Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Alex started to say, ‘That’s just so much bullshit—’ but he was already talking to a blank screen. Leaving Alex with only one way out, which is why he worked all night to finish the synthesis.

  Remembering that conversation, Alex tells Ray, ‘This is something big. Billy Rock is about to go legit.’

  ‘Someone should kill that nasty little fucker,’ Ray says, with a vehemence that surprises Alex. Usually Ray is a gentle soul, an old E-head whose synapses are fried open on a permanent mellow buzz of peace, love and understanding.

  The STOL jet makes a hollow roar as it accelerates through heat ripples. Suddenly it is airborne, making a wide turn to the south, to Europe. Ray and Alex watch it go, dwindling towards the white stacks of the Thameside nuclear power plant.

  Ray stands and slaps his spandexed thighs. ‘London,’ he said. ‘Fucking kills you, huh? I better get on, man. Thanks again for the stuff.’

  Alex finally gets out his question. ‘Hey, Ray? I know you have a couple of vans here. Do you think I could borrow one?’

  13 – Who By Fire

  Alex drives the Transit van he has borrowed from Ray Aziz, a rusty clunker almost as old as he is, back to his workshop, and is not surprised to find Delbert and Doggy Dog waiting for him. They lean against the white limo and watch as he parks the van and clambers out.

  ‘Nice wheels,’ Delbert says. He has a toothpick stuck at a jaunty angle in one corner of his mouth, is wearing black leather jeans and a black leather waistcoat. Carbon whisker quills rattle together when he folds his arms. ‘Thinking of going somewhere?’

  ‘I had a delivery to make.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Doggy Dog says, pushing away from the limo. Under the broad bill of his cap, his smooth young face is twisted with sudden anger. ‘You keep just one t’ing on your mind, and that’s making the stuff for us. Where the fuck is it? You said today.’

  Alex tells him, ‘It’ll be ready.’

  ‘Hey, Delbert? I t’ink we toss his crib, make sure this pasty motherfucker don’t be holding out on us.’

  ‘I’m busy. If you came here to threaten me, consider me threatened.’

  ‘Billy Rock sends you a message. He wants you at his party tonight.’

  Doggy Dog drops a gilt-edged envelope at Alex’s feet, but Alex doesn’t give him the satisfaction of bending to pick it up.

  Doggy Dog says, ‘You better be there, with the stuff. The timing of this t’ing of ours has extreme cruciality.’

  ‘Or what?’ Alex asks, innocently.

  ‘Be there,’ Doggy Dog says and climbs into the limo, giving Alex a hard look under the bill of his cap before shutting the door.

  Delbert backs the limo out of the yard at high speed; horns blare as it screeches in a U-turn into the traffic. Old Frank, sitting outside his unit on a broken swivel chair, slowly claps. Alex salutes him, picks up the envelope and goes inside.

  He leaves a message on the a-life bulletin board, sticks a couple of packs of army rations in the microwave, and begins the arduous job of testing the finished batches of doll-specific hormones. By the time he’s satisfied and has, after some thought, packaged a mix of dosages in lipodroplet form, it is early evening, and Milena still has not called.

  While he’s waiting for the phone to ring, Alex accesses the a-life ecosystem to check on the new bugoids. Things have changed. The edge gliders are no longer restricted to the margins of the habitat, but are ranging across the entire tabletop virtual space. When an edge glider encounters a whirling dervish, Alex understands what’s happening. The edge glider carries one of the selective predators that Milena designed. The two organisms have entered into a symbiosis: the predator fastens on the whirling dervish and swiftly drains its energy to a level that enables the edge glider to absorb the rest of it.

  There are, Alex sees from his God-like viewpoint, edge gliders everywhere. They outnumber everything else. They are taking over. The edge is eating the centre.

  This seems like a message in itself, if only he could fathom it. He is combing through the a-life bulletin board messages, hoping that he might spot some clever twist Milena has used to disguise her reply, when the phone rings.

  It is Leroy, calling from a kiosk.

  ‘You had better get your ass over here,’ Leroy says. ‘Some fuckers just torched your mother’s flat.’

  The first thing Alex sees, when he drives up in the rattling Transit van, is an ambulance waiting by the entrance to the block of flats. Its back doors are flung open, and the two attendants are chatting to a policeman in shirtsleeves. None of them look at Alex as he runs past and hurries up the stairs. The stairwell seems as hot as an oven. He can smell smoke and wet ashes.

  Neighbours stand around on the walkway behind stretched scene-of-crime tapes, gossiping and trying to peek through the blackened doorframe of Lexis’s flat. Alex hears an old woman say that someone was killed in there, and he feels everything fall away.

  He lifts the red and yellow tape and ducks under it. Inside the flat, firemen in helmets and yellow slickers are raking over the wet, charred rooms. The intense smell of burnt wood and plastic assaults Alex’s eyes and nose. A fireman shouts at him, but just then Leroy comes out of the lounge, a cardboard box in his arms. He looks older, diminished, in the ordinary daylight.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Leroy says to Alex. ‘It’s OK. Your mother, she’s fine.’

  It was Lexis’s boyfriend who was killed. Neither the police nor the firemen seem much interested in Alex once they learn that he doesn’t live there and hardly knows the dead man.

  Leroy steers Alex down the stairs. The cardboard box he is carrying reeks of smoke; the same smell clings to Alex’s clothes.

  ‘This here’s stuff your mother wanted saved,’ Leroy explains. ‘People will strip that place clean soon as the police clear off.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to her,’ Alex says. He sniffs hard, and something the size of an oyster slides down the back of his throat. ‘I swear I will. I know exactly who did this.’

  ‘So do I,’ Leroy says grimly. ‘Your mother was staying with me, but I had people keep an eye on her place. That no-good boyfriend of hers wouldn’t move out, and she let him stay. I suppose maybe I was hoping the little fucker would do something dumb, bring a girl back or whatever. Instead, a couple of fellows smashed the window by the door, splashed in petrol and dropped a match. My friend saw it all, jumped in his car and followed them. Had his phone with him and called me up. We caught up with them when they stopped off at a corner shop.’

  ‘Delbert and Doggy Dog.’

  ‘You know them. Now I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Tell me what happened, Leroy. Give me the hard time later.’

  ‘The skinny young fellow saw us coming and ran off, but the other tried to get back in the car and we boxed him in. He won’t tell us his name. He just says we’re in a world of trouble. When I get back I’m going to pull out the spikes he has on his arms, see if that loosens up his tongue.’

  Alex says, his heart sinking, ‘You’re holding on to him?’

  ‘Of course I’m holding on to him,’ Leroy says. He puts down the box to unlock the door of his car. ‘Man tried to kill your mother, white boy. What you want us to do?’

  Alex sees the ceramic carthorse on top of the pile of scorched, smoke-stained souvenirs. Its mended hind leg has cracked off again; its harness is charred. He says, ‘You got to let me talk with this guy you’re holding.’

  Leroy straightens up and fixes Alex with his fierce patriarchal look.

  ‘I don’t have to do anything. I’m thinking of your mother, white boy, even if you aren’t. Right now she’s sort of numb. You should know you don’t shit on your own doorstep. Sometimes I don’t think you could possibly be…Fuck, you aren’t even listening to me.’

  ‘Look, I have that van over there. I’ll follow you, Leroy,’ Alex says, knowing how weak it sounds, ‘it’s important. Trust me.’

  ‘But I don’t trust you,’ Leroy says, and the soft wa
y he says it nearly breaks Alex’s heart.

  ‘Leroy, this one favour. I know the man you’re holding. I can make him talk.’

  ‘This is the last time I help you, Alex. I swear.’

  ‘It is the last time,’ Alex says. Milena. If she doesn’t call, then he really is fucked. Yet despite this he feels a singing in his heart. He’s free and running, and he can’t stop now until he’s dead or off the map.

  14 – Delbert

  Leroy has Delbert stashed away in the storeroom of his shebeen. The bodyguard is tied to a plastic chair with electrical cable. He sits proud and straight under a flickering fluorescent circlet, like a captive king amongst the crates of beer bottles and boxes of crisps and salted peanuts, the lager barrels and black carbon dioxide cylinders.

  Alex goes straight to Delbert, smacks him across the mouth with an open hand and says, ‘Nothing personal. I just needed to do that.’

  Alex has just spent a painful half hour with Lexis. She didn’t want to blame her son for the firebombing, but Alex saw how much it cost her not to.

  ‘I’ll always be here for you, Alex. You know that.’

  ‘You always were. Do you remember when you showed me the lights of the city, and said it was Fairyland? I really believed you.’

  ‘You were just a little boy, Alex, and I was probably high on something or other. You shouldn’t take your old mum seriously.’

  ‘But I always do,’ Alex said, and although Lexis didn’t understand she smiled, and made him promise he wouldn’t go to jail again.

  ‘You’ve got that look,’ she said. ‘Like you had just before the last time.’

  ‘I do? Don’t worry. I have the police on my side this time.’

  Lexis listened as Alex told her how he would make it up to her, and just smiled and took another sip of rum and coke and told him to be careful.

  ‘Never trust a copper. You’re an East End boy, Alex. You should know that.’

  The worst thing was that she didn’t yet know that her boyfriend was dead. Leroy told Alex that he would break the news once Lexis was over the shock of the firebombing.

  Now, with the force of the blow still stinging Alex’s palm, Delbert returns his gaze. Both of Delbert’s eyes are puffed, and there’s blood crusted around his nostrils.

  ‘I thought better of you,’ the bodyguard says coolly.

  ‘Why did you firebomb the flat?’

  ‘Go ask Doggy Dog. I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘You were seen, Delbert.’

  ‘Oh man, you been hanging out with the police too long, you know that? I already told the old man he’s in serious shit, I shouldn’t need to tell you, Alex. You want to talk about the law, let’s talk about kidnapping.’

  Leroy says, ‘You leave him with me for two minutes, Alex. I’ll get him to talk.’

  ‘Hey, Alex? Tell the old man to take a flying fuck at the moon.’

  Alex looks at Delbert. This childishly defiant big man with cable biting into the hypertrophied muscles of his arms, looking at Alex as if daring him to make the next move in the game. But Alex isn’t playing Delbert’s game.

  Very much aware of Leroy watching from the doorway, Alex says, ‘You know what I do for a living, don’t you, Delbert? I make psychoactive viruses. Mostly for recreational use, of course, but I’ve things that can fuck you up permanently. I can give you stuff that’ll turn your brain into cottage cheese. One shot, and you’ll be out in the streets shouting at the traffic for the rest of your life. I can put you right there this minute, Delbert, unless you tell me exactly what you did.’

  ‘We thought the flat was empty, man. Shit, we waited until the old woman left. Waited half the fucking afternoon. It wasn’t our fault someone else was in there.’

  Alex walks around the chair, trying to calm himself. He has a tab of Cool-Z in his pocket, but Leroy is watching. He says, ‘What is it, Delbert? What do you want from me that I haven’t promised?’

  ‘Oh man, we were just making sure, you know. Making sure that you wouldn’t sell us out to Billy Rock. We warned you, man, but you didn’t seem to be taking any notice. We wanted to catch your attention.’

  Leroy says, ‘What’s this all about, Alex? You mind telling me?’

  So Alex has to explain about being in the hole with Billy Rock, about promising to make a batch of stuff for him, about how Doggy Dog and Delbert want to rip off their own boss. He expects Leroy to start in with how he told Alex that all this would lead to grief, but Leroy just shakes his head. Which in a way is worse, because for once Alex would feel better for hearing that he’s done wrong.

  Delbert says, trying to be reasonable, ‘It was just business, you understand, so why are you keeping me tied up like this? Man, I really could sue you for kidnapping if I wanted. In fact that’s the least I could do. You ought to realize you’re in over your head.’

  Alex says, ‘You just tell me what you know about that little girl.’

  Delbert thinks about it, looking off into the corner of the room and mumbling to himself. Then he smiles and says, ‘Shit, why not? You haven’t got the balls to kill me, have you? And sooner or later this’ll catch up with you. I swear it. So go ahead. What you want to know?’

  ‘You can start by telling me her phone number.’

  ‘Hey,’ Alex says, when Milena answers the phone, and Milena says, ‘Very good, Alex. What do you want?’

  Alex says, ‘Delbert and Doggy Dog are out of the game. If you want the stuff you’ll have to show me that it works. And we’ll have to do it tonight.’

  ‘That would be very nice, Alex, but I don’t have a subject. It was never in the plan to do anything straight away.’

  ‘It is now.’ Alex tells her where to meet him, and switches off the phone before she can reply. Let her wonder what’s going on for a change.

  On the other side of the bar counter, Leroy says, ‘Go kiss your mother goodbye, Alex. I’m not sure we’re going to see you again.’

  15 – The Killing Fields

  Alex flashes the Transit’s headlights when Milena comes out of the entrance of the Aldgate Underground station. She crosses the road and clambers on to the van’s bench seat. She is wearing a pink denim jacket over a demure long-sleeved blue dress with a floppy white bow at her neck, the kind of dress Japanese schoolgirls wear, the kind of dress that implies virginity and guileless innocence. A shoulder bag of seamless, silvery material is tucked under one of her skinny arms.

  Alex says straight away, ‘You were going to have those two fools take the hormone away from me.’

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t trust you personally,’ Milena says. ‘The fact is that I don’t trust anyone. What do you want, Alex? It’s costing me a lot to meet you like this. My company expects me to go to a forward planning meeting tonight.’

  ‘You’re scared. I can understand that, because I’m scared too.’

  Alex pulls out into the traffic. It is that time of the evening when half the cars are driving with headlights on, half off. Clouds draw black bars across the red sunset.

  Milena looks at the voodoo dolls taped to the cracked vinyl dashboard, the loops of beads and crosses that swing from the rearview mirror, the garish laminated 3-D postcard of Jesus, crucified and crowned with thorns.

  She says, ‘This isn’t your style, Alex. What’s possessing you?’

  There’s an edge to her voice—good, let her stay scared.

  Alex says, ‘We’re going to a party.’

  ‘To Billy Rock’s party? Is that why you’re dressed like that?’

  Alex is wearing his green check suit over a white cotton turtleneck. ‘The party is supposed to be black tie, but this is the best he can do at short notice. He steers the van around a man in rags who stands in the road shouting at the traffic. Fitfully illuminated by oncoming headlights, the man jabs at the air with a dog’s head impaled on a stick. On the building site behind the man, figures crouch around a fire. They’re probably spit-roasting the rest of that dog.

  Alex remembers
how he threatened Delbert, and laughs. Milena looks at him, looks away.

  Alex says, ‘Do you have the control chip?’

  Milena pats the silvery bag in her lap. ‘Everything I need is in here. Do you have the hormones?’

  Alex doesn’t answer straight away. He makes the turn into Commercial Street. Shops are mostly boarded up or shuttered. An armed guard is standing at the lighted door of an electronics supermarket. A hologram cross slowly revolves above the Seventh Day Adventist church that was once a cinema. Alex waits until he has stopped the van in a queue at traffic lights before turning to Milena and telling her that Delbert and Doggy Dog firebombed his mother’s flat.

  Milena is staring through the windscreen at the itinerant fruit seller who lifts a string bag of oranges, shrugs, moves on to the car behind them. At last she says, ‘They weren’t supposed to do anything like that.’

  Alex says, ‘Well, the world isn’t a logical place, is it? It isn’t like an a-life ecosystem. It’s for real. You’ve been playing around with crazy people, and if Doggy Dog thinks you’re screwing him over, he’ll hurt you.’

  Milena says, ‘You mean he’ll kill me. Oh Alex, you really don’t know very much about me, do you?’

  Alex tells her the name of the company that employs her. ‘They own that house, too.’

  ‘You could say they own me,’ Milena says lightly, ‘but you’d be wrong, even though that’s what they believe.’

  Alex says, ‘Delbert told me they did something to you.’

  ‘All my life,’ Milena says. ‘You can’t begin to understand how it is, Alex. I’m the only success of the programme—the rest went mad.’

  The light changes. Alex puts the van in gear and moves off. He says, ‘They made you brighter.’

  ‘Perhaps they did. Or perhaps I would be this way anyway—there’s no single gene for intelligence, although that didn’t stop the company trying to create its own R&D force of baby supergeniuses. I don’t have parents, just gamete donors. I know who they are, I found that out for myself, when I was four. I also found out that I don’t care who they are.