Later, when the Muslims have gone, Darlajane B. suddenly doesn’t seem stoned at all.
‘They’re assholes,’ she tells Alex, ‘and their community disowns what they do, but they’re our assholes. They want to destroy the hatcheries, and every living doll, it’s true, but they have access to raw materials I need to grow my chips. Besides, I like to use dolls which haven’t yet been chipped, and so I want access to the hatcheries, too. Unchipped dolls are the best kind to turn into fairies, as routines are not worn into their brains. Routines are binding in everyone, little Alex.’
‘I have routines, you mean.’
‘You are a nesting type, Alex, but because of what you want, never can you live easy in one place. That I learned to give up long ago. I am not attached to these things.’
Darlajane B. gestures around her. Her room is low and windowless, a bunker with walls painted matt black. Dusty astroturf on the concrete floor. There are bubbling tanks with brightly coloured fish schooling through violet light, and a bank of television screens, some showing various views of the club, others flipping through the thousand-plus available TV channels, and one showing the night sky transmitted from the twenty centimetre reflector telescope on the roof.
Darlajane B. is reclining in a nest of cushions, a little old lady in black leather, with a five centimetre crest of glue-stiffened hair spikes running from front to back of her otherwise shaven skull, eyes kohled, fingers knobby with rings. She is playing Tarot patience, setting down the big, bright cards with decisive snaps.
She says, ‘One day all this I will leave behind, and move on. If the bourgeoisie can live until two hundred years old in their hermetic cells, then so can I.’
‘Are you saying I should move on too?’
‘For two years you have been here. Have you forgotten your dark lady?’
Alex told Darlajane B. about Milena, and his own role in creating the first fairy, soon after he came to live above Zone Zone, although he’s never sure how much she believes. He says, ‘Perhaps she’ll come to me.’
‘Wish on a star.’ Darlajane B. laughs her cracked, husky laugh. She had throat cancer two years ago, and although hunter-killer fembots destroyed every last trace, it scarred her vocal chords; she sounds like Marianne Faithfull after half a bottle of bourbon. She says, ‘You are still wet behind the ears. The world you need to know if you are to survive on the fringe.’
‘I don’t intend staying here forever. I check out the Web every day. Sooner or later Milena will show herself.’
‘Bah. You might as well look for portents in the belly of a dove.’
Alex says, earnestly, out of tender love for this cantankerous old woman, ‘Teach me stuff, Darlajane. Show me this world. Share it with me. How long do I have to work for the liberationists before you trust me enough to let me know them?’
‘Who says I work with anyone? I have contacts, it is true. But work with others? Pah. Besides, if you wanted to, you could find them yourself. They are everywhere. If they were just old punks like me, how easy it would be for the Peace Police to find us all. No, they dress like housewives, like students…’ Darlajane B. laughs. ‘Really, you do not get it, do you? Such a child of your times, you are. Very literal, very linear, self-sufficient to the point of autism. That is the disease of this new Millennium. Obsession with self-image, obsession with estranging technologies. Happier you’d be to have a one room efficiency in a ribbon arcology outside Munich or Paris.’
‘What’s in my future?’
Darlajane B. fans the remaining cards in her hands, and Alex chooses one:
A man, dressed in the parti-coloured tights, jerkin and cap and bells of a court jester of the Middle Ages, is about to step over the edge of a cliff into bright blue sunlit air. He holds a rose up to the sun, rests his other hand on one end of a stout staff which is balanced on his shoulder. At the other end of the staff is a leather satchel, its flap engraved with the eye and pyramid of the Gnostics. A dog attacks the fringes of the man’s floppy boots, but the man seems unaware of this, and instead is intent on a sulphur-yellow butterfly that hangs before his face. Darlajane B. tilts the card and the figures in the laminated surface seem to move. The dog shakes its head to and fro; the butterfly flaps its wings, revealing human eyes on their undersides; the man smiles and starts to complete his last step, the beginning of his fall.
Darlajane B. tells Alex that he is this figure, the wise Fool, the vagabond who lives on the edge of society, despised, believed mad, yet the genius who carries the spark that will change that society. He is the pure impulse that is neither evil nor good, open to all the wonders of the world and heedless of its dangers; but he is also the Joker, who continually seeks extravagant amusements, heedless of the chaos his search causes because he is lost in the joy of the moment.
Alex says that it sounds more like Darlajane B. than himself. He isn’t much taken with this reduction of the spectrum of human behaviour to a handful of Jungian archetypes, although he also feels, with a needle of unease, that there’s some truth in what she tells him. After all, he did help Milena bring the first fairy into the world. He insisted on it, and now look.
Darlajane B. says that in a way he is right, that’s why she tolerates him.
‘But I am at the end of my journey, and you are at the beginning. The meaning is very different.’
‘What does it mean to you?’
‘For me the card is reversed. Problems rising from impulsive, reckless actions it foretells. For you, it suggests an unexpected influence that will force an important change.’
Later, when all is lost and he is homeless again, Alex will think she’s wrong. Everything seems clearer in hindsight because you only remember what’s important: the brain always finds patterns, and even if they’re untrue, they’re all that’s left of the past.
Perhaps he remembers that conversation because of the microscopic intensity of the hash, or perhaps because, two weeks later, the Peace Police raid the club and arrest him. The doll dormitories of a chemical refinery in the east of the Czech Republic have been firebombed; the Muslim Jihad has claimed responsibility; Darlajane B. has disappeared.
Alex has been down this road before. Now he knows why Darlajane B. was reluctant to tell him anything, and also why she let him meet the two Muslims. He knows almost nothing about the plot, but he can give them up to the Peace Police. After six weeks he’s released at the border, his visa cancelled. He’s happy to leave the Czech Republic; he’s pretty sure that what’s left of the Jihad will be looking for him.
Alex doesn’t see Darlajane B. again, although seven years later he comes close to finding her. Ironically, his arrest gives him cachet amongst the liberationists. He spends five years moving from group to group through France and Spain, making batches of thyrotropic hormone, learning all there is to learn about making dolls over into fairies. In Barcelona, he falls briefly in love with a young, brilliant neurologist who is flirting with the radical fringe. Alex learns much from her, but she soon grows impatient with him. She wants to change the world, and he is beginning to think that he has done enough of that.
In all this time, he finds no clue, no trace, of Milena.
After Alex breaks up with his lover, he breaks with the liberationists, too, although it’s hard to escape them entirely. He has gained a certain notoriety which is transmuted to near-legendary status once he gives up regular contact. He takes up with a grey market biolab, but when he’s in Albania, field-testing psychotropic viruses designed to disorientate troops, his driver makes a wrong turning. He spends two months as prisoner of war in Macedonia, in a little village in a valley high in the mountains.
Summer, the brown grasses noisy with insects, the smell of thyme drugging die blue and gold days. His captors are shepherds whose families have lived there for three thousand years, wiry old men with deeply wrinkled faces, quick to laugh, quick to anger, as slow to forgive as glaciers. There are no young people in the village: the men are away fighting or are dead; the children an
d young women, targets for ransom or rape or revenge killings, are hiding in the hills and won’t come down until winter’s forced truce.
Alex, fitted with a cuff which lets him roam no more than a hundred metres beyond the tumbledown, closely built stone houses, has plenty of time to think about the course of his life. When he is finally ransomed, for a ridiculously small sum, he works out his contract with the biolab and drifts to Amsterdam, where he finds Dr Dieter Luther running a sex arcade which exclusively features surgically modified dolls, with a lucrative and absolutely legal sideline in snuff sex.
Dr Luther pretends not to recognize Alex at first, but it turns out that he has been looking for Milena, too, and with no more success. Alex learns about what happened to Dr Luther’s last assistant, a zek who fell under fairy glamour. There’s a new kind of fairy community, and what it is doing has Milena’s stamp.
Then Alex hears that Darlajane B. has been working in a zek hostel just down the coast at Scheveningen. Although she’s gone by the time he gets there, he stumbles on to the beginning of Milena’s new plan to change the world. A rumour of a changeling boy who for a few weeks ruled the auditing of a virtuality club, the Permanent Floating Wave, that’s almost next door to Darlajane B.’s zek hostel; rumours of a new kind of fembot that love bombs people into permanent rapture.
Alex thinks that he has found Milena at last, but barely escapes with his life when he tries to confront her fairy helpers. And then he hears about something new just outside Paris, a place where, for the first time, Fairyland has come into the light, no longer off the map, but rising into it, rising into history.
A decade after it went into receivership for the third and final time, the Magic Kingdom has come alive again.
2 – The Last Chance Saloon
The Twins find Armand in Frontierland. He’s hiding behind the wreck of an upright pianola in a fast food outlet done up as an old-time Wild West saloon. He’s been hiding there for most of the morning, ever since the rats came back. As their pheromones spread through the nest, Armand woke from a bad dream knowing that another changeling had been located, ripe for harvest, and he immediately went to ground.
It’s cold in the gutted saloon, but although there’s plenty of wood lying around, even if it is mostly rotten plastic-veneered chipboard, Armand doesn’t want to light a fire. The Twins will find him, they always do, but he always tries his best to hide from them as long as possible.
Armand feels as if a thunderstorm is building all around him. Something bad is going to happen. Mister Mike will be called out, and something bad always happens then. His tongue throbs, and scraps of light whirl and fade at the periphery of his attention, the tatters of fairyland. He needs soma badly, but that’s how it always starts, after he is fed the special soma from the mouth of one of the Folk. Then Mister Mike rises out of dreams and his hunger burns everything away.
Armand can still feel the psychic texture of the dream from which he woke. He knows it will cling to him all day, like a hangover. Sometimes he thinks the dreams are just flashbacks from bad chemicals, using found imagery from news items about the wars in Somalia, Liberia, the Sudan, all those countries in Africa where they say the end times are happening twenty years into the new Millennium. The dreams are so real, though—and in the dreams he is always someone else. In his dreams, Armand remembers being Mister Mike.
Armand sits behind the wrecked pianola, trying to remember the dream, trying to understand. If he can understand Mister Mike through the dreams, maybe Armand can make Mister Mike go away. He can’t be sure—he can’t be sure of anything, these days—but he can hope. Hope is all he has.
He sits behind the pianola with his back against the wall, the collar of his grimy puffer jacket turned up around his ears, his hands shoved between his thighs for warmth. Remembering.
Remembering figures, running. The light funny, bronze and flaked steel. The air hot and wet as a steam bath. Columns of light moving, tangling, moving on. Light brushing across the wrecked street, where two storey mud-brick buildings have spilled down across the cracked concrete roadway. Store signs in French and Arabic. Something burning fiercely in the distance, throwing up shivering gouts of orange flame. Figures scampering through firelit shadows.
In the dream, Armand is up close, heart pounding, chest locked so tight he has to take great shuddering gasps to breathe. The figures dance, taunting. Things are out of darkness, tumble through the columns of light and shatter and explode into flames on the road, on the rubble heaps. Armand feels a burst of anger and raises his gun, and then he’s standing over a bundle of rags, firing into it, hosing it with bullets, and it dances as if the bullets are a wind, bloody chunks flying away, and it rolls over and shows a starved child’s face, black skin stretched over the bones of its skull, lips stretched back from long teeth, its woolly hair turning red with the first stages of kwashiorkor.
Armand feels sick, remembering. If these are Mister Mike’s memories, and not just nightmares, Mister Mike has done some terrible things, even worse than what he does now when he comes back into the world. Armand wipes his nose on his scarf—and freezes, because he hears light footsteps on the creaking floor. Two sets of footsteps. The Twins are here.
They always find him, no matter where he hides. It is uncanny. He always hides in a different place, and there are so many different places to hide, overground and underground, but the Twins always find him. Armand is scrunched behind the heavy pianola, at the back of the big dark room, quite out of sight, but the Twins track straight across the room, calling softly:
‘Loup Loup Loup.’
‘Loup Garou.’
‘Loup Loup Loup.’
Two pairs of hands grip the top of the pianola. It tips forward and falls on its face with a tremendous discordant crash. Armand jumps up, choking on the rush of pungent dust.
The Twins look at him, turn and look at each other, and giggle as if at a secret shared thought. They are small and skinny, dressed in their customary ragged desert combat gear. Jackets and trousers that are too big for them, splotched with brown and grey, steel chains wrapped around and around their waists for belts, high-topped baseball boots. One pair pink, the other blue. It is the only way you can tell the Twins apart. They have identical feral faces half-hidden by shoulder-length black hair cut ragged. Their faces are painted blue, and their eyes flash with a startling whiteness under the solid bar of their eyebrows. Armand doesn’t know their names—but it doesn’t really matter, because they are never apart. The Twins are one mind in two bodies. They smile down at him, showing small white teeth in pale, pulpy gums.
‘You’re a bad boy,’ one says.
‘A very bad boy,’ the other adds.
Armand puts his hands over his ears and starts to moan. He doesn’t want to hear this, but the Twins only laugh and start to dance around and shout at him, growing more and more gleeful.
‘Mister Mike is coming out—’
‘Mister Mike is coming out to play—’
‘She is only a little girl—’
‘A poor little—’
‘—sweet little—’
‘—homeless little black girl—’
‘—but Mister Mike will hurt her bad—’
‘—hurt her bad nasty—’
‘—if we let him. And we might let him—’
‘—just this one time—’
‘—we might let him—’
‘—do what he wants, because you won’t be a good boy—’
‘—you won’t love us—’
‘—and that hurts us—’
‘—so we’re going to hurt you!’
The Twins aim kicks at Armand and chant:
‘If you won’t be good, no more soma!’
Armand scrambles up. No matter how he tries to stay calm, the Twins always goad him until he has to run. They like to chase him, and when they’re tired of that, they send the goblins to make sure he’s brought back.
Armand runs down Main Street towards the ca
stle. Its blackened, pointy towers claw a grey sky. He runs past broken storefronts, past clapboard buildings, scabby with peeling paint. Drifts of wet, black leaves are piled up along the edge of the raised pavement. Graffiti everywhere, garish scribbles, the slogan A bas le Mouche! over and over, the swirling patterns of the Folk that Armand doesn’t dare look at because they’ll suck out his soul if he lets them.
The Twins call after him. He stops and turns, and sees that they have guns. Real guns: on the other side of the street, a window shivers to pieces and bits of rotten wood explode from a sagging post. The frightening thing is that the Twins are such bad shots they’re more likely to kill him by mistake than by design.
The Twins shriek with laughter and pose for each other, blowing smoke from the barrels of their pistols. Armand runs on. They won’t hurt him. They can’t hurt him, or not badly, because they need Mister Mike. One day they’ll kill him, but not yet.
It’s no use hiding, but Armand runs on anyway, runs until he has to stop, sick at heart, a knife twisting in his side. No use hiding, but he goes to visit the Algerians who for the last year have been camped out in the dry basin of one of the lakes.
They live in the submarine that is forever stalled in its tracks. It’s actually more like a tram than a submarine, with a row of windows down each side, although it does have saw-toothed fins and a conning tower complete with periscope. For some reason, the previous set of tenants, a bunch of aging ravers, painted it yellow. They’ve gone now; they fell from grace with the Folk. But Armand thinks the submarine looks cheerful, a tropical fruit nestled in the little concrete basin amongst faded plaster corals, fake giant clams and plastic seaweed.
There are about a dozen Algerians, although they are never all there at the same time. Like almost everyone who has fallen under the glamour of the Folk, they are fringers. Ineligible for the Universal Unearned Wage, they subsist on Red Cross handouts and their own wits. The Algerians make jewellery from scraps of copper and steel mined in the Magic Kingdom, and they travel into the city to sell it, although of course that’s not the real reason for going into the city. They have been touched, changed. They are with the Folk, now.
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