Night of the Animals(36)
The time is now a quarter past 6:00 p.m. The London Zoo will close in 15 minutes. Thank you for visiting us today. Come again soon!
He stopped again. On second thought, he wanted to take off the weather-buffer. It was nearly in shreds anyway, but the air was very cool. With its three white stripes partly ripped off one arm, it could be considered sporty only if the game were called Woe; and more practically, a torn weather-buffer would attract attention. He took the thing off, balled it up, tossed it down, and kicked it against a knot of tree roots. He had a reasonably clean, maroon pullover underneath, which he’d haggled for ￡12.50 at one of the back alley markets in Holloway Road. Printed on its front was a cityscape skyline and the unfathomable phrase “Manhattan 3000,” which apparently made sense to someone somewhere on earth.
He knew he had to mind himself. If a Watchman inside the zoo observed him swiftly walking away from the zoo fence, he would explain he’d needed to take a slash and couldn’t find the toilets. (His deeply wrinkled, century-old face, unsmoothed by pricey BodyMods, chewed by Flōt addiction, was more of a giveaway of his status than he grasped.) He was sorry, he would say, very sorry to look suspiciously like someone who had just broken into the zoo, ha ha ha ha! Naff, that!
He walked quickly down the rest of the bank, trying to look unruffled, but he was nearly jogging. He stepped over one of the knee-high rails that ran beside all the footpaths in the zoo. About twenty yards ahead, to his left, was a woman in a glowing-pink nightcape stopped with a glide-pram—oh, a Nandroid, he saw, down from nearby Primrose Hill. The Nandroid—she had huge, soothing violet eyes and creamy-white, skintone-adjustable digital skin—was looking at a small pack of sleeping jackals bunched together in a corner of their pen. The canine pile looked like the discarded fur coat of the god of cyclones. Since they were among the only animals you could spot from outside the zoo in the park, few paying visitors took interest in them.
The Nandroid gazed at Cuthbert and smiled with a quavering pale chin and a cooing sound, but Cuthbert averted his eyes. He couldn’t see the silent baby, swaddled in its ovular glide-pram. He knew that the new aristocracy hired professional Indigent monitors who sat at desks watching dozens of infants through those purple Nandroid eyes, reporting anything suspicious to the Watch. (It was one of the highest-paid jobs an Indigent could get.)
Cuthbert felt uneasily excited. He could hear monkeys whooping, far off, from the other side of the zoo. Their aggrieved Borneo beckoning both charmed and bothered him, and he did not think he should stray far to search them out.
Suddenly the idea of letting any of the animals loose seemed nearly as idiotic to Cuthbert as it would to a normal, well-adjusted citizen. He made an audible whew! sound. “Natty, this is!” he said aloud. The baby began to whimper a bit, and the Nandroid started to rock the pram tenderly and sing, in Welsh. It was a song his own gran used to sing to him and Drystan: “Holl amrantau’r sêr ddywedant, ar hyd y nos,”* and the melody almost made Cuthbert faint with wistfulness.
“A hyd y nos,” Cuthbert sang quietly, with a slight slur. “Oh, Gran.”
The Asiatic lion terraces with their tiered cement hillocks and lily-covered moats were right beside the jackals. He’d seen them only once before, and he was struck now by their tranquillity. Had the lions ever, he wondered, truly ever spoken to him? They were nowhere in sight. The Sumatran tigers, the famous jaguar named Joseph, the black leopard, and all the birds of prey—all silent, too—were just beyond that. For several minutes, he seemed to comprehend that it wasn’t normal or even good to hear animal voices.
“Jesus,” he said. “I’m f*cked.”
When the Nandroid floated away like a great pink hot-air balloon carrying its gondola, and no one else appeared on the path, he moved in closer to the jackals. There were five, he saw, and he gave them a pained smile.
“What are your exact names, now, eh? Are you lot gonna say something now?”
He squinted at them. They were dirty and weird—real animals, and not genomic clones. They were not like the wavy-haired spaniels he saw on Sundays at the park. They had short, tawny hair and narrow skulls. Their large, sharp ears were filled with white hair. A cape of black hair spread down their backs. Their oddest trait was their lean, elongated legs. They looked like foxes on stilts. The placard on the fence read: GOLDEN JACKAL (CANIS AUREUS), TANZANIA.
Of course, a jackal hadn’t been seen in East Africa for thirty years. Much of the region was entirely given over to colossal biomesh and “green fuel” farms.
He tapped the fence. Cuthbert said aloud, quietly, “’Allo-allo, chaps. Don’t want to talk now?”
One of the jackals rolled over and yawned. Cuthbert got out a piece of his diatom-cinnamon chewing gum. He rolled it into a hard little nut and pushed it through the cage. It fell onto the ground. Like magic, and wraithlike, the jackals all stood up and faced him. A young, lean one thrust its head forward and picked the gum off the dirt with its fore-snout, then jerked its head back to take the gum deep into its maw. The animal backed a few steps away from the other four jackals. It began to chew. It was obviously a strange, difficult food for the jackal. The movement of its jaws scared Cuthbert. It was too rapid and repetitive, and it seemed as if the jackal couldn’t make the process stop. He regretted giving it. The chewing jackal’s eyes stayed on the other four jackals, who looked interested and apprehensive. Cuthbert put his palms against the cage. A larger, fatter jackal gazed up at him, panting with a “happy” face. Its mouth was partially open and its glistening long tongue quivered. A sudden, lively feeling, a kind of élan, pushed up from Cuthbert’s abdomen, into his neck. He felt his cheeks grow warm and tingly.