On the table, the TV is showing nothing but static snow. The butler is at the glass doors, standing to one side as the dolls trot past him. He says, ‘My contract has just terminated. Good luck, gentlemen.’
He steps inside and the doors slide shut.
11 – Fever
In the dark, in the cage in the dark, in the cage in the dark beneath the trees, the fembot fever slowly leaves Alex. A brief war has been waged in his body, and now it is almost spent.
His rejigged immune system has manufactured millions of microscopic predators to pursue the fairy-grown fembots through the tides and backwaters of his bloodstream. Each predator has a slightly different set of receptors, so that at least one will bind to any invading fembot and immobilize it. Binding releases a signal which stimulates manufacture of more of the right kind of predator. Unlike the totipotent immune systems which protect the affluent, these predators strip the invaders of their codes, which are transformed within assembler libraries in the marrow of Alex’s long bones, but he can no more alter the codes than he can change his own DNA. Only the feys can use the libraries to make an antidote to the Crusade’s memes.
Slowly, copies of the library of fairy fembot code are written into tangled buckyball strings, which are delivered to Alex’s T-lymphocytes within protein coats derived from modified HIV virus.
Slowly, he is cured of the fairy calenture.
Slowly, his blood becomes a book.
The bars of the cage no longer seem like living serpents, but merely green branches tightly woven with memory wire into a kind of basket. The cage is scarcely bigger than Alex, and he must choose between squatting or standing in a kind of stoop, and is constantly squirming to try and find relief from the aching of his poor joints and the jab of the untrimmed branches.
The radiant creatures that strut beyond Alex’s cage dwindle to mere fairies that are scarcely different from the dolls they once were. These are not like the wild feys, with their sharp, fine-boned faces and lithe bodies, but are squat creatures with small eyes glinting under prognathous brows. They are mostly naked, and armed with little more than knives. Paradoxically, as Alex’s fever clears, they become less easy to see in the predawn darkness, for they no longer seem to trail streams of sparkling motes as they scurry to and fro.
A little way off is a pack of gengineered wolves, with ruffs of carbon-fibre spines, forequarters so over-muscled that they look humpbacked, and long crocodile jaws filled with triangular shark’s teeth. The wolves are staked out so that they cannot reach each other. They rest their long heads on heavy pads, and watch their fairy masters with half-closed yellow eyes. The pygmy mammoth, Hannibal, is tethered at the far end of the clearing. His trunk switches back and forth, and every now and then he tugs at the iron fetter around his right foreleg.
By the luminescent dots of Alex’s tattooed watch, there’s an hour or so before dawn (he wonders if he can trust his watch—there are strains of fembots which can rebuild biomechanisms). His mechanical watch and every other piece of metal, including the tags of the zips of his trousers and his jacket, have been removed by the fairies. They even searched the inside of his mouth. No doubt they scanned him for fembot-constructed nervous system aids, too, but the assemblers are hidden inside his bone marrow cells, and the predators are in themselves little different from the fembots that anyone who has undergone totipotent immune system treatment would have in their blood.
He must be patient. He has delivered himself into the hands of his enemies. They will come to him, in their own good time.
Alex dozes, and wakes, swoony with sleep- and sugar-lack, to find a man staring at him. The man is tall and burly, and squats on his haunches a good distance away from the cage. Scraps of grey sky are caught amongst the branches of the trees. As he watches Alex by this faint dawn light, the man absently caresses the ears of one of the gengineered wolves—the thing is attentive as a cat to the man’s touch, its red tongue lolling from jaws that could take off his arm with a single bite.
Alex returns the man’s stare. Branching horns of buckyball data storage wires sprout from the man’s temples, and carbon whisker aerials from the base of his skull, and his body is thickened with either grafted muscles or sub-dermal plating—perhaps both. Alex wonders what all that extra-cranial capacity is for, but knows better than to ask.
Behind him, a young girl’s voice says, ‘We’ve met before.’ Alex hunches around in his cage, and is filled with a wild mixture of despair and hope.
His first thought is that it’s Milena.
His second is that she’s far too young.
He has to look twice to be sure, because he was expecting to meet his old love at last. But it isn’t her. He’d know her anywhere, no matter how well she disguised herself, how much she had changed, or been changed.
And then a second little girl steps from behind her sister. Alex saw them last night, and thought then that they were a fever dream. They are identical twins, dressed in cut-down camo gear. Although they are both blue-skinned and shaven-headed, they are astonishingly like Milena—their cocked-hip careless poses identical to that of Alex’s vivid, love-lorn memory of the brilliant, crazy little girl who picked up his life and threw it away, who left the void in his memory that is still there, still unhealed, the white room where something strange and wonderful and terrible happened to him. These little twin girls aren’t much younger than Milena was then, Alex realizes. They are the little girls from the Magic Kingdom.
The Twins look at Alex with a sly mixture of amusement and contempt. The blue on their faces is some kind of greasepaint.
‘You’re the one that helped wreck—’
‘—helped destroy—’
‘—our nest.’
They both laugh. It isn’t a nice sound.
‘I expected to find you with the Children’s Crusade.’
Alex is trying to stay calm. It’s happening at last. He cannot let himself become excited, or it might fail.
‘Oh, they’re on their way—’
‘—and we’re near—’
‘—closer than you think.’
‘It’s already breaking up,’ Alex says. ‘It’s individuating. That’s the way with any kind of movement. Even those bound together by infection with fairy memes.’
The Twins smile suddenly, sly and amused and knowing, and then the doubled smile is gone.
‘You think the changes are bad—’
‘—a bad thing. You’re wrong—’
‘—very wrong.’
‘You’re angry because of the fall of the Magic Kingdom. I understand.’
The Twins shrug inside their overlarge jackets. How old are they? Eight? Nine? No more than that, surely. Milena must have managed the miracle of parthenogenesis so very quickly after she fled with that first fairy. How far they’ve come! Alex feels heavy with history.
The Twins say, ‘Oh, the Magic Kingdom was fun—’
‘—we had fun for a while—’
‘—but we knew it couldn’t last. It was an exponential thing—’
‘—it had to grow and grow. The people around it—’
‘—the ones who wanted the little toys our people made—’
‘—they grew too greedy.’
‘Do you know why I’m here?’
‘You’re all alone in your cage, Mister Alex—’
‘—that is your name—’
‘—but we’ll bring you the heads of your friends, one by one—’
‘—by one. We’ll put them on stakes—’
‘—stakes around your cage—’
‘—we’ll feed you the manna of Fairyland. Then you can talk with them—’
‘—you can talk, but you won’t like what you’ll hear. The dead don’t lie—’
‘—and they’ll be very very dead.’
‘I can help you.’
‘Oh, you’ll help us—’
‘—and the woman, when we catch her—’
‘—Katrina, she calls herself—’
‘—Katrina, but her real name is Dania—’
‘—Dania Haessig. Ah, you didn’t know—’
‘—we knew—’
‘—but he didn’t.’
‘Names aren’t so important. Where is Milena?’
‘But names are important, Mister Alex. We have to know who someone is—’
‘—we have to know their name—’
‘—before we can kill her.’
The little blue-painted girls say this with chilling matter-of-factness. One adds, brightly, ‘What do you think of our king?’
‘He’s interesting. More complicated than the warewolf.’
‘Mister Mike had his uses—’
‘—but our king is something else.’
‘His capacity looks very impressive. I hope you haven’t filled him up.’
‘His time will come—’
‘—because we have plans—’
‘—we have plans for him.’
‘Where is Milena? Or whatever she calls herself these days?’
‘She interfered,’ the Twins say in unison. They are suddenly indignant.
‘She left us—’
‘—all alone—’
‘—and then she came back and interfered. But we have—’
‘—we have other friends—’
‘—friends who give us gifts.’
The Twins turn and walk away. ‘Beware of Greek gifts,’ Alex says, but they don’t look back. The horned man follows them into the trees.
No one else comes near Alex for a long while.
Slowly, it grows lighter. Sun strikes under the trees; the hot, sticky air is rich with the tang of pine resin. Alex soon gives up trying to swat the flies that land on him to sip his sweat. He changes his position in the cramped cage, favouring first one leg, then the other. Fairies come and go. One leads away the wolves. Another throws a bucket of water over the cage, drenching Alex. He wrings water from his shirt and drinks that, but he’s soon thirsty again. His gut is loose with fear and hunger—pretty soon he’ll have to take a shit.
Slowly, Alex becomes aware that a man is watching him. The man is dressed in black. The toes of his shiny winkle-picker boots are so long that they must be held up by chains that loop around his ankles. When he sees that Alex has noticed him, he struts over. He’s tall and thin, pale as paper under a rumpled cap of dirty blond hair. He wears little round landscape mirror-shades, the kind that can overlay your sight with fossil martian dunes or a coral grotto. He squats on his heels, a respectable distance from the cage, and asks Alex how he’s doing.
‘Not too good. Can you let me out?’
The man is amused by this. ‘That’s good. Yeah, that’s good.’
Alex licks his lips. He is infernally thirsty, but when he asks for water, the man just shakes his head.
‘I wish I could do it. But this is part of the process.’
‘I came here to see Milena.’
The man shrugs.
‘The mother of the little girls.’
‘They have a mother? Hard to believe.’
The man says this too casually. He knows, all right. He’s a Web cowboy, no doubt about it, and there’s only one reason why he would be out here in the wild wood.
Alex says, ‘Are you one of Glass’s people? When did he go over to the fairies?’
‘He never did. He was betrayed. His mind was clouded, his head was turned. But in the end it won’t matter. He’s beyond all that good and bad stuff now. He’s beyond sides. Where he is, it isn’t relevant.’
‘Where I am, believe me, it’s relevant. Will you take me to see him?’
‘I can’t do that, man. See, we’re out here in the world, but for Glass the world is not the case any more. All this nature, the evolution of matter, it’s over. It’s finished. More species became extinct in the last fifty years than when the dinosaurs were knocked down by the comet. There isn’t a place on Earth we haven’t touched. There’s no nature any more. So we’ve transcended that. We’re looking for the next step.’
‘Is that what Glass says?’
‘That’s what I say.’
‘It’s a lot of bullshit.’
The man nods solemnly. ‘You’ve still got a sense of humour. That’s good. That’s important. You’re gonna need it.’
Alex says, ‘If I can’t talk with Glass, then perhaps I can talk with Milena.’
The man touches his lips with a forefinger. He wears a silver skull ring, with ruby flecks for eyes. He says, ‘You should be careful, friend. Dropping the right name in the wrong place can be dangerous. If you’re relying on the harlot, you’re in deeper shit than you can know. I’ve taken her out of the picture. I own it all now. You want to do deals or look for help, then you talk with me. I’m all there is, here in the world.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Frodo. Frodo McHale.’
The man stands up and walks away. Alex has plenty of time to think about what he said. He wonders what plans Frodo McHale has for the fairies, and for Milena’s daughters. He wonders what plans Frodo McHale has for him.
12 – For Your Own Safety
Before Todd and Spike are taken to see the leader of the mercenaries, Captain Spiromilos, they are forced to strip at gunpoint and take a shower. Their guard, a young man with brush-cut hair, his black, one-piece leather suit unzipped down his triangular bodybuilder’s chest, explains that Captain Spiromilos is paranoid about fembot contamination. He picks his teeth with the point of a knife and watches as Todd and Spike put on the loose-fitting orange jumpsuits and shower sandals he has provided. The guard’s name is Kemmel. He says, ‘Captain Spiromilos thinks that Antoinette wants to change his mind in a radical way.’
‘We heard that,’ Todd says. He pushes back his wet hair. ‘You guys are scared of her, right? I don’t blame you. She’s a scary lady.’
‘Believe me,’ Kemmel says, ‘she is not a problem.’
He pulls on disposable latex gloves, and has Todd and Spike each prick the ball of their thumb with a lancet and express a drop of blood into a plastic straw. He inserts the straws into an analyser and studies the readout.
‘We do this every day,’ Kemmel says. ‘It is a loyalty test. You’re clean. You can see the Captain now.’
Captain Spiromilos has set up his command post on the highest part of the sprawling complex, beside the helicopter pad. As Todd and Spike follow Kemmel, they can see that the wrecked southern wing is still smouldering. A cluster of dish antennae hang over the scorched hole punched by the missile. Broken stromalith slumps to the water’s edge. The mercenaries are still combing the complex, searching for Antoinette. There has been remarkably little resistance to their assault. The bodies of half a dozen dolls lie at the edge of the cactus garden, and twenty more in peach satin uniforms sit docilely, watched by a bored mercenary.
Captain Spiromilos is sitting in a canvas chair in the shadow of the black helicopter, watching a rack of TV screens. He is a stern, upright man in his early forties, with a kind of clenched, held-in look. The sort of guy, Todd thinks, who wears a corset and can count change with his asshole. He wears a flakjacket over a neatly pressed blouson with a red cravat peeking at its open neck. The sleeves of the blouson are rolled up past his elbows; a blue eagle is tattooed on his left forearm.
Near the edge of the flat roof, a teenage kid in baggy blue jeans and a wrinkled sweatshirt is virched into a computer deck holstered at his skinny hip. He pecks and slashes at the air with gloved mitts: it looks like he’s doing blindfold karate. His goggles are half-hidden by a fall of unwashed hair. Another kid jumps out of the helicopter and says he’s turned the pilot, nothing to it.
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘It is your life if you’re wrong.’
‘Hey, fuck you, man. I know my job, OK?’ The kid is wearing a loose red sweatshirt and bright red leggings. A ripped seam at his thigh reveals a length of white flesh. He glances at Todd and Spike. ‘What about the assholes in orange? Want me to do them, to
o?’
‘They’re clean,’ Kemmel says.
‘They are my guests,’ Captain Spiromilos says.
‘Oh sure,’ the kid says, as he climbs back inside the helicopter, ‘the journalists.’
Spike and Todd are offered drinks. Spike takes Chivas Regal; Todd Jack Daniel’s. Captain Spiromilos expresses his regrets for having held Todd and Spike prisoner for most of the day.
‘It was for your own safety, gentlemen. But we have secured this place now, and we’re ready to move on.’
Captain Spiromilos has a soft voice with a hint of a lisp. His English is very good.
Todd sips his Jack Daniel’s. No ice, but you can’t have everything in a war zone. He knows better than to start complaining about being held at gunpoint. Captain Spiromilos will explain what’s going on in his own good time. Guys like this always like to string you along. They like to have an edge on you, even if it doesn’t mean anything.
Todd says, ‘I expected to see Frodo McHale here. I mean, you are working for him.’
‘We have an agreement.’
‘Does that include trying to kill Antoinette?’
‘We believe that she killed herself.’
‘That’s pretty hard to believe. I was talking to her just before you started in here.’
The teenage kid at the edge of the pad slashes his hand through the air and says, ‘She’s not exactly dead, dood. Just translated. She did the Ultimate Hack.’
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘The civilians were supposed to prevent that. They failed.’
Todd realizes what they’re talking about. ‘Jesus. She went where Glass is. She crossed over.’
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘It’s a minor concern.’
‘But it sure is irritating, isn’t it?’
The kid pushes up his goggles and shucks his mitts. His eyes are as pale as milk. ‘We’ll get her, dood. She’s hiding, but we’ll flush her out. It’s no big deal.’
Captain Spiromilos says, ‘I believe she talked to you about Fairyland.’
‘As a matter of fact, she didn’t. What is this, an interrogation? Come on, Captain, what do I know about this? No more than what you’ll tell me.’
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