The butler says, ‘I daresay you were, but there’s no need for that now. We’re inside a very tight security perimeter.’
‘I think Antoinette is expecting me.’ By now Todd is only fifty per cent sure that it really was Antoinette that he spoke to, in that dusty little courtyard in Tirana.
‘Then I daresay she’ll find you, sir.’
Spike laughs. ‘He’s a fucking card, this one. Where are you from, mate? I bet you didn’t start off with that fucking cutglass accent.’
‘I’m Ralph,’ the butler says.
Steps at the end of the terrace descend to a gravel path that snakes across a cactus garden. Concealed lights illuminate tall saguaros and barrel-shaped mammillarias. Todd treads carefully, feeling every sharp stone through the thin material of his silk socks. It is warmer here than by the sea. Crickets stitch the night with pulses of insect code. Beyond the cactus garden is the noise of a party, the babble of many voices rising over thready pop music.
The butler, Ralph, says, ‘This part of the complex is an open house. It’s best not to ask about political matters. The people here aren’t interested in them. Other than that, please do enjoy the party.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ Spike says.
He lopes forward, the snout of his camera drone jogging at his shoulder, and vanishes into the crowd. Most of the men and women are wearing the bright splash prints that are fashionable this year, a dazzle of shifting reds and greens and golds that look like a gaggle of ongoing attempts at solving the four colour map problem. Most of them are older than the butler, too.
Spike comes back and hands Todd a sweating, woman-shaped carton of Asahi beer. Todd takes a swig of the ice-cold raspberry-flavoured stuff and looks around. The urbane, silver-haired butler and the boy soldier have vanished.
‘I’m having a weird day,’ Todd tells Spike. ‘Maybe we should do a number here. No one will believe it otherwise. This is supposed to be in the middle of the fucking neutral zone.’
‘That would be rude,’ Spike says. ‘It’s a nice party. There’s food over there.’
Sushi, yellow and red and black caviars, and fanned slivers of smoked salmon are displayed on shaved ice around a melting ice sculpture of a fish standing on its curled tail. While Spike gorges himself on caviar, Todd watches the crowd slowly move around itself. They are baby boomers, geezers and babushkas in their late sixties who, thanks to fembot therapy, hormone replacement and microsurgery, appear half their age. Todd sees a woman he vaguely remembers from hype shows; escorted through the throng by a tall, white-haired man in a dinner jacket, she’s dressed in a mu-mu, and coloured glowing rods are spiked through her spire of jet black hair. On the far side of the terrace, big screens endlessly cycle through satellite channels, five second slices tumbling past in a flicker of crazy light. Dolls in satin peach uniforms move amongst the people with trays of drinks; one doll has a hairless head shaped like an anvil, and lines of white powder streak the flat plate of its blue scalp. Every now and then someone bends to it and takes a toot. Spike wonders aloud if they grew the doll that way, or did it have surgery.
Todd says, ‘This is weird, Spike. Deeply, badly weird.’
‘It’s good caviar, this. You should try some while you have the chance.’
Todd scoops up a mound of soft grains with his thumb. It is good. He says, ‘I’m going to ask around. Maybe we’ll do some set-ups later. Save some caviar for me.’
‘No worries,’ Spike says.
Most of the people Todd tries to question don’t or won’t speak English. There’s something glazed about them. Most don’t even seem to hear him, but finally he finds a man who listens politely, and then explains that all this is for Glass.
‘We’re here to cheer him up. It’s a splendid party, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, it’s something all right.’
With his deeply tanned, creviced face, shock of grizzled grey hair, and scarlet, gold-trimmed robe, the man looks like a pirate king. He says, ‘It’s old-fashioned of us, I know, but actually being here is important. It’s what counts with us.’
Todd says, ‘I have business with Glass. And with Antoinette.’
‘He will be enjoying the party. Watching over us all.’ The man takes in Todd’s blood-stained jacket, his lack of shoes. ‘Where are you from, young man?’
‘Albania.’
‘How lucky that you’re here, then.’
‘I was sort of kidnapped. Is Glass really here?’
‘We came here for Glass,’ the man says. For a moment, his gaze becomes unfocused, and then he blinks and says, ‘What were we talking about?’
Todd sees that the man is about to turn away. He says, ‘What is it, between Antoinette and Glass?’
That gets the man’s attention. He smiles and says, ‘If he’s John F. Kennedy, she’s Marilyn Monroe.’
‘Except this is the twenty-first century,’ someone else says. He’s a skinny man about Todd’s age, with the unhealthy pallor of a cave-dwelling animal.
‘Of course it is,’ the older man says. ‘And such a wonderful time to be alive, don’t you think? Now I simply must talk to a very dear friend who won’t forgive me if I continue to ignore her. You must forgive me, Mr…ah…’
‘Hart. Todd Hart.’
But the man has already turned away. In his place is a tall, pale wraith dressed entirely in black, with a dead white face and a mop of pale hair. His eyes are masked by little round landscape mirror-shades. This apparition grins at Todd, exposing discoloured teeth set crookedly in pale gums. ‘You’ll have to excuse the way we wired up the Eurotrash,’ he says, and shoves his hand forward. He wears memory rings on every finger, the kind that are accessed through a secondary nervous system grown through the epidermis by fembots. ‘I’m Frodo, Frodo McHale. I can’t talk long. Security is amazingly poor here, but eventually they’ll catch my morphing program and I’ll no longer be the Invisible Man.’
Todd shakes Frodo McHale’s hand. ‘Glass has some strange friends. Who are they?’
‘Don’t you worry about them. They’re getting kind of worn out, and besides, they never were much more than burnt-out premillennial cases. Still think possessions count, still hooked on the money fetish. They want to live forever, freeze themselves in their ideal images. They reject change, reject diversity, reject freedom. They can’t learn what Glass teaches.’
‘How is Glass?’
‘He’s a mystery. A riddle wrapped in an enigma. He’s himself. That’s what you have to accept. Good, bad, that’s a human thing. A duality created by split-brains joined at the animal level. Our work will transcend that.’
‘I accept I was brought here at gunpoint. I thought I was here to talk with Antoinette.’
‘That fucking bitch,’ Frodo McHale says evenly. ‘You don’t know how it’s been here. She seduced Glass, stopped us from talking to him, threw us off the project. But we’re going to get it back. Stick around and you’ll see. Sooner than she thinks you’ll see. Then her agenda will be history, believe me. I came here to warn you.’
Todd asks, ‘Can you tell me where she is? Or how to speak with Glass? I’ll be honest with you, I’m not in any kind of mood for a debate on post-human ethics.’ He’s wondering what kind of work a virtuality supermodel could be doing here. Brazilian callisthenics for the troops perhaps, or presenting the publicity package. Every rebel gang and freedom fighter group, even one as small and obscure as Glass’s—especially one as small and obscure as Glass’s—has some kind of mixed media data set ready for upload. It would make a change from earnest, stilted voice-overs in fractured English and slow, unfocused tracking shots of comrades doing drill with scarves over most of their faces.
Frodo McHale shows his bad teeth. One incisor in there is totally green. ‘Speak, and he’ll hear you. The place is his skin. His presence is everywhere. She’s put her spell on him, but he’s wiser than she knows. You look around while you can. Pretty soon we’ll talk some more. I got to fade now, get back to our side of the wire. Outside, can you bel
ieve that, after all we did? But she can’t keep us out forever.’
Frodo McHale turns and pushes away through the crowd. Todd goes in the other direction, thinking that a little reconnaissance wouldn’t be a bad idea. He takes a bottle of Metaxa and explores a series of open plan rooms which lead one into the other, all exquisitely furnished, all uninhabited. In a corner of one room, he finds a computer deck on a Louis Quinze secretaire. There are disposable goggles and mitts in one of the secretaire’s fragile drawers.
Todd plugs in and addresses himself to the network’s editing suite. It scrolls up around him, but every desk is dark, and when Todd tries to leave a message explaining where he is, the notepad doesn’t respond and the phone doesn’t work. He has his partial jump to another desk—the same problem. Even stranger, the computer deck won’t address itself anywhere else.
There’s a flicker of movement and Todd swings around and sees the burning man standing on the far side of the room. At first it seems that he’s clothed in blue flame, as if he’s been doused in brandy and set alight. Then Todd realizes that he can see through this apparition—the burning man is nothing but flames, fire contained within a human shape. He just stands there, looking at Todd.
Todd has his partial make the jump across the editing suite, but the burning man is gone. Todd strips off goggles and mitts, and drops them in a wastepaper basket that imitates an elephant’s foot. The big room is in semi-darkness. The noise of the party like surf in the distance. African masks on the walls, vat-cultured lion skins on the long sofas, fake zebra skin rugs. At least, he supposes these things are fake, but with the geezer generation you don’t know. Some of them used to wear fur coats. He takes a long swig of Metaxa and shivers. He’s lost in this strange land, and it seems the next move is his captor’s.
9 – The Wild Hunt
Alex wakes with a start to find Ray straddling his chest. In the moonlight, the fey’s small, close-set eyes look like the holes of a mask. He says, ‘They find us.’
‘Who’s found us, Ray?’
‘Big trouble,’ Ray says, and Alex realizes that the fey is afraid.
‘I’m getting up,’ Alex says, but Ray catches his face in both hands. The fey’s sharp nails prick his jowls.
‘Listen,’ the fey says.
Far out in the dark forest, something blows a long mournful bugle note that rises in pitch as it fades away.
‘It’s started,’ the fey says, and scampers away to wake Mrs Powell.
The stones of the shrine shine like bones in the bright moonlight. The night sky is filled with a harvest of stars. The Angry Ones have disappeared. The sacrificial fire is out. On the far side of the clearing, the pygmy mammoth shifts uneasily from foot to foot.
The mournful bugle note sounds again—and the pygmy mammoth raises its trunk and answers.
Ray grins at Alex. ‘You think there is more than one? This is the home of the oldest population of feys in the world. They are here from the first. Their children are many and strange, in the forest.’
Feys don’t distinguish between the dolls they’ve made over and the creatures they gengineer.
Alex says, ‘Are you scared, Ray? I need to know the truth.’
‘No games, big man,’ the fey says. ‘We’re surrounded. They have the numbers, and at least one warewolf. I think they outgun us, too. The feys here make do with what they find, and they find a lot, because you humans are fighting so much. But their ammunition supply is patchy, and these others bring stuff with them from outside. Bad karma.’
Someone runs down the grassy aisle of the ruined shrine towards them. It is Katrina. She has stripped to her T-shirt and leather jeans, and has smeared her face and bare arms with night camouflage. She wears padded protective bands on her knees and elbows. A tiny infrared torch is slung beneath the muzzle of her machine-pistol, and night-sight goggles are pushed up on her forehead.
‘They’ve broken through,’ she says, ‘If we’re lucky, it’s just a scouting group, but I don’t know how many are out there. Fucking Avramites set these fuckers on us, I swear.
‘You change the air for leagues around,’ Ray says.
Alex tells Katrina, ‘We need one of them. Dead or alive it doesn’t matter. Just the chip and a few millilitres of blood, if you can’t bring the body, but the body would be better.’
‘They turn us,’ Ray says. ‘They have strong glamour.’
‘They won’t turn you, Ray,’ Alex says. ‘Your glamour is just as strong.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ Ray says, and draws his pistol. ‘And I have these magic bullets.’
Alex says, ‘If I get a chip and some blood, then maybe we can think about turning them. Or at least shut them down.’
‘They’ll be at the perimeter in two minutes,’ Katrina says.
She sprints back the way she has come, twisting this way and that, doubled low. A moment after she disappears into the trees there’s a quick burst of automatic fire. The hard sounds echo from the cliffs behind the ruined temple.
Mrs Powell says, ‘What can I do, Mr Sharkey? I’m not entirely useless, you know. If there’s to be a fight, I have first aid. I once worked with a flying doctor in Africa.’
‘Then start making bandages,’ Alex says.
He finds his pack and straps on night-sight goggles. The moonlit clearing intensifies into a startling chiaroscuro. He can see little shapes running this way and that amongst the trees downslope, but even with false-colour enhancement he can’t tell which are the Angry Ones and which are the enemy. There are very few gun shots; fairies prefer to fight face-to-face, saving their human-made weapons for truly desperate situations. Just as well, because most fairy bullets are hollow tipped, containing fembots that swarm through their victim’s bloodstream and eat away major vessels. The spaced bursts of fire are probably Katrina’s.
Alex pulls his brace of air pistols from his pack and loads them with hollow-tipped feathered fléchettes.
Mrs Powell says, ‘I am a fair shot, Mr Sharkey.’
Alex gives her one of the pistols. ‘That’s good, because I’m bloody awful. These are soporific darts. Don’t touch the tips. One will bring down a fairy, two a man or a warewolf, a dozen the little mammoth there. I want something alive, if I can. Try not to shoot it in the head, either. If I can get a chip, perhaps I can find out the control codes. Usually, chip codes can be accessed through visual input—the right pattern of light pulses can shut them down. You stay here. I’ll do a little hunting of my own.’
Mrs Powell looks at him. Half a dozen shots light up the trees downslope, but she doesn’t flinch.
‘You wouldn’t last a minute out there,’ Alex says.
‘I know what they are, Mr Sharkey.’
‘No, you don’t. Even I don’t know what they’ve done. Fairies can instruct their fembots to make specific changes in the geneplasm of creatures they infect. Like the pygmy mammoth there, or the troll you saw.’
‘I know all about their magic. I know the creatures of the woods. I’ve studied them for a very long time. I know they’ve made real dragons, for instance.’
‘No one uses dragons in a fight like this. When it’s all over, I’ll explain why. Don’t be surprised by anything that comes at you. Just shoot it. And look after the pack. It has all my magics in it.’
Ray tags along as Alex carefully makes his way between gnarled oak trees towards the fierce, short-lived trajectories and collisions. Alex feels powerful and quick and excited. He feels as if he’s floating through the sharp night air. The eerie thing about the fairy battle is that there’s so little sound. No shouts or cries of pain: only a few spaced shots, quick flurries of footsteps, and shocked cries quickly stifled.
Ray touches his arm, and Alex turns and sees a dead fairy sprawled in a bower of dry ferns.
‘One of the Angry Ones,’ Ray whispers.
Tenderly, Ray turns the body over. The eyes are blinded by thick mucus; the throat has been torn out. Ray looks around, then says, ‘Three more over there.’<
br />
But they are all Angry Ones, too.
Alex tells Ray they might as well wait until the fight comes to them. He takes shelter between the roots of a riven oak. The night-sight goggles reveal in false colour details his merely human eyes would entirely miss. About a hundred metres off, something is chasing something else through a bramble thicket. There’s a brief, fierce commotion, and after a minute’s quiet a single stooped figure runs off. Alex tracks it with the sight of his air pistol, but it is already out of range, and quickly disappears downslope.
Ray impatiently makes a little foray to one side of Alex’s hide, circles back to quarter in the other direction. That’s when he’s attacked.
Something long and lithe springs at him, and they go down in a tangle. Alex fires a dart into the ground, momentarily distracting the thing, and Ray rolls clear. He jumps up and fires his big pistol, and the recoil knocks him backwards. The thing springs at him again, and this time Alex gets a clear shot. It thumps down, bites at its flank, and subsides.
It is a fox, but a fox with huge ears and a wrinkled, elongated snout. Enlarged glands like wattles depend from its lower jaw—poison sacs, Alex guesses, but Ray shakes his head, and lifts the thing’s lips to reveal the hollow front teeth. It is a vampire, able to inject fembots from its wattle-like storage sacs.
‘Half my people are made over by things like this,’ Ray says.
Alex puts on disposable gloves and uses a hypodermic straw to draw milky fluid from the vampire fox’s sacs. He sticks the straw in a test kit, notes the red light that indicates the presence of fembots. No point testing further—if Ray is right, Alex knows what kind of fembots they will be, mapping closely if not exactly to the clades infecting the Children’s Crusade. The fox has tiny eyes sealed with a thick callus of epidermis; it is not chipped.
‘At least we can use its blood,’ Alex says.
Ray lifts his head, his big ears twitching. Alex glimpses something throwing itself into cover behind the swollen bole of a grandfather oak. Something else is crawling beneath a cloak that matches the coloration and heat signature of the forest floor. Alex puts a dart through the cloak and the fairy underneath bolts out from under it. Alex misses with his second shot and turns and sees another fairy not twenty metres away. Very tall and very thin, it makes an impossibly quick sinuous toss of its head and a gob of thick saliva blinds Alex’s goggles—the stuff burns his fingers when he tries to wipe it off.
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