‘Two hundred cycles per second,’ Alex says. ‘It happened to me, too.’
The man lets Alex go and steps back. Toys move away from his expensive black brogues.
There are dozens of toys, all amniotronic. A monkey in a gold vest and red fez clashes cymbals as it totters up and down. A turtle cautiously bumps along the skirting board. A couple of racing cars chase each other in and out of the other toys, flashing their headlights.
A teddy bear is saying over and over in a gruff, plaintive voice, ‘Come back. Please come back. Come back to us.’ When the man picks it up, the teddy bear windmills its stubby arms in alarm, and says indignantly, ‘You can’t play with me. It’s not allowed.’
‘We’ll interrogate them,’ the man says, setting the teddy bear down, ‘but I don’t think they’ll tell us very much. There might be something on their chips. They all store a week’s worth of visual and auditory data. Where is she, Mr Sharkey?’
‘I don’t know.’ It hurts to speak.
The man flexes his gloved hands. ‘I have to be careful with these. I could poke a brand new hole in your face with my forefinger. Be a good boy. Tell me where she is.’
By one of the shuttered windows, a canary in a gilded cage bursts into brief song. The rushing burble of trills stirs something in Alex that brings the prickle of incipient tears to his eyes. He remembers the budgerigar Lexis kept in the flat. It lasted a full two weeks after the pigeons and sparrows and starlings started falling out of the sky. Alex found its corpse early one morning. He still remembers the crisp dry lightness of its body, its delicate coral-coloured clawed feet, each claw with a tiny transparent nail. The canary, caught in a blade of light that pries between the shutters, turns its head back and forth as it sings and sings and sings.
‘It’s a toy,’ the man says. ‘It isn’t real.’
Alex says, ‘The toys will tell you that I was here. They’ll tell you that Milena did something to me, the same kind of thing that she did to Nanny Greystoke. But I don’t know what it was. You can tell me: what did she do?’
‘I’m just a foot soldier, Mr Sharkey. Someone else will interrogate the toys. I’m picking up here before the trail goes cold. Where is she?’
‘She fucked up my head,’ Alex says.
He is shivering, and angry, and close to tears. It’s this room, this white, white room. It stirs up vague memories, but he can’t remember what she did. He can’t remember.
The man, implacable in his anonymous black suit and black gloves, stands in the middle of all the whiteness, watching with professional patience. Alex walks around in tight circles, and realizes that the racing cars are following him. He kicks out and they split up, zooming away to different corners of the room.
Alex says, ‘I have to know.’
The man shrugs.
‘You knew what she was doing. What she was doing to me.’
‘We know everything up to the point when she let the fighting dolls loose. You two got away in the confusion, and one of our agents was later found dead.’
Alex says, ‘Doggy Dog was working for you?’
The man admits, ‘He wasn’t what you’d call reliable, but we were taking what we could at that point.’
‘Who else? Billy Rock? Dr Luther?’
‘Dr Luther works for Billy Rock’s family. Billy Rock, before a fighting doll bit off his face, was an unstable gangster with a heavy drug addiction.’ The man’s gaze is unwavering. ‘What happened to her, Mr Sharkey? You went with her when she ran away. The company allowed that. It wasn’t my idea. I wanted her brought in, but I’m just the guy who clears up the shit on the streets. I was overruled. Make my job easy. Tell me what happened.’
Alex tells him. Why not? He hasn’t got anything to lose at this point. It doesn’t take long. As he talks, men come and go, moving stuff from rooms above. One comes in and starts to pack up the toys; he has a hard time catching the racing cars. Another leads Nanny Greystoke away.
Alex says, ‘That’s not her real name is it? Greystoke, I mean.’
‘One of Milena’s little jokes,’ the man says. He is flexing his hands inside the black gloves. Or perhaps the gloves are flexing and moving his hands of their own accord, because the man lifts his hands and looks at them as the fingers bend and straighten. He adds, ‘She was very fond of stupid little jokes like that.’
‘What was she?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘She told me something of what you people did to her. She thought she was better than us. She thought that she was a superior being who was raised up by animals, like Tarzan and the apes, or like Mowgli and his wolves. But she was just a little girl, very bright and, I think, very unstable, and your people let her loose to play in the world.’
This at least seems very clear to Alex. Perhaps Milena whispered it all to him after she zapped him. Here in the white room, or in the van.
He says, ‘I think she wanted company, so she’s trying to make something out of the dolls. The way she was made, the way she was changed.’
‘We don’t know what she wants,’ the man says.
Someone comes into the room, another smooth-shaven burly type in an expensive black suit. He carries a video camera. The first man tells him, ‘One minute,’ and says to Alex, ‘You go home, Mr Sharkey. If we need you we’ll be in touch.’
‘Just like that.’
‘We already know most of your story. The rest may not matter. You’re an interesting man, Mr Sharkey, but at present we have other concerns. You run along now, and don’t cause us any more trouble.’
So there’s nothing there for Alex, except the knowledge that Milena got away. She is more ruthless and resourceful than even her owners suspect. Alex has seen her operate, and has learnt all about ruthlessness from the Wizard. He is pretty sure he knows where she has gone, too, when he finds that Dr Luther has quit his premises.
‘Left owing me two months’ rent,’ the aging skinhead owner of the comic book shop says. His hairy belly pushes out of the bottom of his T-shirt and makes a fold over the top of his jeans. ‘Was he a friend of yours?’
‘I only met him once,’ Alex says, and refuses an offer to buy Dr Luther’s stainless steel table.
Alex has to walk all the way to Leroy’s shebeen. He stops half a dozen times to use his phone, and on the last try gets Perse’s partner, Stevie Cryer.
Alex says, ‘I want to clear this up. Tell Perse that.’
‘You’d better come in and talk about it.’
‘He wants to lay the murder on me.’
‘Which murder would that be, Alex?’
‘I didn’t kill Doggy Dog. I mean I was there but I didn’t kill him.’
‘Well, we can talk about it.’
Alex tells Cryer where to find him. ‘Give me a few minutes, and I’ll give you Doggy Dog’s partner. He’ll tell you what they were up to.’
‘I can’t make any promises,’ Cryer says.
By the time Alex gets to Leroy’s shebeen, there’s an unmarked police car waiting outside. Alex goes past without looking to see who’s in it.
Persuading Leroy to let him talk with Lexis is harder than persuading him to fix up Delbert. It isn’t an easy conversation, especially as Lexis forgives him so easily. She’ll be all right, she says, and Alex makes all sorts of promises he’s not sure he can keep.
At last, Alex says, ‘Remember the time you showed me the lights? I’ve realized that it’s not a place, it’s an idea.’
‘You were always making things up, Alex,’ his mother says, and gives him money and tells him to send a postcard.
Alex zaps the bodyguard with an old strobe left over from Leroy’s sound system days and tells him to forget what happened here, tells him to walk up to the street.
Alex follows after a minute. Three policemen are sitting on Delbert while a fourth cuffs the bodyguard’s hands behind his back. Cryer gets out of the unmarked police car, and Alex walks over to him.
18 – No Big Deal
; Alex waits a long time in a shabby interrogation room in the bowels of New Scotland Yard. The usual green paint, the usual big mirror everyone knows is one-way, the usual scuffed carpet tiles. Cheap plastic chairs, a beat-up wooden desk with a cassette recorder and an overflowing ashtray. Even the tea is just as Alex remembers, milky and lukewarm, with a dusty aftertaste.
He smokes two packets of cigarettes, waiting there. He feels clammy in clothes he hasn’t changed for more than a day. The sharp creases in his green check suit are wilting. He is deeply aware that with every minute Milena is moving further and further away. After a while, Perse gimps past the open door on crutches, his left foot wrapped in white bandages. He doesn’t look at Alex.
Alex waits some more, and at last Stevie Cryer comes in. He takes one of Alex’s cigarettes and says, ‘You’ve a day to get out of the country.’
‘I need to sell my stuff.’
Cryer fixes Alex with his weary blue eyes. ‘Your stuff may have been bought with profits from drug dealing. We’re going to impound it at noon tomorrow. There’s your deadline.’
‘This isn’t much of a deal,’ Alex says.
‘Are you complaining?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘That’s smart of you.’
‘Perhaps I’m smarter man you think.’
Cryer exhales a riffle of blue smoke. He looks tired, his clean boyish complexion sallow in the harsh fluorescent light. He says, ‘Being smart—it’s no big deal. For one thing, there’s always going to be someone smarter than you. For another, it gives you a dangerous contempt for other people. You think you can use them. Well, now you’ve been used. Welcome to the world, Alex.’ He stubs out his cigarette. ‘Come on, I’ll sign you out.’
On the way to the front desk, they pass a room where half a dozen policemen, Perse amongst them, are watching a big TV. They are laughing at this scared-looking fat man in orange coveralls puffing along in the dark, in the rain, after a little girl and a naked, blue-skinned doll. The camera pans to show a boxy white blur. The Transit van. Alex realizes that security cameras must have caught the whole thing.
Alex looks at Cryer, who smiles and taps the side of his head. ‘I’m curious,’ Cryer says. ‘Where are you going?’
Alex smiles right back. Perhaps the impulse to move on, his sudden restlessness, his urge to follow Milena, is an infection Alex could cure with a shot of universal phage. But he knows he won’t. He has a place to get to, if he can find it, if it exists. Perhaps it is no more than an idea, but these days ideas are as real as the common cold. It is an idea whose time has come. It is pushing its way into the world.
He says, ‘I’m going to look for Fairyland.’
PART TWO
Love Bombing
1 – Europa
Europe in the early years of the Third Millennium is not an easy place to find a preternaturally intelligent little girl who has deliberately gone to ground. Alex Sharkey makes a long journey of it, across France and Germany and through the little kingdoms and republics of Eastern Europe. He searches for twelve years. Although the products of Milena’s imagination are all around him, in all that time he only once comes close to finding her.
Dolls are no longer the novelty toys of the rich. They are used as cheap, versatile computer-controlled labour in industries where working conditions are traditionally hazardous—chemical refineries, deep coal mines, intensive horticulture, nuclear fission power stations. Gradually, they replace human workers in the emergent nanotechnology industries: driven by plug-in chips and fembot-grown neural nets, dolls can work for twenty hours a day accurately electron-etching primary fembot templates no bigger than bacteria. Killing Fields franchises are built in Rotterdam, Hamburg, Budapest and Moscow. Every day, more than a thousand dolls are hunted down and killed for sport in arenas across the European Union. There are women-only arenas, arenas for senior citizens, arenas where the clinically disturbed therapeutically discharge the murderous fantasies of their superegos.
It is an age of excess.
In the Europe of the First World, most people enjoy a universal unearned wage and unlimited leisure in booming economies driven by new technologies that are making techniques of mass production, hardly changed since the days of Henry Ford, finally obsolete. They live at the edge of the old conurbations in ribbon arcologies, vast conglomerations of apartment complexes, leisure parks and shopping centres that are part built, part grown. More than fifty per cent of the population of First World Europe is over eighty, the baby boomer generation of the last century come into a post-Millennial paradise. Nanotechnology and gene therapy promises that at least half of them will live into their second century.
But there’s also the Europe of the Fourth World, the Europe of the dispossessed, the people of the fringe. Half the population of the old Communist Bloc countries have been displaced by civil wars, and their numbers are swollen by refugees from the economic and ecological disasters in Africa, migrants who flock through Italy into the heart of Europe like swallows. They are uncountable, although tag and recapture methods used by UN relief teams estimate that refugees are roughly equal in number to the official population of Europe. Sometimes, especially in summer, it seems that all of Europe is on the move, a giantess tossing restlessly but never quite waking, displacing and distorting the maps which cover her.
After five years of travelling, Alex settles for a while in the café and beer hall culture of the demi-monde of Prague, where two generations of American exiles have established an easygoing Bohemia. There are fairies here—there are fairies everywhere, now, if you know how to recognize their enigmatic traces—but they are fey, wild and elusive, and still heavily outnumbered by their human creators and collaborators.
Alex falls in with an aging punk who calls herself Darlajane B., her stage name from the 1980s, when she was lead singer in an East German thrash metal group, the Thalidomide Babies. After four years of playing the semi-legal clubs of East Berlin, half the band was thrown in prison by the Stasi, the East German secret police. A year later, they were let out in time to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Darlajane B. has a fuzzy recording of herself dancing by searchlight on top of the wall in T-shirt and lycra cycle shorts, soaked by the play of firehoses.
For a year, Darlajane B. made a good deal of money selling pieces of the wall to gullible American and Japanese dealers (‘So much we sold, a wall they could have built from Stockholm to Beijing.’), along with Stasi torture equipment, Soviet military uniforms and badges and even weapons. She gave that up after someone with a high velocity rifle took a shot at her as she was crossing a St Petersburg bridge minutes after leaving a hotel room where a couple of Ukrainians had offered her two kilos of weapons grade plutonium.
With finely tuned empathy for the Zeitgeist of the end of the twentieth century, Darlajane B. migrated to Prague shortly after Czechoslovakia split into two. She set up the city’s first coin-operated launderette and lost the profits from that in a venture in exporting beer, started over as bartender in a folk-rock café, and is now part-owner of an ambient club, Zone Zone, deep in the maze of alleys and passageways of the Starê Mesto.
She also grows chips that can make over dolls into fairies.
For two years, Alex lives in two rooms above Zone Zone’s arena. Of necessity, he sleeps by day, but he doesn’t mind that. He’s having fun, and beginning to hope that Milena’s glamour has eased its pull. He grows psychoactive viruses for the clubbers and brews batches of doll-specific thyrotropic hormone for the liberationists, but he doesn’t quickly discover who Darlajane B.’s associates are, nor where she’s learned her skills or obtained the fembot templates.
‘Such things,’ Darlajane B. declares when he asks her, ‘you don’t need to know.’
But Alex persists in asking. Eventually, Darlajane B. lets him know that she has contacts with a cell of a radical Muslim group which is held to be responsible for sabotaging doll-associated enterprises all over Eastern Europe, including the firebombing of a hatcher
y in Budapest that killed the plant supervisor and four technicians as well as thousands of newborn and unborn dolls. This association makes Alex more than uneasy. There are dozens of liberationist groups, from political pressure groups to underground organizations with names like Daughters of Morlock or Blue Star Liner, when they have names at all. But the Muslims aren’t interested in freeing dolls and making them over into fairies; instead, they want to destroy every trace of these blue-skinned devils.
Darlajane B. doesn’t share Alex’s concern. She says she will talk to anyone. Information should be free: it is not information that destroys, but people who use it. She does spend just about half her waking life on the Web, it’s true. She’s almost evangelical about it.
At last, Alex gets to meet with two of the Muslim group. One is a Moroccan student with a ferocious knowledge of molecular biology, the other a tall loose-limbed drummer in his fifties. Alex gets very high with them on harsh strong mountain hashish from Tunisia, smoked in a hookah over peppermint oil, and he learns that as a teenager the drummer once played with the Rolling Stones, and that the student’s grandfather was working in the Hotel Minzah in Tangiers when Brian Jones stayed there.
‘Connections everywhere,’ Darlajane B. says. ‘It’s a very wiggly world.’
They all laugh—they are so stoned that everything seems funny. When the student says that one day they will cleanse all palaces of sin, including Zone Zone, they all laugh at that, too.
‘By then I will be so old I will want it destroyed,’ Darlajane B. says.
‘The older you get, the more neurone connections you grow,’ the student says. He is wearing an expensive one-piece suit and is immaculately groomed—he is the first man Alex has met who has manicured fingernails. ‘Civilization is very old, too. Many many connections. You are proof, Darlajane B., because you know many people.’
Darlajane B. passes the pipe and says, ‘I knew twice as many when I was in Berlin, but half of them were Stasi informers. Now I choose more carefully who I talk to.’
Fairyland Page 13
