Night of the Animals(111)
In the central building, zoo guests could glimpse at the apes through glass windows that looked into the apes’ night rooms.
Cuthbert examined a brass, embossed evolutionary tree on the way, showing how Homo sapiens and apes shared a common Homininae limb. There was a raised silhouette of a naked man and woman. Someone had rudely stuck a piece of chewing gum on the man’s head. Cuthbert pulled it off and scratched it clean with his thumbnail. Below the naked people was a photograph of a prehistoric skull, Australopithecus africanus. It was yellow and long, with a tiny brain case and a protruding maxilla with big squarish teeth—it had no mandible. Cuthbert felt as though the human animal in this form could be comfortable—a place for thoughts no bigger than a tea mug.
Nearby, to his right, a brightly painted wood sign bore the message: THE GREATEST DANGER TO ANIMAL LIFE. There was a hole in the sign for a human face—unabashed guests could put their heads in the opening and ask a mate to snap a naff “picky” on their retina-cams.
The happiest of the apes Cuthbert could see was the life-size bronze statue of an old dead London Zoo celebrity, Guy “Fawkes” the Gorilla, set near the entrance of the pavilion. Leaning forward on his knuckles, surrounded by leafy vines, and blessed with plenty of room, Guy looked ready to spring downward and away, out of gorilla heaven, to dole out exploding bananas for all takers.
Cuthbert gave the double doors a jiggle. They were locked tight with a key, it seemed. But the noise roused the smaller residents. The monkeys suddenly cried out with a furious astuteness. Cuthbert was instantly animated by the whole, simian keenness of the pavilion; he could feel it, physically. The “monkeys,” he hoped, were doing their part to prepare for the Heaven’s Gate war. He would do his.
He was beginning to see much larger numbers of flashing yellow and blue lights blooming in the west, and more sirens. What he thought were the death cult’s mini-spacecrafts in the sky—ordinary police and autonewsmedia aerodrone, along with a Red Watch frightcopter, investigating an intrusion and rumored animal release at the zoo—beat their wings of liquid titanium like huge dragonflies. He didn’t understand why they didn’t begin to attack. The motion-sensitive security lights he had tripped earlier inside the zoo, he noticed, were turning back off, and a pitch darkness enveloped everything near him, except for light beams coming down from the “spacecraft.” A blue-black spindly bird flew past above him; it was enormous, and Cuthbert stood with his mouth gaping. It was one of the famous herons from the park’s heronry on the lake.
“You,” he called toward the bird. “You! Get the Gulls of Imago, will you? Can you help, can you?” But the bird was gone.
The greater apes, late to the noise making, started in just then with a fresh vociferousness. First, a cartload of four chimpanzees, already wide awake in their night room, stormed out into the outdoor exhibit area and began hooing at Cuthbert, sticking their golden, soft fingers through the spaces in the grid-fencing. It was as unusual for them to encounter an interested human at night as it was for Cuthbert. Whenever the night watchman, Dawkins, came through—and that was rare—he typically tapped their cage, listened for a moment, and walked on. But like many of the animals, the chimps were no longer confined to night rooms and holding cells after hours. (In the years before all the other zoos on Earth closed down, many had conceded that since nearly all animals are nocturnal, it was inhumane to keep them locked up all night. And no one had seriously worried about the possibility of a zoo invader like Cuthbert.)
The chimps soon roused the nearby, and most rare, mountain gorilla named Kibali, who was living in isolation because of his grouchy temperament. He was the last wild-born mountain gorilla on earth.
He had arrived from the Congo, via Uganda, the year before, all four hundred pounds of him, and he never quite adjusted. His mother and a young sister had been shot to death before his eyes by Interahamwe fighters where he’d lived, up to then, under a canopy of ayous and sapelli trees. He’d been led away from their bodies on three separate leashes.
Kibali was hobbling in circles around his night room, fingering his lips with a twitchy boredom. The room served as an indoor presentation area in the day. Its brick walls were daubed a pale green, a lame attempt to simulate “rain forest” tonality from an era nearly gone on earth, but a colossal, eight-foot-long window of toughened glass—for viewing—made Kibali look like a glum man at a bosonicabus stop.
He picked up a bunch of wood wool and shredded, lurid junk-food wrappers, which were regularly given to him for nest-building. He pulled the soft wad apart in his long black-nailed hands, and tossed the pieces away. A food-wrapper scrap, stuck in Kibali’s neck fur, bore the phrase you can see that Lena has the goods to please all “passengers” on Bonk Air . . . Many gorillas in captivity like to construct messy nests before bedding down each night, but Kibali had stopped making nests. He was just throwing bits around. He received no comfort from the hoots of the chimps; instead, he felt compelled to strike things and to beat his chest.
Not long after he had arrived at the London Zoo, he had been introduced to a group of biosoftware-cultured females—his potential retinue. But the females had recently been sent, temporarily, to an animal shelter the zoo operated in Bedfordshire. The exile was for their own safety. Kibali had bitten one of their scalps, and nearly broken another’s arm. He was supposed to be having a “cool down.”