BELL
IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS

When she did so, a great, uncanny horn sounded out. It was like the sound of all animal voices synthesized into one snarling caterwaul, or the way thunder would sound if clouds were not water but living creatures.

In a bright, aureate haze, the Zoological Gardens of London gave up its ghosts.

One by one, but rapidly, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, sparkling green-gold animal figures unfolded from some subtle
mundus imaginalis
beyond our quotidian world. As Astrid approached the lion terraces, and dozens of other police officers, reporters, and zoo personnel converged, the little animal souls began to whirl around them all, quickly filling in the general vicinity between the lions and the Penguin Pool. It was as if a wild ark had cracked open, and now out they came, a vast revenant herd of nearly two hundred years of caged beings.

Philosophers and theologians in the West had generally not granted animals souls. Exceptions to this rule among the brainy or blessed were few—a mystic cabalist here, a Christian hermit-saint there. These rarest of visionaries, such as Rabbi Chaim Vital
and St. Francis, knew that animals never died. Even the Luciferian death cult, the Heaven's Gaters, feared animals because they believed them to possess, at the very least, weak demi-souls, which threatened their own self-loathing operations. But much of humanity allowed nothing. Toddlers in Florida were told about Peter Rabbit; the one-tusked elephant, Ganesh, was worshipped in Mumbai; the terrier was an object of fetish in Hollywood—but who really, among the humans, apart from the mad and a few brilliant scientists and ridiculed activists, genuinely saw themselves as profoundly
equal
to their sentient cohabitants of Earth?

Now the souls of the animals living and dead in London were coming to try to save humanity—for they were animals, too.

Some of the spirits were notable. There was the famous Guy, the sterile gorilla, clapping his huge hands with excitement—he was ready to slap the cultists back to San Diego; the black bear from Canada, Winnie, walked forth on its hind legs, growling; Jumbo, the colossal African elephant eventually sold out to Phineas Barnum's circus, blasted into the night with a joy it rarely had in life. The sweet Sudanese hippopotamus who set Victorian London ablaze with curiosity, Obaysch, lumbered toward the Penguin Pool. Atop him was the Mexican bird-eating spider Belinda, carefully stuck upon Obaysch's pinkish-golden back. There were lesser-known luminaries, too—Eros, the snowy owl and survivor par excellence, whose unrelenting flight at sea kept spirits up in England's rationed, dour 1950s. There Eros soared, circling above, catching eyes now like a white undertuft of the night's ripped-out fabric. Then came multitudes of the extinct beasts, materializing like passé but beloved angels: a Tasmanian tiger, flexing jaws large enough to swallow a wallaby; a zebra horse, the quagga, whinnying and kicking at the cold air; the giant red-speckled Welsh hare, the largest lagomorph the world had ever known—all of them the last of their kind, all perished at the London Zoo.

The glittering procession of animal souls doubled over and twisted into itself like some living, breathing Möbius strip, like a million wet honeycombs balled into intersecting globules, like an explanation for the seventh dimension, like a religion. It was as if all the powers borrowed from them by kings, nations, by parents, by children, by creeds across human history and right to the Pleistocene, had been ceded back to the animal kingdom.
Here's what we lent you,
they seemed to suggest,
look at it.