Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  The door has been broken open. A looped infinity sign with a dependent cross has been scrawled in white above the frame. Inside the house, someone has pulled down the heavy curtains and tried to set fire to the Persian carpet, but water from pipes ripped from the walls has put out the flames, leaving a stench of wet char.

  The computer deck is gone. Alex says that it was just a terminal, like Max’s, that his data files are stored elsewhere. But he’s lost something of his cheerfulness, and sits on a plastic chair and stares into the distance, ignoring Morag’s questions, while Katrina rummages noisily through the house. When she comes back, she says there’re signs all through.

  ‘Fucking Ray fucked us over.’

  Morag asks if it’s fairies, but Alex says no, it’s the Children’s Crusade.

  ‘I think we definitely have her attention now,’ he says. ‘Come on. They’ll have sown monitors here and I can’t trust my scavengers to find every one.’

  Outside, Katrina says, ‘That little fucker. I see his blue face and his stupid grin he’s dead.’

  Alex says, ‘We don’t know it was him.’

  Katrina says, ‘You are too trusting. The fucker is working both sides. As usual. He was her creature all along. She will know everything.’

  ‘No, not everything. I think we still have a chance.’

  ‘Without Ray?’

  ‘Well, you didn’t trust him, so it should make no difference to you. We have Bloch, and we have the warewolf. Last time it was just us.’

  ‘Last time we nearly got fucking killed,’ Katrina says. ‘One more thing, I say we leave her here.’

  ‘You try,’ Morag tells her.

  Katrina gives her a hard cold look.

  ‘We made a deal,’ Alex says. ‘Don’t give me a hard time over this, Katrina. We’re in enough trouble as it is.’

  Armand has woken up in the taxi, and has been trying to free himself. He reeks of sweat, and his wrists are raw where be has been pulling at his handcuffs. He glares at them through greasy hair that’s flopped down over his starved face.

  ‘You’ll get yours,’ he says. ‘I have friends.’

  He keeps this up on the drive out of the city, laughing when Katrina reaches around to slap at him. ‘You wait,’ he says. ‘You wait.’

  Alex says, ‘You’re on your own, my friend. The killer in your head is gone, and without him your little friends won’t have much use for you. Think about it.’

  This shuts Armand up for a while. They stop at a transport café just off the motorway. Katrina stays in the taxi to keep an eye on Armand. Inside, Morag drinks nutmeg-flavoured coffee while Alex devours three cheeseburgers, one after the other.

  ‘You should eat,’ he says, speaking English, ‘Keep your strength up.’

  ‘I want to know what you’re doing this for,’ Morag says.

  Alex dabs at his greasy lips with a napkin. He is uncomfortable and anxious, squeezed behind the fibrechip table in the little privacy booth. Now that he is committed to act, he realizes that he depends upon this determined but naïve young woman more than he can admit. And he can’t possibly explain the glamour that was cast over him so long ago, that pulls at him still for all that he was used and then abandoned.

  He says, ‘There was this fellow I met in Amsterdam. I learnt something from him about the kind of fairies that have taken over the Magic Kingdom.’

  ‘Was this when you met Katrina?’

  ‘Just before. Dr Luther had a kind of brothel, and used zeks as assistants. You know how that works?’

  ‘I worked in a parole clinic for a wee while.’

  ‘Dr Luther had special requirements. He used zeks with medical training to help him convert dolls into sex toys, and he could get around the limitations of zek control chips. He also dealt with fairies, a kind of side business. One of his assistants got mixed up with the fairies, and they gave him a taste of something special.’

  Morag makes a connection. ‘Armand needs something, doesn’t he? Something the fairies give him.’

  ‘I’ve heard it called soma, but it certainly isn’t much like the drug of the Rig-Veda. It transforms your perception of the world, and gives you an intense sense of well-being, but you remain functional. It’s also very addictive. Someone once told me it strips away the veil, shows you the light of creation shining through base objects. She said it really does put you in Fairyland, But you don’t just need the drug, you need to be infected with something that knits itself into the muscle of your tongue and grows up into your limbic system. And that’s all I know.’

  ‘People would pay for something like that?’

  ‘Of course. Drugs tend to reflect the stresses of the times. Think of the craze for mood-altering drugs at the turn of the century, when people struggled to adjust themselves to an ideal. Now there’s a reaction to the kind of mass psychosis prevalent in the late twentieth century. People want individual trips. They want to disappear inside themselves. Think of all those geezers and babushkas in their little cells in the ribbon arcologies, with only the artificial intimacy of the Web to connect them to other human beings. They spend much of their lives inside their own heads. One of the things Max monitors is social trends. There are thousands of mobots scattered across the Moon and Mars which people can plug into any time they want to—soon there will be at least a million on Mars alone, because the astronauts are setting up a factory there. There’s the self-replicating probe in Jupiter. People in the ribbon arcologies spend at least half their lives in virtuality or plugged into some machine that experiences the world for them.’

  Morag thinks of the excursion dolls that march in obedient crocodile files through the streets and museums and monuments of Paris, each with a virtual tourist gazing through its eyes.

  Alex says, ‘The next step is to move across the mind-machine barrier. It’s been possible for five years, although impossibly expensive. But it’s what an increasing proportion of humanity want. This is an age of solipsists, and I used to cater to that. It’s how I made my living. I started by making psychoactive viruses for ravers, and more recently I fell in with love bombers like Max. And there’s even more extreme stuff out in the world than anything I’ve ever made. Even more extreme than soma, believe me.’

  Morag says impatiently, ‘What does this have to do with rescuing the poor wean?’

  ‘Armand needs soma. It’s physiologically addictive, and he’ll be hurting bad pretty soon. We’ll let him go and he’ll lead us in. I have a contact in the Interface who will help. At a price.’

  ‘And then what will you do?’

  ‘We’ve done this before. Trust us.’

  ‘As long as you find out how to make soma? That’s what you’re really after?’

  ‘I told you what I’m after. The soma is just for finance.’

  ‘This woman. I wish I could believe it was as simple as that.’

  ‘Love is never simple,’ Alex says.

  14 – The Interface

  They drive into the Interface without any trouble. Alex pays the outrageous toll with a platinum credit chip, and the taxi is waved through into the big, mostly empty parking lot.

  Armand is nodding out, sweating heavily and shivering. Morag recognizes the symptoms. He’s going cold turkey, with vascular collapse a real possibility. She wants to get him stabilized, but Alex says that it won’t be fatal, and Morag has to believe him. Still, she gets a little orange juice down Armand’s throat before she leaves him in the taxi with Katrina and follows Alex across the parking lot.

  The Interface has grown up around the ruins of the main gate of the Magic Kingdom and the biggest of the resort hotels. The hotel’s original structure has platforms and towers bolted on to it, crowding up around each other like plants fighting for light, all turned towards the Magic Kingdom. There are even camera platforms suspended from tethered blimps. The plump, silvery blimps swivel and flash like pregnant guppies above the Interface’s unregulated sprawl. Close by the perimeter of the Magic Kingdom, filter traps, like pl
antations of giant black sunflowers, hoover the air for fembots and gengineered microbes let loose by the fairies.

  Corporate research teams rent space in the hotel itself, paying astronomical prices for any room with a glimpse of the Magic Kingdom. But much of the surveillance and sampling of the Magic Kingdom is carried out by freelances. They live and work and play in trailers and slab prefabs and inflated tents strung out along pot-holed roads or muddy tracks, and in houseboats floating on the long lake.

  The Interface is an unplanned zone driven by the Invisible Hand of free enterprise. Like a nineteenth century gold rush camp, extremes of opulence and squalor sit side by side. There are a dozen different communications systems, and a web of competing power-lines and cableways is strung overhead. Walls are scribbled with spraytags and scaled with responsive posters: an unwary step can loose a spray of advertising meme carriers in your face. There are fast food stands and credit washrooms, and dozens of tiny bars. Holograms hang above trailers and the flat roofs of prefabs, from the sharp, tiny signs of one-person operations to the serene, towering icons of the megacorps. Virtuality, Sanyo, Sega-IBM, InScape: characters from electronic dreams loom into the sky as huge and insubstantial as gods, the luminous figures Morag sees every night as she works the Bidonvilles to the south and east of the Interface.

  Alex leads Morag through this maze of narrow streets at a good pace for a man of his bulk. Concrete paving gives way to astroturf to trampled mud and back to paving again. A Japanese TV crew is taping an interview with some teenage scout, who, lounging in black jeans, black leather jacket and video shades, is irradiated in a hyperreal glow from floating lamps. One street is blocked by sawhorses strung with bio-hazard tape, and a crew in decontamination suits, looking like Mars astronauts, is working inside a bubble thrown up over a prefab.

  ‘Things get out of hand sometimes,’ Alex tells Morag.

  He’s excited by the palpable buzz of the Interface’s runaway commercialism. His face is flushed, and his breathing is alarmingly stertorous.

  ‘You should have seen it when it first set up,’ he says. ‘The big corporations have marginalized everyone else now, but in the beginning it was a scramble where anyone could come out a winner. Now most of the small outfits are trying to work up stuff from the discards of the bigger outfits, gleanings that aren’t worth the trouble of screening. The fairies seem to be manufacturing their stuff by hyper-fast Darwinian selection. They don’t design anything, they just seed a tailored environment and sit back and wait for something to win out over everything else. As a result, there are a million varieties of fembot that don’t seem to do anything, but which could turn out to possess some novel and commercially useful feature. A lot of the gengineered stuff is junk, too, and most of the rest is nothing but stripped homeoboxes, strings of DNA coding for sets of effector proteins, but without any kind of activator or regulator. People bolt on all kinds of transcription instructions, and most times it doesn’t work. And when it does, most times it doesn’t do anything, or starts replicating in futile cycles of junk DNA. And usually when you do get something to work, you don’t want what it does. Containment is the only thing that is regulated here, but sometimes it breaks down. Or it is broken down.’

  Morag has noticed that half the passers-by are wearing the same kind of goggles and mask that the blonde woman gave her when the Children’s Crusade raided Max’s place. There’s not only the risk of fembots small as bacterial spores drifting across from the Magic Kingdom; there are the products of a thousand unlicensed bioware and nanotech labs to contend with. Every month, someone in the European Parliament calls for the shutdown of the world’s biggest uncontrolled bioreactor, this century’s Chernobyl or Sellafield in the making. Nothing blown out or released or traded by the fairies has ever been proved infective, but that doesn’t mean that some gene hacker won’t make it so, by design or by mistake. Or that one day the fairies will not release something that will make HIV or Ebola virus look like the common cold. But the simple fact is that Europe needs the money; the demands of its vast social infrastructure are outstripping its shrinking manufacturing base.

  Anything is possible in the Interface, but even so Morag is amazed when they turn a corner and run into a Children’s Crusade revival meeting. One moment she and Alex are walking down a muddy track between slab concrete walls; the next, they are in the middle of a holographic vision of a pastoral heaven out of the chiliastic paintings of John Martin, with a celestial city shining like golden soap bubbles beyond the gauzy distance of English meadows. Angels as vacuously handsome as soap opera stars rush towards them, and Alex grabs Morag’s arm and hustles her back the way they came, out of range of the meeting’s sensors.

  ‘Anyone who can afford it can set up here,’ Alex says. ‘You understand that the Children’s Crusade has more reason than most.’

  He leads Morag to a long lake where houseboats and rafts rub together, linked by pontoon causeways or simply strung in rows, so that you have to clamber from deck to deck to get where you are going. At the outer edge of this shabby archipelago is a bar built inside a steel barge grounded to its gunwales on the muddy bottom of the shallow lake. Its deck is a tottering cascade of platforms, some with little gardens, others bearing wire or dish aerials, one with a holographic miniature of Escher’s paradoxical watermill, shining in bright colours on this grey day. On the tallest platform is a pay telescope of the kind that used to be found along every beachfront in Europe. It is pointed towards the distant towers of the Magic Kingdom. Skull and crossbone flags and banners fly from a skeletal microwave mast; the largest, in letters made of skulls and long bones, proclaims that this is the Oncogene.

  The inside is done out in tacky red velour plush and industrial steel. Blue and bronze welds scar mirror-polished surfaces. At one end is a pool table, with black baize and balls patterned like monochrome Bridget Riley prints. At the other end is a bar counter backed by a huge TV showing, like the information screens at an airport, acronyms and number strings that continually scroll up line by line.

  A bored bartender is watching a soap opera on a palm-sized TV. The only customer is a lanky man who sits crosslegged on a couch, scribbling on a slate. This is Alex’s contact. His name is Pieter Bloch. He has a long, morose face, and a shock of grey hair like electrified wire wool. He squints at Morag, taking in her waterstained quilted coat, and says to Alex, ‘You said nothing about this person. Where is Kat?’

  ‘Things change,’ Alex says affably. ‘You know how it is.’

  Morag returns Bloch’s stare until the man looks away and says, ‘I don’t like sudden changes. First there was this mass release, and now you bring this strange woman I do not know.’

  Alex says, ‘What mass release?’

  ‘You do not know?’

  ‘Let’s all have a beer,’ Alex suggests. ‘Then you can tell me about it.’

  The bartender opens three Heinekens—Heineken, blond or dark, is all the bar serves—by knocking off the caps on the edge of the counter. Bloch takes a long swallow of beer, wipes his mouth, and tells Alex that huge numbers of a single type of fembot were discharged into the air above the Magic Kingdom just after dawn.

  ‘There are plenty of rumours about what it’s for, believe me, but no one yet knows. The consensus is that it is a meme carrier.’

  ‘It got past the air curtains?’

  ‘Of course it did. They never really work. Prevailing winds were towards Paris, too.’

  Morag says, ‘Is it dangerous?’

  Bloch shrugs.

  ‘So,’ Alex says, ‘the fairies love bombed Paris. It’s an interesting coincidence.’

  ‘You know it is not a coincidence. The Magic Kingdom is either breaking down or undergoing some drastic change. This release is a part of the situation. You have the human agent? Where is he being held?’

  ‘He’s safe enough.’

  Morag feels a sudden spurt of anger. She is beginning to realize how much she has been used. This has all been planned, and now sh
e has been used as bait for the warewolf there is no real part left for her to play.

  ‘So we can go in tonight,’ Alex says to Bloch.

  ‘Don’t worry about that side of things. It’s in my hands now. Trust me.’

  Morag, who doesn’t trust either of them, says, ‘What about the security here?’

  Bloch makes a kind of snorting noise through his nose.

  Alex says patiently, ‘Anyone can try and penetrate the Magic Kingdom, but no one wants to destroy it. The big corporations are probing it all the time, but no one gets very far. Nor do they want to, as long as the fairies continue to produce the goods. The aim of security here is to prevent attacks on the Magic Kingdom and the infrastructure of the Interface, to keep the outside outside. That’s why we need specialist help to be able to sneak in—centimetre for centimetre, the Magic Kingdom is probably the most heavily watched spot on the planet.’

  Morag thinks of how quickly the security guards arrived, and realizes that the perimeter peeper wasn’t running from them, he was running from her. Association by guilt. And then it really hits her. The murder—all the murders—must have been witnessed by dozens of cameras and surveillance devices.

  She says, ‘Tell me one thing. Was I part of your plans from the beginning? When you saw the little girl’s murder, when you saw who did it, when you saw me, Jules and me, find the body, did you work it all up then? Or were you just waiting for something like this to happen?’

  Alex says, ‘The fairies have been taking ovaries from little girls for at least a year.’

  ‘But we disturbed them, and they wanted to get rid of us. That’s when you saw Armand, wasn’t it? That’s when you decided to use me as bait.’

  Alex says, ‘Even if that’s so, what does it matter? We’ll take you in. Don’t worry.’

  Bloch says, ‘If the little boy is alive, I’ll find him.’

  Perhaps this is meant to reassure Morag, but the flip way he says it reveals that for him this is a trivial part of the operation.