Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

‘My children may rule the world one day—who knows? But not here, not yet. Now be still.’

  And the King becomes stone, except that a rill of bright blood trickles down his granite cheek and splashes his grey chest like a medal ribbon.

  The woman turns to Morag and says, ‘Do you know about slime moulds?’

  Morag shakes her head. She can hardly remember who she is; her heart is beating so strongly in her chest that she feels that she might at any moment be overwhelmed by the force of her own blood.

  ‘I suppose that basic biology is no longer a part of medical training. There’s no need for you to know, except that you can tell Alex that there will be a great scattering, and a greater union to come. He’ll plod along after me, my poor faithful Merlin. He might even guess what I’m going to do, but he’ll be too late. I can do anything I like. No one government or corporation can stop me, and none will join together until it is too late. It is always the way. No one who counts takes the future seriously because no one can canvass the votes of those yet to be born, let alone benefit from them. And more and more, people live in the past, sheltered from the winds of the future. Well, one day, quite soon, we’ll blow their house down. You see if we don’t.’

  ‘The boy,’ Morag says, and then she is walking in a meadow drenched in sunlight. Snow-white bunny rabbits—or they might be mice, or rats, the light is too bright—peep from dew-spangled grass. Bluebirds soar and dip, bluer than the perfect blue sky. The little boy scampers ahead of her, laughing with delight.

  The woman says, ‘He is my grandchild, you know. They all are, and so I have been punished by the deaths of all the little girls.’

  It is night again. Morag says slowly, ‘They all lived near the Magic Kingdom. They were all born after the fairies arrived.’

  ‘My own children took it upon themselves to make more sisters and, by accident, one brother. I should have known what they were doing, but I was…preoccupied. Living another life while I waited for my own plan to mature. They were very clever. They took nuclei from their own ova and implanted them into artificial spermatocytes. How they laughed to see the women conceive, made big-bellied by the wanton wind, et cetera, et cetera. That was four years ago, when we founded the Magic Kingdom. And then they harvested their half-sisters.’

  ‘They killed them.’

  ‘My children were brought up to survive. They thought that this was the way to do it. They took the ovaries of their daughters, and perhaps they would have raised a strange and terrible army against me. Part of their punishment is that I won’t ask them, or let them explain. No more questions? That’s good. I’m tired. Tired of questions.’

  Morag realizes that the woman has been growing smaller—when she speaks her last word, she and her retinue are no higher than Morag’s knees. Then Morag realizes that they are not shrinking, but flying from her. The speed of their passage makes their clothes flap and billow like banners around them. Only the grey King is unmoved. Morag goes down on her knees, on her belly, to watch them dwindle into unguessable distances, and then she is awake.

  She is lying on a cold bleak hillside, the ground trampled to mud around the little island of rough grass where she lies. The tree stretching its net of branches against smudged grey light is just a tree. Lying between its roots, wrapped in an ordinary orange welfare blanket, is the little boy, sleeping soundly, sweetly, innocently. Saved.

  18 – Saved

  Six months later, Morag receives a postcard from Alex. She is back in Edinburgh, staying with her parents in the familiar Morningside house in the familiar quiet, tree-shaded street. What little media blitz there was has died down—the story of the lost little boy was swiftly borne away on the flood of speculation about the cause of the end of the Magic Kingdom and the crash of the Interface.

  Morag left a message for Alex on the Web as soon as she could. If it didn’t find him, perhaps someone in his circle of conspiracy theorists would pass it on. The message wasn’t much more than what the woman told her, and she didn’t expect a reply.

  Meanwhile, she was given extended fembot therapy to remove the thing that bonded into the muscles of her tongue and extended its pseudoneurons into her limbic system. The doctors wanted to test it before removing it, but she insisted that it was taken away at once. The little boy still had his, after all, and his father was selling his story to the newschannels, and no doubt would be pleased to sell the research rights, too.

  That is what hurts most, if Morag will let it, although she should have expected no less. In a way, the little boy’s father is right. She took it upon herself to rescue his son, unasked. She should look for no reward.

  It was surprisingly easy to rejoin the aid programme. Her left arm aches from an injection of a clade of fembots that will specifically modify the helper T4 cells of her immune system, enabling them to recognize a broad spectrum of infective viruses and bacteria. She has already been through briefing. In a week she will be in Djibouti, where civil war between the two rival ethnic groups, Afars and Issas, has flared up again, forcing a million people to flee the capital.

  When Morag returns from Tiso’s with strong bush boots, a dozen T-shirts, and a hat with a mesh veil, her mother says that there’s a postcard for her.

  ‘Someone hand-delivered it. One of those young girls with the funny hair transplants.’

  It is a picture of a sprawling fortress, white walls rising from grey limestone cliffs against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. On the reverse, in cramped but neat handwriting, Alex has written, Listen carefully.

  ‘Not hair,’ her mother says, ‘but a sort of cap of bright feathers. Like a hummingbird.’

  ‘Did she say anything?’

  ‘She said it was for you. She knew your name. Then she was off. Would you like some tea? There’s still a smidgen of Earl Grey.’

  Morag triggers the postcard’s tiny voice. In accented English, it tells her that it is a picture of Gjirokastra citadel, one of the finest examples of a Byzantine and Ottoman fortress in the Balkans.

  ‘…which has fascinated Western travellers since Byron and Edward Lear ventured here in the nineteenth century. Some claim that Berat fortress is a purer example of the Ottoman style, but Gjirokastra’s dramatic situation against the Buret mountains…’

  Morag holds the postcard to her ear and runs it again. The postcard’s voice scratches on, and underneath it she hears Alex’s London accent. He only says four words, and she has to hush her mother and listen to the postcard’s spiel again before she understands his message.

  ‘Still looking for Fairyland,’ he says.

  PART THREE

  The Library of Dreams

  1 – The Burning Man

  ‘We’re in,’ Max tells Alex. ‘Here, take a look.’

  They are talking in Max’s Home Room, a crystal-walled bubble that seems to float high above the sulphur-yellow cloud decks of Jupiter. The view is transmitted from an element of the European Space Agency von Neumann probe that is seeding copies of itself across the giant planet. Alex is lying on a couch: in real life he’s lying on sunwarmed turf on a hillside, and orientation in a vironment at odds with reality makes him nauseous. While Max is present as himself, he has morphed Alex into the mad Roman emperor Caligula, with purple toga and a crown of laurel leaves. Their agents eye each other from opposite poles of the spherical room: Alex’s scarlet daemon, with his pitchfork, horns and barbed tail, Max’s green woman, her shape crammed with leaves as if she’s a window into some lost wood, her eyes cornflowers, her lips and nipples poppies, her hair delicate ferns.

  Max opens a data window. Text scrolls up, is replaced by a glimpse of a burning figure running across a wide space floored with gold-veined marble. It leaves a trail of black footprints. Then more text, and row upon row of symbols. Max watches intently as they scroll up. Alex looks away. A lightning storm as big as a continent is flickering at the vast world’s rim.

  ‘Definitely fairy generated,’ Max says, spearing an intricate moire pattern with a forefinger
. ‘Their entoptics underlie the primary image. See? Fuck, Alex, at least take a look. It took me thirty-six hours to strip out the codes.’

  Alex looks. He asks, ‘How did you get in?’

  For years, cracking Glass’s Library of Dreams has been a hacker grail.

  ‘Some kid on a trawl found a backdoor,’ Max says vaguely. He’s more interested in what he’s found than how he found it. ‘I wonder what kind of computing power Glass has? Those flames must take up gigabytes of iterative calculations, even with anti-aliasing.’

  ‘He has a lot,’ Alex says. ‘Especially a lot of Reality Engines. Otherwise Milena wouldn’t have gone to him.’

  ‘All that graphical power wasted on generating a mausoleum for one dead guy to wander around in. You do the Ultimate Hack, and you put yourself in a glass bottle when there’s the whole world to explore.’

  Alex asks, ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit…suspicious that you’ve managed to hack into the Library of Dreams right at this moment?’

  ‘Of course it’s suspicious. It’s all part of the game. The strange thing is, this burning guy leaves damage in the system. You saw those smoking footprints?’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘A copy of the Library of Congress, one of the lobbies between the stacks. It’s not the generic portable Library, either. It’s the fully integrated version universities use.’

  ‘Why would Glass make something that damages his own system?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a watchdog, there to trash anything that logs in through the backdoor. The Peace Police will shit themselves if it gets into the Web.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘No one outside the circle knows about it. Not yet. But only because the kid who stumbled across this doesn’t know exactly where he ended up. But he will, and then he’ll tell his friends, and pretty soon half the world will want a look. There’s enough bandwidth on the backdoor feed to allow it, too.’

  Alex says, ‘We need your help, Max. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘The burning man isn’t some virus. Nothing can contain it, not even its host system. It can burn through the hardest security programs. It could burn out the whole Web. The more people start dicking around in here, the more likely it’s going to get out.’

  ‘You’ve already hacked the codes. We need a backdoor into his system, and I can’t wait, Max. I’m out here in the real world, and its jaws are closing.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Split the problem up. Packet it. There are ten million bored wannabes out there. Give them something to do.’

  ‘Don’t teach me my job, Alex. I’ve already worked out an architecture for distributing the problem in a discrete way. All I have to do is press this button—’ a bulging red button appears in the air before Max’s forefinger, jiggling with barely controlled desire—‘and it’s into the Web.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So, are you set to go?’

  ‘Kat’s out now, trying to make contact. Meanwhile, we have this local guy who says he can get us into the neutral zone. We don’t trust him, but he’s the only way through the army. Bribery isn’t simple with these people; it’s mixed up in some kind of ethical code. And then there’re these mercenaries Glass’s people have hired—’

  Max says impatiently, ‘I can find out about them. It’s no big deal.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re wrong, Max. Perhaps we should just take everything we’ve got—’

  ‘Yeah, and what? Tell the Peace Police? They’d love that. It would be perfect propaganda for their drive to send every fairy up a chimney before next Christmas.’

  ‘I was thinking of the UN.’

  Max looks scornful. ‘One, they wouldn’t believe us and, two, they think the Crusaders are, what…?’

  ‘Religious refugees.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Listen, we’re behind you, man. Every step. I’ll distribute the problem. I estimate that twenty thousand people will try to hack it. Fuck, twenty thousand is a minimum number. My architecture will link them up. It will talk to them, drop hints. The thing will grow. I based it on the massive parallel distributive architecture of that three body solution hack the Princeton group organized ten years back. And that involved a million people. It’s under control.’

  ‘Sure, but I’m in the war zone, and you’re…where? Where are you, Max? How’s your girlfriend?’

  ‘What the fuck does it matter, as long as we can talk? But if there are more of these fuckers—’

  Max stabs at the data window, and there’s the burning man again, running out of nowhere into nowhere and leaving behind his smoking footprints.

  ‘If there are enough of those things and they cross over every time a lurker takes a peek into Glass’s fabled Library of Dreams, then they’ll burn out the Web, bit by bit.’

  ‘And no one can squirt them with a fire extinguisher.’

  ‘If we knew what to squirt them with it wouldn’t be a bad idea. But don’t think we’re not trying. Maybe we’ll get lucky. But if not…’

  Lightning flashes all around Jupiter’s horizon.

  ‘Very dramatic, Max.’

  ‘I’m good, aren’t I? Call me when you know something, Sharkey.’

  Max’s agent spreads her arms. Max kicks away from the data window and, falling upwards, passes through her shape. For a moment, Alex sees him walking away between trees in some sunlit wood, and then the agent blows away in a scattering of leaves. Alex tells his own agent to shut down the connection and strips off his goggles and sits up in the real world, blinking in bright sunlight on a grassy slope that drops away to the red and grey roofs of Gjirokastra.

  2 – Cheap Holidays in Other People’s Misery

  The Holiday Inn in Tirana was once Albania’s first high rise structure, the Hotel Tirana, built all the way back in 1979. Despite extensive remodelling, including a spiky façade of architectural stromalith, nanotech tunnelled hyperconnectivity, and responsive environmental microconditioning, the hotel still retains the concrete bones of the original, functionally determinant Soviet architecture. And although it is semi-intelligent, and generates its own power from wind stress and temperature differences, in these troubled times the elevators often aren’t running and the water supply is, at best, erratic.

  Todd Hart has been given a room overlooking Skanderbeg Square—by no means as good as it seems, because the room is in clear view of the mountains. That’s where the pro-Greek rebels are, and currently they’re winning Albania’s latest civil war. Half an hour ago, Todd was up on the roof with Spike Weaver, his cameraman, watching tracer rounds swoop towards the city’s dark rooftops like lines of incandescent hummingbirds. The bombardment seemed to be concentrated on the eastern suburbs, an extensive maze of unmetalled streets and flat-roofed single storey mud-brick houses. Nothing much, Spike said, and it was true, none of the other journalists had bothered to leave the bar to take a look. Spike is in the bar now, talking over old wars and actions, refusing offers of cheap sex and drugs from the artificially tanned whores, and generally ignoring the flatterers and hangers-on who buy the reporters drinks in the hope that this will persuade them to part with a few ecus in return for dubious nuggets of information.

  If Todd had any sense he would be getting drunk with the others, exchanging gossip and plugging into the old baloney factory. God knows he had no luck with either the US consul or the UN press officer. The consul was a young and stunningly naïve Yale graduate with a doctorate in Southern Mediterranean Paleo-Christian archaeology; the press officer the usual time-serving bureaucratic reptile who didn’t try very hard to give the impression that the UN was actually doing something other than watching the civil war from the sidelines. Not only did he try to stop Todd’s overflight of the Children’s Crusade, he also tried to have Todd arrested afterwards. Todd and Spike spent a long two hours in a bare room in the UN compound, without air-conditioning or access to the soft drinks machine humming just outside the door, before someone with a smidgen of public relations savoir-faire r
ealized it might not be a good idea to piss off an accredited member of the US media.

  Todd is looking forward to getting wrecked, but first he must file his report. He’s been here three days, now, and he’s on the sharp end of an unfavourable stringer’s contract, the only way he could get accreditation and enter the country legally. He has to feed a few stories to the system and be a good boy until he’s out of the capital and on his way up-country on his own business.

  So Todd is in his room, lights off and the heavy curtains drawn (snipers have a habit of shooting at lit hotel windows), sitting in an overstuffed easy chair with his deck on his lap. Its parasitic patch cable, snaking out of a hole in the window frame Todd made with his portable diamond-bit drill (the window doesn’t open because of the responsive environmental microconditioning), has found a connection with the main trunk that climbs the side of the hotel to the dishes on the roof. Todd is waiting for the deck to upload the footage he and Spike shot of the Children’s Crusade that afternoon. The Crusade is old news, falling through the ratings net, but not many people go in for close-ups, and it will show the network that at least he’s trying.

  Todd remembers his first sighting of the Crusade from the hired copter. It wound across the dry, brown countryside about fifty kilometres south of Tirana like a column of army ants. Todd remembers the way the copter’s cabin was filled with sunlight as it tipped down towards the column, remembers how dry his throat was when he started his speech with the Crusade ambling past in the background, down on the ground in the heat and whirling dust, and a powder-blue UN copter buzzing overhead.

  Todd needed three takes to get his little speech off pat—that’s what the deck is uploading, along with establishing shots and footage of Todd’s brief forays into the column itself. Once the big squirt of fractally compressed pictures has been transmitted, Todd puts on goggles and mitts, and across the desk that’s suddenly there, his editor asks him what he’s got. Todd tells him, and the editor thinks about it, then shrugs.