by Bill Broun
“Chui!” Suleiman gasped. “Leopard!”
The leopard began to slash into the Neuters, and any humans within reach. He was a power beyond any of their machines, any of their programmed incantations. A violet-blue liquid spumed out of the Neuters’ necks as if from broken lawn hoses. It was not blood. It was ice cold, and it tasted bitter to the cat. It made the animal more determined to bring the infidels to heel.
The gorilla, Kibali, watched from a distance, shifting his weight fretfully from one foot to another, back and forth, back and forth.
“Stop this,” the gorilla called to Monty. “Please, let us take the paths of peace, my friend. Friend!”
“The Mahdi comes!” Monty screamed, beyond reason, swiping and gnashing and tearing into any spot of creamy white flesh its claws could hook. “For everyone, for all, for now, for you!”
Astrid could hear every word of the creature, although she wasn’t sure she understood them.
“Brr-row-brr-row-brr-rowowow!” snarled the animal. “Bow down and pray before the Mahdi!”
“The Mahdi?” Astrid asked the great cat.
“He waits for you, at the zoo,” said Monty, pausing from battle, yet somehow speaking to her intimately and alone, even as many melees spread around them. “You, the princess of all things untamed, and the force ‘through the green fuse’—you, the Otter Christ.”
“That can’t be,” said Astrid. “I am just a lonely drug addict in London, and you’re nothing but a symptom of the Death.”
“You will see,” said Monty. The black panther vaulted into the air and slammed onto a Neuter.
“Inside! Inside!” the Neuter repeated, trying to chop at the black cat’s hot muzzle even as its cold heart ceased its slow, steady, quantum-powered ticking.
“Down! Bow!”
It was Abrahamic religion versus www.heavensgate.com.
Some of the citizens in the square decided to surround Kibali, and they began to hurl objects at him—plastic bottles, belt buckles, shoes. “Fuck,” said Mason, huddling close to Astrid and Suleiman. “Fucking idiots.”
“Why they want to hurt the sokwe?” asked Suleiman. “He hurt no one.”
“Let me die,” Astrid could hear Kibali pleading. “Let me go.”
These weren’t the Neuters, who had indeed planned, later, to put the gorilla down. This was the human mob.
Astrid and Mason now saw poor Kibali fall to the ground in the square, just across the street from the embassy; the ape lay on his side on the grass, clutching his chest in pain, and Mason ran toward him. Astrid and Suleiman followed.
The noble silverback was having a myocardial infarction. The appearance of the white-suited aggressors, the stress of the escape, the spurting violet-blue liquid, the years of sedentary anguish, those éclairs from the well-meaning keeper, and finally, this insult of ordinary people—it had been too much.
Kibali felt crushed by what he had found outside the zoo. Humans were not only his foes, but they also were not even as minimally decent as animals. He would be hunted eternally. The entire city was merely an outgrowth of the zoo, and he would never be allowed to escape.
All around Kibali were the voices, too, that Cuthbert had heard in the zoo—the high-pitched, fussy, and deeply cloying treacletones of Heaven’s Gate. They were repeating certain phrases, The mammals will pass from the earth, and Deactivate the animals. Surely, thought Kibali, the Interahamwe soldiers could not be far behind, and in an odd way, he knew he would prefer them. In being cut to pieces with a machete, one died at the receiving end of real emotion, of something both animal and human. Here, by contrast, was detached, digitalized, mob slaughter. Here was the truth of the comet Urga-Rampos, bringing the possibility of holocausts beyond the nightmares any of previous millennia. If he had only made it to St. James or Hyde Park, or to the Wyre Forest—perhaps from there he might have ducked under the cover of these beautiful English trees, and he might have proceeded slowly ahead, from green patch to green patch, until he arrived in the Congo. Oh, if he could only die under the ayous and sapelli trees, in peace, with ants tickling his knuckles and his family around him, how content he would be to leave this world.
He could not breathe. He tried to pull the air in, but nothing came from the effort. He felt dizzy.
Mason held Kibali in his arms now, cuddling the big, sad beast against him while Suleiman, in turn, placed his hand on Mason’s shoulder. Mason had held dying bucks he’d shot like this before in Pendleton County. He would tell them the same words: “It’s OK, fella, it’s OK.”
At that moment, Astrid felt sure that she saw the golden eagle atop the embassy awaken, too, tearing the bolts from its talons like annoying thorns. The steel bird of prey flew down to the four animals huddled in the square, and hovered above them. It was an America-within-an-America, an animal core and inner spark like Omotoso’s Yoruba ori, a guardian disguised as art, that would never fit into any death cult’s plans.
Under the shadow of the eagle, Kibali spoke to Mason, too, for he also had listened very hard to animals his whole life, and at last he could hear their words now, at least for this night.
Kibali said, “I say to you both, ‘Gagoga maga medu.’ That is the life-phrase by which the survivors of today will know one another. I give it to you from the animal world. It’s the voice against the rushing-in of death. It means, ‘I want to live.’”
Then the gorilla, his eyesight dimming, his heart trilling to a stop, looked up at Astrid, who, in his eyes, seemed to be floating above him, and he said to her, in the stalwart gorilla tongue, “Gagoga maga medu, Astrid. Live! Live, sweet messiah! You are almost past the Death. And you are the last holder of the Wonderments on Earth. You are the princess of the wild, the Otter Christ of England. You will save our country, and you will save our world. But the cost of avoiding pain and grief is annihilation, I assure you. Just as you cannot trap an animal and expect it to survive, you must not go back to Flōt. You must keep imagining the green world, and you must walk toward it—and we will be by your side, on the road of happy destiny. Help the stranger, in the zoo. That poor crazy man who thinks you’re his brother. He may or may not be your grandfather, Astrid. Why does it matter? The fact is, he can be.”
“I hear you,” said Astrid. A fresh set of king’s bulletins and orange-freqs eeped in her eyes, but she dismissed them all without reading.
“If I could only gouge out my eyes,” she seethed. “Bugger!”
The golden wings of the eagle covered them all like a feathery shield, kicking up a cloud of dust around the square, hiding the creatures under its wings—three Homo sapiens and the Gorilla gorilla—and keeping them safe. They were pulling together, Astrid saw, as though circling the proverbial wagons, but soon the Heaven’s Gaters would find them and drug them and force them into the soul-swallowing machine. They must leave or perish, she suspected.
Suleiman, unsurprised but heartbroken, felt sure now that he would not make it to any new country. These American immigration demons, as he decided to think of them, had them surrounded. The only dim hope he felt was the Shayk of Night.
Apparently immune to the Neuters’ silver stunners and to bullets and mob-hurled projectiles, the black leopard had grown frantic and exceedingly lethal, screaming in leopard language, ripping the pale demons to pieces like so many rotten white peaches.
Under the beating eagle’s feathers, Astrid felt herself kissing Kibali’s forehead as he lay there, struggling for breath.
“You wake up,” she said, her licorice-colored hair falling onto and tickling his face. “Wake up.” Such was the fantastical tenor of her swirling brain in second withdrawal, she had to wonder: was she really talking to a gorilla, or to herself. “Please!”
Kibali’s own last thought was of his dead mother, named Long Stander, the matriarch of his father’s troop in the verdant hills of eastern Congo. He saw leaves in her hair, felt her pulling him closer to her, there under the ayous trees. As he expired, he heard her singing her burly ape lullabi
es with a might beyond the human heart.
releasing the spirits of animals past
AND NOW THE EMBASSY’S “EAGLE” WAS PULLING Astrid deeper under its wings, and dragging Mason and Suleiman upward, too, as the Shayk of Night battled on in the square. Astrid felt herself rising into the sky, and she wondered if this journey, this spiriting away by an eagle, would finally—finally—be the end of second withdrawal.
Saved by an eagle. That’s how good fantasies always end, she mused darkly. Perfect.
But it wasn’t an eagle. The creature had doors, and the doors had sprung open, and human arms had emerged to yank her inside.
The “eagle,” it turned out, was merely another, larger frightcopter—a troop transport—with a very ill, grinning Dr. Bajwa piloting it. The good GP had come to rescue them from the square. He sat working the holo-controls with an expert’s ease and comfort, and a weekend pilot’s lavish joy.
In the cargo area of the frightcopter, the three unhelmeted, regular Red Watchmen who had lifted Astrid, Mason, and Suleiman into the copter were trying to help them into their seats.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” said Mason, drawing his neuralzinger from under his blazer, and rolling himself in front of Astrid and Suleiman like a giant, awkward jelly roll. He waved his pistol at the Watchmen, holding his arm out stiffly, but he was still lying prone.
“Hey, jeez, jeez, jeez,” one of the Watchman said. “Keep your hair on, mate. We’re awright.”
“It’s OK,” Bajwa assured everyone. “People, sit down. You are safe. Inspector, the Crown has . . . for now . . . seen the error of its ways. These gents—Jake, Nigel, and Lawson—they’re on our side. The Watch is fighting the cultists.”
“You can count on old ’Arry,” said the one named Nigel. “’E’ll get these suiciders. I hear that ’e’s even brung Æthelstan’s Bliss out for this do, yeah? That’s the noisy sort of mortar what toys with time? With those pink arms?”
“I’ve heard the . . . tales,” said Mason, slowly holstering his sidearm. “I thought you might be more of . . . those people.”
“The cultists?” asked the doctor. “It’s unprecedented. They’ve finally gone too far. Even the English republicans—and the Earl of Worcester!—have allied themselves, for now, with King Henry.”
“I can’t believe it,” Astrid said to the doctor. “But the Neuters want to destroy us all. It’s the animals they want most.”
“Erm, yes,” Dr. Bajwa said vaguely, as if not quite grasping what she meant but wanting to show politeness.
“The suicide cult,” said Mason. “They’re not human.”
“What?”
“He’s right,” said Suleiman. “I saw them. They all look exactly alike.”
The most senior-looking of the Watchmen, Lawson, abruptly turned to Astrid and said, in a stone-mouthed, sea-blasted West Country accent: “I’ve just had a new freq, miss. Incredible.” He blinked his eyes a few times, clearly reading his corneas carefully. “His Majesty ’Arry9, I’ve been asked to relate, says he’s sorry for any misunderstandings, m’om. And you needn’t warry about any re-class-ifi-cation. And we’re getting hope for yar mum with her Bruta7, ar-right? You’ll not need to warry about the P-Levs, either. Right? Oh, and EquiPoise ’as been told their off yar case. And, erm . . .” He paused for a moment, glancing above himself, and tapped his eyebrows a few times. He was reading off his corneas. He scratched his chin. “I think that’s it. M’om.”
“Well,” said Astrid. “Thank bloody God.” Out the window, she could see the great white quarkbeam sizzling across the sky. Despite the light pollution, the comet Urga-Rampos wasn’t actually any harder to see. Indeed, it was now luridly luminous, as if it had lowered itself toward Earth.
“Thank His Highness,” said Nigel, who sounded more local—perhaps from south London.
“Whatever,” said Mason.
“We need to hurry,” said Astrid. “The longer the beam runs, the more species we lose—forever. To the zoo!”
“I’m one step ahead of you,” said the doctor. “Just two minutes, and we’ll be above the lions.”
“But the beam, it’s a kind of energy weapon,” said the local Watchman. “What do you mean, ‘species’?”
“Animals,” said Astrid.
At this, Dr. Bajwa turned around from his holo-controls and looked at Astrid quizzically.
“I don’t understand,” said the doctor. “You’re sounding, Inspector, like—my patient. Cuthbert.”
“St. Cuthbert.”
Dr. Bajwa peered closely at Astrid’s face. He asked, “Did you do whatever it was you needed to do . . . to humor . . . to help, you know, our friend, Cuthbert?”
“I didn’t need to humor him. Something happened to me, something that made me understand Cuthbert better, but it’s something I may never understand myself. I was ‘the Christ of Otters,’ as Cuthbert might say. And I can hear animals speak now.”
Dr. Bajwa felt so startled, his manipulation of the holo-controls slipped, and the frightcopter dipped down hard.
“Oh no,” he said. “Cuthbert’s delusional. It’s got to be Flōt withdrawal. This is classic Flōt. You’re in second withdrawal?”
She said. “Yes. It may be the Flōt, but others saw it, too.”
“Others saw it?”
“We saw it, too,” said Mason. “The inspector—she turned into . . . some . . . being. And, I think—I think—it was almost like I heard the gorilla. Speaking.”
“Huh,” said Suleiman, his lips trembling. “I saw the woman, too. She was like a kind of forest, come to life. She held the sokwe in her arms as he died, and he looked into her face as if looking at his own mama-sokwe. But I did not hear him.”
The frightcopter stopped above the zoo now, with a slight shudder, and it began hovering quietly on top of the lion enclosure, where the earlier deadly confrontation had taken place.
“We’re here,” said the doctor. “As for your story, I can only suspend my disbelief. But this is all very, very strange!”
“Shite!” Nigel yelled. “Look out the window, where we just was—that fucking thing!”
And that’s when all the passengers glimpsed the source of the earlier draconine noises—it was King Henry’s rumored Æthelstan’s Bliss. It was as big as a small cathedral, and just as tall. Its main platform crawled on massive titanium caterpillars, crushing everything in its path. Only its glowing pink tentacles, waving and screeching and erasing clusters of Neuters and anyone else it came close to—and playing a very risky game with time—were visible to the copter passengers.
Trained on enemies within its grasp, the Bliss was at once folding and scrubbing timespace of members of the suicide cult. It not only killed, it nullified a human being’s moment in the universe while, simultaneously, mopping up the dimensional residue of her or his existence.
For every cultist the Bliss “unexisted,” there was the potential for any animals “exited” by a cult member to be restored. The problem was the staggering “collateral damage.” Each time a whipping rose-colored tentacle even brushed the back or forearm of an innocent bystander, that person’s entire identity—in the flesh and online—dissolved. Worse, all the lives connected to that person would be smacked by ripples of alternate timelines. Whole families could be wiped out. If a boy who would one day pull a fire alarm at his school was accidently touched by a tentacle, droves of burn victims might appear.
“If that’s what I think it is, anything can happen tonight,” said Mason. One of the tentacles—they were actually “fired” from the base of the apparatus—nearly hit the frightcopter, which it veered to the right violently.
“Fuck!”
“We need to land,” said Baj. “It will destroy us!” Astrid noticed that the pilot-physician sounded a little different, his voice more sonorous and low. Strangely, too, he looked considerably heavier than he had earlier, as if he had gained two stone.
The frightcopter plunged again, sprang up, and shimmied side to side for a
moment, but then Baj got it back.
“We’re OK,” he said. “Perfectly OK.”
“Your king is a fool,” Mason said to the Watchmen. “You don’t fuck with time.”
“Piss off,” said Nigel. “You can fuck right off, Yank. You fucking Americans, you—” And with that, Nigel disappeared.
“No!” cried Lawson. “Holy fuck!”
Mason shook his head. He said, “Not good. I guess the Bliss just erased someone in some way tied to the life of your poor friend, and when he was cleaned from time, he went, too.” He sighed. “But there’s a chance he’s not dead, too. He could have just been moved. I guess we’ll find out.”
Astrid said, “Any one of us could be next?”
“Yes,” said Mason.
“Not Cuthbert, I hope. Not poor Cuthbert.”
“The gorilla—the thing he said: ‘Gagoga.’ We’ll say it. Say it. What can it hurt?”
Nothing. So they did, again and again, and the two Watchmen left in the frightcopter looked at them as if observing two mental patients.
When the group disembarked and approached the lions’ enclosure, they came to a huge crowd of others standing around it, looking on helplessly.
Astrid pushed her way to the wall around the enclosure, just above the moat, and there was Cuthbert, out of the water now, a giant ursine mess of a man, stumbling quickly toward the halted lions, bolt cutters in hand.
“Cuthbert,” she called. “Come back. Come back!”
As the lions themselves had predicted earlier in the evening, this was where the night of the animals would end, in their strict orbit.
Locomotion still felt gluey and slow to Astrid. When she turned around, for a moment, she thought she saw Atwell and Omotoso in the dimness, far behind her, sprinting, but the tenebrous figures didn’t seem to move nearer, oddly. She felt a panicked sense of clarity: it was all Flōt withdrawal. Everything and everyone—figments!
But she could not stop herself now. She beelined for a red alarm box that stood just outside the lions’ enclosure. It had not once, in the zoo’s history, been used. And despite the fact that one of the largest and fastest assemblies of police and public safety forces in British history now ringed the zoo, with sirens blasting, solarcopters thumping, whirling yellow and blue lights in inferno mode, Astrid nonetheless felt compelled to punch out the glass and pull down the emergency lever, which no one, oddly, had deigned to consider.