Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Outside, the blonde guard says, ‘Three minutes, and then there’s no guarantee the AIs won’t have penetrated the worm’s cloak.’

  The fat man says, ‘They’ll only let us in if they want to, Bloch. You know that.’

  ‘Frontierland,’ Bloch says. ‘There’s a dozen ways in through the concession stores there.’

  The blonde guard says, ‘You were supposed to have scouted this out.’

  ‘I think we’ve rung their bell,’ the fat man says, and points at the mountain.

  Figures, small and skinny as children, scurry here and there on its crags, or stand silhouetted against the sky glow.

  Bloch says, ‘They know we have their warewolf. They won’t try anything.’

  Armand can smell his sweat.

  Bloch says, ‘We’ll go through the Frontierland storefronts.’

  They move forward The path is littered with bits of metal—parts of the machines sent in by spies and fools. Armand kicks at the litter until the blonde guard jerks on the cuffs. A bridge loops over an arm of the lake. Below its span, islands of foam stiff as beaten egg white drift and turn on the black water. On the far side, there’s a short street of old Wild West buildings, a movie set made three dimensional with scrupulous fidelity to an ideal of what never was. The buildings shimmer faintly, as if dusted with silver phosphorescence. The signs of the fairies crawl like black snakes through the dim glow. Fairies stand in every doorway, look down from balconies and the flat roofs.

  The fat man says, ‘Lead us, Armand. Take us to her.’

  Suddenly, two giants race down the street—or no, they are slim human children riding the broad stooped shoulders of squat, muscular dolls. The mounts are bridled, and slaver drips from their snaggle-toothed jaws as the riders turn them deftly to come to a halt before the four humans.

  It is the Twins. They point at Armand and say as one:

  ‘Mister Mike will do you slow and nasty.’

  The blonde guard steps forward, dragging Armand with her. ‘We’ve come to talk,’ she says. ‘Take us inside. Out here, everyone can see what’s going on.’

  Overhead, there is the noise of a helicopter, and then the blare of an amplified voice.

  The guard shouts, ‘Otherwise we’ll kill him!’

  ‘It’s too late—’

  ‘—too late to talk now the barbarians—’

  ‘—the barbarians are at the gates.’

  The Twins raise their hands above their heads in a grand gesture. In the doorways, on the balconies and roofs, the fairies step backwards into darkness.

  The fat man says, ‘It’s not the protest, is it? It’s her.’

  ‘You silly—’

  ‘—silly foolish—’

  ‘—silly foolish vain man—’

  ‘—we don’t fear her—’

  ‘—not in the way you fear her.’

  ‘We’ve done all we need—’

  ‘—everything we want—’

  ‘—and now it’s time to go.’

  The Twins look at each other—their equivalent of a shrug—then laugh and spur their shambling mounts. The brutes wheel and scamper away, their riders jouncing on their shoulders. At the same time, a gang of naked, muscle-bound goblins rush out of the storefronts.

  The blonde guard raises her machine-pistol, and Armand runs into her: the pistol’s short, sharp burst smashes fragments from the concrete around their feet. Armand is buffeted by a blow to his head, and after that everything seems to happen with underwater slowness.

  The blonde guard screams as she vanishes under a flurry of blue bodies. Armand is picked up by his arms and legs. Something wet hangs from his wrist; it is a severed hand, dangling in a ring of steel. Upside down, he sees headlights glare across the lake. A mob of people races towards the bridges, but then the things carrying him run into a frame of darkness, down into the familiar maze of corridors sparely lit by nodes of blue phosphorescence. The goblins run quickly, hooting softly to each other. Heat and a musky stench rises from them. Claws prick Armand’s biceps and calves. The goblins ignore Armand’s attempts to reason with them, and when he starts to shout, one clamps a hard leathery paw over his mouth and nose until he almost passes out. He’s never liked goblins. They are stupid creatures, loyal because they can only hold one idea at a time in their heads.

  Swiftly, he is carried through a long, wide corridor he hasn’t seen before. Cold air blows past, and suddenly they’re outside, beyond the perimeter of the Magic Kingdom. Armand twists his head and sees that a group of fairies are waiting. But these aren’t the Folk; they have the sharp, cruel, clever faces of feys, and they are carrying automatic weapons.

  For a moment, the two groups regard each other. Then the goblins drop Armand and with growls rising in their throats rush forward. Armand presses himself flat on the cold ground as gunfire hammers briefly. While the rest of the feys cut off the ears of the goblins for trophies, their leader walks over to Armand and squats beside him.

  Armand turns his head and looks into the fey’s dark, liquid eyes. He is resigned to death.

  The fey says, ‘The Queen wants you. Come with us, if you want to live.’

  17 – The Fairy Queen

  Morag sees Armand turn in his seat to stare at her as the jeep goes past, and she starts to run after it. Alex Sharkey is in the jeep too, sitting beside the security guard who ordered her away from the perimeter of the Magic Kingdom. The jeep turns a corner and disappears into the night. Morag goes on at a steady jog towards the only place it can have gone.

  Other jeeps start to overtake her, all heading in the same direction. Morag sticks out her thumb, and almost at once one stops. She’s so amazed she doesn’t move until the driver shouts at her, and then she climbs into the back. Two other people in orange coveralls just like hers make room for her.

  The jeep drives across the grills of the air curtain and picks up speed, racing around the perimeter road in the middle of a convoy of jeeps and trucks. The woman beside the driver is watching a flatscreen TV resting on her knees, and at one point she turns around and shouts, ‘They’re off the road! Off the road and heading for the perimeter!’

  Then the jeep crosses the railway line and tops a rise, and Morag sees what is happening. People are marching across the gentle swales and hummocks of the dumps behind half a dozen bulldozers and earthmovers with their racks of lights blazing, moving towards the floodlit boundary of the Magic Kingdom. A helicopter clatters overhead, probing the crowd with a laser spot.

  The jeep swerves to a halt beside two trucks parked end to end, and Morag jumps out with the others. People in orange coveralls are unloading reels of tanglewire. Beyond the trucks, activated reels jump and dance as they rearrange themselves, throwing out neat coils that climb over each other and shoot out clusters of razor-sharp spikes. People with tanks on their backs wield wand-like sprayers as they build up huge banks of stickyfoam.

  Morag can hear the crowd now, howling as one in sharp percussive phrases, but she can’t quite make out what it is they’re shouting. The helicopter whirs lower. Its loudspeakers clatter, and then a voice like the voice of God tells the people to disperse.

  The crowd reacts like a single organism. A forest of arms thrusts into the air and then the crowd surges forward. The bulldozers belch clouds of smoke as they accelerate and smash through the fence at the edge of the dumps. The lead bulldozer hits the tanglewire and keeps going, dragging a long vee of wire, until it smashes into the perimeter wall of the Magic Kingdom. It stalls, as if stunned, its blade buried under an avalanche of concrete blocks.

  People run forward and hurl arcs of liquid at the banks of sticky-foam, which promptly start to dissolve as exponentially multiplying fembots eat away the foam’s cohesive bonds.

  Two earthmovers dump mounds of trash on a section of tanglewire, and people start climbing this makeshift ramp.

  Morag runs forward to meet them, grinning like a maniac, shouting that she’s a friend, she’s on their side. A man holds out his arms and
catches her and whirls her around. It’s one of the drivers from the Mobile Aid Team, Kristoff.

  Together, they move forward in the middle of the crowd. ‘This is her,’ Kristoff keeps saying to people around him. ‘This is her! This is Morag Gray! The woman on TV!’

  And people smile and shake Morag’s hand. They know her. An old lady dressed in about a dozen falling jumpers layered over each other kisses her on the cheek; a man offers her a drink of wine from an unlabelled carton. Kristoff tells her that the call went out across the Web a few hours ago, and then someone inserted a pirate loop in the cable feeds of most of the local TV stations. People from the Bidonvilles, homeless people coached in from Paris, radical fringers and ordinary citizens: all have come together. It’s an instant protest, catching the police and the Interface’s security forces unawares. Morag thinks of Max, then wonders how he could have organized even one tenth of this.

  Kristoff says, ‘It grew! It just grew. Spontaneous organization!’

  A great cheer goes up around them. Morag realizes that they’re inside the Magic Kingdom. A dozen women in a kind of uniform of fringed black leather jackets and white jeans suddenly run towards one of the bridges across the lake. People are spreading out in confused knots. Off to one side, the roof of a house in mock Carpenter’s Gothic style is suddenly burning, the flames reflected in the foam-flecked black waters of the lake. There are people everywhere, suddenly running free through the fantasy landscape.

  Morag runs too. Somewhere beneath the Magic Kingdom is the little kidnapped boy, the fairy changeling. She runs towards the prickly towers of the great castle simply because it is in the centre. Flames from burning buildings send her shadow staggering ahead of her.

  Someone is standing on the drawbridge that leads into the high forbidding grey walls.

  It is the fey, First Rays of the New Rising Sun.

  He waits while Morag gets her breath back. Her back is hot under the coveralls, the rest of her chill with undried sweat. At last she can say, ‘I’ve come for the boy.’

  Ray shows his mouthful of needle-point teeth. ‘He’s not mine to give. But come with me anyway. We find him.’

  ‘If this is a trick I’ll break your spine.’

  ‘You are listening to the ideas of that crude woman. Trust me. I make a deal.’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Ray takes one of Morag’s hands. His skin is dry and hot. Morag lets him lead her through the castle gate. The fey suddenly lets go of her hand and shouts into the darkness, ‘This is the woman!’

  Another fey jumps on Morag’s back. She whirls around but the fey is clinging to her waist with its legs. Strong ringers pinch her nose shut until she must gasp for breath. A glob of something with the texture of raw liver is thrust inside and she tries to spit it out but it has dissolved into her tongue.

  ‘She wants this!’ Ray is shouting. ‘She wants this! Not me!’

  Then Morag is picked up and swung over a muscular shoulder. An animal’s muzzle thrusts towards her face. Tusks pierce its cheeks. The tusks are capped with silver. Talons prick through the coveralls as the thing tightens its grip and carries her down through long perspectives lit by wedges of dim phosphorescence.

  Morag is lying under the bare branches of a big tree, on a soft fur rug that generates an animal heat and ripples beneath her as she gets to her knees in the cold air. Strange blue faces swim in and out of flickering lights set in a wide circle around the tree. Long mournful faces with wide lipless mouths, faces with mouths crowded with crooked teeth, like old kitchen knives, or faces with a ruff of stiff quills standing around them, faces with snouts like pigs, or long morose muzzles, faces as round as the moon with tiny features centred in them. People, small, strange, blue-skinned people.

  Fairies.

  ‘It’s about time,’ Ray says.

  Morag turns. Ray is standing beside a woman sitting on a plain, high-backed chair. The woman is cloaked in a long, fur-trimmed velvet coat. A fantasticated helmet fringed with spikes and horns covers her face. Instead of eyepieces, it has four faceted lenses the size of saucers, so that the woman seems to have the head of a mantis. A cable runs from the back of the helmet into a computer deck lying on the withered grass.

  ‘I bring her,’ Ray says, ‘I am true to my word.’

  The woman reaches up and lifts the helmet from her head. Her face, its profile as keen as a knife, is the face that, from posters and pages torn from magazines, from TV screens, from the air above the Interface, blesses with its presence every shack and hovel of the Paris Bidonvilles.

  A fairy steps up and takes the helmet from the woman. She says to Ray, ‘We would have taken her anyway.’

  Ray shows his teeth. ‘I do so much for you, besides her. We talk about this, you say you help me, help my people—’

  The woman says coldly, looking at Morag rather than Ray, ‘I don’t do deals with feys. You helped me because you know what I am. You shouldn’t expect anything in return.’

  She makes a gesture, and a muscular, bandy-legged fairy steps forward. It smiles at Ray. Its teeth are fused in two jagged curves of ivory.

  Ray looks at Morag with something like desperation, and Morag says, her heart beating quickly, ‘I can’t help you, Ray.’

  Ray howls, and runs headfirst at the circle of fairies. There’s a knife in his hand, and its black, crooked blade slashes left and right, but the fairies simply step aside and he runs on, howling, into the darkness.

  The woman tells Morag, ‘You see that I am not cruel.’

  ‘You used Ray. I think you were using me, too, and Alex.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll not judge you. But I don’t think you’re a kind woman.’

  ‘You want the boy back, and you shall have him. He should not have been taken in the first place.’

  ‘Alex said you called yourself Milena, but that isn’t your real name, is it? I mean, no more than—’

  ‘I’ve changed myself, and soon I’ll change again. Soon it won’t matter what I’m called. I have little time left here, but that’s time enough for you to see what the boy will miss. It’s only fair, after all.’

  The woman points at a fairy and it steps forward and kneels before her, looking up expectantly. The woman produces a little plastic bottle half-full of a heavy, milky fluid which she drizzles into the mouth of the fairy. It crosses over to Morag, takes her face between its hot, dry hands, and kisses her. Morag kicks out and knocks it down, but not before the hot sweet taste of its tongue has entered hers. And then the violation doesn’t matter, because Morag sees.

  The night is alive with light, a river of stars carried by people with grave, beautiful, shuttered faces, endlessly rising from darkness and sinking away.

  ‘Walk with me a little while,’ the woman says, and picks up a slender, luminous wand. It lays a buttery gleam on the black skin of her face. The tree seems to reach down with its branches towards the light, as a man might warm his hands at a fire.

  Morag can feel the tree’s yearning for the light as they walk away; for a moment she thinks it might pull its roots from the ground and follow, no longer content to allow the world around it to fall into spring.

  The woman says, ‘I’ve sent my words on the wind, and those who recognize them will know where to go.’

  ‘You want the Magic Kingdom destroyed, don’t you?’

  ‘It was a mistake to let it live beyond its usefulness to me. I indulged my daughters, and they betrayed me. Do you know who lived here before history?’

  Morag says she doesn’t. She has the floating feeling of walking in a dream.

  ‘They were hairy, mostly, and lived in holes in the ground. When the first true people came here, with their axes of pure copper, the hairy ones would take babies. Sometimes the babies were rescued, but they never could be human. You can have the changeling my children took, with that warning. He will always be with me.’

  They have been walking up a slope, and
now they reach its crest. Beyond, a long procession winds across the land. From this vantage it seems endless, although Morag knows that can’t be true, because otherwise it would have been marching since the beginning of time, or would have no destination but an end in itself, having swallowed its own tail. It marches away from a burning city where huge, palely luminous ghosts haunt the air and giant insects buzz and chatter. A huge castle rises out of the flames, clawing heavenward with twisting towers.

  Morag knows that this is the true aspect of the Magic Kingdom. She also knows that this is a hallucination, but she doesn’t care. She feels a scary giddy glee at the way in which the world has been transformed. Happy. Her fear has become happiness, and it is this which makes her scared.

  ‘We walk into the future, as we always have, second by second, but time is so much richer now that every second compresses a whole sheaf of years into its tick or tock. Fairyland isn’t a place,’ the woman says, ‘it’s a hyperevolutionary potential. It is where we can dream ourselves into being. Remember to tell Alex that, if you see him.’ She gestures towards the darkness. ‘My children’s poor king.’

  A group of fairies, slender and beautiful, talking animatedly, climb the slope, bowing low as they pass the woman. Behind them trudges a tall, burly, one-eyed man, dressed in scraps of armour and leather rags. A poisonous snake wraps his left wrist, biting into swollen tender flesh. There are ivy leaves in his hair, and his ruined eye drips tears of blood that steam when they strike the frozen ground.

  The woman bids him draw near. He kneels and says, ‘I failed. Forgive me.’

  ‘I forgive you because you failed,’ the woman says. She touches his bleeding eyesocket with long white fingers. ‘I can’t heal you, and perhaps that’s best.’

  ‘It was the Twins,’ the man says. ‘They brought out Mister Mike.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the woman says with sharp impatience.

  Morag knows now who the King is.

  He says pleadingly, ‘I didn’t believe them when they said they would rule the world. But perhaps Mister Mike believed them, do you think?’