Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Billy Rock is watching Alex. His almond-shaped eyes are just visible behind the shades. He says, ‘You like her? Want to go a couple of rounds maybe?’

  Bow legs splayed, the doll stamps and pulls at the chain, which is welded to an iron ring around its left ankle. The nails of its toes and fingers are thick and yellow and raggedly sharp. There is a ruff of carbon whisker quills around its neck, and a kind of mane of quills twitches and clatters down its back as the creature rakes the air, hissing. Thick saliva drips from pointed teeth.

  Alex sees that blood sprays have darkened the wood of the palisade fence around the arena. He fumbles out a cigarette and says, ‘She’s what, your runner’s girlfriend?’

  Doggy Dog scowls. ‘Don’t you be dissin’ me, fat boy.’

  Billy Rock laughs. ‘Anyone tried to fuck her, she’d have their guts out in a minute. She’d claw out your liver and your lungs and eat them right in front of your eyes while you were still wondering what happened. She doesn’t know when to stop. That’s what makes her good. She’s been in three bouts and won every one in less than two minutes. Three more, then I retire her and use her as breeding stock.’

  This shocks Alex more than the sight of the thing. He coughs out smoke and says, ‘She’s fertile?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Billy Rock says, ‘but there’s a way to do it. Maybe if I tie her up you could help out, uh? You sit down, now. You look pale.’

  He gives Alex a nasty smile. The thing about Billy Rock is this: he’s both dumb and mean. He’s the youngest of five brothers, but three of those were killed in the vendetta that gave his family control of this part of South London after they moved in from Hong Kong. The fourth survived being shot in the head and losing most of his forebrain, but he spends all the time in a room in the basement of the family house, hunting for imaginary enemies and howling like a dog. Which, because his father died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s, means that Billy Rock is the de facto head of the family.

  Billy’s uncles handle most of the day-to-day business, and he is left with little to do except indulge in his drug of choice. Crack, mostly, which is how he got his street name; that, and his fondness for speed metal. The last time Alex had to talk with Billy Rock, maybe the worst half hour of his life, Billy Rock was lying flat out in the back of his limo, smoking pipes of crack and scratching patterns on his skinny bare chest with a penknife while, the soundsystem blasted out the crank rock of the Bad Brains so loud the big car was rocked back and forth on its cushioned suspension.

  But Billy Rock seems clean now, almost animated. He spends about fifteen minutes talking about fighting dolls, which is his family’s latest scheme, it turns out, or one half of it. Billy Rock has been running fighting dolls for a year, taking a percentage of the bets laid, but now he’s building a big arena where punters can hunt down unmodified dolls and kill them for real. He tells Alex that he wants to call it Mortal Kombat, after some old computer game he played when he was a kid, although it will be mortal only for the dolls. They will be armed with laser tag guns, while the punters will have the real thing.

  ‘Mortal Kombat would be a keen name, but my fucking uncles are calling it after some old film.’

  ‘The Killing Fields,’ Doggy Dog offers.

  ‘Whatever. Some pussy name. Although maybe we could stage gladiator stuff, too. Set fighting dolls against guys with swords and nets, shit like that. Make it more sporting. What do you think?’

  Alex lights another cigarette. He thinks that someone has been feeding Billy a line. There’s no way he could have come up with this on his own. The kid, Doggy Dog, is watching Billy the way a teacher watches an educationally challenged pupil trying to recite the ten times table. Alex thinks that he will have to be careful around Doggy Dog.

  Down in the arena, a handler is swiping at the doll with a long bamboo pole. The handler wears a heavily padded suit, chain mail gloves, and a kind of crash helmet with a cage of bars in front of his face. After a minute of this goading, the doll suddenly wrenches the pole from the man’s grasp and chews down on its end: bamboo three centimetres thick shatters with a noise like a gunshot. The doll tosses the pole away, spits splinters, and glares at the handler with dumb, triumphant malevolence.

  Alex says, ‘I think the dolls would win.’

  Billy Rock likes this answer. ‘Sure they would,’ he says seriously. ‘The point is, how many could someone kill before they got him? Something like that would bring in some sincere attention, don’t you think?’

  ‘If you could find people dumb enough to go against those things.’

  ‘That’s hardly a problem,’ Billy Rock says.

  Doggy Dog says, ‘Listen, boss, tell him the deal, OK? There’s somet’ing you need to see out on the site.’

  ‘Hey,’ Billy Rock says, turning around and fixing Doggy Dog with his shades. ‘Who’s in charge here, huh?’

  ‘It’s the concrete they be pouring—’

  ‘Fuck the concrete. You see these boots?’

  Alex and Doggy Dog look at Billy Rock’s boots, cocked up on the palisade.

  ‘They cost a thousand pounds,’ Billy Rock tells Alex, ‘and this little turd expects me to go walking through the fucking mud to look in a fucking hole full of wet concrete. These are genuine ostrich skin boots. They just can’t make them any more. You think I put them on because I want to go walking through all that shit? I wanted to do that, Dog, I would have dressed like you.’

  Doggy Dog says petulantly, ‘Oh man, you’re being ripped off, like I said you would when you went for the cheapest bid. How you t’ink they g’win make a profit on what you pay if they don’t cut corners? Which is just what they be doing, cheating on you and generally showing you disrespect. You got to do something.’

  Billy Rock tells the kid, ‘You just tell them to get it right or they’ll be part of the foundations.’ He says to Alex, ‘Details—that’s what I pay people for. See, they all said I couldn’t run a business, but this is the cutting edge of entertainment, believe me. We’ll have families out here wanting to buy popcorn and T-shirts and gimme hats and shit like that. Maybe I should start a franchise. What do you think? Want to get in on the ground floor?’

  ‘I wish I could,’ Alex says, feeling a little better now. Billy Rock will want him to do something to help this along. He can live with that. He says, ‘You really think that you can get dolls to breed?’

  Doggy Dog says, ‘It be against the law.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Billy Rock says, ‘but that doesn’t mean it can’t be clone. This is a separate thing, you understand, from the Killing Fields thing. My own private thing my uncles don’t need to know about.’

  Doggy Dog explains, ‘This will be for sporting types who want to breed their own stock, like racing horses. Breeding is like an art, understand, and people pay a lot more for art than technology. Dolls those fucking Koreans sell be male, and all of them guaranteed sterile. But they have all the equipment, it just isn’t developed. It needs starting up.’

  Alex has been wondering where they got a female doll, but it isn’t the kind of question you can ask in circumstances like this. He says, ‘And you want me to work out a way of doing this? That would be worth a lot of money.’

  ‘You want to talk about money,’ Billy Rock says lazily, ‘we can start talking about what you owe. I hear you fucked up a deal yesterday, maybe can’t make this month’s payment. Man in your position should be glad of a business opportunity.’

  So Billy Rock did have something to do with screwing the deal. And Alex is certain that Perse somehow found a way to let Billy Rock know about it. Maybe Doggy Dog is doing a deal with Perse behind Billy Rock’s back.

  Alex asks, ‘You’ll square what I owe with the family, if I do this for you?’

  He is thinking of Billy Rock’s uncles, sober, dignified men who look like barristers or bankers, immaculate in silk pinstripe suits from Jermyn Street. They don’t approve of Billy Rock screwing around on the street like this. It is bad for the family’s reputation. But
if this goes wrong, Billy Rock won’t be the one hurt.

  Billy Rock waves this away. It is another detail. He says, ‘You come along to the party I’m giving. We’re floating this Killing Fields thing on the stock market in a few days.’

  Alex drops his cigarette butt and grinds it under the heel of his construction boot. He says carefully, ‘I’d be pleased to come along. Of course I would.’

  Doggy Dog says, ‘You have a hormone synthesis problem to solve. See, we can get female dolls, but they be as sterile as the males. Your job is to make the stuff to bring them on heat. Understand, we’d send it to a real biotech company, but they’d pass it straight on to the Korean fuckers who make the dolls.’

  Alex says, ‘There’s got to be more to it than giving them the right hormones.’

  Doggy Dog says, ‘Don’t you be worrying about that. You just make the hormone.’

  ‘For one thing,’ Alex says, ‘the things you’ve had done to change that thing down there into a fighting doll are all somatic. They won’t be inherited.’

  Doggy Dog says, looking amused, ‘There be ways to make the changes down at the blastula level, before separation of the somatic tissue and…how you call it?’

  ‘Generative tissue.’ Alex wonders how the little gangster knows this stuff.

  ‘Yeah, whatever. So that way the changes get passed on.’

  ‘It’s illegal to make genetic changes to generative tissue,’ Alex says. ‘Even in this country. I mean, really illegal.’

  Doggy Dog cracks up at this. He laughs so hard he can hardly stand, finally calms down enough to be able to say, ‘Man, that be the least of your worries.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about a thing,’ Billy Rock says, ‘as long as you do right by me.’

  4 – Dealing

  The next day, Alex meets Howard Perse in a pub off the Whitechapel Road. Perse is working on a double murder, two Uzbekistanis found that morning in a corner of Bethnal Green Cemetery, tied back to back and both shot through the head.

  Perse says, with weary irony, ‘We’re looking for the people who did it so we can recruit them. The victims were a couple of pieces of shit dealing in heroin from the old country. But that’s too crude for the likes of you to bother with, isn’t it, Sharkey?’

  ‘That’s Mister Sharkey to you,’ Alex says. He’s tired and irritable, sweating into his green tweed suit and perched uncomfortably on a stool at a little round table with a cracked marble top and a heavy cast iron frame. The table is crowded with empty beer glasses. A drowsy wasp buzzes from one glass to another and back again. Overhead, a ceiling fan stirs the layers of cigarette smoke but does nothing to cut the heat. The sun, striking through the greasy window, glows incandescently on nicotine-stained red flock wallpaper and haloes the heads of the people around the bar, as if they are saints crowding for a glimpse of the Messiah.

  Alex has been up early, has already been to pay the visit to his mother that he promised himself he’d make if he wasn’t arrested after the deal was fucked. Lexis has a new boyfriend, a scrawny kid barely out of his teens. All the time Alex is there, the boyfriend sits in the other room drinking canned lager and watching football on interactive TV, switching restlessly from viewpoint to viewpoint, the volume turned up so loud it rattles the paper-thin walls of the flat. Ten in the morning, for Christ’s sake.

  When Alex had money, when he was working for the Wizard, he bought his mother the satellite TV system, a new suite of lounge furniture and the air conditioning unit that hums above the sliding glass door on to the narrow balcony. He offered to buy her a house in the suburbs, but she has lived all her life in the East End and says she would never move. All of life is here. Out in the suburbs they’re dead and don’t know it.

  Lexis Sharkey. His mother. A peroxide blonde who always, it seems to Alex, wears full makeup, powder and lipstick and mascara, this morning in a cheap nylon kimono that, carelessly tied, exposes her loose, freckled breasts in their black lace cradle. She keeps herself in shape, this feisty forty-eight-year-old broad. She knows right away Alex is in trouble—they have never been able to hide anything from each other.

  Alex grew up in a tower block flat much like this one, with black mould on the walls and Pharaoh ants in the kitchen, and a view from the wind-battered picture window across the Thames’ glittering loops to the terra incognita of South London. The tower block was demolished to make way for an access road to the London City Airport, but the cheap shabby furniture of his childhood has persisted, along with dozens of undusted pottery figures, plastic souvenirs and artificial flowers in plastic baskets imitating woven straw, the empty budgerigar cage with its mirror and bell, a ceramic dray horse with a broken hind leg mended with superglue—Alex knocked it off the wooden shelf above the electric fire when he was four or five—and a leather pouffe with a rip down one side dating from the day Alex cut it open convinced there was money inside. He vividly remembers finding only yellow and green foam rubber chunks. They’d never had any money, but they’d always managed. Lexis is a fighter.

  Lexis says that if there is anything he needs, he only has to ask, and Alex tells her that it’s all right, he has a deal going, and she smiles and lights another cigarette—he brought her a big carton of Benson and Hedges, like a gold brick, and a bottle of Lamb’s Navy Rum.

  ‘You only have to ask,’ she says again, exhaling a cloud of smoke. ‘And if you get in trouble, you come and tell me. The boys down the club can sort it out for you. That’s what friends are for.’

  The club is Leroy’s shebeen, currently located in the basement of an abandoned office block, where a crowd of middle-aged Jamaicans spend the nights playing pool and dominoes and listening to old reggae tunes. Bob Marley and the Wailers. Burning Spear. Max Romeo. Lexis is a dealer herself in a small way, mostly homegrown weed now, but she sold E and whizz in the raves and clubs in the good old days of the nineties, when she’d been a single mother trying to stretch diminishing welfare payments. Alex has sworn never to supply his mother with even a single infective unit of the psychoactive viruses he splices, not that she has ever asked him.

  ‘Your problem,’ Lexis tells her son, ‘is that you don’t have any friends. You think you don’t need people, but you do. What kind of trouble are you in?’

  Alex does have friends, but they are safely distributed through the hyperconnective geography of the Web. He likes to gossip and boast as much as any gene hacker, he just doesn’t want to meet up with the people he talks to. The thought of actual live face-to-face conferences on gene hacking makes Alex’s skin crawl.

  Alex tells Lexis that everything will be fine, that business is just a little slow. What else can he say?

  But his mother just looks at him and says, ‘Alex, you haven’t been sleeping. Don’t think I can’t see it. And that’s a fucking awful suit. It makes you look like Oscar Wilde. What possessed you to buy it? If you ask me, you haven’t been the same since you went in the nick.’

  Alex can’t deny it. He woke in the early hours, and found himself standing by the computer console, drenched in sweat and convinced that he’d been talking to someone. Somehow he could hear an echo of a voice. He’d switched on all the lights and looked around, wondering if a rat had got in. He even checked the security cameras, but they showed nothing but moonlight-drenched tarmac.

  And now, in the hot, crowded pub, Detective Sergeant Howard Perse crushes a cigarette in the overflowing tin ashtray and lights another and says, ‘Whatever you’re going to ask me, you’d better do it, Sharkey. There’s pressure to get a result with this case.’

  ‘Someone cares about a couple of dealers?’

  ‘A couple of dealers who were taking payment for their stuff in hardened electronics. The sort of electronics used in smart weapons, the sort that can survive being shot out of a cannon, and then guide the shell down to target. Mind you, this is strictly off the record.’

  ‘Everything you tell me is off the record.’

  Perse takes a long drag on his new ciga
rette, followed by a swallow of his Guinness. He is a stocky man in his mid-forties, with a comfortable swag of beer belly straining his striped shirt, and a face pockmarked and cratered by old acne. With black hair combed back from a widow’s peak, and a truculent saturnine glare, he looks like a low rent Count Dracula. When he lifts his Guinness, his jacket tugs sideways to show his pistol holster under his armpit. He is looking over Alex’s shoulder, and Alex turns on the stool to see what has caught Perse’s attention.

  The pub is crowded with old men in straw hats and bright leisure clothes. The local dealer is in one corner. Every five minutes or so, someone comes up and puts money on the bar in front of the dealer, and he hands a packet over and his customer turns and shoves through the crowd out into the sunlight. There’s a gang of crusties in the back, all dreadlocks, beads and ethnic clutter. Dogs on string leads wind themselves around their masters’ legs. The crusties are smoking blow and taking long theatrical snorts from a little bottle of clear liquid they pass amongst themselves. But Perse isn’t watching the passing trade—he could start arresting people up and down the Whitechapel Road and not be finished by Christmas. He’s watching the television hung in the angle above the bar, which shows a helicopter shot of billowing columns of black smoke rising from a cluster of mirrorglass skyscrapers into an achingly blue sky.

  ‘Where’s that’ Perse says. ‘Houston?’

  ‘Atlanta, I think. The army pulled out of Houston two weeks ago.’

  ‘Thank Christ for our system,’ Perse says. ‘Always had a fatal weakness, the Yanks. Never had a strong central government.’