Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Sometimes they are allowed to have a woman or two with them, but never for very long. They say wistfully that there are not enough women, because in their country boy babies are preferred. It is against Allah to determine a baby’s sex, but there it is, everyone does it. But they are happy enough. The Folk compel them to be happy. They work at their jewellery and smoke kif, with a TV showing the broadcasts from the Saudi Makkah 2 satellite, or a little radio playing rai, the high voices of the singers twisting like fine silver wire. Sometimes, at night, the Algerians play drums for hours on end, and their piebald dogs howl along, echoing across the abandoned theme park.

  The Algerians take Armand in, feed him stew from their perpetually simmering pot, serve him strong, sweetened coffee in a tiny copper cup. Armand has learned to take off his shoes before entering the cramped living space inside the submarine, to eat only with his right hand, to slurp his coffee to show his satisfaction, and to always drink more than one cup, even when he doesn’t need it. He’s a guest after all, he should behave in the expected way. It doesn’t cost him anything, and the Algerians appreciate it.

  Armand once had a special friend amongst the Algerians: Hassan, the youngest, with sad brown eyes and a thick drooping moustache. It was Hassan who told Armand that he had been in the Foreign Legion—the red dot on Armand’s wrist is a military ID chip. Hassan, who liked to play around with electronics, used a modified supermarket scanner to read the chip’s data into the Algerians’ portable computer. But most of the data was corrupted; all the chip yielded was Armand’s date and place of birth. He was born near Lyon, a town called Chambéry. He remembers nothing about it. And he is exactly as old as the new Millennium, one of Midnight’s Children. Although, as Hassan pointed out, the real Millennium is almost five hundred years away, the Algerians still regard this coincidence as auspicious. Perhaps this, as much as Armand’s politeness, is why they tolerate him. Hassan said that if he had better encryption facilities he might be able to recover more details—but then Hassan disappeared.

  Armand misses Hassan. It’s bad to miss people in the Magic Kingdom, they come and go so quickly, but Armand especially misses Hassan because he wants to know more. He remembers so little of his life before the Folk. He was ill once. He was living here. The woman came, bringing the Twins and gathering together the Folk. And now she is gone, and the Twins rule in her place.

  After a while, having satisfied the rituals of hospitality, the Algerians get on with their work. Armand sleeps dreamlessly until he is woken by the howling of the Algerians’ piebald dogs.

  The oldest of the Algerians says, ‘They come for you.’ There is a white rat on the old man’s shoulder. Its head darts from side to side as it sniffs the air; its claws are hooked into the red strands of the man’s mesh jumper. Armand would like to take that rat and swing it by its tail and smash its head in. They are sneaks and tattle-tales, the rats.

  ‘Afreets,’ another Algerian says. He is smiling but at the same time trembling, and tears glisten on his cheeks. He says with an effort, still smiling his terrible fixed smile, ‘We are grateful you came, Armand, but now you must go.’

  Armand thanks the Algerians for their hospitality, and, sick at heart, climbs out of the conning tower. It is almost sunset. The dogs howl and bark amongst the lake coral and seaweed, straining at the limits of their tethers. They are barking at the figures ranged along the edge of the basin. The Folk have come for their warewolf.

  3 – Lost Children

  The Mobile Aid Team hits the recyclers’ Bidonville late in the winter afternoon, its half a dozen vans and cars wallowing down the deeply rutted track with sirens wailing and blue lights whirling. Dr Science has rigged up a couple of strobes on his ancient methane-powered Citroën 2CV, and their stuttering white light freeze-flashes the children running towards this circus. As he pulls out at the edge of the Bidonville, Dr Science fires his flare gun through the 2CV’s open sun roof and green light bursts high above in the darkening sky.

  Morag Gray, climbing out of the back of the mobile dispensary, sees the flare and instinctively flinches. Flares in the night sky beyond the wired perimeter of the refugee camp almost always preceded bursts of gunfire, as border guards hunted down people infected with the loyalty plague who were trying to cross the river.

  Children are already flocking around the members of the Team. Morag pushes lollipops into clutching starfish hands until the pockets of her ankle-length quilted coat are empty. The ragged children chatter excitedly, their breath puffing into the air. Dr Science, like a ginger-haired pirate in his sheepskin jacket and tight blue jeans, casts handfuls of boiled sweets left and right into the growing crowd as he strides towards the young priest who is waiting in the lighted doorway of the makeshift chapel.

  Jules and Natalie run up the mobile dispensary’s rear door and switch on the spots above it. Jules throws Morag a black bag, and together they set off down the narrow track that runs down the centre of die Bidonville.

  Filthy water runs beneath duckboards patched together from scrap plastic. Shacks and hovels stand shoulder-to-shoulder, some sturdily built from packing cases and flattened chemical drums, some no more than sacking draped on rickety framing. Biolume lamps and candles frame scenes of shabby domesticity: a man hunched at a table, smoking a cigarette with a weary voluptuousness; a woman washing a naked toddler who stands shivering in a plastic bowl; children silhouetted by TV flicker.

  And everywhere there are the signs of meme infection, the effluvia of a hundred cults and crazes codified in fembot form and acted out by infected refugees too poor to be able to afford the universal phage which protects against the pranks of meme hackers and the predation of cultists. There are shrines to the unborn Messiah and to the UFO corn cult; a shingle advertises E-metering; scribbled tags proclaim that Elvis Lives! or Bob Knows! (spray-painted on the wall of a shack, the top-hatted, heavy-jowled silhouette of Papa Zumi promotes a chill of recognition in Morag); the distant sound of a drumming circle.

  The marsh stink of the nearby dumps permeates the cold air; scraps of paper blow everywhere. Bulldozers, engines bellowing and blowing clouds of black smoke, are working on a ridge of compacted rubbish that rears above the roofs of the shanty town. People walk backwards in advance of the bulldozers, raking quickly through the trash turned over by the blades. It’s dangerous work. The bulldozer drivers, isolated in airconditioned cabs, won’t stop if anyone stumbles. Last week, Morag helped amputate both legs of a fifteen-year-old boy who was run down by a tipper truck. Beyond the softly rounded ranges of the trash heaps, the towers of the Magic Kingdom prick the neon glow of the Interface, the free trade zone where the corporate scouts, the curious, the crazies and the grey marketeers hope to make something from scraps traded or dropped by fairies.

  Morag and Jules split up, stopping wherever someone calls to them. Many of the people know them by names; some even want to pay what they can, and Morag always takes what’s offered because it’s important to their dignity. Most of the inhabitants of this Bidonville are originally from Africa; those who know that Morag worked in the Sudan joke that like her they made the mistake of coming here to escape the loyalty plague.

  It’s Sunday, and there’s plenty of work to do. There are the usual childhood illnesses, the diabetics who will never be able to afford gene therapy, and those with cancer or full-blown AIDS, with tuberculosis or antibiotic-resistant cerebrospinal and blood infections. Eye and skin infections are common; so is asthma. There’s a particularly intractable strain of viral TB going through the Bidonvilles, too, and one of Morag’s tasks is to try and vaccinate every poor body in this shantytown, whether they want it or no.

  It takes a lot of persuading in some cases. Psychotics believe that anything from a hypogun must be some kind of fembot that will scramble their brains—not actually unreasonable, given that there are plenty of meme hackers and love bombers who go around doing just that. Morag was hit by a love bomber a few weeks ago, soon after she arrived in Paris. She saw a golden sp
here float down and engulf her in a swarm of lights and a feeling of overwhelming peace. The transient stimulation wore off after thirty seconds, leaving her with a dumb expression that no doubt caused the gowk who zapped her to cream his pants.

  All this, and the Saturday night specials to deal with, too. Takings from begging are highest on Saturday, and as well as all the usual problems there are minor knife and gunshot wounds, broken bones, alcohol poisoning, the residues of bad trips, and neurological damage caused by meme infections gone wrong.

  One teenage girl is suffering multiple fits because someone in the Interface hired her for sex and instead zapped her with a new kind of fembot, which is the Interface in a nutshell. Morag tags the girl and uses her phone to check the taxi-ambulance’s schedule with its driver, a tall laconic Pole called Kristoff, tells the girl’s mother that someone will be here to take her daughter to hospital in twenty minutes or so, and moves on.

  It’s dark now, and freezing mist mixed with smoke from cooking fires swirls between the shacks. As Morag steps outside, the mist parts like a curtain and she sees a little girl standing in the middle of the pathway.

  ‘Someone woke me up,’ the little girl says.

  She’s no more than three or four, with glossy black skin. Beads and washers and bits of circuitry are woven into her tightly braided hair. She clutches an orange welfare blanket around her shoulders.

  ‘You had a dream,’ Morag tells her.

  The little girl shakes her head and says solemnly, ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘You had a dream,’ Morag says. ‘I’ll take you back to your mother.’

  ‘My father,’ the little girl says stoutly. ‘And there’s Gabriel, too.’

  ‘Let’s find them,’ Morag says, and takes the little girl’s warm, sticky hand.

  A young man with cropped hair sits on an upturned crate, looking up at the sky with an unblinking stare focused on infinity. He glances at Morag and the little girl, and says blissfully, ‘They’re here. I saw their lights.’

  The little girl leads Morag to a low, burrow-like shack. There’s a kind of trolley outside, stacked with neatly folded cardboard. Inside, the little girl’s father is asleep in a nest of cardboard. He is fully clothed, even wearing his boots; trench foot is endemic in the Bidonvilles. A chubby little boy in a ragged grey jumper sleeps in the crook of his arm.

  Morag wakes the man. He is drunk or drugged, and hardly knows where he is, but he gives up his ID card readily enough. He must be asked for it at least a dozen times a day, even more if the cops have decided to especially hassle the recyclers for need of anything else to do.

  Morag swipes the man’s ID through her reader and learns that the little girl’s name is Grace; the little boy, Gabriel, is her twin brother. They are Tutsi refugees from the last but one coup in Burundi. The little girl’s mother died last year. Morag settles the little girl beside her father and brother, tucks the blanket under her chin.

  The little girl looks up at Morag solemnly. She whispers fiercely, ‘They wanted me to go with them!’

  ‘Who did, dear?’

  ‘The fairies.’

  Morag smiles. ‘You were dreaming, dear.’

  ‘They were like monkeys,’ the little girl says, and yawns, showing white milk teeth in pink gums. ‘They sent in rats first. Little white rats.’

  ‘Then you really were dreaming, dear. There aren’t any white rats here. Go back to sleep, now.’

  Dream about cute white rats, with lively red eyes and adorable pink noses and neat wee paws. Dream of something nice.

  Morag meets up with Jules an hour later, in a shack at the far edge of this part of shantytown. Jules, a raffish Algerian barely out of medical school, is stitching a wound in the scalp of the shack’s owner, an old black man who believes he once ruled the world. It is a delusion spread by a meme that was very common last year.

  The old man is sitting on a web chair and leafing through a copy of Vogue while Jules, working by the light of a penlight stuck in his headband, puts in close neat stitches. He never likes to leave a scar. It is a serious point of honour. The voices of advertisements whisper and sing as the old man flips the magazine’s pages. There are stacks of glossy magazines in the shack, and bales of flattened foil tied with bright blue or yellow nylon tape. Apart from the chair, the only furniture is a bed of warped plywood on cinder blocks and a wall-hanging TV with no sound that is showing the latest pictures from the Mars Expedition. The long arrow of the ship hanging at a tangent above Phobos’s sooty surface; a shot of the rosy, battered face of Mars; a gaunt crop-haired woman in coveralls turning from a bank of instruments, giving a slow-motion wave. The TV’s plastic screen is badly scratched, and washes of solarization bleed from the edges of anything that moves.

  A battered radio lying on the rumpled sleeping bag on the bed is playing some kind of rai dub. The old man taps his feet, keeping perfect time to the five over eight beat: to hustle a little change, he sometimes beats out complex rhythms on an old cardboard box beside the Métro entrance at Les Halles.

  Morag knows better than to sit on the bed—lice—and instead squats in the doorway. She wants some of the coffee in her flask, but because there isn’t enough to share with the old man, she’ll wait until Jules is done.

  The old man winces, and Jules says, ‘Courage, my friend. This will not take long.’

  ‘I could have gene to the hospital,’ the old man grumbles. ‘In the old days…but I forgive you, my son. I’ll remember everyone who has helped me once I regain my sky-borne throne…’

  ‘We are pleased to be of service for you,’ Jules says, and winks at Morag. He never seems to get tired.

  The old man jabs his finger at a picture of a woman with a graceful profile and a long, elegant neck, and says, ‘She was my consort. We lived in a palace of marble and pearl amongst the clouds.’

  It is a picture of Antoinette, the vironment supermodel who two years ago was discovered living in a Bidonville less than half a kilometre away, who has given up her contract with InScape to pursue some vague political campaign. It was all across the networks six months ago, but little has been heard of her since.

  ‘She’s a pearl, all right. Dream queen of the dumps.’ Jules ties off the black thread, pats the old man on the shoulder and tells him to sleep, and next time go to the hospital if he gets hurt in town.

  ‘I hate queues,’ the old man says. ‘I passed a law, you know, to ban them, but my enemies overturned all my good works. Anyway, I knew you come here today.’

  ‘Even a day here with an open wound is to risk getting it infected, my friend,’ Jules says, and tells Morag, ‘Kids mugged him for change. Can you believe it?’

  The old man says, ‘They were amateurs. All they stole was an hour’s takings, they didn’t even look for my stash. Next time I’ll have a knife ready for them.’

  ‘And what if they have a knife for you?’ Jules says, serious now. ‘My friend here will give you a shot, then we’re done. We’ll leave you to watch the expedition getting ready to step into history.’

  ‘Is it real? I thought it was some movie.’

  Outside, it’s freezing now; Morag is glad of the thermal skins she wears under her jeans and quilted silver coat. The taste of the dumps is in her mouth. She rinses it out with lukewarm coffee from her flask and pushes aside the wish for a cigarette.

  Jules has a flyer. He shakes it out, and its tinny speaker crackles the crude threat printed in French and Arabic on its shiny black surface in dripping red characters.

  We give notice that the garbage will be cleared from the dumps within the week.

  ‘Posted all over here Friday,’ Jules says. ‘The people tore most of them down. They say it’s from the Interface, but how do you prove it?’

  ‘Dr Science will tell the police, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course, but the police probably distributed the fliers.’

  Morag tells Jules about the girl who was zapped, and Jules shrugs. ‘That’s nothing new.’

 
‘I suppose not.’

  ‘They come in at night,’ Jules says, ‘and try out their latest ware on these poor people. And we get to clear up after them. The more complex the meme, the more distributed memory it parasitizes, and the more damage it causes. They come up with the cutest things. Last month, just before you arrived, I had this guy who was convinced that Paris was populated by dinosaurs.’

  Morag says, ‘My flatmate has one of those pet microsaurs.’

  ‘You see them in the park sometimes,’ Jules says. ‘Kids get tired of them and let them go. But they need some kind of special food, and don’t live long out in the world. Let’s go back. You must be freezing.’

  ‘It’s not as cold as Edinburgh must be, but Africa has thinned my blood.’

  Someone is standing and shouting in the middle of the street. Tendrils of smoke and mist swirl around him. At first, Morag thinks it is the UFO watcher, but no, it is the little girl’s father, big as a bear in a black overcoat so stiff with dirt that it stands like a bell around him.

  He sees Morag and shouts, ‘Where are they?’

  Jules says, ‘Take it easy, guy.’

  ‘My children,’ the man says. His eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot; a livid scar down the left side of his face twists the eyelid askew. His breath has a sharp acetone reek. ‘My children,’ he says again. ‘You took them. You took my Grace and Gabriel. You give them back!’

  People have come out to watch, shadows in the lighted doorways of their shacks. One of them calls to the man, saying that these are good people, they do good here.

  ‘They took my children,’ the man says, but he sounds merely truculent now.

  ‘Your little girl was having a bad dream,’ Morag says, as much to Jules as to the man. ‘I’ll look for her. Perhaps she went sleepwalking and took her brother with her.’