Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  As a cloud of dust spreads across the deep lake of polymer where the drug fields once were, the mercenaries begin to lay down a pattern of small arms fire.

  ‘They can build the town again if they want,’ Alex tells Mrs Powell. ‘Let Spiromilos waste his time pounding it.’

  The Twins come back, driving the horned man through the dense ferns at the edge of the forest. The horned man stumbles along with both hands pressed to his head, and when he trips and sprawls headlong the Twins start to kick him in frustration.

  Mrs Powell chases them off, using her parasol like a stave.

  ‘Wicked wicked children!’

  The Twins run from her fury, then turn and shout their defiance.

  ‘You’re a silly old woman—’

  ‘—very silly very foolish—’

  ‘—you should be down there—’

  ‘—down there, marching towards slaughter—’

  ‘—marching with a song in your heart and nothing—’

  ‘—nothing in your head.’

  ‘She changed you, too,’ Mrs Powell says. She helps the horned man sit up, and turns his head and holds his forehead as he groans and spews a thin gruel.

  The horned man’s name is Thodhorakis, but he can’t remember much more than that. The modifications run deep, and appear to have erased whole blocks of his memory. He may have been a soldier or a bandit, caught during some incursion into the neutral zone, or perhaps an innocent shepherd. He can’t remember. His excursions into the inner space of the Library of Dreams are more vivid than memories of his life before he was changed.

  The horned man, Thodhorakis, lifts his head and says, ‘I can’t see too good.’

  Mrs Powell gingerly touches the carbon whisker aerials that sprout in a rigid fan through crusted skin at the base of Thodhorakis’s skull. She says, ‘If you can remove these things, Mr Sharkey, you should do so at once.’

  ‘We still need his hardware,’ Alex says. ‘But he can ride up with me.’

  ‘Better to walk,’ Thodhorakis says.

  ‘Good for you! If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Sharkey,’ Mrs Powell adds, ‘you need attention yourself.’

  ‘You’ll need to draw more blood soon,’ Alex says.

  He has already drunk a measure of blood from each of the Twins, and from the horned man. Once his modified immune system processed the exotic fembots, Mrs Powell drew off a litre of his own blood for distribution amongst the Twins’ fairies. It was one of them that effected the partial cure of the horned man, with a kiss. The surviving Angry Ones will also need to taste Alex’s blood, assimilate the T-lymphocytes with their libraries of defused Crusade fembot codes, and use them to build fembot vectors which can strip the Crusade assemblers and fembots from the Crusaders’ nervous systems.

  The Twins take a couple of uncertain steps towards Mrs Powell, their eyes searching her face, trying to figure out whether they should trust her or try to trick her.

  ‘Give him to us—’

  ‘—we can help him—’

  ‘—we know how to help him.’

  Alex feels sorry for the Twins. They have been hard used by Milena. Although they are as intelligent as she is, they have always been dependent on her. She even found a way to profit from their rebellion. They do not acknowledge that they have lost, but they know that they’ve been playing in a game where the rules are very different from what they supposed. It has taken the heart from them.

  Alex says, ‘This will be over soon, one way or another. You can help us or you can leave.’

  The Twins look at each other, then flop down amongst the ferns, arms around each other’s shoulders. More and more they look like two ordinary, frightened little girls.

  The mercenaries’ gunfire peters out. In the hush, something in the undergrowth sings, an open-throated cascade of notes. Alex looks down and sees a small lizard on a lichen-spattered boulder close by Hannibal. It has a ragged covering of feathers, a skinny elongated neck, and a bulging belly. Ray tries to stalk it, but it belches a lick of flame at his fingers and springs away into the ferns.

  ‘That’s what I meant about the dragons,’ Alex says to Mrs Powell. ‘They’re very small, mostly, and live in holes in the ground. They ferment vegetation in a crop and store hydrogen in throat sacs. They only use it for defence.’

  But Mrs Powell isn’t listening. Perhaps, in his fever, Alex only imagined he spoke. Instead, she has risen to her feet, is pointing like the statue of victory towards the little town. She cries out: ‘They’re here! Oh, they’re here!’

  Ray stands beside her, looking at Alex over his shoulder and baring his teeth. He is ready to fight.

  A straggling column is moving up the road on the far side of the town. From this distance it looks like a single organism, a ragged snake uncertainly probing this way and that.

  With fingers made clumsy by fever, Alex fits goggles over his eyes and inserts the foam button of the speaker in his ear. White noise, grey light. Then Max says, ‘Can’t you give me a visual feed?’

  Alex finds that he seems to be floating in midair. He feels a lurch of nausea, as if at any minute he might plunge through Max’s crystal sphere and endlessly fall through Jupiter’s decks of poison clouds.

  ‘You don’t need to see anything,’ Alex says. ‘It’s about time.’

  ‘I could perhaps tap into the visual feed,’ Max says. He’s sitting cross-legged in the air before the data screen. His fingers move on the ghostly keyboard that floats in front of him.

  ‘The poor guy is fucked up already. You take away his sight and he might just run out over a cliff.’

  ‘I could ghost the feed,’ Max says.

  ‘You’re already trying that, aren’t you?’

  ‘I want to see what’s going on. We all do.’

  ‘Most of all, we need to stop the Crusade.’

  Alex makes his partial frown, and Max gets the point. He says, ‘Don’t worry. It’s done.’

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘You saw me do it. It wasn’t hard, once I got into the guy’s backpack computer. There’s about fifteen hundred cowboys and wannabes helping out. Half the Virtuality Labs at MIT are in on it, too. We’re using huge amounts of bandwidth on this problem. More than half just hiding what’s going on from the Web monitors. Just don’t lose the link, or I’ll have to reestablish the networking system, and that will take time. Is it working?’

  Alex takes off his goggles.

  He tells the empty air, ‘It’s working.’

  Ray looks up and says, ‘Now they are ours. It is our time.’

  Alex says, ‘You let us handle this—’

  The Twins are laughing.

  Ray insists, ‘This is our place. Our time. This is the place of the knot. Now it is cut.’

  And out along the ridge, there’s the sound of gunfire and revving motors.

  18 – Wise Blood

  ‘He did it,’ Katrina says. She hugs the slate to her breasts and rocks back and forth on the heels of her biker boots. ‘The fat fucker actually went and did it.’

  ‘What is it?’ Todd says. Something’s happened, he can feel it in the air, but he can’t work out what it is.

  Eater of the Sun, its bandolier of ear trophies flapping at its chest, scampers up the side of a ruined wall. Lacy stonework crumbles under its clawed toes. At the top, it raises itself to its full height and beats its chest. Something cracks past in the air and Katrina shouts at it to come down, but the fairy puffs up its cheeks and hoots in noisy defiance.

  Spike has the camera drone far out, over the Children’s Crusade. He says, ‘Jesus fuck!’

  Todd says, ‘What is it? Has Spiromilos—’

  Katrina says, ‘Spiromilos doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘—attacked the Crusade?’

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ Spike says. ‘What it is, they’ve stopped.’

  Todd starts to run. Spike calls after him, but he runs on, across dry, weed-grown fields towards the road and the Children’s Crusade. />
  The road that runs out of the forest is raised above the fields on a gently sloping embankment. The long procession of the Children’s Crusade has stopped halfway between the forest and the town. It is breaking up. More and more people are wandering away from it into the fields. They move with the slow uncertain deliberation of sleepwalkers, their wide eyes starry with unshed tears. Some beat at their foreheads with their fists; others press the heels of their hands into their eyes: all share the same goofy, wondering grin.

  Todd runs from person to person, waving his arms and shouting, trying to grab their attention. They have had a hard time of it since he last saw them. They have lost or abandoned their camping gear, their solar-powered trikes and scooters. They are gaunt with hunger and red-eyed from lack of sleep, and their ragged clothes are heavy with dirt and dust. A young man carries an old woman on his back. Others carry young children in their arms. Many are barefoot; the stony ground cuts their feet and they leave bloody prints amongst the dry weeds.

  Todd whirls amongst the Crusaders as they scatter across the fields. None of them pays him any attention. They are listening to something only they can hear, stare through him towards some invisible glory.

  His wonderful story is disintegrating around him, foundering like a well-appointed cruise liner that, on course for its string of exotic ports, suddenly runs on to an uncharted reef. When a young girl, naked but for an even coating of talc-like dust, stumbles into him, he grabs her and shakes her and shouts into her face, ‘What is it! Tell me what you see!’

  She blinks and says, ‘Fairyland,’ and suddenly throws her arms around him and kisses him on the mouth.

  Todd, electrified with fear, pushes her away. He spits, tries to spit again and chokes on a mouthful of dust. All around him, the Crusaders have stopped. They are all looking in the same direction, turning to stare towards the ridge beyond the town, just as a field of sunflowers turns towards the sun. They begin to murmur the same word, over and over—fairyland, fairyland, fairyland—and a sudden wave of motion spreads through them. Along the road and the embankment, across the brown, weedy fields, they are sitting down.

  In a minute, Todd is the only person standing. Frustrated and heartsick, he turns and runs back the way he has come.

  Katrina says, ‘They think they’ve arrived.’

  Todd gargles a mouthful of water and spits it out. He is frightened that the girl has infected him. His hair is full of dust, and he has a stitch in his side. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and says, ‘Where did they think they were going?’

  ‘Fairyland, of course. Or so they believed. In truth they were walking to their own deaths, although I hope they did not know that. If they did, she is more cruel than even I think she is. But we have saved them!’

  Todd says, ‘Antoinette did this?’

  ‘Now she calls herself that. Before that she called herself Milena, and that was not her real name either. We never knew her real true name, Max couldn’t find it…’

  ‘Names are important, huh?’

  ‘Names are power. But if she drew the Children’s Crusade here, it was someone else who stopped it.’

  Katrina turns away and looks through field-glasses at the ridge that rises above the ruined town. She says, ‘I think something has infiltrated the mercenaries’ line up there. Make your thing, your camera platform, fly over it.’

  ‘Do it, Spike,’ Todd says.

  ‘And get it shot down?’

  ‘Now you worry about that.’

  Spike sends the drone up to its ceiling of two hundred metres. The view on the data slate is crystal sharp, looking down on vehicles beginning to move around each other. Muzzle flashes blink and stutter amongst the trucks and jeeps. A jerky jump of magnification shows naked, blue-skinned figures flitting to and fro amongst the trees and dense stands of dry bracken at the edge of the forest.

  Todd sees Kemmel’s motorbike crest the ridge. Jeeps and then the trucks follow, running abreast in a ragged line. Some of the mercenaries are laying down smoke and the rest are firing through it as they accelerate towards the ruined town. Orange muzzle flashes punch through the bank of dense white smoke that’s rolling down the terraced slope, and then the vehicles outrun the smoke and spread across the polymer lake…and begin to slow down.

  Katrina is whooping for all the world like a triumphant fairy, and all around the surviving fairies are hooting and drumming.

  The mercenaries’ vehicles are sinking. The heavy trucks are going nose-down. The jeeps are trying to turn back, but their balloon tyres only churn up gouts of semi-liquid polymer as they subside. It’s over in a matter of minutes. Some of the mercenaries keep firing right until the end. A few gain the cab roof of a truck, but then the truck tilts sideways and they must jump into the liquefied polymer.

  Then there’s only the white smoke, dispersing into the brightening morning air above the polymer lake. Fairies stand along the ridge, calling to their fellows in the ruins of the town below.

  Katrina grips Todd’s arm and says over and over, ‘Wise blood. They have wise blood.’

  Spike is still masked with his tele-presence goggles, still recording. He says, ‘There’s someone coming down on a little hairy elephant. That wouldn’t be a friend of yours, would it?’

  19 – Fairyland

  Ray says, ‘This day and the night. You go. You all go.’

  Katrina says, ‘You’re an ungrateful little fucker.’

  Ray looks up at her and strikes an attitude. ‘I can hurt you bad nasty, but I don’t. You thank me for that.’

  ‘Alex nearly gave his life for you. Me also. Fuck, you are only here because someone made over a worthless doll labourer.’

  ‘You ask to be born?’

  Ray is grinning now, and Katrina takes a step back.

  Alex raises himself up and says, ‘I’ve always been grateful to my mother, Ray. My father, I never knew my father, but I knew my mother.’

  Alex is lying on a deep litter of pine branches. The fever that has burned through his blood for most of the day is now subsiding. He feels tired and heavy, as heavy as if he were on Jupiter, and cold despite the silvery blanket Mrs Powell has tucked around him, despite the hot sweet tea she made him, despite the rich sweet chocolate he’s eaten, a whole half kilo. His heart is flopping around in his chest; he’s frightened it might burst.

  He has donated another litre of blood rich in T-lymphocytes. The surviving Angry Ones wander up one by one, scoop a dripping handful of his blood from a communal bowl, drink and turn away, licking their long fingers. Drink this, my blood. My wise, quickened blood. They’ll use the libraries of code sequestered inside the T-lymphocytes to make clades of anti-Crusade vectors, pass them on with a kiss to each of the remaining uncured Crusaders who sit or sprawl in the weedy fields to the west of the ruined town.

  The fairies from the Twins’ entourage, quickly grown bored with changing humans, have slipped away. The Twins disappeared at the same time. Alex had to ask Ray what happened to the two little girls. Suddenly, he’s dependent on Ray. They all are. Most of the feys won’t talk to the humans; most of the rest will only talk nonsense. There’s one, a big fellow hung with grisly trophies, who talks as if the humans are pets or slaves. Katrina came near to shooting him, before Ray interceded.

  The few surviving Angry Ones are still here, drumming and drumming amongst the shelled ruins, and solitary, wood-wise feys are slipping in from the forest. Some have brought food, haunches of deer or wild pig, or skinned and gutted rabbits. The dazed Crusaders accept a portion of this bounty as their due, and are roasting the meat on little fires that haze their casual encampment with blue smoke.

  Ray tells Alex that the Twins know only Fairyland. It would be cruel to take them away from that. He says that the Twins will help the feys. There will always be a need for human agents. Alex thinks that Ray is indifferent to the danger that the Twins might once again try and turn the feys to their own use, but you can’t talk to Ray or any of the feys about what mi
ght happen. There is only what is, the present moment pregnant with the past.

  Ray says now, ‘My mother a breeding thing. A doll. My father a woman who wants me to be her child. I leave her long ago, far away.’

  Alex says, ‘You remember who quickened you?’ He’s interested; Ray has never before spoken about his past.

  Ray is fingering the loops of knotted string that hang from his belt, telling his coded memories. After a while, he says with a shrug, ‘I cut that knot.’

  Mrs Powell says, ‘You should rest, Mr Sharkey. Sleep, and tomorrow you can think about these things.’

  ‘I’m not ill, Mrs Powell. Exhausted, that’s all.’

  ‘You are ill, Mr Sharkey. You’re just too stubborn to admit it.’

  Mrs Powell is tending the only surviving mercenary, a woman who speaks neither English nor French nor Greek nor German. She had to be cut from the hardening polymer, and has suffered multiple fractures of both her legs. Chunks of hardened polymer bonded to her skin will have to be surgically removed. She is in a lot of pain. Mrs Powell has given her a shot of morphine and now is making sure she doesn’t slip into shock. The other mercenaries are drowned and buried, locked within the polymer that the fairies phase-changed with their own wise blood.

  Ray says again, ‘This day and the night, and you go.’

  Alex sleeps a little. When he wakes it’s night. The feys are still drumming. He can hear the crackling of the polymer lake as it hardens, and the tiny, stealthy noises, a billion minute raspings and creakings, as the towers and spires and arches of the little town are rebuilt, molecule by molecule, by a myriad microscopic tireless toilers. Little lights twinklingly outline those few spires which survived the bombardment. The lights are slowly crawling around each other, like the fragments of shattered moons that make up Saturn’s rings.

  ‘Fairyland,’ Alex says, and feels a moment of pure intense happiness as he accesses some simple childlike part of himself, a buried mote of memory that flares with the brief intensity of a meteor.