Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Alex saves his notes on hormone synthesis and has his daemon order a minicab. The driver is a Bengali Alex knows slightly. His minicab is done out in red plush and gold braiding. Little trinkets hang from bead-chains on the dashboard. There’s a hologram of Shiva the Destroyer right next to the driver’s laminated photo ID, and the slogan God gives me speed is lettered across the top of the windscreen. The Wizard would give God a run for his money, Alex thinks, when he reads this pious boast.

  Postcards of religious images are pasted on the cloudy plastic screen that divides passenger from driver. The driver has pushed open the sliding window in the screen so that he can talk to Alex. It’s as hot as an oven in the minicab, and a joss stick wedged into the air vent on the driver’s side sends up a thick sweet smoke, the smell of Alex’s childhood. Lexis was into that post-hippy New Age shit when she was a single mother no older than Alex is now. He could be, Alex thinks, in a little bubble of Fairyland.

  Old London Town is growing strange and exotic in the grip of what they are now calling the Great Climatic Overturn. Lights drift past the minicab like stars seen from some hyperlight spaceship. Streetlights, the scattered lights of the tower blocks behind screens of hardy sycamores and ginkgoes, the lights of the pyramid-capped tower of Canary Wharf rising into the sodium orange sky. A helicopter slowly crosses the sky from west to east, the needle of its laser spotlight intermittently stabbing amongst the flat roofs of deck access housing.

  The driver tells Alex about the latest drive-by shooting out on the Whitechapel Road. ‘A whole bunch of skinheads, screaming past in an old Cosworth Sierra, out where the youth fucked up on crack hang out. You know that café?’

  The Gunga Din?’ Alex knows it’s where Billy Rock’s family supplies half the Bengali crackheads. He adds, ‘I always like to think the owner has a sense of humour, although I’ve never been in.’

  ‘No good man goes in,’ the minicab driver says. ‘The youth and their gangs are gone bad and crazy. We disown them, we disown the lot of them.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if I’m a good man, but I still wouldn’t go in there. Nights like this, don’t you think you could just drive forever?’

  Alex feels alert, buzzing with a tab of whizz, good old-fashioned methamphetamine sulphate, the kind mother used to make. The Wizard in his cell, churning it out to turn on his fellow inmates, brighten their grey routines. Alex remembers the Wizard’s searching gaze, arctic blue behind the slab-like lenses of his glasses, his intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic.

  Alex sometimes feels guilty that the Wizard is banged up and he is free—but the Wizard always said that he was free wherever he was, free inside his own head. He’d had to explain his syntheses to the police techs after he was arrested—he’d even given them the right kind of masks when they’d arrived. Part of the game, taking a pride in showing the blundering coppers what he’d been getting away with for so long.

  The minicab driver says, ‘I don’t have the ration to drive as much as I’d like to, Mr Sharkey. You’ll notice how carefully and sweetly I drive. It is to conserve fuel. You wonder where those white trash motherfuckers get their petrol, eh? Criminals, all of them, and criminals aren’t supposed to get petrol. But they have more than me, an honest man doing his job. They have enough to drive around all day looking for targets.’

  ‘I know,’ Alex says.

  ‘Five shots. Bang bang! Just like that!’ The driver takes his hands off the wheel and claps twice. His eyes meet Alex’s in the rearview mirror. ‘They think this one youth, he’ll die. Shot in the head. Two others wounded, but they will live, and perhaps learn their lesson. Stay away from there for now, Mr Sharkey. It’s not a good place for a white man.’

  ‘I’m a man of circumscribed habits,’ Alex says.

  The driver drops him across the street from Ma Nakome’s.

  ‘I’m going to hang out for fares up by Aldgate,’ he says, after Alex has paid him. You come over and find me, OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ Alex says, although he knows he’ll call for a cab right here in Ma Nakome’s, which even close to midnight is busy, people sitting at the plastic tables scattered on the pavement outside and the little bar crowded, Hi Life Dub blaring out across the heads of the customers in the hot dark air.

  Alex is a regular, and Ma Nakome herself comes out of the kitchen to greet him. She seats him at a table at the edge of the raised area in back, a prime spot where he can see and be seen. Ma Nakome is a fat woman, heavier and rounder than Alex, swathed in red and gold cotton, with a gold-flecked smile in a shiny black face. Like half her customers, she’s Somali, part of a community that has established itself in East London over the past twenty years. There are even newer immigrant communities now: Nigerians, Tongans, Albanians, refugees from drowned Polynesia. At the beginning of the last century it was Poles and White Russians and Lithuanian Jews. The East End has always been the point of entry for each wave of war-driven immigration into London.

  The Somalis have done well. Most of them were professionals—lawyers, teachers, scientists, the cream of their country’s intellectual élite. Even when their men sank into khat-induced torpor to escape the bleak reality of Brick Lane, the women worked and organized. They’ve formed a tight-knit but inclusive community, embracing British culture while retaining or modifying the best of their own.

  Alex eats a huge plate of lamb and green bean stew served on baked plantain leaves, with okra and sweet potatoes on the side, and drinks a litre of freezing cold Sappora beer. The speed is wearing off, leaving him dry-mouthed.

  He’s working his way through a bowl of chilled, cumin-flavoured goat’s milk yoghurt when someone drops a hand on his shoulder. He turns and Billy Rock’s boy runner, Doggy Dog, is standing there. The big driver is right behind him, bare arms folded across a black leather vest, showing off the quills laid along his muscled forearms.

  ‘You fucker,’ Doggy Dog says, ‘why don’t you be working, eh? You work for us, man, you work, ’stead of sitting here wallowing in your food like a pig.’

  Doggy Dog dips his fingers in Alex’s yoghurt, scoops up a dripping gobbet and sticks it in his mouth. He has a ring of raw unworked gold on his thumb; it is laid along his cheek as he sucks on his fingers.

  ‘Tastes like fucking pig food, too,’ Doggy Dog says loudly.

  The other diners look at him, and then look away.

  Alex says, ‘You have a message from Billy?’

  ‘Billy, Billy, they named that man good, he be billied out all the time on crack, wiggling around like a worm on his genuine cow leather upholstery to that Satanist music of his.’

  ‘Are you billied up, to be talking like this?’

  Alex speaks from a calm quiet space that is not yet fear. He doesn’t believe that even Doggy Dog will do anything here.

  The boy says, with regal disdain, ‘Man, I don’t be needing no shit.’

  Alex sees that this is the truth. Doggy Dog is lifted up by his own craziness. He wears a long T-shirt with hoops of green, red and gold over the same baggy blue jeans he wore yesterday. A little leather cap is pitched on his shaggy hair. Alex can see the outline of an automatic pistol under Doggy Dog’s T-shirt. It is tucked into the waistband of his jeans.

  The boy leans forward until his face is a few centimetres from Alex’s. Alex keeps quite still.

  ‘I know I frighten you,’ Doggy Dog says. ‘That’s OK. You see I’m a powerful man. Billy Rock is used up. He lets his contractors fuck him over, you believe it?’

  ‘It isn’t Billy Rock you have to worry about,’ Alex says, looking right into Doggy Dog’s bloodshot eyes. ‘It’s his family.’

  ‘I don’t be knowing anything about families. Bunch of old men in suits, in that big old house in Hampstead? Shit, bwoy, they don’t know anything ’bout the street, nor do you, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Doggy Dog says, ‘The deal you have with Billy Rock? He wants dolls to fuck each other, make baby dolls. You ever t’ink about fucking dolls yourself? Men fuc
king dolls?’ The boy spears three fingers into Alex’s chest, pushes himself upright. ‘You t’ink about that,’ he says, and walks off.

  The imperturbable driver nods to Alex and follows.

  Ma Nakome comes over to apologize. She tells Alex that she’ll never let that little scorpion in her house again. She sends for more yoghurt and coffee, and sits at Alex’s table.

  ‘He was here for the insurance,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t think he’s working for Billy Rock any more,’ Alex says.

  ‘That boy is wrong in the head, if he thinks he can take money away from Mr Rock.’

  Alex agrees. The thing about Yardies is not that they’re fools, but that they are crazy. They have no hierarchy but that sustained by alpha male domination games, no territory except where they have women stashed away, no real plans. Most of their violence is impulsive, and most of it is directed at each other. Their idea of a plan is to ramraid a drugdealer’s crib, pile out shooting, grab the stuff and any money, and get away. No such thing as an old Yardie, except for a few very violent, very rich and very cunning men. Doggy Dog is setting out on a rising curve, and he’ll kill his way up until he’s killed by someone luckier or smarter or hungrier.

  Alex tells Ma Nakome about his latest project, although not what it’s for. He never tells her that. He respects her too much. She was a research technician at Queen Mary Hospital until the health service was taken over by the big insurance companies and the research budget was cut to nothing. She appreciates his shoptalk. She has used the same techniques, she tells him, and he offers her a job that she laughingly declines—she has too many children, he must find a woman of his own to look after him, it is what all men do.

  Alex agrees, thinking of his mother, the times they had up in the windy air above the Thames. A nation of two, with the city at their feet. Sitting in the dark, watching the lights, Lexis slowly getting smashed on rum and coke. Fairyland, she’d tell her son. There’s anything you want out there, anything at all. Alex must get rid of that little parasitic shit of a toy boy, see if Lexis will find a steady man, a good man. She deserves that, at least.

  Ma Nakome says that he’s troubled. Maybe he’d like her to send one of her girls around? ‘She’ll be round today, tomorrow. When you like, Alex.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Alex says, feeling obscurely bullied. Sex will never be a big thing in his life, he knows, so he tries not to think about it too much.

  ‘Alice,’ Ma Nakome says firmly. ‘That’s who you like. I know she was with you just the other night.’

  ‘Sure,’ Alex says distractedly.

  It’s true that he likes his routines, but right now he feels momentum gathering like a wind at his back, the feeling he had before he was arrested, as if he was accelerating through the nighttime city, no traffic lights to stop him, everything getting out of his way as he sped by, faster and faster and faster, invincible in his speed. But then they caught him and sent him down without even charging him. The world is implacable—you can’t escape it.

  Still, he does like Alice. She’s a little older than the rest of Ma Nakome’s girls, most of whom are barely in their teens. Alice waits tables at the restaurant some nights, works only a few chosen customers. He can tell her stuff, after, and she lies there listening, or pretending to listen, and it’s comforting.

  ‘Sometimes I wish I was a Catholic,’ Alex says.

  Ma Nakome laughs and punches him in the arm and starts to get up, like a summery mountain rising. ‘You are a crazy man,’ she says.

  Alex pays the bill and rides a gypsy cab driven by a young Armenian who has to be given instructions to find the way back to Alex’s crib. The Armenian tries to sell Alex a lid of DOA, and can’t understand why Alex laughs in his face.

  6 – Alfred Russel Wallace’s Dream

  Alex fights up from sleep. He’s standing by the computer, his bare feet cold on gritty concrete. He’s naked except for a T-shirt. Sweat streams down his flabby, hairless chest and heavy flanks. It’s three thirty-three a.m. An omen. He has the feeling that someone has been talking to him, and just then the phone rings, loud in the still black air.

  Alex accepts the call cautiously, using the lightest possible pressure to punch the code. There’s nothing at first, a dance of static snow on the phone’s little screen, a roar like the sea from the speaker, like the sound of his own blood rushing through the arteries of his inner ear. Then the static snow starts to whirl and billow, as if driven by some electronic wind, blowing away to show the face of a young girl in grainy black and white that slowly bleeds into colour.

  ‘I know you,’ she says. ‘You’re Captain Marvel.’

  She is perhaps twelve, her round, serious face framed by straight black hair. She has some kind of middle European accent.

  ‘Miracle Man,’ Alex says. It’s the ethername he uses on the a-life bulletin board.

  The little girl says, ‘I’m Alfred Russel Wallace. We’ve talked before, on the board. And I’ve lurked around while you were talking to others. That’s how I know you. That’s why I decided I could use you.’

  Alex can’t help laughing. Alfred Russel Wallace, named for the naturalist whose theories on natural selection finally persuaded Darwin to publish, is the ethername of a notorious and brilliant a-life hacker, almost certainly some maverick academic, who burst on to the scene a year ago. No way can this little girl be who she claims she is.

  ‘Sometimes I think I dreamed you all up,’ the girl says. Her smile is hardly there. Her dark eyes are serious and serene, fixed on infinity. ‘In a fever dream.’

  Alex remembers that the idea of natural selection by survival of the fittest came to Wallace while he was tossing and turning in his hammock, burning with swamp fever in the Borneo jungle. Darwin suffered from recurrent fevers, too. Evolution was a fever dream burning away the fossilized hierarchies of the Victorian Age.

  ‘You’re having problems with your edge gliders,’ the little girl says.

  ‘Well, everyone is having trouble with their edge gliders.’

  Alex was discussing this on the a-life bulletin board only that night, after he got in from Ma Nakome’s. Edge gliders inhabit the margins of the tableland maps in which the traditional a-life ecologies run. They skim a thin living at the brink of oblivion, but recently their marginal habitat has been invaded by a clade of parasites which hook on to them and gradually drain their energy. The parasites have evolved from piggyback organisms which infiltrate the mass configurations of clusterfucks, voracious, amorphous colonies which feed on their own dead as much as the informational energy all a-life organisms need to perform the algorithms necessary to survive and reproduce. At the risk of being absorbed by their hosts, piggybacks grab stray bits of informational energy at the shifting margins of the clusterfucks’ huge agglomerations. The two kinds of a-life organism have achieved a stable relationship, necessary if the clusterfucks are not to grow so large that they would fuse and take over the entire a-life ecosystem, like algae choking out a fishtank. But the fragile edge gliders have no resistance to these parasite, and so far no one has worked out how to prevent the edge gliders being decimated by piggybacks without also destroying the clusterfucks and unravelling the complex web of interrelationships that stabilizes the a-life ecosystems.

  The little girl tells Alex, ‘I can help you. I can download something that will take care of it.’

  ‘Why are you talking to me?’

  ‘Think of it as a test,’ she says. Her image is breaking apart in a snow of white pixels. ‘Do you want it? I haven’t long on this line.’

  Alex opens a buffer, and it fills with the little girl’s program.

  She says again, ‘Think of it as a test. You work out how to use it, I’ll know.’

  Then she’s gone.

  7 – Hyperconnectivity

  Detective Sergeant Howard Perse hands Alex a folded piece of paper and says, ‘It was so easy, I’m beginning to think this is some kind of set-up.’

  ‘What do I do, read thi
s and eat it?’

  Perse takes a long drag on his cigarette and says, ‘Do what you like with it, but be careful.’

  ‘You really are worried. Is that why you dragged me here?’

  They are standing under the trees at the riverside edge of the car park in the shadow of the Tower of London, both smoking cigarettes they hold cupped inside their palms, a habit Alex learnt in prison. They might be a couple of old lags, discussing some scam in one of those old Ealing films that have recently become popular all over again, in a wave of nostalgic yearning for the thumbsucking comfort of a safe stable past that never really was. Across the car park, tourists queue patiently as they wait to be allowed to pass through the metal detector at the security fence. A family stands stiffly around a sweating Beefeater while the father videos them. It is ten in the morning, but already swelteringly hot under a milky white sky. The river is at low tide, flowing as sluggishly as brown jelly between stinking mud banks. On the far side, HMS Belfast shimmers in a haze.

  Perse looks at the ancient wall that looms above the car park. He is wearing mirrored shades that flash in the sunlight. He says, ‘Have you ever been inside?’

  ‘The Tower? Christ, no. Why should I?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It isn’t as if the Crown Jewels are in there any more. Do you think that story about the ravens was true?’

  Perse shrugs. ‘They didn’t leave. They died. The point is that you wouldn’t even go in if the King was brought back and put on exhibition. No one living in London would. So it’s a safe place to meet.’

  ‘You’ve done this before.’

  Perse doesn’t deny it.

  A gaggle of tourists go past, trooping up from the river boat that docked at Tower Pier a few minutes before. They are Americans, all well past retirement age—Alex suppresses the impulse to ask them how the war back home is going. At least half the men wear a hybrid costume of tartan tam-o’-shanters, T-shirts and Bermuda shorts that will do nothing to protect them from UV burn; the women, more sensibly, wear floppy straw hats or carry parasols, like aging Southern belles. A woman who must weigh all of two hundred kilos, so heavy that even Alex thinks she’s really fat, is encased in a carbon fibre exo-frame. As the frame walks the fat woman up the road, the whine of its motors rises above the chatter of her companions.