Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  The jeep is smart and quick and agile. Its big segmented wheels have independent universally jointed suspensions and are each driven by a separate motor, controlled by a hardwired nervous system. Kemmel lets the jeep find its own way, and it moves up the rocky slope like a bug on a griddle, dodging amongst trees and crashing through rose thickets.

  Spike has already unshipped the camera drone, which follows the jeep like a pilot fish surfing the wake of a whale. The red light above its lens turret blinks calmly. Kemmel grins and gives it the thumbs-up, happy to be a prime-time star.

  Todd hangs on to the crash bar and leans forward and says to Kemmel, ‘Are you happy? It’s not exactly real fighting.’

  ‘Plenty of action soon,’ Kemmel says. ‘In the town it is quiet, but that does not mean it is unpopulated. They wait for us, I think.’

  Todd says, ‘What I mean is, I didn’t come out here to record a meaningless firefight, or an equally meaningless massacre.’

  Kemmel says, ‘But you’ll still use what you get.’

  The sick thing is that the mercenary’s right, but Todd can’t admit that. He says, ‘You’ve been around, Kemmel. So have I. Let’s be men and agree that much. What are you getting out of this?’

  ‘I get paid. I get to see action. I get to grease as many monkeys as I can. Why do you think I’m here?’

  ‘Don’t be an asshole, Kemmel. Spiromilos is a crazy man, we both know it.’

  ‘Maybe so, but he knows how to hustle.’

  ‘He’ll run out of luck sooner or later.’

  Kemmel shrugs. ‘Not yet. This high enough for you?’

  The jeep has climbed out of the trees, and is scrabbling and sliding up the beginning of a steep field of scree with dogged determination. Below, the lights of the convoy glimmer amongst dark trees. The ripping sound of chainsaws drifts up.

  Todd says, ‘Do him, Spike!’

  The drone swerves sideways and rushes forward. Kemmel sees what’s happening and has time to raise an arm in front of his face before the drone smashes into him. His head cracks against the jeep’s windscreen with enough force to star the glass.

  The jeep registers the problem and stops, and together Todd and Spike heave Kemmel on to the scree. The mercenary’s face is masked in blood, but he’s still breathing.

  Todd is trying to figure out how to override the jeep’s AI when something lands on the hood and levels a pistol at him. He shouts, ‘American! American journalist!’ before he sees that the thing is a doll—no, a fairy, barechested in cut-down camo breeches, with nipple rings and a mouthful of pointed teeth. A pair of crooked tusks, yellow as ivory, grow through its cheeks. The tusks are tipped with steel.

  ‘Come with me,’ it says in a thick voice, ‘if you want to live.’

  15 – Milena’s Last Gift

  ‘We took this from your dark lady,’ Frodo McHale says. ‘So now you get to ride into battle in style, and on the winning side.’

  The cowboy, grinning like a fool, is standing in the aisle of the helicopter’s little passenger compartment, holding on to the headrests of the seats in which Alex and Mrs Powell are fastened. His little round landscape glasses are like black holes in his long white face. Another cowboy, a kid in red, crouches up front. He’s wearing goggles and mitts, and his computer deck is jacked into the pilot’s cocoon. Ray lies beside the pilot, his wrists shackled to his ankles. The fey’s eyes are open, staring into infinity. He lies so still that he might already be dead.

  Alex watches the green-lit clearing drop away as the helicopter rises above the trees. Its searchlight comes on, probing the dusk as it turns northwards, towards the abandoned town of Leskoviku. They’re going to meet the mercenaries with whom Frodo McHale’s cowboys have formed an alliance, and then intercept the Children’s Crusade.

  Frodo McHale tells Alex, ‘As your friend Katrina might say, for you the war is over. In fact, it never really began, did it? Our little trap might not have caught everyone, but we have the leader of the feys.’

  ‘You don’t know much about feys, do you?’

  Frodo McHale isn’t listening. ‘We’ll have to kill it, of course, once we’ve taken everything it has in its blood. If you cooperate, Alex, we won’t have to do the same to you.’

  ‘Let Mrs Powell go. She has nothing to do with this.’

  ‘The old woman? Why not? She’s harmless. She can go when this is over. We wouldn’t want the British Embassy making noises, would we?’

  ‘Young man,’ Mrs Powell says, ‘I shall certainly be making noises about this.’

  Frodo McHale ignores her. He leans close to Alex and whispers, ‘By the way, Alex, there’s something you should know about your dark lady. She—’

  That’s when the helicopter tilts sideways. In the cockpit, the kid’s goggles suddenly blaze with light, and he screams and claws them off.

  The helicopter tilts the other way. Its nose goes down, and Frodo McHale falls backwards. As he starts to get up, Mrs Powell whacks him on the top of his head with the carved handle of her parasol. He falls to his knees and puts up a hand to protect himself, and Alex distinctly hears two of the cowboy’s fingers break when Mrs Powell hits him again and lays him out as flat as a landed fish. Ray suddenly twists and bites into the cowboy’s throat.

  Alex shouts, ‘Don’t kill him!’ and pops his seat harness. The vibrating deck yaws violently. Beyond the canopy, in the cone of the searchlight, the air is filled with a blizzard of wood fragments as the helicopter drops through the forest canopy.

  Although it is a controlled crash-landing, the impact knocks Alex on to his back. Frodo McHale is arched, his weight supported by his heels and the back of his head as he claws at his spouting throat.

  Ray turns his head and spits a wet mouthful on to the deck. He says thickly, ‘No words there.’

  Frodo kicks out and then relaxes. His black clothes are wet with his own blood.

  ‘I think we have an angel on our side,’ Mrs Powell says.

  Crouched by the pilot’s cocoon, the kid is pressing bunched fingers into his streaming eyes and howling that he’s blind. His face is underlit by the light pouring from the goggles he has dropped.

  Then the light starts to pulse.

  Ray says, ‘She wants to talk with you, big man.’

  The blinded cowboy won’t stop wailing, so Mrs Powell gives him a sedative shot and takes him outside. Alex jacks his own computer deck into the pilot’s cocoon. He pulls on his mitts, fits the goggles over his eyes, takes a breath, and punches the space bar of the keyboard that appears in front of him.

  And his eyes are filled with white light.

  Gradually, like a developing photograph, lines and perspective emerge from the light. It is a room, a white-painted room with bleached wooden floorboards. The white shades at the two windows are luminous with sunlight. Between the windows, a yellow canary in a cage is singing its heart out. Although in real life it was a mechanical toy, here in virtuality it appears to be alive, its eyes bright, its yellow breast heaving and its head turning back and forth as it looses a cascade of trills.

  For a moment the canary is the only spot of colour in the room, but then something moves against the wall, and Alex sees a woman in a long white dress standing there. Her dark eyes burn through the white hair that shrouds her face.

  Alex immediately thinks of the virtual ghosts in the Ladies’ Smoking Room of the Grand Midland Hotel at St Pancras, for the woman is a ghost. She is Nanny Greystoke. Then she is Milena as Alex remembers her, the little girl with the calm wise face, her thick black hair woven into a French braid. She is wearing the same white T-shirt and green shorts that Alex recalls from the second time they met, in the Pizza Express in Soho.

  Alex stands up, and Ray asks him what is happening. Alex ignores the fey. The raw stench of Frodo McHale’s blood, the hot oil smell of the crash-landed helicopter, the sounds it makes as it settles in its canted bed of smashed tree branches: all falls away. Alex is deep in virtuality, registering only what he sees and hears th
rough the link.

  He says, ‘Is this what happened after I rang your doorbell? Is this what I’ve forgotten?’

  ‘This isn’t what happened, Alex. Does it matter?’

  ‘All these years—’

  ‘You were looking for me because—’ The single line of Milena’s eyebrows dents in the middle. Then she laughs. ‘Oh Alex! You are such a romantic!’

  ‘You never did understand people too well.’

  ‘I was never interested in details. Nothing’s lost, Alex, if you know where to look.’

  There are toys scattered across the floor. A couple of racing cars circle each other and then zoom off towards opposite corners of the white room. A clown beats a drum and a redcoat soldier blows on a tiny, tinny bugle. A teddy bear clumps up to Milena, its unjointed arms held out in mute entreaty. She picks it up and cradles it.

  ‘You came back,’ the teddy bear says in its gruff, growly voice. ‘I knew you would come back.’

  Milena says, ‘I found this room in the archives of the company that owned me. They were very meticulous about recording the circumstances of my disappearance.’

  ‘I remember that. I found your daughters in Paris, Milena, but I just missed finding you.’

  ‘They aren’t my daughters. You know that, Alex.’

  ‘You cloned yourself, when? It must have been soon after you left London.’

  ‘Dr Luther helped me. Curiously, although I gave him the technique—I stole it from my company—he used it only to make his sex toys.’

  ‘I saw Dr Luther last year, but he never told me that.’

  They are like old, former lovers, Alex realizes, talking over past times and lost friends.

  Milena says, ‘Despite his interests, or perhaps because of them, Dr Luther has a very Victorian sense of honour. He gave me his word that he would not divulge what he had done. I’m pleased to see that he kept to it. But you, Alex. You’re something of a disappointment to me. You keep bad company. That impossibly crude vigilante, and the silly old woman with the romantic ideas. Siding with the feys. It doesn’t become you. I thought you were smarter than that.’

  ‘Cleverness isn’t everything.’

  ‘No?’ Milena sets the teddy bear on the floor, and it vanishes along with the rest of the toys.

  ‘I’m here—’

  ‘Please, Alex. Spare me the speeches. I know why you’re here.’

  ‘The feys—’

  ‘It got out of control, I admit, but I have made arrangements.’

  One of the window shades rolls up, and sunlight floods the room. It’s so bright that Milena seems to dissolve into it. Her voice says, ‘I have made a fairyland. Look.’

  With no sense of transition, Alex is standing at the window. Outside is not the little street—he’s forgotten its name, although he remembers double yellow lines on heat-softened tarmac, high brick walls, and service entrances—but a verdant, summery countryside. Green hills saddle away under a bright blue sky towards a horizon where, like a storm, or the battlements of a walled city, a vast forest looms. There are meadows starred with poppies, and copses of oaks and elm. In the middle distance, a little pavilion, its walls creamy silk, its conical roof pink, is pitched in a daisy-starred meadow. A white horse grazes beside it. The horse has a spiral, nacreous horn as long as a man’s arm growing from its forehead.

  Antoinette says, ‘Fairyland.’

  Alex isn’t surprised at the change. He is surprised to see that Antoinette is naked, with raw sutures around the top of her shapely, shaven head. He says, ‘It’s a bit of an anti-climax, frankly.’

  A disneyfied bluebird flies up to the window. Its brown, human eyes, with coy, fluttering lashes, stare into Alex’s. It chirps a merry song, and then swoops away across the sunny meadows.

  Antoinette says, ‘It can be anything you like. The window is a metaphor for a very special buffer. You’re not seeing it the way the fairies see it. The way, Alex, that I can see it.’

  ‘Who did your body, by the way? Not Dr Luther, I take it.’

  ‘He does tend to overstate the attributes of his sex toys, doesn’t he? He’s a great believer in the lordotic response, which is why he exaggerates secondary sexual characteristics. Oh, some of the work was done in Thailand, and some of it was done in the old-fashioned way, diet and exercise. It was Glass’s idea, and we had so much fun planning it. We made up a whole other life, faked our way into InScape’s auditions and rigged the selection. We even created an agent which did all its business over phone lines. It made my transition so much easier, because InScape had done all the physical and reactive profiling already, and of course I had access to the backdoors in their Reality Engines. We borrowed a lot of their codes to build the foundations of the Library of Dreams.’

  ‘Are the stitches a fashion statement, or another of your metaphors? Are you getting ready to follow Glass? You may be disappointed. It isn’t over yet, Milena. Not until the Children’s Crusade crosses the border.’

  ‘You’re too late, dear Alex. You worked some of it out, but you were too slow.’

  ‘We can still stop them,’ Alex says, but he’s uncertain now. He has the free-falling feeling that Milena has outsmarted him again.

  ‘Of course. But only with my help. And that’s all you can do.’

  Alex understands. The sutures. The playfulness. He would never have expected Milena to be playful, not in the real world.

  He says, ‘You really did it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Three days ago. Frodo McHale made an alliance, but I out-manoeuvred him.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘I know. The pilot was always mine, Alex.’

  ‘You can’t go back?’

  ‘A bush robot with ten million fembot-sized scanning and recording arms stripped my cortex neurone by neurone. It took no more than a hundred seconds, and at the end of it my original was dead. I’m not a copy but a simulation of that original, built up from the bush robot’s measurements and six months’ sampling and recording of cortical activity. Everything I remember of my original’s life was built into a cross-reference data-base, and a heuristic program does its best to fill in the gaps. Frankly, it’s not recording and simulating the activity of a mind that’s the problem. It’s the interface between the simulation and its environment.’

  Alex says, ‘We could still turn you off.’

  ‘I’m not in the Library of Dreams. It was useful, but I’ve spread out. I’m distributed across the Web, Alex. I use a maximum of about point nought nought nought five per cent of its capacity, but only when fully recalculating Fairyland, and that last happened when the curtain went up for you. If you want to hurt me, you’ll have to switch off most of the Web. I’m not anywhere any more, I’m everywhere. You’re still blundering about with those ridiculous goggles on. You have to plug in. But I’m here…’

  ‘What’s it like? Really. I’d like to know,’

  ‘It hurts. I’m feeling so much that it hurts. I’m using every one of the receptors that were mapped across, and half of those are pain receptors. But that will pass, I’m told. I’ll adapt. The inputs should slowly change the output of the receptors.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Then I can accept the pain.’

  Alex tries to imagine it. Like instantly being flayed alive, and that instant lasting forever, never dulling from its peak intensity of raw white-hot agony.

  He says, ‘It must be like Hell, Milena.’

  ‘I’m going to live forever, Alex. What’s a little pain?’

  ‘You haven’t changed. You always were…unique.’

  ‘I knew you’d understand, Alex. After Glass, you understand me best.’

  ‘When I was much younger, I’d’ve taken that as a compliment. Where is Glass?’

  Antoinette hands Alex a little brass spyglass. It allows him to look through the walls of the silk pavilion and see the old man sleeping inside a glass coffin.

  ‘He passed through before the codes derived from the Children’s C
rusade were available. I’ll wake him soon. Then we’ll be together forever.’

  ‘You love him.’

  ‘It’s not exactly love, Alex.’

  ‘It’s more than understanding.’

  ‘He’s nearly as brilliant as I am, Alex. And as alone. We were fated to be either lovers or mortal enemies.’

  ‘You were using the Children’s Crusade all along, weren’t you? And even after your daughters turned against you, you were still using them.’

  ‘I admit certain aspects got out of hand, but side-effects are inevitable in a project this size. My daughters interfered, it’s true. They were very naughty, but they didn’t really know that what they were doing was wrong. Besides, the world won’t mourn a few little girls who would have grown up only to die of violence or a fatal disease after breeding more of their kind. In a way, you know, they were my true daughters.’

  ‘I know you’re not human, Milena. But you needn’t pretend to be a monster. It isn’t you.’

  ‘But I’m no longer the Milena you knew. The mapping isn’t even remotely precise, but that doesn’t matter. No one remains the same. We all map and remap ourselves.’

  ‘I’m not out to destroy the Children’s Crusade, Milena. That never was my intention.’

  ‘And that’s why you are a fool. My daughters may want to use the Crusade to change the world, but that was never my intention. The Crusade is my laboratory. I used it as a self-organizing system to evolve fembot interfaces by artificial evolution, driven by the requirement to translate fairy entoptics as efficiently as possible. The codes used by the fembots are the only way to directly interface with virtuality…’

  Alex turns as her voice fades. She is Milena again, the little girl with the glossy black hair, the white T-shirt, the knee-length green shorts. She says, ‘You’re still here.’

  ‘You were explaining what you did. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’