Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, although Alex doesn’t seem to be upset by her laughter. ‘We seem to have moved a long way from where we started, that’s all.’

  Alex says, ‘What do you know about entoptic phenomena? Well, have you ever done psychoactive drugs?’

  ‘Kif. It was easier to get in the Sudan than alcohol.’

  ‘Entoptic phenomena are a range of luminous precepts, independent of an external light source because they are generated by the human nervous system. They are the basic stuff of visions and hallucinations.’

  ‘Oh,’ Morag said, ‘you mean phosphenes.’

  ‘They’re called that, too. Some people call them form constants. Anyone who enters an altered state of consciousness is liable to see them. They are a set of basic geometric forms which the subject embellishes with all kinds of iconic significance. They are the grammar of visions, if you like, although in the final state people move away from entoptic forms towards more hallucinatory iconic imagery.

  ‘The point is that entoptic phenomena are independent of cultural background. All humans share the same basic set of forms—grids, parallel lines, flecks, zigzag lines, nested curves and filigrees. You can even find them in cave paintings, if you know what to look for. Those Stone Age hunters were stoned when they did their murals. Entoptic phenomena are derived from the basic wiring of our brains, down in the limbic brain, the innermost and most primitive layer. You might say that the grammar of the way we perceive the world is hardwired. But the fembots used by the Children’s Crusade to induce visions in their victims have a distinctive signature quite unlike human entoptic phenomena. I’ve done some research, and I’ve come up with quite a different set.’

  Morag remembers the strange swirling spider-shape daubed on the tunnel wall, above the discarded body of the little girl.

  ‘If you’re right,’ she says, ‘I’ve seen one.’

  ‘I saw it, too. I bribed the police recorder. It’s disturbing, isn’t it? Almost hypnotic, in a sinister sort of way. Have you ever been love bombed?’

  ‘Yes, but never by the Children’s Crusade.’

  ‘I have examples stored right here, if you’d like to sample them.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘They’re quite safe. I’ve defused them, removed everything but the overt iconography. It’s the stuff beneath the overlay that’s damaging. I’ve learned,’ Alex says, cocking his head at a sound somewhere in the house, ‘to be something of a meme hacker. She started that, too, you know. The very first crude images.’

  ‘Tell me about this man. The one you saw near my apartment. The human agent, you called him.’

  ‘He is a very confused individual. He remembers very little of his former life, but he told me that he was one of Midnight’s Children, born in Chambéry, on midnight January 1st 2000. I hacked into the town hall records. An Armand Puech was born there at the right time; the Foreign Legion has him missing in action in Djibouti. That’s all I know. Not much, I know, but he’ll surface again. I’m quite sure of that. He’s looking for you. You saw something, or they think you saw something.’

  ‘I can’t think what.’

  ‘That’s a pity. It would be a great help if you did.’

  Morag is just beginning to decide that this fat man is mostly harmless, an obsessive suffering from mild paranoid delusions to be sure, but not violent, not evil, when there is a creak behind her, a footfall on a loose floorboard.

  She turns, and the doll smiles at her, showing a mouthful of teeth filed to points.

  10 – The Human Agent

  Armand wakes slowly. Pieces of consciousness bump and whirl apart and bump together again like ice floes on the black waters of a flooded river. Night. It is night. He is lying on a cold, hard floor, his neck, his back, his legs stiff. An unfamiliar ceiling, an unfamiliar room. The green glow of streetlamps, fretted by the blades of a blind, drops across him. When he brings his hands to his face he discovers that they are scaled with dried blood. It isn’t his.

  Something bad has happened again.

  The woman.

  Mister Mike has killed the woman.

  Armand sits up cautiously.

  He is in an apartment. A couch is tipped over. Clear gel bulges from slashes in its fabric. There’s blood spray on a wall, blood trails across rucked rugs on the floor leading to a door that, not quite closed, shows a segment of white bathroom tile beyond.

  The blood looks black in the green light leaking through the blinds.

  Armand hears a sound and turns, his heart suddenly pounding. There’s a nest of cushions in one corner, under a big fern hanging in a rope basket. One of the Folk sits there, watching Armand with dark, liquid eyes. It holds a raw haunch ripped from some kind of furry animal.

  Armand asks what happened, but the fairy puts a long forefinger to its mouth. It is wearing loose paper coveralls and plastic sandals.

  Armand says that he doesn’t understand. The fairy points to the bathroom, then rips off a hunk of meat with its sharp teeth and swallows it whole, fur and all. Armand doesn’t want to go in there, not yet. Instead, he walks over to the moulded kitchen nook and meticulously washes his hands. Bloody water runs over cups and saucers piled in the sink. All of the kitchen accessories are blinking the same message, over and over in red or green letters:

  System disengaged. Please call your service agent.

  Armand finds half a stick of stale bread on the counter. He tears off a piece and chews on it as he paces around the apartment.

  The fairy watches from its corner.

  A wall-hung TV, a scatter of magazines on slick erasable paper, Turkish cushions, an intricate carved frieze of fish and seaweed. The wood of the frieze gives off a faint odour of roses. There are two small bedrooms off the short hallway. Each smells differently, one tidy, the other strewn with clothes. Something moves under the bed, , but it is only a little cleaning mobot, the tropic kind that comes out to vacuum the floor when no one’s around. A panel hangs askew by the door at the end of the hallway, a single burnhole punched through it. Behind the blinds in the main room a view across the nighttime city.

  The TV’s clock tells Armand it is ten past five in the morning. A holocube lights up when he touches it. He tilts it from face to face, and scenes come and go inside: a man smiles at him; the bright sunlit straws and ochres of a parched countryside; a house with a terracotta tile roof under a deep blue sky; a group of people standing on the roof of a tear-drop shaped runabout parked in the sun-speckled shade of a poplar tree. Fragments of a life. Armand holds the cube out to the fairy, who takes it and tosses it aside without looking at it.

  Armand sits down to think it through. Mister Mike came out to a play. Probably Mister Mike was let into the apartment by the fairy, killed the woman who saw the bad thing with the little girl. Armand feels a measure of relief. Well, at least it’s over. Perhaps he can go home.

  He asks the fairy if that’s what it is, and this time the fairy jumps up and starts pushing Armand towards the bathroom.

  ‘All right,’ Armand says, ‘all right.’

  Bright white light inside, bouncing from white tile walls. Someone is huddled in the shower cubicle. A woman, blonde hair down over her face, her shirt soaked with blood. The fairy pads up behind Armand, hands him a flat photograph in a brushed aluminium frame. A different, younger woman in a lime-green scuba suit, looking directly at the camera, mask and snorkel pushed up on a wet tangle of long black hair, salt-white sand and blue water burning behind her.

  This is the woman Mister Mike was supposed to kill, but she wasn’t here, and her roommate was killed instead. The fairy explains this to Armand, and tells him he isn’t ever again to do anything he isn’t supposed to do. He’s to stay here, he’s not to take one step out of the apartment, until someone comes for him, the fairy adds, then kisses Armand full on the mouth. Before it leaves the apartment, it waits for the kiss to work, then repeats its instructions over and over until it is satisfied that Armand has fallen under its
glamour.

  The trace of soma bestowed by the kiss blurs the edge of things, but the light of their real selves is sunk deep in their dead casings. Alone in the apartment, Armand paces around some more, scared and sick and excited. He is free, and yet not. He could walk out the door, but he knows that he won’t. He can’t. A geas has been laid upon him.

  Armand ransacks the fridge, collects together half a sugar melon, a pepper sausage, three anchovies, a watery cube of tofu. While he eats, he watches dawn lighten the sky. Necklaces of green streetlights dim as the grey streets and tower blocks resolve from shadows. The ribbon arcologies loom like thunderclouds at the city’s horizon.

  Armand switches on the TV for company, its sound muted. He rearranges rugs to cover the blood smears. He looks through the closets in the bedrooms, sniffing the clothes, growing excited. It isn’t that he has forgotten about women, he just doesn’t want to think about them because that part of him is too much like Mister Mike.

  He lies on the unmade bed and breathes in woman-scent from the pillow, masturbates with a pair of panties wrapped around his cock. He comes almost immediately. When he can’t manage a second time, he hunts down the little mobot that lurks under the bed and stamps on it until its ceramic shell shatters. He finds another mobot lurking under the blinds of the picture window in the living room, a thing like an etiolated spider that clings to the glass with suction cups. Armand snaps its fragile limbs one by one and drops it on its back, laughs as it feebly struggles to right itself.

  Later, when he has to take a piss, the accusatory presence in the shower at first defeats him, but after he throws a towel over her head it’s easy. He grins in the bathroom mirror, and Mister Mike grins back. He’s ready.

  11 – First Rays of the New Rising Sun

  The fairy’s name is First Rays of the New Rising Sun; Alex calls him Ray. Although Ray has the blue skin and wiry, metre-high frame of a doll, he also has large, lambent eyes necked with gold, and sharp, high cheekbones a model would spend a long day under the knife to get. Ray’s prominent ears are pointed like Mr Spock’s, and the points rise above the knitted watch cap he wears on his bald head. The ears twitch this way and that with independent life. Their margins are notched, and the left is strung with gold rings and clips.

  Ray is a solitary fairy, a fey, made over five years ago in a warren just outside Amsterdam and now living on the fringe of the fringe. He has travelled down the coast of Europe to the tip of Spain and back again. Fingering knots in a long string wound around his waist, he says that more and more people on the fringe have become incorporated into the Children’s Crusade. They call themselves the saved. They want every one they meet, human and fairy alike, to be part of their cause.

  ‘They are sick in the head,’ Ray says. He squats on the ragged Turkish carpet, speaking careful, precise French in a gravelly voice, grinning around the words, showing his sharp shark’s teeth. ‘I keep away from them. I know that they will change me with a look.’

  ‘It’s a fembot meme,’ Alex explains to Morag. ‘A set of beliefs transmitted by machine infection. Fairies are more susceptible than humans.’

  ‘Many fairies are part of this,’ Ray agrees, smiling at Morag. ‘I find many living in a warren in an old civil defence bunker outside Brest. Fairies and humans.’ His grin widens. ‘Humans serve fairies now. One change that is better.’

  Morag feels surprisingly calm. Perhaps it is part of the drunk cure Alex zapped her with in the taxi. She doesn’t find Ray at all threatening, despite his filed teeth. His face sometimes seems to be that of a beautiful woman, sometimes that of a preternaturally alert child, and yet he is none of these things. He is neither animal nor human, but a synthesis that transcends both. Morag has listened to his story without question, but now she asks, ‘What does the Children’s Crusade want?’

  ‘They all know the same thing, but you only know what it is if you are one of them.’ Ray shudders delicately at the thought.

  Alex says, ‘It’s her. It’s her religion.’

  Katrina passes a hand over the strip of fur that grows on the crest of her skull. She says, ‘Children. They like to take children. Just like these fucking fairies.’

  Ray says guilelessly, ‘It is best to take children because they learn so quickly. They have less to forget. Besides, you have so many, and you are so careless of them. I am never surprised that it is easy to murder human children.’

  ‘You take them because they are helpless,’ Katrina says. ‘The weak prey on the weak.’

  ‘He means no harm,’ Alex tells her.

  The fey smiles at Katrina. ‘I walk alone,’ he says.

  Morag says, ‘But you help these people.’

  ‘People help me. I help them.’

  Katrina says to Morag, ‘This little shit passes on gossip to anyone who will pay for it. He is shameless.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Ray says. His wide grin shows all his sharp teeth. ‘It’s how I make a living. I’m not an animal, not like some of my brothers. They eat whatever they catch. Babyflesh, succulent even when raw.’

  ‘Fucker!’ Katrina’s chair falls over as she springs to her feet. She grabs Ray by the lapels of his jacket and lifts him into the air.

  Ray dangles limply in her grip, smiling fiercely, looking into her eyes. He says, ‘I rip out your throat. One bite. Watch you bleed to death. This is a comfortable life here, you grow soft. I live out there, all the time. Every day I survive it.’

  Katrina makes a sound of disgust and drops Ray. He resumes his squat, unperturbed.

  Morag says, ‘Ray, you do know something, don’t you? You know about the little boy.’

  ‘I hear he’s alive, but I hear bad things and I move on. I don’t stop to take care of any little boy.’

  Morag says, ‘But you could take me there. Into the Magic Kingdom.’

  Katrina says, ‘I wouldn’t trust him to lead me across the road.’

  Alex says, ‘It isn’t just a case of walking in there. The place is a real warren, a ruin combed with tunnels and chambers. You’d either never see a single fairy, or they’d kill you before you got to the heart.’

  ‘There are guards,’ Ray says. ‘Things you wouldn’t like to meet.’

  Morag remembers that the perimeter peeper said something about goblins. She says, ‘But there’s the little boy. And you said that you can go anywhere, Ray.’

  Katrina says, ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into. On the last raid I made on a warren I was attacked by something like a dog with a crocodile head. Fought my way through a booby-trapped maze and all I found were a few dead dolls. I never saw a single fairy for more than a moment.’

  ‘We make ourselves invisible.’ Ray says. ‘It is a trick we have.’

  ‘They always have ways of escape,’ Alex says. ‘For every way in, there are two out. They don’t need to be invisible.’

  Katrina says, ‘The ones I killed when I got my brother back weren’t invisible.’

  ‘Maybe they weren’t fairies,’ Ray says.

  ‘Maybe you aren’t one.’

  ‘Doll-fucker,’ Ray says, with equanimity.

  ‘You wish,’ Katrina says.

  Morag says, ‘I just want help to get into this place. What about it, Ray? What will it cost for you to take me there?’

  ‘He doesn’t want money,’ Alex says. ‘He wants what I can give him.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Certain drugs,’ Alex says. ‘Hormones. He trades them.’

  ‘Alex number-one.’

  ‘It’s true I was the first, although at the time I didn’t know what I was getting into. Morag, it really isn’t a question of walking in there. It’s more like conducting a small war. I want you to understand because we need your help.’

  ‘Alex, this is a crazy idea,’ Katrina says.

  Morag says, ‘You’re a drugdealer.’

  ‘In my time. Actually, I was more of a gene hacker, dealing in psychoactive retroviruses. Have you ever done Ghost? Well, I suppose th
at it was a few years ago, and viruses are out of fashion. I work with fembots now.’

  ‘What do you want out of this?’

  ‘Information, if I can get it. It’s all linked, Morag. It all stems from one source. I want to trace her.’

  ‘This woman.’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes.’

  Alex says it in such a hopeless, yearning way, like a spurned lover in an opera, that Morag has trouble keeping a straight face. Katrina gives him a level, quiet look that communicates a world of sympathy. They are both wounded in different ways, Morag thinks. They understand each other.

  Morag says, ‘And what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘You’re to be bait.’

  Morag doesn’t understand.

  ‘We let their human agent come after you. Then we find out from him what we need to know to get inside.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  Ray said, ‘They are stone crazy. Loco. They want to know things man is never meant to know.’

  Katrina says, ‘They want children. More and more are taken every day. I’ve destroyed two of their nests so far, and the second time I went in I didn’t have the right information. I nearly died. I’m going in there soon. You can help me survive it.’

  Morag says to the fairy, ‘What about you, Ray? I’m a paramedic. I can get drugs, if you want them.’

  ‘Not the right kind,’ Alex says.

  ‘It’s true,’ Ray says.

  ‘You had better stay here,’ Alex tells Morag. ‘The human agent will be looking for you, and you don’t want to come on him unprepared. I’ve every reason to think he’s dangerous.’

  Morag has a long soak in an old enamelled tub with clawed feet, in a bare room with mould-blackened walls and a warped sash window that lets in gusts of icy air. The room fills with steam and she nearly falls asleep, so she climbs out of the bath and wraps a towel around herself and takes a little black wake-up pill. She knows from long experience that with a little chemical help she can go without sleep for a couple of days.