Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘Blood has a curious effect on marble. They have an affinity for one another.’

  They had to move a carpet and an armchair to see it. Todd took a couple of photographs to placate Marku, but it was embarrassing, and more than a little ghoulish. Something to do with it being in a hotel lobby, perhaps. He later learnt that most Albanian stringers insist that their employers take a look at the bloodstain—the murder for a debt of honour is bigger news than the civil war.

  Marku says now, ‘You want to report this assassination, I will find out all about it for you. We wait a few minutes and his relatives will come, shouting for revenge. They will tell us all. A little local colour for your report.’

  Todd says, ‘I haven’t got that long. This meeting is more important.’

  Marku exclaims, as if it is Todd’s fault, ‘Then why are we standing here, idly gossiping?’

  As they walk, Marku says, ‘You do understand why you can’t bring your cameraman. They don’t trust anyone. Even me.’

  Todd says, ‘Are you sympathetic with these people?’

  Marku shrugs. ‘They are dreamers. Like your Lord Byron. I hear you left the city today. You should be careful.’

  ‘I don’t take sides here.’

  ‘Some people might say that if you live in the city, you shouldn’t talk to people outside it. Especially the Crusade.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  Marku smiles and says, ‘I just worry about your safety. No one in this country likes the Crusade. But it has protection and money, and my countrymen’s hate and fear are directed on any associated with it.’

  Todd doesn’t trust that smile. He says, ‘Well, I won’t be going back. The UN arrested us for a while, in case we didn’t get the point, and in any case this is the real story.’

  ‘Ah, you are still the Wild Man of legend,’ Marku says. ‘It is an honour to work for you again.’

  ‘Save the bullshit for the interview, Eduard. I’ve a feeling we might need all the charm we can slop on.’

  ‘Do not worry. She wants to talk with you. She says you are the only journalist famous enough to carry her story.’

  ‘Then she’s fuller of bullshit than you. She could talk with Vogue or Rolling Stone any time she wants.’

  ‘Ah, but she does not want some interview with an online journal, here today, gone tomorrow. She wishes to talk with the Wild Man of Atlanta.’

  ‘You’re getting a cheap thrill from this, Eduard. I’m not sure if that’s flattering or disturbing.’

  ‘I’m hoping to get some good money,’ Marku says. ‘I could do with getting out of this country. I have too many enemies.’

  Todd and Marku cross a little canalized river, the Lanu, and pass the Enver Hoxha memorial, a strange structure like a huge concrete flying saucer poised for flight. Although Albanians still call the long-dead dictator the ugly one, and most curse his memory, in these troubled times some wish him back. He is becoming confused with the old hero, Skanderbeg, who drove back the Turks and united the country. It is said that he never died, but lies waiting for the call to arms to save Albania again.

  Once he’s satisfied that they aren’t being followed, Marku steps out into the surging traffic, dodges a pedicab like a bull fighter, and flags down a Mercedes taxi. It has been converted from diesel to alcohol, and frequently misfires or stalls. It wallows along the poorly maintained roads at a speed that has Marku looking at his old-fashioned LED watch and haranguing the stolid driver.

  This part of Tirana still hasn’t been rebuilt after the earthquake of ’09; there are whole blocks of tumbled roofless ruins. Refugees who fled the countryside ahead of the pro-Greek rebels camp out amongst weedy spills of brick. The air is blue with woodsmoke. Bats, roosting in shattered leafless trees lining the road, twitch like little leather suitcases about to unpack themselves. A skinny cow wanders into the road, and stands looking baffled as the taxi driver raps impatiently on his horn, until at last a small boy in a long ragged jumper drives it back with a stick.

  ‘You can take the peasant out of the country,’ Marku remarks, ‘but not the country out of the peasant, eh?’

  Marku’s jacket has ridden up, and Todd notices that a pistol is tucked into the waistband of his trousers. Todd says, ‘What kind of gun is that?’

  Marku takes it out and shows Todd. It has a short, fat barrel and a floating breech mechanism. When Marku ejects the clip, the driver glances in the rear view mirror, looks away. Marku says, ‘You like it? It is Russian. They make good automatics.’

  ‘It’s a pretty big gun, Eduard.’

  ‘You want to stop a man, this will do it with one shot. Caseless hollowtips, a pop-out laser sight. It does the business.’ Marku smiles, racks the clip, and tucks the thing away.

  ‘Have you ever shot anyone?’

  ‘You need a gun in this city,’ Marku says. ‘At home I have a mini-Mac-10.’

  Todd hunches forward in the sagging seat, looking through the dusty windshield at the ruins. Little groups of men stand smoking and drinking on street corners. Most of them have semi-automatic rifles slung upside down on their backs. The setting sun infuses everything with an apocalyptic light.

  Marku says, ‘Don’t worry. It’s safe until dark.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse in New York,’ Todd says. Mugging or kidnapping is the least of his worries. An edgy nervousness is beginning to cut through the benign glow of the Serenity. Todd is breaking an important precautionary rule by entering dangerous territory on his own. He adds, ‘I thought we had safe passage.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ Marku says vaguely. He smells overpoweringly of cologne; sweat makes half moons under the arms of his linen jacket. It occurs to Todd that Marku is more frightened than he is.

  The taxi leaves the boulevard and plunges into a maze of narrow streets that wind between two storey mud-walled houses packed so close together their overhanging tile roofs almost meet overhead. The taxi driver turns on his headlights, plays a restless arpeggio on his horn, and guns the Mercedes through every junction in a cloud of dust.

  When the taxi finally pulls up, outside a house no different from any of the others, Marku talks rapidly to the driver and has Todd pay him fifty dollars.

  ‘I tell him there’s three times as much for him if he waits. He says he will.’

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ Todd says.

  ‘You will be amazed,’ Marku says.

  Armed soldiers lounge just inside an arched gate at the side of the house. They are young, smooth-skinned, muscular giants, adolescents given growth and muscle enhancement treatments and fembot-spun nerve nets. Capturing the enemy’s young male children and turning them into short-lived killers is a recent trend in the hundred or so civil wars and insurrections around the world. The treatments will give these young supermen marrow and liver cancer, by and by, and make them prone to pseudo-Parkinson’s, and grand mal seizures, but most don’t live long enough for the side-effects to become a problem. They are armed with snub-barrelled high velocity rifles that fire caseless ammunition, mostly memorywire needles that expand and sprout spikes on impact. One soldier has something that might have started off as an Alsatian on a chain leash. Its over-muscled jaws make its head look like some diseased tree root dug up from the earth.

  Like basketball players in a fast-forwarded video, the tall soldiers bounce and jostle around Todd and Marku. They wear the death’s head badge of the Nationalist government. When Todd points this out, Marku tells Todd that they are hired for the occasion.

  ‘There’s no loyalty in the city these days. It makes my job very interesting, as you can imagine.’

  Todd and Marku are patted down—Todd has to show the soldiers how the notepad works, to convince them it isn’t some kind of bomb—irradiated with low energy microwaves to inactivate any hitchhiking fembots, and finally allowed into a paved courtyard where lamps burn amidst lemon trees and orange trees growing in tubs. Fairy lights are strung on the high walls around the courtyard. A tall, slim woman in com
bat jacket and trousers and high-topped boots sits on a canvas camping chair within a circle of light. The two soldiers standing behind her are real: she isn’t.

  Antoinette. Her image has a fine faint luminescent shimmer, as if coated with oil. She seems to be abstracted from a more perfect world, where even light is finer and purer.

  Todd has seen plenty of pictures of Glass’s consort, but she is even more beautiful than they suggest. Until a year ago, she was a vironment supermodel, plucked from a Bidonville outside Paris. Hers is a rags-to-riches fairytale that burnt a brief predictable arc through the information-saturated mediaverse, terminating in a contract with InScape which she famously broke after six months. After issuing a single page manifesto calling for the deconstruction of male and female roles within all vironments (which one commentator compared unfavourably to an earlier Antoinette’s pronouncement, saying that at least France’s last Queen offered cake, while this opinionated gamine offered nothing but rhetoric), she vanished and then reappeared in Glass’s stronghold.

  Todd has her figured as either a poor little rich girl looking for a strong father figure, or an incredibly clever manipulator of media image. Either way, she’s his way to Glass. And, yes, she is beautiful, even allowing for subtle morphing of her image. She has the deep black skin, long neck and swelling, bicephalic skull of a Pharaonic princess. Her hair is done in tight cornrows caught with silicon tags that flash intermittent constellations of little white lights. Her eyes are beaten gold; her eyebrows are a solid bar above these eyes, a single flaw that simply makes her more beautiful than mere perfection. Her smile is slow and lazy and very wide in her generous mouth. It is a lioness’s smile.

  One of the tall soldiers sets out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label and a flask of cloudy raki. Todd can’t help noting the faint tremor in the boy’s hand, the sweat standing on his brow. His cheeks are stippled with steroid-induced acne.

  Marku introduces Todd, pours a shot of whisky and carefully toasts Antoinette’s image. ‘Jete te Gjate.’ May you have a long life. Todd follows suit, and Marku repeats the toast, this time with raki. Todd downs a glass of the stuff, too. He’s already beginning to feel woozy, but at least he isn’t scared any more.

  Antoinette’s image finally stirs, and her voice comes from the air above their heads. She tells Todd how much she admires his broadcast about the Children’s Crusade. ‘It is always useful to have a new perspective on that particular problem,’ she says.

  She has a British accent. Todd remembers that she claims to have learned her English from BBC news broadcasts.

  He counters, ‘I was hoping you’d tell me about the Crusade.’

  Antoinette smiles her slow, predatory smile. Her gaze is precisely centred on Todd: the remote sensing equipment she’s using is very good, although he expects nothing less.

  She says, ‘The Crusade has some interests in common with our cause, but many that are not. We wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. After all, the Web is an arena of accelerated discourse. “All things exist within it, and all possible configurations of things.”’ It is a quote from one of Glass’s rants.

  Todd says, ‘A woman in the Crusade asked if I’d join.’

  Antoinette dismisses that with a flick of her hand. Her palms are dyed red. She says, ‘That’s irrelevant now.’

  Todd says, ‘You quoted Glass just now. Are quotes all you have for me?’

  ‘This is a story in itself, is it not?’

  ‘Very much so,’ Marku says.

  Todd says, ‘It isn’t a story without my cameraman.’

  ‘We will supply you with a record of this meeting.’

  ‘It would have to go out with a disclaimer.’

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘How many questions can I ask? Three?’ Todd realizes that he’s more than a little drunk. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to drop that dose of Serenity. Still, he has a gut feeling that an aggressive line of questioning may let him learn something useful, and besides, he’s no good at the PR sycophancy which media stars expect.

  Antoinette says, ‘It’s a strange restriction for an ambitious man.’

  ‘I hear it’s traditional,’ Todd says. Tell me something new about the Crusade.’

  ‘The Children’s Crusade is dangerous not because of what it believes, but because of what it is. In the wrong hands, it could change everything.’

  ‘But not in the way you want things changed?’

  Antoinette responds by quoting Glass again. ‘“The meta-environment of the Web, which contains all possible vironments, is real and unbounded; nations are no more than fictions glued together by common delusions. Democracy is a fiction within a fiction. It is only a special case of the human experience. In the Web, everything is possible, because everything is allowed.”’

  ‘I can get this stuff from any archive. Why has Glass made an alliance with the Crusade?’

  Antoinette says, ‘We offered the Crusade a haven. You know that, Mr Hart. Everyone knows it. We offer it no more than that; it is all we can offer. You say, Mr Hart, that it still wants to gather more and more to itself. I’d know more about that.’

  ‘The woman was pretty old, and she looked like an elephant’s asshole. She wanted to kiss me, I guess. She wanted to turn me on. I got out of there before she tried.’

  ‘There’s no need to be ashamed,’ Antoinette says. ‘Sexual panic is a natural reaction when certain men feel they’ve lost control of a situation.’

  Todd is touched by anger. It burns through the heat of the alcohol in his blood. He says, ‘I tell it the way I see it. You read into it what you will. I don’t even know if you’re real.’

  ‘Of course I’m not real.’

  ‘I mean if you’re the real Antoinette, not some expert system manipulating a morphed image.’

  ‘Does it matter so much to you? You could be useful to us, Mr Hart. We could be useful to you. Would you like to know more?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘You’re there because you’re being followed, and your hotel room is bugged.’

  ‘All the rooms in the Holiday Inn are bugged.’

  ‘Parasitizing the hotel multimedia cabling isn’t a very good idea. All your traffic is being monitored.’

  ‘Which is why I want to talk with Glass face to face. How about it?’

  Antoinette laughs, and then her image shrinks into itself, condensing into a dot of white light that hovers for a moment before rising into the darkening air above the little courtyard. The two soldiers move forward. They have drawn their pistols, and are deaf to Todd’s protests.

  ‘Shouting will do no good,’ Marku says, as they are marched out of the courtyard. He seems resigned to this turn.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll kill us, or they’d have done it in the courtyard, right?’

  Marku says grimly, ‘The river is considered to be a convenient place for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll take us to Glass. Is that it, boys? I do want to see him, but I have to pack my bags first, and I need my cameraman. So how about if we go back to the hotel first? Get a meal, have a drink, it won’t take so long. I mean,’ Todd says, as he’s hustled into the dark street, ‘what’s the rush?’

  The taxi has gone. The two soldiers keep hold of Todd and Marku while one of their fellows talks into a radio and is answered by an angry burst of speech. He closes his fist over the little transceiver, says something to his companions.

  ‘They are waiting for someone.’ Marku says, when Todd asks what’s going on.

  Then all the soldiers whirl as, with the scream of an overpressed engine and a dazzle of headlights, an army truck roars at them down the narrow street. The soldiers stand their ground and start to shoot. The truck’s windscreen turns to lace and blows away. Its engine coughs a geyser of hot sparks and it slews to a halt in a shower of scraped mud-brick fragments. More gunfire, unbearably loud in the confined space. Shots are coming from the roofline and the soldiers fling themselves into do
orways and return fire. Marku, caught in the crossfire, is thrown against a wall. Todd is grabbed by a soldier, turned, lifted—and the soldier shudders and collapses on top of him.

  For a horrible moment Todd thinks he’s been hit too, but the blood is only the soldier’s blood. He kicks and kicks, losing his bush hat and a shoe but getting clear of the soldier’s dead weight, and runs back into the courtyard. There’s a door. It’s unlocked. Todd bruises his shoulder and hip as he slams through it.

  He runs across an empty room, kicks open another door and falls into a narrow passageway, picks himself up and then simply runs. He doesn’t see the hornet until it slaps into his chest. The sharp pain makes him think he’s having a heart-attack, but then he sees the little machine clutching his T-shirt with its eight wire-thin legs. He beats it off, but the thing circles back and stabs him in the neck. He manages to run a few more steps but then has to sit down on a doorstep, which is where, after they have killed the ambushers and set fire to the army truck, the surviving soldiers find him.

  5 – Across the Border

  The commander of the medical relief team is not pleased to find Alex waiting by himself in the chilly pre-dawn light outside the hotel. When the two jeeps arrive and Alex goes forward to meet them, the commander looks around the empty square and asks severely, ‘Where is your woman?’

  It’s something Alex would like to know. He and Katrina had another big row last night, but she did at last agree to his plan.

  ‘For now,’ she said. ‘But if the fuckers start acting funny, that’s it.’

  ‘At the moment, that’s the least of our worries.’

  ‘I will deal with this ersatz medical team. But even if I don’t, the worst that happens is that we’re taken to Glass and your precious dark lady.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want to go there empty-handed. Ray says he needs our help, not hers, and I believe him.’