Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  After signing off, what Alex mostly does is watch little brown butterflies flit above the flower-starred turf, or look out at the distant mountains that rise up in a kind of blue haze far beyond Gjirokastra. He watches the sheep scattered over the slope, lazily thinks about an algorithm that could describe the way they bunch and straggle. Sheep with shorter legs on one side would move quickly on a slope, but only in one direction. Around and around until they reach the top of the hill. Then roll down to the bottom, protected by thick fleece, and start over.

  The sheep here are shorn, skinny creatures which share a single startled expression. As Katrina climbs towards Alex, they bolt with sudden, ungainly movements, then forget what they’ve just run from and return to nipping at dry grass.

  Katrina is out of breath. Her face shines with sweat, and her scalp is sunburnt either side of the strip of genemod leopard fur. His lady death. She has nowhere else to use her sudden energies but with him, in a cause she hardly understands. She thinks he’s crazy to even think of trying to find Milena.

  ‘Get a cure,’ she tells him. ‘It’s not real, it’s a fembot thing.’

  They had an argument about it yesterday morning, after Mr Avramites told them he had secured safe passage across the border for them, and Alex told her then, ‘Everyone has to have one disease they’re comfortable with.’

  ‘Fuck that shit. I’m going to live forever.’

  ‘You’re in the wrong place for that.’

  ‘You wait and see,’ Kat said, and shook her fist in his face. The place where she lost two fingers on her right hand in the battle of the Magic Kingdom—after she drove a bulldozer through the perimeter wall, she grabbed the working end of a security guard’s taser—is almost healed.

  Now she stands over Alex, blocking the sunlight and breathing hard from the climb. ‘You’ll get cancer,’ she says. ‘You’ll burn red and break out in big, bloody tumours.’

  ‘It’s an Englishman’s privilege to behave like a mad dog and lie around in the midday sun.’

  Katrina doesn’t get the reference. She really does think he’s crazy.

  ‘How are you, Kat? How were the woods?’

  Katrina says, ‘Full of trees. Where is the Crusade?’

  ‘About three days out from the old border.’

  ‘And after that they’re in the neutral zone and we’re fucked. Anything else?’

  Alex has set a swarm of self-replicating datarats loose in the Web. They’re programmed to search for traces of Milena and return to their nest—Alex’s mailbox on the University of Kansas a-life bulletin board—with any tasty tidbits. There must be more than ten thousand active now, but for the past few days there’s been no report, which could mean that Milena isn’t doing anything, or that some Web controller has set a ratcatcher. Alex must ask Max to check that possibility; it could upset their other activities.

  Alex tells Katrina, ‘It’s very quiet. The burning man hasn’t crossed over. Or if he has, no one has spotted him.’

  Katrina says, ‘Just as well I’ve got some real news.’

  ‘You saw—’

  ‘The little fucker has caught up with us, yes.’

  Katrina has been off the day before scouting the road up the Drinos valley towards Kakavia. She camped out in the empty woods a few kilometres south of Gjirokastra, and she tells Alex as they make their way back to town that it was a spooky experience.

  ‘There was always a dog barking off in the distance. One time I woke and saw something big moving off in the moonlight, through the trees. I found big round prints. Think they have elephants here?’

  ‘But you saw—’

  ‘That little fucker. He is like the counterfeit currency.’

  ‘The bad penny.’

  ‘Yeah. Always he turns up, with that attitude of his.’

  ‘He’s a survivor, and he’s taking a huge risk coming here. He’s on our side, now.’

  ‘Only because he thinks we want to help his mistress.’

  ‘She used him, Kat, just as she used us.’

  ‘Also, he knows there will be recycling camps in the rest of Europe soon enough. He knows that the way things are going, there soon won’t be any place to hide. He is out to save his ass, not that I blame him for it. Still, he told me something about these so-called aid workers. I think we must believe him.’

  ‘I assume that they’re not really aid workers. It did seem a bit too convenient, them just happening to be able to give us a ride in the direction we want to go.’

  ‘That fucker Avramites has sold us out. Just like I told you.’

  ‘I believed you then. I believe you now. But Mr Avramites is a necessary evil.’

  Mr Avramites is a lawyer who, in the long tradition of interpreters of fis, the complex tribal laws and customs codified in the Kanun of Lek, arranges negotiations and trade-offs between different factions in the region. At the moment, Gjirokastra is in the hands of a pro-Greek warlord, and although the federal government of Greece does not officially recognize him, it does allow a certain amount of unofficial movement across the border. Mr Avramites has arranged transport for Alex and Katrina with a jeep convoy that brought medical supplies into the town. It just so happens, Mr Avramites says, that one of the Greek companies that sponsors the aid once employed Glass’s team to hack a new distribution structure.

  Katrina says stubbornly, ‘We could walk in. I know you say that the border is lousy with UN sensors and traps. I know you say it is bandit country besides, but our little blue-skinned friend says he knows a way through.’

  ‘Kat, do you trust him? Completely trust him?’

  ‘You say he’s on our side. I say I trust him as much as I trust Avramites.’

  Alex can’t help smiling. ‘She’s here, Kat! I know it! And she needs me. Why else would he be here?’

  ‘I must deal with these fake aid workers when the time comes. Also, I should kill Avramites, but I suppose you won’t let me. Do you really have to sit down again? I’m carrying your fucking deck, after all.’

  But Alex has to stop and rest. It’s a long way down, and it is very hot. Katrina, wired on something more than last night’s adrenalin, can’t sit still. She runs down a sheep and wrestles it on to its back, laughs, and lets it scramble up and run off.

  Alex tells her, ‘Good thing there are no shepherds around. They’d set the dogs on you.’

  Shepherd dogs here are combat enhanced, with behaviour-mod chips, re-engineered jaws and ceramic teeth, to protect sheep from wolves in the high mountain pastures.

  Katrina says, ‘Let them. I’m ready.’ She dusts her hands on her hips, strikes a defiant pose. ‘I am so tired,’ she says, ‘of all this fucking waiting. Even if we die tomorrow, I would not care, so long as we leave this backwater.’

  That evening, they meet Mr Avramites in one of the few restaurants still open for business in Gjirokastra. Alex argues with Katrina for an hour before she agrees to come along. He makes her promise not to say anything, and not to try and stab Mr Avramites with a fork.

  ‘There’ll be time for that later, perhaps, but right now he can be useful. Besides, when he tells us he can’t come with us after all, then we’ll know he’s sold us out.’

  ‘We already know that,’ Katrina says in disgust.

  They pay war-inflated prices for mutton stew and rough red wine. The professional classes still dress up for dinner in Gjirokastra, doctors and schoolteachers and local officials in clean, pressed suits, their wives in starched cotton dresses. Alex is wearing a crushed velvet poncho over a one piece suit that in truth is a bit too small for him. Katrina is in her leathers, kicking at the flagstones with her biker boots. The bourgeoisie look at them sidelong, muttering what are probably unflattering comments. Mercenaries aren’t welcome here, and Alex and Katrina are clearly foreign mercenaries, even if they are friends of the local fis expert.

  Mr Avramites looks more like a grizzled roadmender than a lawyer, with a floppy cloth cap on his balding head, his black jacket out at one elbow, an
d a red kerchief knotted at his throat. He puts on gold-rimmed spectacles to read out the terms of the pass he’s obtained. It is in Greek and Albanian. Katrina grimaces at Alex, and Alex smiles back serenely. Actually, Alex likes Mr Avramites. The old man’s greed is honest and open, and he likes to be your friend even as he is insinuating his hand deep into your pockets, or, as now, selling you behind your back to your enemies.

  Mr Avramites is supposed to be coming with them; Alex has hired him as translator. He lost his family ten years ago, during the government reoccupation of Gjirokastra. With the rest of the Albanian-Greek men, Mr Avramites fled to continue the fight in the forests in the mountains. He paid for his wife and daughters to be sheltered in a cellar in Gjirokastra, but the family who said they’d do it reneged, and moved north long before the Greeks retook the town. No one knows exactly what happened to Mr Avramites’s family, but they were probably shot early on in the occupation, and buried in one of the mass graves outside the town. Mr Avramites sometimes lapses into a mournful silence, thinking about this, but now he’s cheerful enough—too cheerful for a man about to embark on a hazardous expedition, Alex thinks.

  Mr Avramites folds up the stiff paper pass with its hologram seal and hands it to Alex. ‘You will keep that safe, Mr Sharkey.’

  So this is it. Alex can feel Katrina looking at him, but he keeps his eyes on Mr Avramites. ‘Surely it would be better if you kept it?’

  ‘Ah. Alas…’ Mr Avramites makes a complex shrug that involves most of his body. ‘I learn that the commander of the medical team has a fair English, and alas, I have business still in town…I will not, of course, expect the payment that you would have given me.’

  ‘That’s something,’ Katrina says.

  ‘Kat, do keep quiet.’

  ‘You will be in safe hands, I am certain,’ Mr Avramites says. ‘An old man like me, I would be a trouble.’

  ‘I’m sorry you choose not to come with us,’ Alex says.

  ‘Ah, but still we are here,’ Mr Avramites says quickly, smoothing over a moment of awkward silence. We will celebrate your departure after such a long wait.’

  With Alex’s money, Mr Avramites buys a litre of raki—where they are going, he says, is only ouzo, and that is only drunk by men who aren’t confident of their masculinity.

  Katrina gives Alex a dark look. She says, ‘Perhaps we should let Avramites get on with his business.’

  Mr Avramites misses or pretends not to notice the sarcasm in Katrina’s voice. He says serenely, ‘Plenty of time for that. Tonight I am here for you.’

  Alex says, ‘Kat, why don’t you tell Mr Avramites about the big animal you saw.’

  Mr Avramites listens, then shrugs. ‘Things from the war. Not good to know about them. Besides, a lot of stuff isn’t real out there. The hills are full of ghosts. If you walk into one you might never walk out again. Lamia, they call them. You know the old story. A contemporary of Lord Byron, John Keats, wrote on the subject a moving poem.’

  Byron is something of a hero to the Albanians. Even if he did side with the Greeks in the end, it was for all the right reasons, chiefly honour. Alex has found that Albanians expect the English to be intimately familiar with Byron and all his works, but all Alex knows is that he had something to do with Bride of Frankenstein, or some other ancient black-and-white horror movie.

  Katrina bangs her tumbler on the table. The couple at the next table, who all evening have bent towards each other and talked in whispers, turn and blink slowly, as if coming awake. Katrina glares at them and says, ‘This thing was no ghost. It was as big as a fucking elephant.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a horse,’ Mr Avramites says. ‘They take horses and change them, in this war. Men too. The fairies like to do that.’

  Katrina says defiantly, ‘I heard voices, too. Like whispering. High in the air. It’s a very Shakespearean wood, no?’

  ‘I was in the forest an entire winter,’ Mr Avramites says, with the intense gravity of the very drunk, ‘and I never once saw a fairy. They had some dolls, in Tirana. In the tourist hotels there. For business entertainment, you understand. That kind. But they took the courtesans out and shot them last year, when the new government took power. One thing on which we Greeks and the Muslims agree is that fairies and dolls are an abomination in the sight of God. These fairies that are here now have come from other countries. Like your friend Mrs Powell. She does not understand that we must deal with them in our own way.’

  Alex has been looking into the candle flame. Something seems to live in there, small and snaky, coiled around the burning wick, breathing the cool steady flame. He has been doing too much networking these past few days, trying to trace Milena’s work, connecting with his allies out in the interstices of the Web. Hypnogogic visions bedevil him when he’s tired.

  He says mildly, ‘Mrs Powell is no friend of mine. She believes in all the right things for all the wrong reasons.’

  Mr Avramites shrugs. ‘In the woods, you will be more concerned with bandits and Nationalist guerrillas, believe me. Fairies are nothing, not out here. Not any more. We have invented the solution.’

  Alex thinks that the old man has a lot to learn. He says, ‘That’s not what Glass thinks.’

  ‘We have to get past the fucking Nationalist border guards first,’ Katrina says. ‘We have to get out of this fucking country. I told you,’ she says, pointing her ruined hand at Alex, ‘that we started in the wrong place.’

  ‘She’s drunk,’ Alex says. How did she manage to get so drunk?

  Mr Avramites says, ‘The Nationalists are a long way off. They have lost the south of the country. We control it now. You will go with this convoy, and you will have no trouble crossing the border. Bandits will not attack anything flying the Greek flag.’

  Alex says, with as much sincerity as he can muster, ‘I’m sure your Greek friends will see us safe.’

  ‘Truly, you will not need me. They will look after you, I swear it.’

  They fall silent, Katrina belligerent, Mr Avramites retreating inside himself, into the past, Alex trying to guess the future. They all know what has happened, betrayed and betrayer alike. They finish the raki, and the next morning, when he is woken before dawn in time to join the convoy out of the ancient hillside city, Alex has a terrible hangover.

  4 – Trouble in Tirana

  While Todd Hart is waiting on the steps of the Holiday Inn for his contact to show up, he’s witness to an assassination in the secondhand car market on the western side of Skanderbeg Square. Todd isn’t looking for trouble. He’s just had a shave and haircut in the hotel’s barbershop, and he’s wearing neatly pressed linen shorts and a fresh white T-shirt. His lightweight faux sharkskin jacket, iridescent with a million tiny, fembot-spun scales, weighted with his notepad, is slung over one shoulder; his bush hat, with its faux tigerskin band, is at a jaunty angle on his head. He’s feeling pretty terrific. He did a little Serenity up in his room, and it’s mellowing him out nicely; he isn’t even worried that his contact is late.

  It’s early evening. People are promenading around the big square in the welcome coolness. Half a dozen open air cafés are set up in the shadow of the crumbling Palace of Culture, and their radios send up a mix of polka tunes, opera and Thai pop. Around the plinth on which once stood a colossal, gilded statue of the old dictator, hawkers sell bandwidth access to the Web, line rental on mobile phones, iced sherbet, lemonade and cigarettes. The moneychangers are doing brisk business: many Albanians cherish the dream of making a fortune by judiciously playing the international money markets.

  From his vantage point, Todd sees someone running out from the ranks of battered Mercedes and Peugeots on the far side of the square. The man runs in a desperate zig-zag scramble, waving his arms as if trying to swat something. People scatter—they know what’s about to happen. The man has been targeted by a hornet, a small, self-powered micro-missile guided by scent to a specific target. All the foreign journalists take pills which alter the pheromone content of their sweat from da
y to day; hornets can be primed with an old sock, or a newspaper handled and carelessly set down. They are implacable assassination machines. Both sides in the civil war use them, and so do the ganglords who run the black market.

  The man stops and starts to tear off his shirt—then there’s a flash and he tumbles backward and lies still.

  ‘Another debt repaid,’ Eduard Marku says.

  Marku must have arrived at the same time as the hornet reached its target. Not a comforting connection. He is a suave, sardonic man in his late forties. As always, he is wearing a crumpled black suit and chain smoking Italian Camels—a sign he has connections, because Camels, the favourite cigarette of Albanians, are not even available on the black market. Todd first met him three years ago. Like the city, Marku has grown embittered, closed in, and careless with threats. Todd remembers when Tirana was open and welcoming. Police would shake your hand when they learnt you were a journalist; they would invite you into their homes. Now they hang about in threes and fours, harassing passers-by, arresting journalists and letting them go after a few hours with vaguely threatening advice that foreigners should take especial care on the streets.

  Back then, Marku worked for the last government’s information service. He went to prison when that government fell, and was released in the amnesty for political prisoners declared on the present regime’s first anniversary (the President was once an MTV advertising executive, and, if nothing else, is big on gesture and rhetoric). He is neither a reliable nor a particularly trustworthy informant, but Todd likes the man’s style, and his sense of the macabre.

  When Todd arrived back in Tirana, Marku told him that just a week ago a man was hacked to death in the lobby of the hotel. It was a revenge killing: forty years ago, in a northern village, the victim’s father had killed his sister’s fiancé. Marku insisted on showing Todd the exact spot of the murder.