Night of the Animals(37)
“Hi, hi,” he said to the animal.
He decided to have a go at setting his marked finger on a strand of fencing, and the black 9 mm mark he’d scored, he noted, was at least five times the width of the thin fencing. It was evident that his bolt cutters could free the jackals easily—and take on much thicker-gauge fencing, too.
A yellow isosceles triangle on the fence displayed a black silhouette of a hand with an orderly half-circle cut out of its palm. It read:
These
Animals
May Bite
“Better not hold my donnies in the cage,” he said to himself; but he felt that he probably could keep his finger there and no harm would come to him.
“You’re only a dog, aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve been off my head, puppy!”
After a few minutes, the jackals began to lurk around their long enclosure, except for the one still chewing the gum. They moved with an awkward grace, as if they might fall off their own legs and yet make it look purposeful. One animal held its head low to the ground, trotting around like a police sniffer dog. It seemed disturbed by something. Much of the grass inside their prison was worn away, exposing long tracts of dirt patted shiny by paws. A few coarse, raw roots sprung from the soil, like the pale elbows of underwater swimmers in a dark lupine lake.
Cuthbert knew the Red Watch was after him, but he hadn’t noticed what the jackal had: one tall, unmantled Watchman striding in their direction, from near the hyacinth macaws.
Some of the jackals began barking in their high-pitched, melodious yaps.
Cuthbert realized that he hadn’t moved for a long time. It was time to get going.
As he began stumbling along, he stopped to steady himself with his hand on a short brick wall, then lurched against a small elm tree. There was supposed to be a line painted on the walk somewhere for a self-guided tour, but he couldn’t see it. If he tried to follow a line painted on the path, anyone with sense would see instantly that he was stewed. He began berating himself for succumbing to the impulses that had brought him here. “Fuck me,” he said. “Fuck me!”
The lone Watchman bumped against him hard and scowled; he carried his golden neuralwave pike, but he seemed distracted and rushed.
“Stay the f*ck to the side of the path,” the Watchman hissed, stopping for a moment. “Indigent shite!”
“Ay, sir! Sorry, sir!”
“Haven’t you heard? The whole bloody country’s on f*cking King’s Alert tonight. What’s the matter with you? You look like a slapped arse, mate.”
The jackals snarled at the Watchman, who sneered at them, “Dirty dogs—is this your little filthy mate?”
One of the jackals, a large male, hurled itself toward the Watchman and smacked against the fence. The Watchman jumped back, reflexively.
“Shite dogs,” he said, shaking his head. “Should be exterminated.”
The Watchman walked away, apparently not interested in further abusing any creature for the moment. Such a painless departure was unusual and lucky, since Cuthbert was surely on the Red Watch List. At best, the Watch List meant arrest and internment; at worst, an Indigent on the list could be neuralpiked to death if she or he met the wrong Watchman. Officially, Indigents not databased or indentured had no restrictions on movement in Britain, but unofficially, the Watch sometimes beat them away, on sight, from places where the upper-middle classes and the new aristocracy congregated, and this almost always involved checking their compliance status. Whatever negligible power and dignity an Indigent ever held, the Watch List instantly crushed them.
HAVING ESCAPED THE WATCH once again, Cuthbert didn’t feel relief so much as curiosity. Why was England on alert this time? Was the Army of Anonymous on the attack again? He thought, then, that he heard distant sirens, but he wasn’t sure.
On the far side of the jackal enclosure, a few zoo workers in loose, pine-colored spawn-ball shirts had shown up. They were beginning to work their way through the series of chain-link fence walkways and double gates that led into the jackal enclosure. One of the keepers, a woman with a short brown ponytail, was staring at Cuthbert. He almost felt she was appraising him as a fellow animal, both absentmindedly and indulgently, like a bosonicabus passenger gazing at the face of another passenger in a passing bosonicabus, then glancing away.
Cuthbert decided that he should leave the zoo immediately. He felt certain that he was about to be found out. That last Watchman may have already put in a call. He needed to come back, but only in the deep of night. Or maybe he could get an Opticall to Dr. Bajwa, tell him he was ready for the Whittington, ready to detox.
Cuthbert strolled down footpaths. They sagged and veered with such wide egressions, and offered so few forks, they seemed designed for people easily bewildered. He felt a little more relaxed, simply moving, but this calm would wear out fast, he knew. Oh, god, he could use another good pull off that Flōt orb in the grotto.
He came to a capsule-shaped white sign that hung on black metal tubing. In black lettering, it read: GREEN LINE TRAIL: FOLLOW THE GREEN LINE—YOU WON’T GET LOST AND YOU WON’T MISS A THING! There was an arrow pointing to the ground and a set of paws, but Cuthbert saw no green line. He suspected somehow being tricked by the zoo. The idea that the zoo had merely placed a reference sign poorly did not occur to him. He clipped along but kept pausing at footpath intersections to read cryptic signposts. A taloned claw denoting Birds of Prey; a single long-necked antelope for the Arabian Oryx’s lonely zone; a crescent and stars for Moonlight World. Another sign had the zoological society’s initials in animal-skin prints: ZSL—for Zoological Society of London—in zebra, snake-scales, and tiger stripes, above its long-used phrase “Living Conservation.” Cuthbert did not grasp the meaning of conservation, really, but he took it as an article of faith. It had to be somewhere, in some tiny hidden cage or test tube in a back office. Unlike the rest of Britain after the Second Restoration, the fifteen-hectare scalene triangle that housed the London Zoo hadn’t slid back to an almost pre-Victorian ethos where the poor, the animals, and the non-English were to be worked, caged, and subtly subjugated. After the Property Revolts, conservation outside the zoo had ended in all but signage and laboratories, and if not for a dedicated and well-connected core of ZSL scientists, the zoo would have shuttered in the 2020s.