Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Her phone is still in her bag, and she uses it to call the apartment. There’s no answer. Not even the apartment’s housekeeper answers. Morag is suddenly all goosebumps, shivering violently in the cold, steamy room. She calls the hospital, gets through to the surgery station, and asks for Nina.

  The receptionist says that Nina is on duty, that she cannot be contacted except in a genuine emergency. Morag starts to say that this is an emergency, and then a man overrides the machine and says that Nina hasn’t checked in for her shift.

  ‘I’m her roommate. I need to talk with her.’

  ‘She isn’t here,’ the man says, and cuts the connection.

  Morag quickly rubs herself dry and gets dressed, undoes her hair from its loose bun and brushes it out. She searches through the dark rambling house and finds Alex in the tiled kitchen. He is standing at the counter, picking at a cold croissant stuffed with cheese and ham.

  Fear and amphetamine have dried Morag’s mouth. She drinks a glass of water and asks if she’s a prisoner here.

  Alex bunks with sleepy surprise. ‘Of course not. Do you want some breakfast?’

  ‘I have an errand to run. Will you let me go? I won’t tell the police anything.’

  Alex looks at her, then says, ‘It won’t matter if you do. But be careful. You don’t know what’s out there. Kat—’

  ‘I want to go on my own. I promise I’ll be back.’

  ‘That’s OK. We know where you live.’ Then: ‘Hey, that was just a joke.’

  ‘Too many people know where I live.’

  Morag forces herself to walk, not run, out of the house. It doesn’t occur to her that she should tell the two fringers that there’s something wrong at the apartment. The fact is that she doesn’t trust them. She will deal with this herself.

  It is dawn, grey and cheerless. Lights show in a few of the tall houses along the impasse; more than half have been boarded up. A woman in a floral print dress, emptying an electric washer into the gutter by her door, bids Morag good morning. A slow goods train rumbles through the cutting as Morag crosses the bridge. After a few panicky minutes she has her bearings, and half an hour later she is at the apartment building.

  The elevator takes an age to get down to the lobby, just as long to climb back up. People on the way to work or university are getting on at every floor. Morag calls the hospital, is still trying to get through to the aide in charge of Nina’s ward when at last the elevator reaches her floor.

  The door opens at her touch. The apartment is quiet. Morag immediately becomes hyperalert, because the apartment has learnt to greet her when she returns home. Then she sees the burnhole in the expert system’s service panel and she knows she should run. But if she starts running now she figures she’ll never stop.

  Nerveless, stealthily, she goes down the little hallway. The TV is on, its sound turned down. The rugs have been moved, and there’s stuff flecking the walls. With a shock, Morag realizes what the flecks are—and a man slams open the bathroom door and rushes at her. He skids wildly on a loose rug, and Morag runs straight out of the apartment and bangs the elevator call, bangs it again and turns and sees the man standing there in the doorway.

  A tall, raw-boned, unshaven man in his early twenties, his jumper ragged at the hem, his combat trousers stiff with dirt. His eyes are looking all over the place, everywhere but at her.

  ‘Help me,’ he says. He takes a step forward, flinches and dances back. It’s as if there’s an invisible wire there, a boundary he can’t cross. ‘Help me,’ he says again. ‘I want to get out. Help me, please.’

  ‘Are you working for Alex? Alex Sharkey? You know him? Is Nina in there? Nina!’

  The man’s smile is there and gone, but it tells Morag everything.

  The fucking elevator is still descending towards her, floor by floor. Morag shoulders through the swing door to the service stairs, goes down them as fast as she can. The concierge isn’t in, and so Morag uses her own phone to call the police, then to order up a taxi.

  She’s hunched in a corner of the lobby, shivering, trying not to cry. A gaggle of students give her quick glances as they hurry out to classes. Then a doll dressed in maintenance coveralls comes through the door. It looks straight at Morag, and her nerve breaks. She runs out into the street and is almost knocked down by the taxi she ordered.

  As the taxi pulls away, Morag tells the driver she’s changed her mind, she doesn’t want to go to the Mobile Aid Team’s depot out by the airport, she wants to go into the city instead. The driver shrugs and pulls a U-turn right in front of the police cars that have drawn up in front of the apartment building.

  Morag spends the ride with her hands clamped between her thighs, letting deep shivers work adrenalin out of her blood. She ran once, she’s determined not to run again, but first she wants to know who she’s up against. She can’t go back to the two fringers, and she certainly can’t ask Dr Science, but in her short time with the Mobile Aid Team she’s already learned that there’s one person who knows everything that happens on the streets.

  Morag leans forward and tells the driver to take her to the Jardin des Plantes.

  12 – The Wild Hunt

  Claude the Cook has a well-established beat, swinging in from the Bidonvilles beyond the ribbon arcologies, through the half-abandoned suburbs to the centre of the city, and then back out again. Most of the aid workers know where to find him on any given day. Today his Cook-Out Collective is set up in a tree-shaded corner of the Jardin des Plantes, at the foot of the hillock crowned by the cedar of Jussieu, which that gentleman brought to Paris from London as a seedling nestled in his three-cornered hat.

  Claude is supervising the cooking pot, a big round iron cauldron smoking in the cold morning air over a wood fire. As always, it contains red beans and rice. About twenty men and women are eating breakfast from paper plates. Most hardly spare Morag a glance, but Claude greets her cheerfully.

  He is always cheerful, a strong pot-bellied man with a wide smile creasing his weather-beaten face. He lost his left arm in the American civil war, and the sleeve of his flannel checked shirt is pinned to his chest. He isn’t French, but a Cajun from the Louisiana bayous, and his name probably isn’t Claude. Everyone in the Mobile Aid Team knows Claude the Cook, and he knows more about the fringe than anyone else in and around Paris.

  Claude is especially happy today, because he’s hustled a tonne of day-old bread. He’s expecting a lot of people later on, after the bread is trucked over. Morag tells him who she’s looking for, and while he thinks it over, she takes a turn at stirring the mess of beans and rice with a heavy, metre-long wooden paddle that’s charred black along its edge.

  At last, Claude says, ‘I don’t know the fellow, but Justin over there, he was in the Legion. He could know.’

  Justin is a very young, very shy man, with raw wrists poking from the frayed cuffs of his filthy puffer jacket. He tells Morag that he used to hang out with a few guys from the Legion, and yes, one of them was called Armand.

  ‘But I haven’t seen him for a year now, a year at least.’

  ‘You don’t know where he went.’

  Justin shrugs. ‘Maybe he’s dead. Maybe not. He left the Legion before it was ready for him to leave, so he has good reason to hide out.’

  Morag asks if Justin can tell her anything else, and Justin thinks it over. ‘I remember his combat tag. What he was known by when he was in action.’

  ‘Like a nickname?’

  ‘More than that. Do you know how it is, in the Legion? They put in a chip loaded with what they call a partial personality. It learns off you until it can take over in combat. Then the officers can boot your ware, turn you wolf. So, see, it isn’t you fighting, doing that stuff you need to do to survive in intense situations. It’s the partial.’

  Justin wraps his arms around himself and rocks back and forth on his heels. He suddenly has a thousand metre stare.

  ‘It’s like, you aren’t even there,’ he says. ‘The partial uses you. It hacks
your meat, you understand? It has reflexes you haven’t even learned to use, and no morals. A compulsive something or other.’

  ‘Psychopath?’

  Justin smiles. ‘Sure.’

  ‘I thought that soldiers were just given extra reflexes.’

  ‘The partial has access to hardwired chip modes, shit like that, sure. But it puts you offline, too, so it isn’t inhibited by all the socialization stuff you learn as a very young kid. It doesn’t want your reflexes messing up its reflexes, so it just throws that big red switch in your head, boots the ware, and you’re gone. When it’s done, you come back, because the legion doesn’t want crazy people running around who are crazy all the time. You don’t remember what you did. That’s what they say. Except, sometimes, you dream. You dream stuff, and it’s mixed in with your normal life. That’s hard.’

  ‘I imagine.’

  ‘You can fucking imagine,’ Justin says evenly, ‘but you can’t ever know. When you’re discharged, they flash your chip to strip its codes, so it’s gone forever. I kind of slipped the net, but I made sure I got my chip flashed all the same. You don’t want that kind of thing in your head longer than you need. Even if your chip is flashed and pulled, you know, you still dream.’

  Morag meets this poor, haunted young man’s stare and says, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You wanted to know about Armand. There it is. He still alive?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘They called his partial Mister Mike. He was the communications operative, you understand. So he was called Mister Mike when his ware got booted. Know why I’m telling you this?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Word is, old Armand turned warewolf. A rogue, you understand? Last time I saw him, his chip was still functional. He said he was too scared to have it flashed. Said that Mister Mike told him not to do it. Poor Armand, he was more mixed-up than most. You excuse me now, mademoiselle,’ Justin says, and gets up abruptly and walks away. He doesn’t look back when Morag calls out her thanks.

  ‘Come back later,’ Claude advises. ‘I put the word out, find out more about this fucker.’

  It’s possible that the police caught him, but Morag seriously doubts it. She’s sure that the doll—the fairy—had come to set him free. Even now he might be on her track.

  For the first time since Africa, Morag buys a pack of cigarettes. The first tastes terrible, and the nicotine rush hits her so hard it makes her dizzy. The second is better. What the hell. It isn’t as if they give you cancer any more.

  She’s in a little café, getting warm. Coffee and cigarettes. Who first stumbled on this blessed combination? They should make her a saint.

  When she’s calmed down, she calls Dr Science. It takes her twenty minutes to get through his screening service, and when Dr Science finally answers he at first refuses point blank to see her.

  ‘I’ll go to the press,’ Morag says. There’s a silence. She says into it, ‘I mean it. This thing can’t go on.’

  ‘What thing is this, Morag?’

  ‘Not over the phone. Will you come and talk to me?’

  Dr Science suggests that she should come to the depot, and she tells him, no, and explains where she’ll be instead. He agrees reluctantly, and this gives her a thin satisfaction, like a skim of ice over a deep black cold lake. At least she has gained a bit of control.

  Dr Science arrives late, saying that he had trouble finding this dump, why couldn’t they talk at the depot or at least a decent restaurant? The place Morag has chosen has unnerved him: good. It is a cheap café that serves the students of the nearby medical school, tucked away in a little rubbish-strewn alley in the centre of the Left Bank. The Guillotine was perfected just around the corner, next door to Marat’s printing press, but the Left Bank has been going downhill ever since the expensive shops moved out, and hardly any tourists come here any more. Even the café has an armed guard on the door.

  Morag faces Dr Science across a trestle table they share with half a dozen students. Most of the noisy people around them are wearing white laboratory coats, and there’s a tang of formaldehyde that cuts through the haze of cigarette smoke. Waitresses bang down plates and flasks of wine with studied carelessness, shout orders to the chef who works behind a folding screen.

  ‘It isn’t beefsteak,’ Morag tells Dr Science, when the waitress slaps down their food. ‘It’s really horse.’

  She is feeling a fine adrenalin high now. She’s burning her bridges and it doesn’t matter. Perhaps later she’ll feel remorse, but right now she’s feeling a kind of rapturous glee.

  ‘So few places serve good horsemeat any more,’ Dr Science says coolly.

  His equanimity is returning, although he’s still uneasy. His denim jacket with the Harley Davidson logo sewn on the back, his Rough-rider jeans, his motorcycle boots, are all too new, too well-made. He has a scarlet handkerchief knotted at his throat that in his usual haunts would be a piece of studied carelessness, but here is an affectation. He’s a fashionplate about half a century out of date, and to Morag he’s never seemed so old as now.

  Morag can’t eat. She pushes food around on her plate, then she comes right out and asks for this one favour. She wants the truth about the murder to be known.

  Dr Science rears back from her, says something she can’t hear because of the noise. ‘No,’ he repeats. ‘It is out of the question.’ His eyes won’t meet hers.

  ‘It’s not just the little girl’s murder: her brother may still be alive. I can tell the police, they don’t have to know where the information came from.’

  ‘There are…compartments.’ Dr Science shapes divisions in the air. ‘Information in one cannot leak into another. It causes problems. I see you do not understand, but it’s true. In order to help the people of the Bidonvilles, we have to work in a kind of innocent vacuum. And we do help them, don’t we?’

  ‘At what cost?’

  ‘Morag, you should try and take in the whole picture. You are just seeing a little part of it.’

  ‘Fairies,’ Morag says. ‘A new kind of fairy. That’s what took the little boy. That’s what is killing the little girls.’

  ‘You see? You should not know this.’

  ‘Jules is dead. I think my roommate is dead. If I’m not careful that will be my fate, too. Tell me that you don’t know anything about what goes on in the Magic Kingdom. Tell me that the companies working at the Interface don’t know about it.’

  ‘Let me explain, my dear. The effect of technology on social trends is very unpredictable. It is not an exact science, any more than weather prediction can be exact. The more you look at the detail, the fuzzier the data get. As for fairies, trying to apply human logic to them is like trying to predict the weather on Mars by extrapolating what you know about weather here. It is very difficult. For a long time it wasn’t understood that the murders were a part of the changes that resulted in the Interface. Now that it is known, believe me, every effort is being made—’

  ‘I’ve seen the white vans. But it isn’t the feys who are doing this thing. It’s the fairies in the Magic Kingdom.’

  Dr Science throws up his hands. ‘You just don’t have all the information. You have some of it, but not all of it. It isn’t for you to make judgements.’

  ‘I’ve seen a fey. I’ve talked to him. This thing can’t be hidden any more.’

  Dr Science slices the last morsel of meat on his plate in two, eats first one half, then the other. He says, ‘Perhaps if you come back to my office, I can do something.’

  ‘I don’t have the time.’

  ‘Morag, you must trust me.’

  Morag realizes that she doesn’t trust him at all. With a sudden constricting dread, she feels that she is in the middle of some kind of ambush. She throws money on the table and pushes her way through the crowded café without looking to see if Dr Science is following her. Then she runs.

  She takes the steps of the Odéon Métro two at a time and rides the train out to Les Invalides, where she walks around the col
d, over-decorated spaces of the Église du Dôme until she feels calmer. A group of dolls controlled by virtual tourists are clustered in the ornate gallery around Napoléon’s sunken tomb. For the first time, Morag sees the dolls as slaves, jerked around at the whim of people who might be on the other side of the world. She watches them for so long that the armed guide who accompanies them comes over and asks her to move on.

  It’s growing dark by the time Morag returns to the Jardin des Plantes. There’s a steady stream of people making their way into the park. It’s popular with the homeless as a spot to bed down for the night, and as long as they strike camp at sun-up, the cops generally leave them alone.

  People have set up pitches under lampposts along the paths, the poor selling to the poor everything from half-used food packs to brand new TVs. A group of hackers have taken over a phone booth and are offering line access at reduced prices. There’s open dealing in drugs and fembot hits; users stagger across the grass, holding intense conversations with God or with aliens, or contemplate empty air with wonder, seeing cathedrals or angels, dragons or dead stars. In one part of the park, a group of people infected with the drumming meme have already set up, and their polyphonic rhythms rise and fall like distant surf.

  It occurs to Morag, moving amongst the homeless, that she is homeless too.

  The best pitches, under trees or against walls, have already been taken. Single men and women, sometimes whole families, are wandering about, looking for their own spot. Portable TVs murmur. Their flickering screens, most glowing with the red light of Mars, make it seem that a field of stars has fallen across the park.

  Claude the Cook and his helpers are busy, tending three big cauldrons and serving people as fast as they can. Firelight beating across trampled grass makes shadows move in the trees which lean out from the slope beyond. Cartons of processed bread are stacked head high. A couple of saxophone-playing buskers are giving a free performance; their wailing freeform scat twists into the night. When he’s not bawling at his crew, Claude blows on a harmonica in crude counterpoint, holding the instrument entirely in his mouth to leave his one hand free. He beats time with a big wooden paddle, splattering rice and beans.