Night of the Animals(103)
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-f*ck 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.