Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Even at this late hour there are crowds milling up and down the rue Berger. The half-sunken, double curve of the Forum burns from within, lit by thousands of lights and mirrors. Katrina has to bat at the taxi’s horn to make way through the strollers, tourists, prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, dealers and junkies. Kids on scooters, their puffer jackets iridescent with shifting patterns, sinuously weave through the throng. The tireless workers of the Children’s Crusade are busy, begging, handing out leaflets, love bombing passers-by with instant karma when the police aren’t looking. At any given moment half a dozen people are transfixed as their selves dissolve in a sea of nirvana, while half a dozen more are looking for the little bastard who zapped them. Music booms from an ambient sound system someone has set up by the Fontaine des Innocents. A big news-screen casts Martian light over the heads of the crowd. It shows a couple of astronauts in white pressure suits posing at the edge of a vast sinuous valley that, except for the soft-edged craters, could be anywhere in Arizona.

  There are restaurants along the rue Berger that stay open all night, popular with junkies who know there’s nothing like an order of fries to deliver the fat they crave after a hit. Morag sees a couple of flics, one with an alert Alsatian on a short leash, but they are hassling a bunch of scooterists and only the dog looks at Morag as she raps at the window.

  ‘There’s a Vietnamese place along here serves soup with testicles in it,’ Katrina says. ‘Want a snack, Alex?’

  ‘Just make a left here,’ Alex says. He sounds infinitely patient.

  A white van is parked outside a fast food arcade. Dolls in red and white uniforms are lined up. Katrina double parks the taxi, gives the finger to a scooterist who toots his horn as he swerves past.

  ‘You’ve seen these, I suppose,’ Alex says, ‘but I doubt if you know what they are for.’

  One by one, the dolls step up to the pair of technicians. One by one, prognathous blue faces flash into sudden clarity, wink out.

  ‘It’s a test,’ Alex says. ‘They’re screening for fairies.’

  ‘I saw something like this last night.’ When Jules was still alive. ‘Only they were walking the dolls through some kind of metal detector.’

  ‘A magnetic resonance imaging frame. This is a bit cruder, but the idea’s the same.’

  ‘None of their tests are worth shit,’ Katrina says. She lights another cigarette from the butt of the first and breathes a cloud of smoke into the taxi’s windscreen.

  Alex ignores her. ‘A fairy is a doll with enhanced intelligence and free will. To make a doll over, you take out its chip, the one that controls it when it’s doing whatever it was bought to do. You put in a different kind of chip, give its synapses a connectivity boost, give it hormone treatment. The hormones are mostly to firm up the musculature; fairies are sterile unless they have reconstructive surgery, and most liberationists don’t go to that trouble. The thing is, in first generation fairies all this change is on the inside. They don’t look too different from unmodified dolls. But now the authorities are panicking, because they’re becoming aware of the scale of what’s going on. This is the result. Those techs are scanning the implanted chip of each and every doll, checking it against spec.’

  ‘It will do no good,’ Katrina says again. She cranks down the window a centimetre, flicks her half-smoked cigarette through the gap, rolls the window back up again. ‘She’s seen it, Alex. Let’s go.’

  ‘In a moment,’ Alex says. ‘The thing is, Morag, that fairies don’t mingle with dolls. That was the mistake of the liberationists—they thought that fairies would make over the rest of the dolls, that it would be an autocatalytic liberation movement. But fairies aren’t like dolls. They aren’t even much interested in dolls. That’s why this sweep is doomed.’

  ‘Why don’t the authorities do something about the Magic Kingdom?’

  ‘There are fairies,’ Alex says, ‘and then there are fairies. Most kinds are harmless, and so they don’t attract attention. You’ve encountered a set whose lifestyle is not, let us say, invisible. They’ve come out, they’re trading for their existence, and that’s the problem. They’ve bought themselves protection.’

  ‘They took the little boy and they killed his sister. They killed all the other little girls, too, didn’t they? And Jules. The things killed Jules. And you know why, and you haven’t told the police!’

  Alex doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the techs processing the dolls in front of the fast food outlet.

  Katrina says, ‘You’ve said too much, you silly fucker. Why does she need to know anything?’

  Morag says, ‘Because if I tell you anything, I want to know why. I want to know if we can get the little boy back.’

  ‘We don’t need to bargain—’

  ‘Kat,’ Alex says sharply. Surprisingly, the woman is silent. ‘We can’t talk here,’ Alex adds. ‘Do you really want to know, Ms Gray?’

  ‘Are you part of the underground? I thought that the liberationists disbanded years ago.’

  ‘Mostly,’ Alex says. ‘Some were arrested, some just gave up, some were absorbed, as it were, by their own creations. But there are still evolutionary changes going on, and something is driving that.’

  ‘You won’t find her,’ Katrina says, ‘not after all this time.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Alex says. ‘Let’s go, eh?’

  Katrina pulls a U-turn right there in the street, sounding her horn as she noses through the crowds. A vagrant lurches forward and starts smearing a rag across the windscreen. Katrina snarls and punches a switch on the dash. Fat blue sparks snap at the vagrant’s fingertips and he jumps back, swearing and shaking his burnt hand. Katrina puts her foot down and aims the taxi through a gap in the crowd.

  Morag tries to keep track of where she’s being driven. Somewhere in the north-east, she thinks, which makes it easier, because that’s where she lives. These people don’t strike her as particularly dangerous, or even professional at what they are doing. They obviously know something about the liberationists—perhaps they are a remnant of some cell or other of the fabled movement that, in the second decade of the century, did threaten to change the status of dolls from enhanced animals to legally protected human beings. But the liberationists foundered as all revolutionary movements founder if they do not quickly force and win war against the state. They broke up because of attrition by police actions, because of disaffection and internecine squabbling, because of exhaustion. People grow older, lose their fervour. They get a job, get married and settle down, have children.

  Morag feels that bourgeois gravity herself, from time to time, the tremendous inertia of doing what is expected, of disappearing beyond the eventual horizon of marriage. She knows that she fled Edinburgh because of it.

  The taxi takes a bridge over the Canal Saint Martin into the serried ranks of apartment buildings of Belleville-Ménilmontant. They are perhaps a kilometre from where Morag lives. The fat man, Alex Sharkey, is fussily scrolling through a note pad. The tiny light that illuminates the slate strikes him under his chin, catches a spark in each of the lenses of the little round spectacles he has hooked over his ears. He reminds Morag of a portrait of James Boswell, not at all like a dangerous underground revolutionary. And for all her tough talk, Katrina is more like a louche punk than a coldly efficient hitperson.

  They are a couple grown old together, Morag thinks, their squabbling an affectionate habit. With that thought, Morag discovers that she is not frightened. The dose of whatever it was that sobered her has left her weak and lightheaded, but she has been in worse situations than this.

  In the camps that sheltered refugees infected with the government loyalty plague, there was the continual ominous presence of Papa Zumi’s secret police, smart young men in video shades and crisp white shirts and black suits. Armed with machetes and machine pistols, they made random tests on men, women and children, and executed those who failed to measure up to their parameters. They didn’t live in the camps, but every morning drove in, in Mercedes and B
MWs, from the five star hotel in the nearby town. The aid workers had to negotiate with the secret police every day, and at least once a week Morag was threatened by one of them. Until the terrible day at the very end, their regime was marked by sudden, random acts of extreme violence.

  And before that, there was the time when she was out in the bush treating children for river blindness, and a minor Somali warlord stopped her Land Rover and held her hostage for five days. He was charming, Oxford-educated, and never once made an overt threat. Morag was given her own room in his rambling compound, was well fed and could talk to his wives. And yet she was in a constant state of terror.

  There was an oppressive feeling in the compound, as if the air was under pressure, and lacked about half the normal amount of oxygen. Look out of any window and there would be two or three men in ragged combat dress, toting Malaysian Kalashnikov copies, heavy machine guns, one-shot light antitank weapons. And there were the sounds at night, off beyond the compound’s perimeter. Human screams, faint but vivid, single shots like whipcracks, a truck motor idling for half an hour before being abruptly switched off.

  When Morag was released, after some high-powered manoeuvring of which she’d been completely unaware, and was actually allowed to drive off in her own Land Rover, she got about ten kilometres down the rutted red dirt road before she started shaking so violently she almost turned the Land Rover over, shivering as if from malaria, then attacked by vomiting and diarrhoea. She dosed herself with morphine and managed to make it to a checkpoint manned by government soldiers before collapsing.

  That was fear. That was terror.

  The taxi jounces up a steep street. Beyond bare trees, lights of apartment blocks are sharp in the cold night. There’s a bridge over a railway line, and then the road gives out in a cobbled impasse where nineteenth century houses of six or seven storeys stand behind railings and overgrown gardens.

  It is one of the little pockets of old Paris that escaped the grand redevelopments of the last quarter of the twentieth century, surviving the new regime like dowager princesses exiled in coldwater flats. Although Morag lives right here in the arrondissement, she has only a vague idea where she is now.

  Katrina cuts the taxi’s engine and lights, gets out and opens the door for Morag who, as she climbs out into cold damp air, feels a wave of nausea rise through every cell in her body. She falls to her knees and throws up luxuriantly into the gutter in the centre of the street.

  When she stands, wiping chyme from her chin and blinking chill tears, Alex is unlocking a gate in a tall iron railing. Katrina gets a shoulder under Morag’s arm, helps her along. There is hard muscle in the woman’s arms and torso. She radiates heat and a peppery scent compounded of cigarette smoke and incense.

  Inside the house, in a room with a creaking wooden floor muffled with ravelled Turkish carpets, Morag sits on a plastic folding chair and sips warm orange juice with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar stirred into it while Katrina lights clusters of candles set on a heavy oak sideboard. The buttery glow of the candle flames gleams on her shaven scalp either side of the strip of leopard fur—it is real fur, a genemod epidermal treatment.

  There’s a sleeping bag balled up in one corner of the room, mouldering piles of old paperback books stacked along one wall, a few more folding chairs, a computer deck with goggle and mitt attachments. The deck is jacked into a phone plug; a single red light indicates that it is active. The vinyl of the mitts is cracked, and patched with silvery duct tape.

  Alex returns from somewhere deeper within the house, takes a bite from the pastry in his hand, and says around it, ‘He’s coming.’

  ‘Who?’ Morag asks.

  ‘A friend,’ Alex says. ‘This is very convenient for us. Out of the way, not overlooked, and with the railway line in the cutting behind that’s mostly used at night. Anyone who’s ever taken a sleeper train out of the Gare du Nord has passed by this place, but hardly anyone bothers to look out the train window.’

  ‘It looks like you’re camping here,’ Morag says.

  Alex sits, not on one of the folding chairs, which would probably have collapsed under his weight, but on the carpeted floor. He takes his time, breathing heavily. When he’s comfortable, he says, ‘I met up with Kat about three years ago, in Amsterdam. She helped with some unpleasantness there.’

  Katrina says, ‘You think she needs to know?’

  ‘Kat’s brother was taken by fairies,’ Alex says. ‘She was hunting them down. So was I, but for a different reason. I was looking for the woman who started it all, although I find it hard to think of her as a woman. I knew her in London, and she was only a little girl then, you wouldn’t think anything to look at her. She made over a doll into the first fairy, and escaped with it. Others started doing it soon after, but she was the first. She spread the idea, and the chips and the nanotechnology necessary for it. I’ve been looking for her ever since.’

  Katrina starts to hum a tune. ‘That Old Black Magic.’

  ‘Well, it’s probably true,’ Alex says. ‘I think she did infect me with something to make me loyal. Glamour is like love, only deeper, at a cellular level. I’ve never found her, only traces, hints. But now I’m certain she’s in Paris. Or at least she was, until recently. What do you know about these murders, Morag?’

  ‘What will you tell me?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘There are two things. I want to save the little boy.’

  Alex looked at Katrina, then nods. ‘OK.’

  ‘You think he’s dead.’

  ‘No, not dead. Changed, perhaps. But he might be saved. They haven’t had him long.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Katrina says, and stalks out of the room, banging the door frame with her fists as she goes. Candle flames bob in her wake like boats on a black, stormy sea.

  ‘It happened to her brother,’ Alex says. He pulls a tube from a zippered pocket of his jerkin, pops its lid and uses two fingers to scoop beans and franks into his mouth. Chewing noisily, he adds, ‘They took him when he was three, and we found him four years later. No hope.’

  ‘But these things have only had the little boy a few days.’

  ‘Fairies. Never mink of them as things. They are living, breathing, autonomous creatures. They are fairies. She didn’t call them that, you know. I think it might be my fault.’

  ‘This girl. In London.’ Morag has the sense of going around in a circle.

  ‘The girl. In London.’ Alex digs deep into the tube for the last of the beans, licks tomato sauce from his fingers, ‘What was the other lining you wanted?’

  ‘The police say that Jules…’

  Alex waits, patient as a mountain.

  At last, Morag is able to say, ‘My friend who died at the clinic in the Métro station of the Place de la Concorde. The police say that he committed suicide.’

  Alex says flatly, ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘He wasn’t the kind to commit suicide. I know he didn’t.’

  ‘He was murdered,’ Alex says. ‘They lured him into the tunnel, caught him, and knocked him out. The train did the rest. It’s brutal, I know. But it’s the truth.’

  ‘And I suppose you know who murdered him.’

  ‘Fairies. Them, and someone helping them. At least one human agent. They do have those, you know. Many are liberationists, others are crazy people, all have been seduced by the fairy glamour. He’s been seen, moving here and there. I have at least two confirmations of sightings close to murders. I saw him myself, two nights ago, waiting near your apartment. We had a little talk, but then he got away.’

  ‘What was he doing there? What did he say?’

  Alex raises a finger to his lips, says, ‘Information exchange, that’s the way the world works. Tell me about the murder you saw.’

  ‘We didn’t see it. We heard her scream…’

  Again, Alex waits until she can go on. He listens intently as she tells him about finding the little girl and taking her back to the shack, about the chase, about the disc
overy of the little girl’s body under the strange graffito, about the perimeter peeper and the security guards.

  ‘They know,’ Morag says. ‘They know what’s going on there.’

  ‘I understand, but there’s no good in getting angry with hirelings.’

  Morag takes a deep breath, then another. ‘All right. Tell me why the fairies took the little girl’s ovaries.’

  ‘Because they want to make more changelings. They have experimented with making over very young children, but I think that now they want to start at the embryo stage. Sperm is no problem, they can always cast their glamour over some poor sucker out on the fringes. Obtaining human ova is a tougher problem. They could hold a woman, I suppose, jack her full of hormones to bring on menopause, then start up ovulation again. That way she’ll produce many eggs at once, yes?’

  ‘Yes. But it takes time, and I suppose it would be too risky.’

  ‘I think they just can’t be bothered,’ Alex says. ‘Instead they are taking immature ovaries. Freezing some, perhaps, bringing others to maturity with hormone treatment.’

  ‘And why do they want changelings?’

  ‘Why do we want dolls?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. Basically, there are three types of fairies. The fey, who live mostly solitary lives. The sensualists, who cast their glamour over humans, but only to collect sperm to fertilize artificial ova they make from their own cells, to make more of their own kind. And then there are the others. I think they are hers, her own special kind. I first became aware of them in Amsterdam. There was a report of a changeling boy found wandering on the beach there, although he had disappeared by the time I went to check it out. And I think that’s where the Children’s Crusade started.’

  Morag laughs. She can’t help it. It’s just that this is the kind of all-embracing paranoid conspiracy theory that drug addicts on the fringe dream up, a magical world of hidden forces often built on right brain delusions or visions induced by meme infections. She’s heard everything, in her short time with the Mobile Aid Team, from flying saucer kidnappings, usually featuring some famous dead media star, through mundane mind ray plots involving hoovering up people’s memories into a giant computer buried beneath Paris, to people who claim to be three thousand-year-old high priests of Atlantis.