Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘I thought I had explained.’

  ‘I’m still human, Milena. I have to proceed one bit at a time.’

  ‘I don’t move any faster, Alex. Each of my sub-selves must be recalculated in parallel, or one would begin to dominate the others. I would suffer a psychosis.’

  Alex prompts, ‘You used the Children’s Crusade.’

  ‘I used it as a laboratory, a space to evolve fembot interfaces. The evolution was driven by the requirement to perform translation of fairy entoptics. Fairies can live in unbuffered virtuality. They can make their own worlds in it, because their entoptics are the same as those of information space. I should know—I designed them that way. The Crusaders marching towards the neutral zone are only a small part of those who were infected by the fairies. They are those in whom the pseudo-sexual combination and recombination of the best assembler codes produced something close to what I wanted. The fact that they responded to my call shows how closely the codes fit to my ideal. The rest, all the other people infected by Crusader memes, I freed.

  ‘The remainder are too dangerous, because what they carry could be used by others. In them I found what I wanted, and I took it. Assemblers in their blood make very fast and very compact interfaces between the human nervous system and artificial realities. I sampled over a thousand different types to build a library of source code for the interface which allows me to directly immerse myself in virtuality. I made my selection in Paris, by the way, while you were scrabbling in the bowels of that dreary little pleasure park. Do you really think I’d allow such a precious cargo to make its way on foot through a war zone? In fact, I hoped they wouldn’t make it this far, because it would save us the trouble of neutralizing them. The Crusade reached its end long before it began its final march.’

  Alex remembers her precocious interest in a-life. ‘You planned well, Milena.’

  ‘I intend to live forever, and I long ago learned the spider’s art of patience. When I met you I had already been planning my escape for years, and I have been planning this apotheosis for almost as long. I’ll be a saint, you know. The saint of the Web cowboys. For I have shed my burden of flesh, and how they long to do likewise! Except, poor children, they’ll never manage it unless they start my work over.’

  ‘And you’ll destroy all the Crusade and the feys and the other fairies, because otherwise the cowboys just might use what’s in their blood to follow you. You don’t have the right, Milena.’

  ‘Dolls are destroyed by their creators every day, thousands and thousands of them. In a way, fairies are less than dolls—they exist only because of radical neurosurgery. Pull their chips, and they become of less use than they were when they were dolls.’

  ‘They are a new thing, Milena. You may have created them, but you don’t know what you have created.’

  ‘I know exactly what I did, Alex. I always knew what I was doing, every step of the way. My daughters were a little too like me, perhaps. They have devised a way to control the last remnants of the Children’s Crusade. But you already know of the burning man, and even that small trouble will be smoothed away. Despite your interference, I might add.’

  ‘And that wasn’t part of your plans.’

  Milena smiles. ‘Perhaps it was, perhaps not. But you have to admit we both want the same thing. We want the Crusade neutralized. We both know that it is too dangerous to be allowed to continue in any form, especially if it falls into the hands of Frodo McHale and his mercenaries. You have no choice but to help me, if you want to save the feys.’

  ‘I do want to save them. That’s the difference between you and me. You want to destroy the fairies because they can come after you.’

  ‘There are forces out to destroy the fairies that have nothing to do with me, Alex. The fairies have had their time, and now people know that the fairies can change people just as people changed them, that time will soon be over. I hardly need to do anything. You hope otherwise, so you do not believe me.’

  ‘You have a moral responsibility. Not only for the fairies, but for the people you changed, too. The people of the Children’s Crusade you used as incubation chambers.’

  ‘Most are already freed of the glamour which held them. The remainder, a tiny minority, are too dangerous to be allowed to live. You know it. Not because of what they are, but because of what they carry in their blood. Because they are the ones in which the interface codes evolved most successfully. Even the UN has recognized that they are dangerous. You’re just as dangerous, Alex. Infecting yourself that way, turning yourself into a breeding ground…You’re a fat man, I know, but you shouldn’t abuse your body.’

  ‘Frankly, I didn’t plan my life to take this path.’

  ‘I know. Sometimes I wish that I could feel sorry for you.’

  Milena walks over to the other window. She is fading. Alex can see the white-painted, Adam fireplace through her shape. She says, ‘There is one more thing,’ and unhooks the window shade with one ghostly finger—or perhaps the shade itself has become ghostly, the shade of a shade. Cold yellow Jupiter light falls through the window, which looks into Max’s virtuality Home Room. The view of Jupiter’s cloudscape seems more real than the white room, which like Milena is becoming transparent.

  ‘Come here,’ she says.

  And Alex is there.

  ‘I’ll give you a last gift,’ Milena tells him. ‘It will help you neutralize the Crusade, if you choose to use it.’

  Her ghostly form suddenly shrinks into itself, gaining mass and definition and light. Apart from Alex and the two windows, one on to Jupiter, the other on to Fairyland, she is the only real thing in the room. She hovers in midair, small as a butterfly, with gauzy wings and a dress like an inverted tulip, and shining silver hair done up in a lazy coil. She wrinkles her pert nose, throws a nebular scattering of sparkling dust at Alex, and zooms off, passing through the ghostly glass of the window into Fairyland, tracing a rising contrail of luminous dust as she soars into its vast, perfect blue sky.

  Which vanishes. There is only the window on to Jupiter, now. A seethe of nothingness presses at Alex’s back. He could take off his goggles, of course, but instead he makes a step and is in Max’s Home Room, with Max suddenly turning to look at him, startled, then puzzled.

  ‘Now, what the hell? I thought that I was the only one who knew about that backdoor.’

  ‘I had help.’

  ‘This wouldn’t be something to do with the codes that were just dumped into my buffer, would it? It’s the strangest thing, but I’ve just found the way into the burning man.’

  Max reaches up and pulls a data window out of the air.

  Alex says, ‘Don’t use it. It’s her gift. It’s from Milena.’

  ‘He’s got to be destroyed.’

  ‘Yes, but not yet. She did the Ultimate Hack, Max. Her and Glass. She wants to pull the door in with her, and the burning man is a key to that door. He’s our way into the Crusade.’

  Max looks off at the ochre cloudscapes of Jupiter. Light from the dense lines of code glowing in the data window is caught in his nappy hair like scraps of brass. At last, he says, ‘It’s the Web or her. Wannabes and lurkers are beginning to sniff around the backdoor to the Library of Dreams. I sent out a cancelbot, but assholes are posting the address faster than it can cope, and anyway I can’t do anything about word of mouth. We’ve got to close it, Alex, or someone will hack it permanently open.’

  ‘You’ve got to trust me on this, Max. We need to use the burning man to stop the Crusade.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Max says, suddenly challenging. ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘I was caught by fairies, Max. The same ones that were in the Magic Kingdom. They’re allied with some of Glass’s hackers—’

  ‘Yeah, I know. And these mercenaries, I promised I would find out about them? They’re led by someone—’ Max pulls down another window ‘—name of Captain Spiromilos. Used to be in the US Marines. Claims he’s Archigôs of Himara, whatever the fuck that is. Before this
he was working freelance for the Peepers, hunting down feys in Slovakia. That’s where I got most of the information.’

  ‘Can you give it to me? I mean right now?’

  ‘Consider it done. Why are you in a helicopter, by the way?’

  ‘It’s a long story. The important thing is that Milena wants us to use the burning man to stop the Crusade’s march. She says it’s the only way, and I’m beginning to believe her. So we can’t destroy him, or not yet. Not until the Crusade is stopped, because if we can’t stop it, how can we begin to try and cure the Crusaders? And we have to cure them before they reach the mercenaries and Frodo McHale’s hackers.’

  ‘You know, I could destroy him right now,’ Max says, and Alex feels a measure of relief, like a drink of cold pure water, because he knows Max won’t. Not yet.

  ‘A little longer is all I ask.’

  ‘I just bet she plays chess. This is your classic knight fork. We have to choose to sacrifice something because we don’t have time to chase after Milena and to stop the Crusade. And because we have to stop the Crusade to begin to cure it, we must choose between destroying the burning man or using him to try and access where Milena has gone, and risk letting copies spread into the Web. A little longer is all you’ve got. The Crusade is almost at the border. It’s on half the news channels.’

  The data window flickers with a cascade of aerial shots of a long column of people marching down a forest road.

  ‘The UN is letting them through,’ Max says. ‘They’ll cross the border tomorrow. When that happens I pull that flame-filled fucker’s plug.’

  ‘There are more than a thousand Crusaders. We can’t kill them, not all of them, Max. We need—’

  ‘That’s it, Alex. I’m running out of thumbs here.’

  ‘Thumbs?’

  ‘To plug the dike. Lots of luck, dood.’

  The bubble vanishes, and Alex, his sight and hearing filled with white noise, almost falls over before he remembers to strip off the goggles.

  Green light fills the helicopter’s cabin. Ray turns from the open hatch and says, ‘They’ve caught up with us.’

  The Twins are standing at the edge of the swathe of broken foliage cut by the helicopter’s abrupt descent. The horned man stands behind them. Green lamps held by the fairies make a scattered constellation in the dark trees beyond.

  Mrs Powell is standing under the helicopter’s hatch, her hands on the shoulders of the blinded cowboy.

  Alex tries to reassure her. ‘We’ve something to talk about now. We’ve something we can agree on.’

  The blinded cowboy says, ‘They’ll kill you, you fat fuck.’

  Ray says, ‘Just say the word, big man. I drink his blood.’

  ‘Let him be,’ Alex says. ‘He never was very important, and he’s nothing now.’

  The truth is that Alex feels sorry for the young cowboy—he’s another one of Milena’s dupes. They should form a club, and Alex could be president.

  Alex walks towards the Twins, holding out his hands. They glare at him from beneath matted fringes. He says, ‘She’s left you here,’ because he doesn’t know what they call Milena. Not mother, he’s certain of that, at least. He says, ‘I can help you, but you must help me, too. Otherwise she’ll win, and you’ll have nothing left.’

  ‘We already have friends—’

  ‘—friends who can do more for us than you can.’

  Alex says, ‘These kids are nothing to you; they hired mercenaries, and the mercenaries would rather kill fairies than serve them. In a minute, I’ll prove it to you. Forget the promises made to you. You know about me. You know what I did in Amsterdam. I’m offering an alliance.’

  The Twins look at each other, look at Alex.

  ‘You don’t know us—’

  ‘—you don’t understand us—’

  ‘—you can never understand us.’

  ‘I know. I never understood her, completely, even from the first.’

  ‘We know all about you, fat man—’

  ‘—about how you loved—’

  ‘—how desperately you loved—’

  ‘—and lost and never won—’

  ‘—never could win.’

  ‘I helped her, from the first. She’s gone. She’s left you. You know that. Now let me help you. She gave me the way to destroy your king. So far, I’ve spared him.’

  ‘Leave them, big man,’ Ray says.

  Alex ignores the fey, even when Ray’s nails close around his wrist.

  The Twins look at each other again. ‘You want us to help—’

  ‘—to help them—’

  ‘—to help the feys?’

  ‘You and the feys all want the same thing. You all will lose the same thing if you don’t cooperate. Frodo McHale and the other cowboys hired mercenaries who were hunting fairies for a living. They’re only your allies for as long as they need you. After that, they’ll destroy you.’

  ‘Prove it,’ the Twins say, and Alex knows he’s won.

  16 – Leskoviku

  Flares rise up and burst in the black sky as Todd and Spike slog their way across the polymer lake behind the fairy guide, and the ruins of Leskoviku are suddenly pinned under their stark white light. The little town has been changed by fembots. Clusters of fantastic, organic-looking spires rise out of shells of buildings eaten away to stone lace. The buttresses and spines, encrusted cliffs and fluted towers, as richly complex and colourful as a coral reef, resemble nothing so much as the post-apocalyptic organic geologies of Max Ernst’s decalcomanian paintings.

  Above, Spike’s camera drone turns to take in all of this. Spike has been recording ever since they came down the far side of the ridge and started to cross the polymer lake. Because Spike is using mitts and tele-presence goggles to control the drone, Todd must help him over the glazed ground.

  The polymer is humped and rippled, a quick-frozen sea. It refracts the flare-light around the dark shadows of the things suspended within it. Some of the things are bodies, inhabitants of the town caught in the wave of their transformed crop. The face of a bearded man looks up at Todd through a few centimetres of glaze. His body is perfectly preserved, like a bug in a resin paperweight, except that one arm reaches up through the surface: the hand is gone, not even the bones left.

  ‘Hurry!’ the fairy says. ‘Or kill you here.’

  This is its constant refrain.

  Todd says, for maybe the twentieth time, ‘Who are you with?’ but the fairy only glares at him before scurrying on.

  The combined light of the flares, falling lower and swaying under their chutes, moves over the spires; shadows move, too, making everything seem to shift and melt. Spike punches Todd’s shoulder and points. Above them, the camera drone turns to point in the same direction.

  Two, ten, twenty figures unfurl from the needle-tip tops of the tallest cluster of spires and fall through the white glare and shifting shadows of the flares, gliding on membranous wings. They look a little like bats, but must be bigger than men. All at once, three of them flare with red light and fall from the sky. A spire cracks apart in a molten spray, its tip plunging down amidst burning wreckage. Someone has just used a one shot pinch fusion laser. From the ridge overlooking the town, tracer fire loops in towards the other flyers, which swoop back into the ruins.

  Captain Spiromilos’s mercenaries have arrived.

  As Todd and Spike stumble into the outskirts of the transmogrified town, a long line of flames roars up behind them like a curtain, and heat and lurid light beats across the ground. The flames are ten metres high, and send up dense black smoke and an acrid kerosene stench.

  Shallow ridges and whorls of rotten concrete, depleted by fembots and fragile as snow crust or termite-eaten wood, crunch under Todd’s boots. He and Spike leave a trail of centimetre deep prints.

  The fairy, Todd notes, leaves no footprints at all. There are others here, scampering this way and that and firing at random through the curtain of flames in the general direction of the mercenaries’ convoy. S
ome hoot and jabber, jumping about on ruined walls and squeezing off single shots; others run up and down, firing short bursts and falling back, their place taken by others. The clamour is tremendous. The curtain of fire roars and roars: the heat and light are apocalyptic.

  Todd hunkers down beside Spike, who is calmly recording as much as he can. Firelight reflects in the gold-filmed lenses of his tele-presence glasses; he slashes and cuts at me air with his hands. Out above the polymer lake the drone bobs and turns, drinking everything in.

  ‘This is fucking marvellous,’ Spike yells gleefully.

  ‘Five more minutes. Then we find some cover.’

  ‘I don’t care! I’m a fucking point of view!’

  The mercenaries appear to have spread out along the ridge above the town, and are returning fire. Despite the heat searing his skin, Todd feels a chill shiver at his core. Adrenalin wearing off. Things seem to be happening in discrete intervals: drooping fans of tracer fire sweeping across the night air with eerie precision; the slow collapse of a filigree siding from the wall of a house at the edge of the town; a yellow belch of flame purling upwards from the far end of the wall of fire; a fairy running out across the polymer lake in long leaping bounds, taking a hit and dropping down in the unstrung way of the suddenly dead.

  ‘Some fun,’ Spike says out of the side of his mouth. Then he adds, ‘Jesus Christ,’ because lights have come on all through the transformed ruins. Strings and loops and lines of lights, yellow and green and blue and red, blinking and stuttering and pulsing.

  Todd turns to look at this, and a fairy, naked and lithe, its blue skin gleaming with sweat, lays its gun on him. It isn’t any kind of gun Todd has ever seen before: a swollen barrel with a tiny aperture, and what looks like a cylinder of compressed gas slung underneath. The fairy is no bigger than a child. It grins, showing teeth all exactly the same size, all filed to points. Its big, pointed ears are studded with gold clips.

  Todd raises his hands and shouts, ‘American journalist! American journalist!’

  A woman’s voice says, ‘Leave him be, you little fucker.’