Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Morag climbs into the taxi and slams the door in the man’s face. He bends to shout through the glass as the taxi pulls away. ‘Alex Sharkey! My name! Call me back!’

  6 – The Fat Man

  Armand watches the fat man watch the taxi pull away. Armand is crouching uneasily amongst the tubs of shrubbery which flank the entrance of the apartment building. This part of the city, with its clean rows of apartment blocks, is not a place where he can easily pass unnoticed. His leather overcoat is torn at one shoulder, his hair is long and greasy, and he smells of woodsmoke. He has been too long in the fringe. He had trouble finding the address which the Twins gave him, and when he went into a café to ask for directions, the proprietor ordered him out and threatened to call the police.

  At least Armand was able to recognize the woman straight away. The Folk took her picture from the police records computer—she is a foreigner, and has to be registered with the police. That’s where they found her address, too, and the place where she works, but how was Armand to get close enough to the woman when she came straight out of the building and jumped into a taxi? And then there’s the fat man. The Twins didn’t say anything about any fat man.

  Armand decides to follow him. The Twins don’t know everything, and this might be important. Besides, although Mister Mike is standing at Armand’s shoulder, Mister Mike can’t come out until Armand gets close enough to the woman. And he doesn’t want that, because then something bad will happen. Something bad always happens when Mister Mike comes out.

  He walks quickly, this fat man. He knows where he’s going. Armand follows at a discreet distance. The wide pavements are buckled and potholed, and there are potholes in the road, too, some big enough to swallow a runabout. People and money are flowing into the ribbon arcologies, and one day the rest of the world will be empty. It is a belief of the Folk. They will take the cities then. They will inherit the Earth.

  Not many people about at this hour. They’re all at home in their little boxes stacked into the sky, eating dinner, watching TV, pottering around the little fantasy worlds they’ve gardened up in VR, or lost in the prime-time interactive worlds of Nova Prodigy or The Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Armand has been there with the Twins, although he wasn’t allowed to do anything, just watch. The Twins were contemptuous when he didn’t understand why they were so interested in one particular virtuality character. One day, they said, we’ll walk wherever we want in that world, but not until she returns from it.

  An old woman walking a little dog gives Armand a look as he goes past. Armand flips her the finger and instantly regrets it. He should stay invisible. He knows that if you think you can’t be seen, if you really believe you can’t be seen, it can work.

  He practises being invisible now, as the fat man walks past a little fenced-in park, its grass a vivid green under the biolume streetlights. There’s a construction site beyond. One of the old apartment buildings is being refaced with architectural stromalith. Supervised by a bored cop, doll labourers are being marshalled into line by a couple of men in yellow safety helmets. A white van drives up, and the fat man stops to watch as two technician types get out.

  Armand crosses the street to watch the fat man watching as, one by one, the dolls are led up to the technicians. One of the technicians holds a kind of lamp that flashes red light in the face of each doll; the other studies a handheld computer. All the while, the petrol motor of the white van idles, and its exhaust makes smoke in the cold night air. The blue-skinned faces of the dolls, each illuminated by a quick blink of light, are all the same, a thrusting muzzle, small eyes under a shelf of bone. It is the face shared by many of the first Folk, except that it is not animated by intelligence.

  Armand hugs himself. His leather coat creaks in the cold. His tongue is swollen in his mouth, and he must keep swallowing the saliva that wells under it. He needs a fix. He needs to get back. But he also needs something to tell the Twins, needs to explain why he couldn’t let Mister Mike do the woman at her apartment like he was supposed to.

  Before the technicians have finished with the dolls, the fat man turns away and walks on. Armand follows as the fat man takes a road leading away uphill. The neighbourhood quickly changes. It is a narrow rural street, an old pavé with a shallow gutter down the middle to drain off water. Two and three storey houses with crumbling plaster façades shoulder for space on either side. Many have been boarded up.

  Then the fat man disappears. Armand stops, puzzled, then walks slowly on up the hill and discovers an archway between two houses. Armand sidles in. There’s a long courtyard running away into darkness. A rusting white Peugeot van is parked just inside the arch, glimmering in a blade of light from a lighted window above. Armand stands still until his eyes have adjusted, but except for the lighted window there’s no sign of life. Mister Mike would go and explore, but Mister Mike is sleeping. Maybe he’s dreaming he’s Armand, freezing cold in this damp spooky courtyard.

  Armand turns, and the fat man is standing there.

  ‘Surprise,’ the fat man says, and there’s a faint hiss. Armand’s face is enveloped in a brief fine mist of oily droplets. He blinks, and slow pulses of white light ignite in his eyes.

  When Armand can see again, he is sitting down and looking up at the fat man, who is leaning against the side of the van. Armand feels a funny floating detachment. His soma thirst has receded. It’s still there, but feels a long way off, as if it belongs to someone else. He says, ‘What did you do?’

  The fat man opens his hand to show the little brushed aluminium aerosol spray, no longer than a finger. He says, ‘You’ve been love bombed, friend. We can talk now, can’t we? I hope we can.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You were following me. Not to rob me though, I think.’

  ‘Oh no. I wouldn’t do that, not unless the Twins asked me.’

  It is out before he knows it. This fat man, he is clever. Armand must be careful.

  ‘No,’ the fat man says, ‘because if you were going to rob me you would have tried that before we climbed all the way up this hill. You were following me, eh? Since when, I wonder?’

  ‘Oh, from the apartment block.’

  ‘Of the woman. The paramedic?’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Yet she’s one thing we have in common, eh?’

  The fat man’s smile is just visible in the light from the window above his head. He has plenty of time, this fat man, but that doesn’t matter to Armand. He’s quite comfortable, almost happy. Eventually, the fat man says, ‘We both know about fairies, don’t we? Do you go to Fairyland, my friend?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re my friend.’

  ‘But they take you there, eh? When did you last get a taste? You look like you’re hurting right now.’

  ‘I can feel it, but it’s OK.’

  ‘I gave you a little dose of fembots. Just a temporary thing. That’s why you feel good. Your need will come back when they die out, worse than ever. And they die out quickly. If you help me, I’ll help you. I’ll dose you up again. Would you like that?’

  ‘I feel good.’

  ‘But not always, eh? It’s a hard life on the fringe. I know, I used to live there myself. Perhaps I still do, in a way. Tell me about your friends.’

  ‘Hassan is my friend. He said I was in the Foreign Legion. He found out when I was born, from my chip.’

  ‘Oh yes? Did your friend find out anything else?’

  ‘Chambéry.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Armand smiles, because he has puzzled the fat man. Drool leaks from the corners of his mouth, and he wipes it away with his sleeve. He says, ‘That’s where I was born. Chambéry. Midnight’s Child. That’s what Hassan said.’

  ‘You didn’t know that, eh? You’d forgotten. Why were you following me?’

  ‘So I could tell the Twins.’

  ‘They’re human, yes?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Not a woman? Name of Milena?’

&nb
sp; ‘Just the Twins.’

  ‘And they have their friends.’

  ‘The Folk.’

  ‘And the Folk take you to Fairyland. Where is that? Where do you go to get to Fairyland?’

  Armand’s tongue is pressed against his teeth and the ribbed roof of his mouth. He can’t speak. Someone is at his back. He can see red earth stretching away, a dry tortured plain of red earth punctuated by columns of smoke unpacking themselves into the big sky. Things move between the columns, helicopters small as flies. The earth is shaking.

  Mister Mike is here. He’s weak because of the fembots, but he’s still strong enough to laugh when the fat man jumps back and pulls out a taser, still strong enough to scream with laughter and run off in search of his prey.

  7 – The Beginning of a Great Adventure

  On the taxi ride into the centre of Paris, Morag is reminded how much she loves this city, its wide boulevards, its grand buildings, its sights. A man in a full-length fur coat sitting at a café table under a haze of diffused laser light; an illuminated pâtisserie’s display like a horn of plenty spilling a golden heap of brioches; transvestite hookers gorgeous in skimpy skintight knickers and halter tops, hair piled high and eyes made up like peacock wings, working the traffic in the Boulevard La Villette; a file of dolls, equipped with remote viewing helmets, looking this way and that as they trot along behind an armed guide, each under control of a virtual tourist vicariously enjoying some Paris by Night jaunt.

  There are always one or two of the splendid buildings of the last decade of the last century visible on the skyline, and when the taxi turns on to the Quai de la Mégisserie, Morag sees the great gothic cathedral, encased in light like an insect in amber, and the tops of the towers of the National Library shining beyond the Eiffel Tower. She asks the driver to let her off right there, she wants to walk.

  ‘Don’t you miss it,’ the taxi driver says, when he hands back Morag’s charge card. ‘They’re about down.’

  Morag doesn’t realize that he means the Mars astronauts until he has driven off. The city is gearing down towards the night. Volumes of cold air lift from the river: it feels like rain. Traffic is sparse, swishing past on the wet roads with a scared, lonely sound. Everyone locked away, sharing history by proxy. Morag passes the museum. A huge turning hologram of Mars’s acned globe, bloodily luminous, hangs above the glass pyramid in the centre of the museum’s big courtyard. Lines of black limos are drawn up in the street, engines idling, pouring vapour into the cold air as they wait for their passengers. The old rich flaunting their power. Morag, hunched inside her quilted coat, doesn’t notice the children until one calls to her.

  It is a cherubic little girl, no more than ten or eleven, with chestnut curls down around her face and a winning smile. She pushes something at Morag, some kind of book, and for a moment Morag almost takes it. Then she realizes what’s happening—this is a proselytizing sweep of the Children’s Crusade.

  The book flops open when it falls to the pavement. Its voice, deep and slow and seductive, starts up in the middle of a sentence. The little girl deftly dips and picks up the book, shakes it to silence it, and tries to hand it to Morag again.

  ‘Why don’t you just ask for a couple of francs for a cup of coffee?’ Morag says. The Crusade uses hormone therapy, and this frighteningly serious little girl is probably at least twice the age she seems to be.

  ‘Please, mademoiselle,’ the little girl says. She has seen something in Morag’s face, a weakness, a hesitation. Her face shines, as if it has been scrubbed. Morag can’t bear to look at it. ‘Please, mademoiselle, I see you are kind-hearted. Let our love shine in your heart. Join us, and simplify your life.’

  Morag manages to get past. There’s a cluster of caped policemen by the museum entrance, but they don’t seem to be troubled by the children who are wandering up and down the line of double-parked limos. After all, anyone who counts has been inoculated with universal phage to protect them against fembot-spread meme plagues.

  But the thing that scares Morag is not the possibility of infection. It is what she saw in the little girl’s eyes, in the Gestalt of her body language. Like the refugees infected with loyalty plague, the little girl is a hollow vessel inhabited by something alien and remote. Morag remembers the children of the camp with a special pity, their solemn yet bewildered expressions, the way they moved with a careful stiffness, like badly manipulated puppets. She walks a little faster, as if to escape her memories.

  Even at this late hour, cars and runabouts swarm in tangled skeins around the Place de la Concorde. There’s a big McDonald’s open twenty-four hours a day opposite the entrance to the Métro station. A white van, its engine idling, is parked outside the brightly lit plate glass windows. A couple of men in white coveralls are guiding a line of dolls through a kind of door-sized frame, like a security metal detector. The dolls wear the check trousers and white shirts of service staff. Their blue prognathous faces are shadowed by the bills of their red caps. One by one, they pass through the detector frame under the guidance of one of the men, while the other watches a handheld computer.

  At the Métro station, the homeless and the dispossessed are moving in to claim their space for the night. They are bedding down even as the last of the revellers stagger off the last train and hurry away up the stairs into the night. Unlike many major European cities, the Paris mass transit authority only allows the homeless in when the system closes down, at midnight. There are no permanent encampments in the Métro stations, so the paramedics and nurses of the clinic at the Place de la Concorde must necessarily work at night.

  Morag is late, and the shift boss is waiting on the platform outside the clinic, ready to complain. Morag smiles and tells him that it was such a nice evening she just had to walk.

  ‘Louis, isn’t it? Dr Science told me about you.’

  Louis is a sour, middle-aged man in a green gown and a white plastic apron. With his hairy arms folded above his considerable belly, he looks more like a truculent butcher than a paramedic. He says, ‘Yeah? He told me about you and your friend, too. This is no rest home, let me make that clear. You two are going to work harder here than in that flying circus.’

  ‘My friend?’ Then Morag sees Jules, already gowned, talking to an old woman just inside the clinic’s door, and she realizes that Dr Science has shafted them both.

  The first part of the shift is busy: that helps. Around three in the morning, when the clinic is at last empty, Louis retires to sleep on a trolley in a curtained-off corner. It is his habit to catch up on his sleep once the post-midnight rush is over, he tells Morag and Jules. He doesn’t expect to be disturbed except for a real emergency.

  Jules and Morag sit side by side on plastic chairs in a corner of the clinic, sipping vile milky coffee under a poster for skiing in the French Alps, some healthy tanned eighty-year-old taking off in a cloud of artificial powder snow. They talk in whispers, aware of Louis behind his screen, the restless sleepers laid out along the platforms outside. They ask each other how they are, and Jules says he’s pleased to see that Morag is bearing up so well.

  ‘Because I should be weeping and wailing instead? Please, Jules. I’ve seen dead children before. In some parts of Africa you start to think children are dying or being killed more quickly than they’re being born. Some rebel groups make them into soldiers at five or six years of age. Dose them with fembots that turn them into psychotic killers and turn them loose into the bush to hunt down and kill other children.’

  ‘Hey. There’s no need to be angry with me.’

  ‘I’m not angry. I feel guilty. Did you see the march on the Interface?’

  ‘Sure. That’s not the first, either.’

  ‘I should have been there, Jules. That’s what I think.’

  Morag finds her coffee has gone cold, and pours it into the sink. Not much of a waste: it is the same coffee that the clients get, milky and gritty, boiled and reboiled in a big aluminium urn. The clinic is a long, low-ceilinged room, its bare conc
rete walls shingled with a mixture of travel posters and health warnings, damp despite the space heater that murmurs to itself over the door. Green curtains on movable rails form makeshift cubicles. Apart from the sink and the steel medical supply cabinets with their big padlocks, the single locker and the coffee urn, there’s little else. A TV hung high on one wall is showing the latest pictures from the Mars expedition. The red face of Mars is the same furnace red as the African dirt.

  Jules says, ‘Let me tell you something. This isn’t the first murder of its kind. I’ve a friend in a department of the Ministry of Technology who’s been correlating reports. There have been a number of similar…incidents.’

  ‘How many?’

  Jules rubs his eyes. He’s tired too. ‘Six. Six that they know about. All involving little girls from the Bidonvilles close to the Magic Kingdom. In every case the victim’s ovaries were taken.’

  Morag sits down again. ‘When did this start?’

  ‘The first was almost exactly two months ago. And that bastard Dr Science knows about it, I’m sure.

  ‘Jules, perhaps this is not my place to say so, but you are taking this very personally.’

  ‘Why wasn’t this in the media, Morag? Six little girls, horribly mutilated. And it isn’t the police, or vigilantes. My friend works in a section of the Ministry of Technology that monitors the effect of technology on social trends. You know what it is, it’s the fucking Interface. Six little girls are an acceptable sacrifice as long as the goodies keep flowing out of it. And the little boy, too. Think what he—’

  Morag says, ‘Don’t.’

  Jules says in a fierce whisper, his dark eyes burning in bruised sockets, ‘Why, because it might blow your fucking cool?’