Night of the Animals(11)

The female otter rose upon her haunches, leaned forward toward Cuthbert, and took in the grassy-oily-boozy human scent emanating from him.

Miltsung, she said, in a squeaky mewl, then gagoga, gagoga, gagoga.

Cuthbert didn’t know what gagoga gagoga gagoga was, but it was not Flōt and it wasn’t the Whittington and it wasn’t even the words of Dr. Bajwa; it was something new, he was sure, a guttural alphabet gurgling in his head like water off rocks. It sounded risky, too, and it sounded urgent. Above all, it sounded like “Let us out!”

And it seemed weirdly familiar to him, too, an incantation from long ago. He wondered if his vanished brother would have understood their meaning, or if he and his loss and his return were their meaning.

Gagoga!

Cuthbert often recalled the blue veins faintly visible on his brother’s pale neck as a child, like tiny unborn rivers, dormant and perfect. He was a beautiful boy, and his loss was ugly and palpable—it roiled Cuthbert’s abdomen, and over his lifetime, it had grown harder and sicker and larger, not unlike his dying liver. Lately, when he cast around his mind for more memories of the boy, he felt increasingly blank, and the unborn rivers ran dry. And yet, as he stood, leaning against the diatom-stained glass barrier, before this once most English of English beasts, there was a sure sense to him of Drystan’s presence. Somewhere in the otters’ dark, slick hearts, in their round tomcat heads, in their webbed claws, as a poet once wrote, “of neither water nor land,” a kind of redemption lived.

There was a tap on Cuthbert’s shoulder. As soon as he saw the scarlet from the corner of his eye, he knew he faced unspeakable danger.

“You don’t look well, Indigent,” said the Watchman coarsely, and with the usual snide undertone. He had a boxy jaw and eyes like dull blue pellets. He wore one of the less bulky mantles of the Watch, red and embroidered with gold orphreys, all with a large eye in their centers. The Eye3 devices belonged to a class of biotech barred from Indigent use. These optical devices—and several dozen glared from every Watchman’s cloak—possessed the red-rimmed sclera of hound eyes. They roved. They accused. They rolled with a dim quasi intelligence. Crowded onto Watchmen cloaks, they created a grotesque effect, like draperies jeweled with eyeballs, and, along the trademark golden neuralwave pike the Watch all carried, the effect terrified the powerless.

“You paid?” the Watchman demanded.

“Ar, sir,” said Cuthbert. “I did.” He wasn’t as high as usual on Flōt, but he wasn’t sober either; the slight buzz let him speak with a touch of composure. He still possessed the illusory proprioception of long legs as well as the self-satisfaction typical of a Flōt high. But the Red Watch were trained to watch for Ingall’s Sign, the slight stooping forward and loping gait that Flōt normally caused in longtime addicts.

“Have you noticed there aren’t Indigents here? This is a place for quality families. That’s what the king wants.” The Watchman ran his hand up and down his pike. “I think it’s time you went home.”

“But, sir, I paid. It’s a medical issue. My doctor’s sent me here. A’m a loyal subject.”

The Watchman frowned at him, nodding. “You leaning forward, mate?”

“I’m just tall,” said Cuthbert.

“Yeah, tall. That’s a coopy* way of putting it.” Then he smiled acidly. “Oh, I’m sorry, a medical problem, is it? You need a hood? Shall I put a call into the P-levs?”

“That’s not right,” said Cuthbert. “I hear animals. You ought not! That’s not —” Before he could get it out, the Watchman tapped him with his pike. His knees buckled and he dropped like a sack of onions. Cuthbert sat on the ground, an old man stunned, rubbing his fat temples and trying to get his bearings.

“Are you thick as pig shit?” asked the Watchman, speaking in a hushed voice. “Get the f*ck up and go wash back down the urinal you crawled from. You’ve no idea how miserable I could make your life, you badger’s arse. Want to spend your golden years wanking in a Calm House? You one of them cultists?”

The Watch was recruited from other Indigents, and notoriously sadistic, and Watchmen acted with special pitilessness toward other Indigents. Cuthbert was in real danger, and he knew it now. It was not uncommon to hear stories of Indigents neuralpiked to death, especially if they were accused cultists or high on Flōt.

A small crowd, mostly milky-skinned women with small children in strollers, had gathered. They glared at Cuthbert with curiosity and contempt. There were no Indigents among them, from what Cuthbert saw.

“Leave him alone,” a younger woman with a long lilac skirt said to the Watchman. “He’s just a poor old man who eats too many biscuits. He’s allowed at the zoo.”

The Watchman quietly made a sheeh sound, snorting a little. “Just keeping the zoo safe, ma’am. This man was, erm, loitering. It’s a tactic I associate with that Heaven’s Gate lot. Or ’e’s a dangerous Flōt addict.”

Cuthbert picked himself up. He patted himself for the sphere of Flōt under his coat, and he felt relieved to feel it intact.

“Take it easy,” he said to the Watchman. “I’ll go. I’m not in any bloody cult.” He glanced toward the otters for a moment, but they had disappeared, sensing a threat. He whispered to them, “Good-bye, you good creatures.” He would see them again, he thought—somehow—and he would see them go free.