London Wild (9 page)

‘They’re still following!’
the one at the window said. ‘Surely they must know they’re no match for us?’ There was a kind of snarl to his voice, making him sound more like a cat than Herbaht usually did.

George sighed audibly as the conversation continued a little more inane
ly than he’d hoped. Sometimes he wondered why he’d ever bought the holoviewa; there was never anything decent on. He reached to the small control pad on the arm of the bench, ignoring the fact that this bench shouldn’t have an arm, and turned it off. Perhaps he just wasn’t in the mood to be entertained these days, not since they’d kicked him out of his lecturing job at the university. He was only forty-two, far too young to be thrown on the scrap heap. But someone had decided that the material he taught wasn’t vital enough to keep him on, and when the university had been told to make cutbacks, he had been one of those cut.  

George enjoyed the silence that turning off the holoviewa had brought. He allowed his mind to wander
, and eventually, as they always did, his eyes alighted on the portrait of his wife that adorned the wall furthest from the entryway to the room. It would be the first thing anyone saw when they entered the room, and it was big enough that they couldn’t miss it. She had died in childbirth, and the baby had died with her. George often liked to remember his life with her, and sometimes he’d try to imagine that she was still alive and just in another room. Occasionally he’d think of her tending their son, but that was harder because he hadn’t spent any time with the child before he had died and had only seen the baby at all because he’d insisted.

On either side of the portrait of his wife were the portraits of his two pet cats. These portraits were at most a quarter of the size of the centerpiece, but his eyes still drifted between all three. To the left was the portrait of Jojo. She was also dead now. It had been an unfortunate accident. He still wasn’t too sure what had happened
, but he had found her hanged in her room with her bedclothes; he was sure she hadn’t done it on purpose. George had been distraught about it for quite a while, and Kitty, his other pet, whose picture adorned the right side of his wife’s, hadn’t left her room for two months after the incident until George had forced her to. She still moped about it now and might even have been doing so as he sat here thinking about her. George had been told the two cats were sisters when he’d first bought them.

For a moment he thought about how cats had started to be made pets. It had started seven hundred years earlier. Everything important that was cat
-related seemed to have happened seven hundred years ago, as if it had been some sort of golden age for the cats. Seven hundred years ago there had even been a yearly truce between the cats and the humans. It had started on Christmas Eve and lasted two weeks until the sixth of January, which, it had been claimed, was the wedding date for the Matriarchs and Patriarchs. The truce was supposed to encompass a human and a Herbaht holiday, and during this time the Herbaht didn’t hunt or kill humans. It was said that the cats could walk openly among the humans, but George doubted that; it would only take one human out for revenge to destroy the truce, and the truce had lasted nearly a century before someone had broken it. They had never tried to reestablish it afterwards.

Nevertheless
, it was during this time that many humans and Herbaht had wanted to extend the truce. They had worked out a number of plans involving people who donated their bodies to the Herbaht as food, but it was rejected because the families of the dead most likely wouldn’t agree to it, whatever the wishes of those donated might be. The humans wouldn’t say so, but they also feared that with no check on the Herbaht numbers, they would soon outgrow the number of people volunteering to be fed to them when they died. The Herbaht would hunt again, and in such numbers that simply couldn’t be checked. There were even fears that it might lead to the Herbaht trying to take over the country. As it was, the cats had taken over supposed control of a small town called Sou’nd, situated about forty miles to the east of London, just on the north side of the Thames estuary. There were still many times more humans than cats there, but the humans that lived there still did so in abject fear.

Eventually they
had invented some sort of vitamin supplement in pill form, a pill that would synthesize the same balance of chemicals found in humans. Cat numbers could safely grow unchecked if they didn’t need to feed on humans. Things had seemed to go well; the truce had been extended to a year as a sort of test that, if successful, would be extended permanently. Cats and humans mingled happily on the streets and all things were forgiven, or so the history books claim. But the cats soon began to realize that they had been betrayed. The truce had been cancelled after only one month, although the yearly two-week truce was announced the following year as normal. It seemed that the makers of the pills had been told to add an extra ingredient. This ingredient would make the cats docile. Most of the cats felt betrayed and returned to feasting on human meat immediately. Others tried to settle down on the pills anyway. The descendants of the latter group were now regularly bought and sold as pets. It was widely believed that the day the very first cat was made into a pet was the same day the Christmas truce had been cancelled.

It was also about this time that the
Greater Matriarch and Patriarch had left England’s shores, going to America. They took about a hundred of their people with them and started their own colony somewhere in Florida, where to this day they had a continual truce with the local human population.

He sighed. He couldn’t sit there thinking about the past all evening. There were things to do
, and he wanted to see some news. He leaned back in his chair and swiveled it away from the holoviewa and the pictures so that they were behind him. Slightly to the right of where he now faced was a small bar complete with three stools, a standard for this sort of house. Directly in front of him was the newspaper. He used the control pad on the arm of the chair to turn the ‘paper on. The flat screen of the newspaper sparked into life and gave a list of the day’s topics.

The topics were listed one after another on the left hand side of the screen. There were three other columns labeled as ‘in brief,’ ‘summary,’ and ‘verbatim.’ The idea was
that the subscriber would highlight the subject he or she was interested in and would then choose how much detail they wanted, but in most cases the pictures that accompanied the news were the same, regardless of network or detail.

There were many networks in the country, some national and some regional. The most popular was called
Triple N
, or the
National News Network
; George was a subscriber to this network.

George read down the headlines carefully, highlighting each with the remote control as he went. Most were of little interest to him.

‘
You vote for your favorite Triple N newscaster.
’

‘
Prime Minister calls summit conference
.’

‘
French Premier sends army to deal with cat problem
.’

And so on.

It was item fourteen that first caught his interest. It was labeled as ‘
Pluto explodes
.’  He highlighted the verbatim column of the list and pressed the ‘commit’ button on his remote.

The menu on the screen vanished and was replaced by a picture of an astronomer standing beside a powerful
-looking telescope. He was wearing a white coat, which made him appear professional, but he seemed a little self-conscious of the fact that he was being recorded.

The narrative began, ‘Astronomers are quite puzzled today by the sudden
and unexpected explosion of Pluto. They have no explanation for the phenomenon, which occurred around lunchtime today.’

‘Indeed,’ said the man in the white coat. ‘I have been monitoring that area of space for the last week or so
, though my interest was more on the supernova activity of the star Epsilon Gamma some fifteen hundred light years distant. There was a tiny explosion in the bottom left-hand section of my remit. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing and thought it might have been somehow related to the phenomena I was studying. It was only later that I heard that the observatory on Pluto was no longer sending data to its collection hub.’

‘Is there any danger from this?’ asked the interviewer
. ‘Any chance that fragments of Pluto might be bound for Earth?’

‘None,’ replied the man in the white coat
. ‘I want to make it clear that this is unlikely to have any more adverse effect than the destruction of an asteroid might. Pluto was simply too small and too far away to have any real repercussions.

‘Tell us more about the observatory that was on Pluto
.’

‘It was
a series of large automatic telescopes on the planetoid, run by the American Iteck company. It was built at the very edge of the solar system both because it was one of the farthest stable bodies from the Earth that could be relatively easily reached, but also because it was free from the light pollution that inhabits the more central planets of our system. Even the observatory on Mars has to deal with light pollution, thanks to the colony there. Iteck sold time on the telescopes to various astronomers around the world, though all the data was collected at a central hub and then passed on to the interested parties.’

‘I see
,’ the interviewer commented.

‘Fortunately
, the entire thing was automated. Some technicians were sent there once a year to ensure that everything was working properly and to collect any data that for one reason or another couldn’t be sent on a light wave. But they weren’t due there for another four months,’ the astronomer replied calmly.

‘Is it possible that something in the power source used to operate the telescope or the computers there could have caused the planet to blow up?’

‘I suppose it might be possible,’ the white-coated man replied. ‘Though I think it unlikely; everything was carefully regulated from the Iteck building in New York. If anything had seemed to be going wrong, I’m sure they would have pulled the plug. Only if something happened so quickly that they didn’t have time to stop it.’

‘And what of what’s left of Pluto?’ asked the narrator
. ‘Can you tell us where the pieces might be going?’

‘The pieces have spread out a fair way
, due to the explosion. These pieces have their own gravity and are attracting each other. They might coalesce into a debris field in a few thousand years or so. Other pieces are heading into the solar system and could, in all probability, get caught in the gravitational pull of one of the other outlying planets. They could even form new moons, although I should stress that such moons would be tiny. It is unlikely that anything will get closer to Earth than Uranus, because of their current relative positions, but there are experts already mapping the pieces’ trajectories so they can come up with an accurate prediction of what is going to happen. Anything else at the moment is just speculation and hearsay. I will add, though, that if any large pieces appear to be on a collision course with the Earth, we are ready to intercept and destroy or divert them.’

The picture changed suddenly as if trying to cut off the end of the astronomer’s speech. Now George was looking at a large building with far too many windows and
a word in large black letters at its top: ‘ITECK.’  The building was in vast, beautiful green gardens with paths leading both through the middle and around the edges. Right before the main door of the building was a large stone fountain with angelic figures holding pitchers that they appeared to be pouring into the basin. The fountain blocked the center path, causing it to split and circle the monument, rejoining again on the other side. There were benches on the outside of the path as it circled the fountain for people to sit and admire the sculpture and perhaps eat their lunch at the same time.

‘We decided to see what the people at Iteck think about the destruction of Pluto and the loss of their remote observatory there
,’ the narrator said.

The picture changed again, the filming camera mov
ing through the big entrance doors of the building to give the viewer the illusion that he or she was doing just that. Not as convincing as a holoviewa, but it was a two-dimensional screen.

George pressed the ‘back’ button on his remote control and returned to the menu. It worried him that planetary bodies could just explode without warning. He felt that it should be at the top of the list of headlines, especially if it
was one of the generators Iteck had installed on the planet that had caused a chain reaction. Iteck used those same types of generator on Earth too.

The next few items on the newspaper’s list were of no real interest to him, though he hardly really took in the subject matter, still thinking that what had happened to Pluto could easily happen on Earth. It would take another eye
-catcher to make him forget it.

The heading read, ‘
Samuel F Goldberg and crew return home
.’ He highlighted
verbatim
and pressed the commit button on his remote.

The image of a large spacecraft appeared. It was on the ground being prepared for takeoff. There were a number of maintenance engineers running many last
-minute checks all over it. An area around the craft had been sealed off by armed guards, and behind them was a ring of fans and admirers, as well as those just wanting to know what was going on and those hoping for a chance to get in front of the camera. Between the craft and the camera, standing on a red carpet was a man in a spacesuit, the helmet of which was tucked under his arm so his audience could see his face. He was waving enthusiastically at the crowd that had gathered. The man finally turned and entered the craft. These pictures were well-known and more than a hundred and twenty years old.