Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Morag smokes a cigarette and waits until Claude has time to talk with her. When he comes over she offers him what she is dismayed to find is her last cigarette—how did she get through the pack so quickly?

  ‘I gave up again,’ Claude says, ‘Can’t have ash in the food, eh?’

  ‘It’s an amazing operation.’

  ‘There’s a couple of guys who go around making little gardens in patches of waste ground. Maybe you know of them?’

  ‘I think I saw one in an old industrial estate. There was a pond, flowers, a packing case bench. Lots of ivy up a wall.’

  ‘Right. You know where to look, you can find these little gardens all over. It keeps those guys sane, and it claims back little bits of the city. We’re an invisible country that’s all around you if you know how to look. There are signs and pathways and meeting places. There have always been drinking places, of course, and the junkies and thieves hang out together because that’s what junkies and thieves do. But there are places where you can meet like-minded people to play chess, shoot the breeze, whatever. Those two guys playing sax are part of a collective who hold clinics and jam sessions where people can improve their skills. You know what I’m saying?’

  ‘I’ve seen a little of it.’

  Claude grins. He is sweating despite the cold. He smells powerfully of sweat and woodsmoke. A red bandanna is tied around his forehead, and he wears a white apron over his coveralls.

  ‘We appreciate your work. That soup kitchen over by the main entrance—they mean well, too. But we have our own thing. I tried settling down once, holding a steady job. I really was a cook, but fuck that shit, being told what to do, working for the system. We have our own system.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I put the word out. Told them it was someone from the Mobile Aid Team asking. There’s a bunch of guys, Algerians, who sell jewellery on the street. The kind made out of scrap copper? They heard of this guy. Couple of them waiting up by the trees there, if you want to talk with them. Hey, give me that cigarette?’

  Morag hands him the pack. Claude flips the cigarette out, holds it up, then crumbles it between his big fingers.

  ‘Smoking’s bad for you. Now I do you two favours.’

  And he laughs and wanders off to shout at his helpers some more.

  Morag introduces herself to the two Algerians, and the older man tells her, in a voice dry as dust, that yes, he knows this fellow well. He is well known to all the people who live in the Magic Kingdom.

  ‘Say that again?’

  ‘You know it,’ the old man says. The hood of his jacket is pulled up around his face, so that only the end of his white beard can be seen.

  ‘You live there?’

  Morag is uncomfortably aware that the other Algerian is looking at her intently—but with a kind of wistfulness, not menace. She returns his gaze, and he says, ‘The man you are looking for has a troubled mind, but he keeps the afreets away from us.’

  ‘Afreets?’ Morag is discovering that the more she knows, the less she understands. Then she says, ‘Of course! Fairies!’

  ‘Some call them that,’ the older man says. Something moves inside the shadows of the hood around his face: it is a white rat. The whiskers on the end of its pink snout twitch as it snuffles the air.

  Something the little girl told her comes back to Morag, and her entire skin prickles.

  A helicopter is beating through the black air above the Jardin des Plantes. Its searchlight is a brilliant pencil of white light that flicks this way and that. The branches of the trees on the slope that rises above the cook-out shiver in the wake of the helicopter’s downdraught as it passes overhead.

  Morag asks, ‘Did you ever hear the name Mister Mike?’

  The second Algerian says quietly, ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Who? Who?’

  But neither man replies.

  The helicopter is coming back. It is flying low and very slowly, turning this way and that with abrupt insectile movements. The white spear of its laser spot strikes down, winks off, strikes down in another spot. All over the park, people are standing to watch it. Beyond the main gate of the park is the blue flicker of police vehicle lights.

  Morag realizes that Dr Science has somehow set her up. The helicopter is drifting sideways above Claude’s makeshift kitchen. Smoke from the cooking fires is driven out in all directions. Cartons tumble, scattering sheaves of bread like a sudden miracle. A spear of light stabs down, transfixes Claude in the act of defiantly shaking a wooden paddle above his head. The helicopter’s downdraught makes his coveralls flutter and snap. He is shouting.

  The light goes out, comes on again over a patch of trampled ground. It winks out, then illuminates the two Algerians. They are not looking at the helicopter: they are looking at Morag. The younger man is crying steadily. Tears glisten on his cheeks and drop silently from his chin. His mouth is open. His tongue curls and writhes like a pinned snake, but he can’t speak.

  Morag walks backwards into the trees, then turns and runs. The helicopter rises above the slope. Its spot snaps on and off like lightning amongst interlaced branches. Morag runs right through an encampment, narrowly avoids stepping on a woman swaddled in filthy blankets. She vaults a low fence, cutting her hands on its wire, and runs across the asphalted space at the top of the hill. The branches of the gracious old cedar tree doff as if in a storm, and a blizzard of fragrant needles blow around Morag.

  Light stabs down, diffracted by foliage into a moire pattern. The helicopter is directly above. An amplified voice clatters, is cut short by an electronic blare. Morag runs around the tree and down the steep steps on the far side. A man looms out of the darkness and tries to catch her arm, but she shoves at him and runs past without breaking stride. He shouts after her, but she’s already gone.

  There’s a little garden at the bottom of the steps, with a pond where the round leaves of water-lilies step across black water. Morag runs straight into the pond and throws herself forward, crying out with the shock of the freezing water.

  She stands up, water streaming from her sodden clothes, then ducks underwater again as the helicopter passes overhead. Light strikes a dozen metres off, illuminating a white stone statue of a naked woman, winks out. The helicopter moves on.

  Fembots. Somehow, Dr Science put fembot tracers on her. It doesn’t take much. A touch can transfer thousands of tiny sound recorders, transmitters and single shot fisheye-lensed cameras whose digitized pictures can be recalled after retrieval. The water has washed them away, and the trace the helicopter was following has been destroyed.

  Morag wades to the edge of the pond. Shivers strike to her bones as she clambers out. A man is standing by the statue of the woman. He seems to have materialized there, a spectre mixed up from shadow and the green glow of a nearby lamp. It is the hungry-looking man from the apartment. He holds up a pair of plastic grips and pulls them apart with a sharp, sudden motion. There’s a humming twang, and Morag knows that he is the warewolf, that what he holds is a monofilament strangling cord.

  ‘Armand,’ she says, amazed that she can speak, she’s so scared. ‘Armand, don’t. I can help.’

  The warewolf grins and runs straight at her. Light explodes inside Morag’s head. She’s pinned to the ground. The warewolf grips her hair and pulls, trying to lift her head. She yells and twists, knowing that if he gets the monofilament around her neck he can sever the major blood vessels with a single twist.

  And someone shouts a shrill cadence. ‘Sirius! Sirius! Sirius!’

  Morag’s hair is released so suddenly she bangs her head on the ground. She lies there, stunned, as the man is lifted off her. Someone helps Morag up. It is Katrina. She is grinning like a fool.

  The warewolf, Armand, sprawls on his back a couple of metres away. He’s sobbing, making odd strangled noises. Alex Sharkey stoops over him and says awkwardly, ‘There, there. There, there.’

  Morag sees that she has been set up. They let her walk away and walk right into t
his. ‘You fuckers,’ she says furiously. ‘You stupid fuckers.’

  Katrina scratches at the strip of leopard fur on top of her skull. She is dressed in black leather jeans and a black leather blouson half zipped over a furry red liner. She says, ‘It worked, didn’t it?’

  Morag kicks Katrina in the knee. The woman doubles over, and Morag gets in a couple of whacks around her head before Katrina grabs her wrist, spins her around and pulls one arm up behind her back.

  ‘You might be more grateful,’ Katrina says in Morag’s ear. ‘I mean, we just saved your ass.’

  ‘Fuckers!’ Morag shouts, so loudly that it hurts her throat. The echo comes back from the hillock.

  Katrina laughs and lets Morag go. ‘You’re all right,’ she says.

  Morag flexes her hand. The knuckles hurt. She says, ‘You have a rock for a skull.’

  ‘Why are you so angry? You didn’t do anything we asked you to do. You went ahead by yourself.’

  Katrina’s aggrieved tone ignites Morag’s anger again. ‘My roommate is dead. He killed her, he was waiting for me when I went back to the apartment. You knew what I was walking into, didn’t you? You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Well,’ Katrina says reasonably, ‘you didn’t ask.’

  Alex Sharkey says, ‘I told you not to go home. I thought something like that might happen.’

  Morag starts to walk away.

  Alex says, ‘The cops are still looking for you.’

  Morag turns. ‘Yes, and did you set that up?’

  ‘Of course not. As a matter of fact, it’s a considerable inconvenience. But if you want to leave the park without being arrested, you’ll have to trust us.’

  13 – Information Flow

  Katrina turns the taxi’s heater up to full as she drives across the river. Wrapped in Alex Sharkey’s overcoat, Morag crouches in the hot roar of the vents. Her shivers go bone deep, and she hardly notices where she’s being taken. The back of her neck is especially cold; as part of the strategy to get Morag past the police checkpoint, Katrina gave her a quick but expert haircut. Morag keeps touching her hair. She hasn’t worn it this short since she was at school.

  Alex is in the back of the taxi with the warewolf, Armand. He tells Morag that he found the switch word, the command that officers use to cancel the ware in their soldiers’ heads.

  ‘If there’s a command to throw the switch on, then there has to be one to reset it,’ he says smugly. ‘I got it off a node in the Web a while back. Someone hacked the Ministry of Defence and downloaded the specs on warewolf chips, compressed them and put them on the Web. Nothing hackers like better than showing off the inside info they’ve cracked. The switch word was buried in the default commands. It worked like a charm, don’t you think?’

  Morag thinks he’s behaving like the hackers he pretends to despise. She’s warmed up enough to be able to start peeling away the pseudoderm gloves which gave her fingerprints to match the false ID they used at the checkpoint. The stuff clings stubbornly to her skin, and comes away in strips and patches.

  ‘It worked like a magic spell,’ Katrina says, and laughs her cracked laugh.

  They stop outside a shuttered shop in a narrow street. A young woman lets them in. She’s a pale nervous wraith with stringy blonde hair who, when Alex starts to explain, shrugs, takes Morag by the hand, and leads her past empty display cabinets to a tiny bathroom. The blonde gives Morag a big, threadbare towel, and drifts off without a word. The towel is purple, with yellow sea creatures printed on it.

  Morag strips off Alex’s overcoat and her own soaked clothes, and wraps herself in the towel. Her newly cut hair is merely damp now. Following the sound of voices, she climbs a spiral stair to what was once an open-plan office. Desks and angled partitions are still in place. Overhead, swags of cable loop between cracked ceiling tiles. The windows are covered with aluminium foil.

  For a moment, Morag thinks she sees something drift around a pillar and spiral up into the hole behind a dangling air-conditioning vent. She blinks hard—it was a tiny fairy, with wings and a white dress and a star-pointed wand. It has left a trail of silvery motes which wink out one by one.

  Behind Morag, Katrina says, ‘Fetching outfit.’

  Katrina has taken off her leather jacket and is doing vigorous one-handed chin-ups using an overhead pipe. There are dark sweatstains under the sleeves of her grey T-shirt. Behind her, the warewolf is lying on a desk with the complete muscular relaxation of the recently dead.

  ‘We gave him a dose,’ Katrina says cheerfully. She isn’t even out of breath. ‘The poor fucker was so zonked he wouldn’t do anything but cry. You can do what you want, I won’t say anything.’

  Morag gathers the towel around herself more tightly. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Me,’ Katrina says, swapping hands smoothly and chinning the pipe, ‘I’d kick him in the balls to begin with. Then give him one or two in the kidneys perhaps, so he pisses blood for a couple of days. Beat on his ribs so it hurts when he breathes. It slows him down, too. Then I would think about some permanent damage.’

  ‘It wasn’t him. I mean, he was being controlled.’

  ‘Shit, baby, what do you know? Soldiers start to confuse themselves with their ware personalities because a good part of the ware personality comes from them in the first place. Most of the rest is just preprogrammed routines and reflexes.’

  ‘Even if it was him, I don’t want to hurt him.’

  ‘You would turn him over to the police, I suppose.’

  Morag retorts, ‘No. No, I wouldn’t. Because he knows the way into the Magic Kingdom.’

  Katrina pulls herself up with both hands, then shifts her grip on the pipe so that she can raise her body parallel to it. She looks down at Morag and says, ‘Good idea, but Alex will tell you the bad news about that. Go on. I will not hurt your boyfriend.’

  Morag can smell coffee. It goes right to her back brain. Clutching her towel, she follows the aroma to the middle of the open plan office’s dusty maze. Lounging in a bartered, padded swivel chair, and lit by a vertical biolume tube that gives his jowly face a lizard tint, Alex is repeating his story to a man in a sky-blue djellabah who is perched on a tall stool.

  On the desk behind the man, translucent shapes tumble and spin above a computer deck’s holostage. A bundled monofilament fibreoptic cable, no thicker than a hair but capable of carrying more traffic than all the cables in this old office space, runs from the back of the computer and disappears into the ceiling. Half a dozen silver flasks stand inside a constant temperature waterbath, and a thermostatic stage is cycling through a programme with a staccato of clicks as its heater switches on and off. Beside the stage is a Braun coffee maker, its jug half full.

  The man glances at Morag, then tells Alex, ‘You’re lucky the switch worked, dood.’

  Alex blows steam from a brimming mug, sips, and tells the man, ‘He was a deserter, and the chip was wiped. Whoever is using him hasn’t bothered with the code or doesn’t know how to change it.’ He smiles at Morag.

  ‘Give me some of that coffee,’ Morag says.

  ‘This is Max,’ Alex says. ‘It isn’t his real name, of course.’

  Max hands Morag a mug of coffee. He’s no more than twenty, with nappy hair and very black skin. His pupils are beaten gold; he’s wearing the kind of contact lenses that transmit images directly to the retina. Tribal scars, a pattern of little crescents, are incised in the skin over his cheekbones.

  ‘You’re a lucky lady,’ Max says. ‘There’s no milk.’

  ‘I drink it black. What would you be, another flake with a theory?’

  There’s a flash of silver at the edge of Morag’s vision. The little fairy hovers right before her eyes, blows her a kiss, and vanishes in a puff of silver flakes.

  Alex says, ‘Max works in the visual arts.’

  ‘He’s a love bomber,’ Morag says. ‘You’re growing fembots right here without protection. One of your creations just zapped me.’

  Max smiles.
‘Tinkerbell? She’s no fembot.’

  ‘A hologram then. Bounced on to my retinas by hidden projectors. Look, I’m not as stupid as both of you assume me to be. Don’t patronize me. I’d as soon walk out of here, except you silly people seem to be at the centre of what I need to know.’

  ‘There’s no need to go to the police,’ Alex says, hands up in a soothing gesture. ‘We have our own way of dealing with this. Go with it, Morag. That way we’ll all get what we want.’

  ‘Except Jules and Nina. They’re dead. And the poor little girl, all the poor little girls.’ Tears prick Morag’s eyes. ‘Damn you all,’ she says.

  The washed-out blonde drifts up, Morag’s clothes over her arm. They have been dried but not cleaned. She hands Max two squares of adhesive tape in a glassine envelope and says, ‘Positive.’

  ‘Now we’ll see,’ Max says.

  ‘We pulled fembots from your clothes,’ Alex tells Morag, ‘and from the warewolf.’

  Morag sets down the coffee mug and wipes her eyes with the heel of her palm. ‘Armand. His name is Armand, What are you going to do to him?’

  ‘Pull his chip might be an idea. Will you help?’

  ‘I thought he could lead us into the Magic Kingdom.’

  ‘I can ask him, but I can’t guarantee anything. The last time I tried some persuasion, it set off his chip. The ware personality surfaced and it tried to strangle Kat.’

  Max says, ‘The army doesn’t like its soldiers to be interrogated, so attempts at forced questioning will bring out the worst in them.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll help if we ask him.’

  Alex says, ‘Perhaps, but we really must pull the chip first. Even without the chip he’s seriously disturbed, but at least without it we won’t have to worry about setting off the ware personality. Will you help us draw his teeth?’