Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘Come on,’ Todd says, ‘it’s just a harmless question. Who’s your boss?’

  The soldier who speaks English holds out his hand, and Spike gives him the rest of the cigarettes. ‘Rich Greek fucker buy us. One day. Bring you here. Here you are. We good.’

  ‘Glass,’ Todd says. He feels a measure of relief. ‘It is Glass. I told you, Spike. Was there a woman with him?’

  But the soldiers aren’t listening to him. Todd looks up, and sees the helicopter swinging towards them out of the night.

  7 – The Angry Ones

  When Alex wakes, the light is fading and there’s a chill edge to the air. It’s fifteen hundred metres above sea level here, high in the immemorial mountains of what was once called Illyria, and the summer nights are cold. Alex checks his watch, a single dot and two lines generated by a chip implanted under the skin of his wrist. The effects of the narcotic gas should have worn off about an hour ago, time enough for Glass’s security guards to have followed the trail to the shrine. Alex feels a lifting of pressure. They aren’t here. They probably took the jeep and made a run for it. He begins to think that this might actually work out.

  There’s no sign of Katrina, but that doesn’t worry Alex. She can look after herself. Mrs Powell is sitting with her back against the low remains of a wall, talking softly with her guide book. The laser diffractometer ticks at her feet, firing threads of red light at each of the dowsing rods in turn. She looks up when Alex stirs, and tells him that the shrine is absolutely packed with energy.

  ‘But it’s so calm. Nothing has disturbed this place for a long time.’

  Alex goes to the spring to wash his face, and that’s when the fairy steps out from behind a low ruined wall.

  It is First Rays of the New Rising Sun, jaunty as ever. He has a new jacket, a cut-down camo affair with zippered pockets and slithery green and brown blotches that continually change shape. It glitters with dozens of talismans, and there’s a big pistol tucked into its cinch belt.

  ‘Long time no see,’ Ray says.

  Alex holds out his right hand, and Ray slaps it. The fey’s sharp nails prick Alex’s palm.

  Ray says, ‘You got away from those creeps. I knew you would.’

  ‘Were they Glass’s men?’

  ‘That’s for you to find out, big man.’

  ‘Maybe I should have gone with you.’

  ‘I had things to do.’

  ‘How was your journey?’

  Ray shrugs, setting his talismans all a-jangle. ‘Wolves chase me, one day, two days gone. I hid in a tree. It is no problem. I piss in their faces and they run away.’

  ‘Really?’

  Ray grins his sharp-toothed grin. ‘They are warewolf wolves, big man. Wolves with human bodies and military imperatives. I dose them with something that blows their chips.’

  ‘It’s the real humans you should be afraid of.’ Alex kneels and splashes his face with some of the cold water that trickles down the slick rockface.

  Ray observes, ‘You take a risk, big man. That there is a sacred spring.’

  ‘The sacred spring vanished long ago. Some earthquake sealed it up, and another earthquake opened up this one, by and by.’

  ‘Everything is sacred here, because it is on sacred ground. You should watch out.’ Ray shows his teeth. They are all the same size, and filed to sharp points. He’s lost nothing of his quick sense of malicious mischief. ‘Who’s the old fart? She the sacrifice? I see her thumping around in the woods by Gjirokastra. I warn off a troll getting ready to eat her.’

  ‘She believes in fairies. She’ll be thrilled to meet you, but don’t let it go to your head. How are you, Ray? We never said goodbye properly, in Paris.’

  ‘I fool you there,’ Ray says, grinning.

  ‘That you did. You played both ends against each other.’

  ‘I’m fooled, too. She plays me like I play you. She uses me and I run away. She makes slaves of us all, if she can.’

  There’s one question Alex wants desperately to ask, but this isn’t quite the moment. If he asks about Milena now, Ray will lie, or turn it into a joke. With their strong survival instincts and fragile sense of self, fairies can fall into rage or fugue with very little provocation. Their consciousness is in no way equivalent to that of humans. It’s a vulnerable affair built on partial personalities, generated by implanted chips, which interact across a highly connected neuron net. Their memory is not distributed, but is discrete and linear—the long knotted string that Ray wears looped around his waist is an externalization of the integrated memories which bind his selves. It is his life-line. Fairies can marshall vast amounts of processing power but lack the sudden insights of humans, whom they think of as disturbingly capricious, unbound creatures.

  ‘Well,’ Alex says, instead of asking his question, ‘here we are, back together again.’

  ‘We knew you’d rise to the bait, big man.’ One of Ray’s large, pointed ears flicks. ‘She’s coming,’ he says, and scampers away.

  A moment later there’s a faint breathy scream. Mrs Powell has seen her first real wild fey. When Alex follows Ray across the ruins, he finds Mrs Powell sitting quite still, staring at Ray with her hands clasped before her mouth. Her book lies at her feet like a wounded bird, talking to itself in a ravelling whisper.

  Katrina walks up out of the trees on the far side of the ruined shrine. A mostly headless, bristle-coated piglet is slung around her shoulders. She doesn’t seem surprised to see Ray. She drops the corpse on the turf and says, ‘The little blue-skinned fucker fucked off when it came to carry this back.’

  Ray says, ‘Without me you never catch it.’ He stamps around on the grass, looks over his shoulder at Katrina and laughs. ‘You have heavy feet.’

  ‘What I have is a smart Glock semi-automatic machine pistol that fires Glaser loads at a hundred rounds a minute. It did the job, not your fancy tracking, or that cannon tucked in your jacket.’

  ‘This is a good gun,’ Ray says, brandishing it.

  ‘Make sure the fucking safety’s on,’ Katrina says.

  Alex says, ‘What kind is it, Ray?’

  ‘A good American gun. A .357 Colt Python. You see it.’

  Ray proudly displays the weapon. Intricate self-engulfing fairy entoptic forms are chased into the barrel.

  Ray says, ‘It fires magic bullets.’

  ‘It better had,’ Katrina says, ‘because you can’t shoot for shit.’

  ‘She blows off the pig’s head,’ Ray tells Alex. ‘We bleed it out so she can carry it. It is no way to hunt. Feys run down deer, and drink their blood until they fall from exhaustion. That’s hunting. Hunting people is the best fun of all, but I tell you nothing of that. Perhaps I hunt you one day.’

  ‘Bite your tongue and bleed to death,’ Katrina advises Ray.

  ‘Don’t worry, I kill you quick if it comes to it,’ Ray says. ‘But you’re safe, big man. Your blood tastes of vinegar and piss, and no one wants to drink it.’

  ‘You might have to drink it all the same,’ Alex says.

  ‘I know it. You better eat much sugar food, sweeten it up.’

  This joke does not disguise Ray’s profound unease. Fairies drink each other’s blood during sex, when they exchange clades of fembots, or after fighting, when the victor takes away a part of the loser. Drinking Alex’s blood will be necessary, but even so it is a deep perversion.

  Mrs Powell draws herself up and says, ‘You must introduce us, Mr Sharkey.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Mrs Powell, this is First Rays of the New Rising Sun. Ray, you put away pistol and meet Mrs Powell. Mrs Powell will probably have plenty of questions later on, when we’ve time.’

  Katrina says, ‘With luck there won’t be time.’

  Alex says to the fey, ‘Then they will come for us?’

  Ray grins. He’s enjoying this. ‘Maybe soon. Maybe not.’

  Katrina starts dressing the piglet. Alex tells Mrs Powell, ‘We should gather fuel.’

  Once they have walked far enough ba
ck down the trail to be out of even Ray’s earshot, he adds, ‘Ray isn’t like most feys.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologize,’ Mrs Powell says.

  ‘It’s a warning, not an apology. Ray’s a flirt. He’s a little shit with a tremendous ego who wants to be the coolest free agent around. He got badly burned when he tried to change sides, and he’s determined to erase that humiliation. We can exploit his attitude so he’ll help us, but other feys aren’t as human as he is. Don’t ever make one angry. Ray talks about killing humans—and I think it’s mostly talk. Other feys would do it without blinking, if they felt their honour was hurt. Very big with the feys, honour. It took me a long time to get them to agree to this. They have to think they’re more important than we are.’

  ‘Perhaps they are,’ Mrs Powell says.

  ‘It’ll soon be dark, so we really should collect some wood. There must be an offering. It’s only polite. Politeness is what will save us.’

  They collect armfuls of dead, crumbling wood, and pile it neatly in a shallow pit Katrina has dug in the turf using her hunting knife. Ray brings boughs of wild rosemary. Katrina puts these inside the chest cavity of the gutted piglet, then coats the carcass in a slather of clay.

  Once the fire is burning well, the clay casing around the piglet starts to crack. Little yellow stars of fat pop and flare in the flames. Alex sprays an entire canister of pheromones into the rising smoke, just to be sure. The smell of roasting meat fills his mouth with saliva. He tells the others that in Italy pork roast with rosemary is called aristo. ‘It’s a funeral meat.’

  ‘Rosemary for remembrance,’ Mrs Powell says.

  They sit in the light of the fire. Little biting insects zip around their heads. Mrs Powell hands around a repellant spray. Ray sniffs it and sneezes, like a cat. While Alex gazes sleepily into the fire, nibbling a bar of piercingly sweet emergency chocolate, Katrina watches the dark forest. She’s very tense, but pretending to be cool. Alex knows better than to say anything to her. Silently, they all wait and watch.

  At last, Ray says, ‘They’re coming.’

  Alex hears the feys before he sees them. They call out of the darkness to each other. High voices merge in a chant that chills the blood.

  Euan! Euan! Eu-oi-oi-oi!

  Katrina jumps to her feet, cradling the machine pistol. Alex tells her to put it away. She hesitates before she fits it inside her leather jacket. She says to Ray, ‘You fucker. You didn’t tell us it was the Angry Ones who’d come to us.’

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ Ray says, with a sharp, toothy smile.

  Mrs Powell says, ‘It is the song the drunken hill shepherds sing. That’s all.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Alex says. He is trying not to show his fear. Ray promised that he’d gather together the wild and secretive feys who haunt this land. The Angry Ones are a very different proposition.

  ‘Still,’ Mrs Powell says doubtfully, ‘it’s a very old song.’ For the first time her indomitable spirit of inquiry seems to be weakening.

  ‘Feys borrow what they need,’ Alex says. ‘The Angry Ones are hedonists, living only for the day, for pleasure. They’re on a permanent trip. If they were the traditional followers of Bacchus, like the pack which killed Orpheus, they’d be running on wine, or beer laced with ivy, or raw Amanita muscaria, depending which theory you believe. The Angry Ones infect themselves with nanoware effectors that induce production of psychoactive chemicals in specific neurons. Actually, I have quite a nostalgia for the method. I—’

  ‘Let’s hope they’ve heard of us,’ Katrina says. ‘Let’s hope they’ve heard of what we did in Amsterdam. They do, we’ll get all the respect we want.’

  ‘No killing,’ Alex tells her. ‘You promised. It will all come to an end with killing.’

  ‘I didn’t know this kind of shit was about to happen,’ Katrina hisses. ‘This fucker has suckered us in and sold us out. For the second time.’

  Katrina lapses into this kind of tough guy dialogue when she’s stressed—she learned English from virtual shoot-’em-ups. Firelight flatters her face. She looks young and fierce and alert, a warrior-princess from the sagas in a black leather jacket, buckled biker boots and black leggings. All she lacks are the mirror-shades.

  Ray says, ‘I always fool you.’

  ‘You’ve fooled yourself this time,’ Katrina says. ‘The Angry Ones won’t be any use in this thing. Where are the other feys? Even two or three would be better than this bunch.’

  ‘This thing is a fey thing,’ Ray says, showing his teeth. ‘We decide.’

  Slowly, figures become visible in the flickering shadows at the edges of the firelight. Mrs Powell looks around as the feys’ high voices call out, first from one side of the clearing, and then the other. Katrina watches Ray with an unforgiving stare. Alex looks straight ahead, his heart beating fast. There is a tremor in his hands. He can’t stop them shaking, and at last puts them between his heavy thighs.

  Faces appear and disappear in the flickering dark. Sharp foxy faces, snouted pig faces, the long mournful faces of horses. The feys are masked and mostly naked. True feys despise clothes as a human affectation, although some wear animal pelts, cast over their shoulders and knotted around their hips. Some have wound ivy in their long hair. Some have dabbed their bare blue skin with blotches of red—ivy sap and urine make a dye the colour of lake. The blotches look black in the firelight.

  Memes, Alex thinks. Milena buried them deep, but they will always show themselves in the right circumstances. These feys are not as wild and free as they like to think they are. The psychoactive fembots liberate the old stories locked inside their heads.

  One of the feys, masked with a tragic human face, carries a bear cub that’s barely old enough to have opened its eyes. It stands in front of the humans and watches them while its brothers slowly advance towards the fire and the roasting piglet.

  Katrina slips her hand inside her leather jacket, and Alex whispers, ‘Easy.’

  With a sudden rush, the feys knock the roast piglet from the fire, shatter its casing, dismember it with their knives, and retreat to devour the portions they have taken. In the darkness, something large moves forward. It is a small mammoth, not much bigger than a horse but more solidly built, and covered in coarse long red hair. Between curving tusks capped with steel, its trunk weaves back and forth, snuffling the air. On its back is a wooden platform with a single piece of carved wood for a seat.

  Alex gets to his feet. Mrs Powell has taken out her camera, but one of the feys snatches it from her. The others watch Ray through their masks as he goes to the mammoth and taps its trunk firmly. It kneels, and raises its trunk above its domed head. Ray turns and tells the humans triumphantly, ‘It’s time!’

  8 – Welcome to the Pleasure Dome

  The arc-lit olive groves drop away as the helicopter swings out to sea. The helicopter’s pilot, small as a child, is masked with a black glass helmet and wrapped in an effector cocoon. He won’t or can’t answer Todd’s questions; nor will the one soldier who came along, a tall boy who must hunch with his knees around his ears to fit in one of the jump seats in the copter’s tiny cabin. The soldier rolls his eyes nervously, and strokes the barrel of his Kalashnikov. He has a teddy bear fastened to his webbing belt. This is a war of children.

  The helicopter is swift and light and responsive. It makes a long curve across the sea, canting above moonlit whitecaps, then swings back towards the black shore and suddenly is travelling barely a metre above treetops, rising and falling in an endless switchback ride.

  ‘That fucker’s not human,’ Spike says, meaning the pilot.

  The black forest drops away. There is a moonlit lake like a shining silver shield ahead, with a kind of necklace of lights heaped carelessly at the far end. As the helicopter skims in, Todd realizes that the lights are those of a long, low building. It is a series of interconnected single storey hexagons and pentagons, grown from architectural stromalith and cantilevered out over the rocky lake shore, a retro gesture to
the Arizona buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright’s last, late burst of creativity. A hundred narrow windows blaze with light. Todd hears the thready pulse of Moroccan pop above the flutter of the helicopter’s fan-blades as it turns on its axis above a flat roof and delicately lowers itself towards a cross limned in flecks of red light.

  A man in full butler’s rig—black frockcoat and grey trousers, starched white shirt and bowtie and white gloves—opens the copter’s hatch and lowers the steps. The boy soldier swiftly unpacks himself, jumps down, and covers Todd and Spike with his rifle as they clamber out.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ the butler says. The tall soldier stares at him wide-eyed. The butler sighs and says something in Albanian which makes the soldier shrug, smile, and put up his weapon.

  ‘That’s so much better,’ the butler says. He’s about sixty, his long silver hair caught in a ponytail that reaches halfway down his back. He says to Todd, ‘I do hope you had a good journey. I understand that doll pilots are very capable, although I wouldn’t trust myself to one. Please do follow me.’

  Spike slings the harnessed camera drone over his shoulder, and they go down a winding stair towards a wide, freeform terrace scattered with tubs of geraniums that look stark and unreal under bright lights. Todd tells the butler, ‘I’m here to see Glass.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘Or Antoinette. I’ve already talked to her, although not in the flesh.’

  ‘Oh, she’s about. Somewhere or other. The truth is, we’re having a bit of a crisis. A little local difficulty with some former employees.’

  ‘We were brought here at gunpoint,’ Spike says. He seems to resent the man’s supercilious tone. Todd wonders if it is some kind of British class thing.