“Almost there,” he said, panting. “Break a leg, mon!”
Cuthbert had no money, no friends, and no possessions, but he had learned through the Wonderments to listen to England’s animals. It was something even the powerful king he so revered couldn’t comprehend, and through this skill, he was going to save Britain and its creatures.
Unfortunately, Flōt addict and madman that he was, not a living human soul on earth believed him.
And on Flōt, as everyone knew, one could believe that microscopic violet-quiffed visitors from Planet Flōtica kept castles on the tips of every blade of grass. One could believe that the last Tasmanian tiger didn’t actually freeze to death in 1936 because of an incompetent zookeeper. When Flōt was good, it was hands down the best legal hallucinogenic and sedative on earth. It offered more than intoxication, more than a release: it took you rippling across whole new planets of purple-white euphoria. Like the old rave drug ketamine, or “Special K,” from the 1990s, it offered a sense of being utterly, and sometimes pleasantly, alone; but uniquely, it also gave the proprioceptive illusion of having extremely long, lissome, and powerful legs. To “get up” or “spire” on Flōt, as it was often called, was all about total self-possessed elevation. On Flōt, the world stood miles below you alone, a distant purple and white field of violets you could only feel tickling your ankles, and you needed nothing or no one else — not God, not a lover, not your pet cat.
CUTHBERT HAD DONE the proper prep for his assault on the zoo, or at least he thought so. A few meters through the dense shrubbery lay a secret grotto that he had fashioned earlier that month inside yew and hazel hedgings and a few coppiced beeches, scooping dirt with his dry hands and charily snapping twigs. He kept an emergency bottle of Flōt stashed there, and a powerful pair of bolt cutters. His plan was to wait until darkness, cut his way in, then break open as many enclosures as possible — especially the otters’. It was the most organized thing he had done in decades. One couldn’t spot the grotto from either the park or the zoo’s interior. It sat a meter from the zoo’s sturdy iron perimeter fence, close to the jackals — and to a rare gap in the iron fence. But the grotto might as well have been in France, such were the difficulties of getting to it now.
Cuthbert shoved forward a few more paces until the crisscrossing hazel branches budged no more and encapsulated him in a green foliate cage. For a moment, he thought he saw a boy, a thin boy with dark hair, shoving along with him a few meters away in the shrubbery. “Dryst,” Cuthbert said. “Look at me. Over here!” Then the boy vanished. Every so often, a stressed branch would crack and loosen the cage’s “bars,” allowing Cuthbert to move again. At one point, tiny twigs jammed up both nostrils and his mouth, making it appear as if he were disgorging leaves from his face like some kind of garden goblin.
“Oh, shittin ’ell,” he gasped, spitting out flecks of shredded leaves. The beast of first Flōt withdrawal was upon him, too, pulling him downward, tearing at his nerves, seizing his muscles — including his fragile heart. A singularly vicious facet of Flōt addiction was its two-bell-curved dual-withdrawal syndrome. It crushed the newly and the long-term sober alike with two acute phases sometimes a decade or more apart. Yet the dual-withdrawal also allowed ex-addicts past the initial psychosis-laden hell of withdrawal No. 1, an island of peace and sanity, before dragging them into the furies of withdrawal No. 2.
For so many years, from the last days of the era of the powerful prime ministers and the European Union, up through the Great Reclamation and the Property Revolts and the slow rise of the various suicide cults of the 2020s, and on through the Second Restoration to the new king in 2028, the ramshackle Cuthbert had somehow survived. All those decades, he’d searched doggedly for his long-lost elder brother, Drystan, who, in his mind, had vanished when they were children, way back in the late 1960s. Since then, after leaving the Black Country, he had learned to suck in and oxygenate himself on London’s quotidian pathologies as naturally as breath. The filthy old town seemed to nourish him, to fuel the hunt for his brother. He took in every coarse ’oi of speech, ate every chip-butty* bag of cheap potato joy, learned every mucky machination to blag* Flōt — all of it, fluently and helplessly, and it had all led to this brambled corner beside the beasts. If the entire history of London, from the Iron Age to the age of digital skin, had a meaning, this spot, as far as Cuthbert knew, was precisely where it stood. This, he was certain, was where his dear long-lost brother Drystan would come back and stay.
GOD KNOWS, the paroxysms of the 2020s and Henry IX had sucked nearly every other last drop of energy from Britain’s tired veins. While thousands of artists, philosophers, and authors had joined the suicide cults or the ranks of brazen self-promoters on WikiNous — the implanted, all-purpose comm-network that grew within human tissue — the most original minds faced almost total indifference.
WikiNous had long ceased being freely moderated by “WikiNousians.” Its inner workings were no longer open-sourced; they were “open-branded” and edited vertically by subeditors obedient to Henry IX and the aristocracy and rules, rules, rules. The sending of messages in Britain had become expensive, tightly centralized, and censored; in America, India, Scandinavia, and parts of the Far East, WikiNous’s relative freedom had brought its own set of problems (particularly, the cults), but even there, open network protocols were dead and the Internet golden age was long gone. Cryptographically protected WikiNous “stalks” had replaced the URLs. Among Britons, WikiNous mainly spread Harry9’s official views and a boorish brand of light “newsertainement.”
“Oh, Dryst,” Cuthbert said aloud, reaching with his hand toward the fence. He clutched a shock of tender, faintly serrated hazel leaves, pulling himself forward. “Dryst!”
Finding the boy wasn’t just the search of a lifetime for Cuthbert — it was a command, a direction, a holy destination.
That his lost brother would have been aged ninety-two, were he alive, was entirely meaningless to old Cuddy. Drystan was, in his mind, always a child.
CUTHBERT TURNED AROUND and leaned against the crosshatching branches he’d just plunged through. He found that they supported his full weight — all twenty-two stones of a man wattled together with crylon mesh and half-poisonous nickel rods. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. It had rained the night before, and a few drips of water coursed slowly across his cheeks and down his neck.
“Gagoga,” he gasped, breathlessly, repeating the most mysterious of the various phrases he had been sent a few months before by the zoo animals. “Ga! Go! Ga!” he cried, sounding as raw animal as he knew. How he knew this watery, gurgling phrase, what it meant, where it came from, why he ought to repeat it — none of those things were quite clear. But he knew he must say it.
Gagoga.
The zoo wasn’t the only source of animal voices, though it was the strongest. He heard them all over the place these days. England roared and screeched with them, especially those of cats. He could hardly make it down the street lately without a moggy telling him that moths in the moonlight were enchanting, or saying that those blue mallow flowers along garden walls in Holloway smelled of petrol, or asking him to touch me here, no touch me there, no here yes there here between the ears there here there — workaday cat-thoughts, really.
Britain’s dogs had much to say, too: a Seeing Eye Labrador on a bosonicabus* had told Cuthbert that invisible grid lines crisscrossed every pavement, street, house, New Tube, or bosonicabus entrance in the city. From its point of view, London was impeccably Pythagorean and soothing. A wirehaired fox terrier, on the other hand, who yelped behind a wooden gate that Cuthbert often passed in Islington, would shrill with impish pep, Happyfury! Happyfury! Happyfury! Cuthbert did not know what it meant — but he believed it.