Fairyland

by Paul J McAuley

  Fairyland.

  Lexis says, ‘It’s all around you, Alex. You only have to open your eyes to it.’

  He smells the harsh sweet smell of hash—but Lexis is dead, she died last year. He got a letter from Leroy six months after the funeral. Poste restante. He remembers standing there in the central post office of Tirana with a stunned look on his race and the crumpled piece of blue paper, its address half-obliterated by official stamps and frankings, in his hand.

  Mrs Powell holds out the joint, and Alex takes a long drag.

  ‘Nature’s analgesic,’ Mrs Powell says. ‘Go back to sleep, Mr Sharkey.’

  ‘I think I’ve been sleeping ever since I left Gjirokastra.’

  Katrina is asleep, and so is the cameraman; his sleek black drone hovers three metres above him, its fans murmuring quietly in the warm night air. The American journalist, Todd Hart, is masked and gloved, using Alex’s deck to access his news agency. Farther off, Hannibal stamps at his tether, his trunk twitching between his up-curved tusks. The pygmy mammoth is made uneasy by the drumming of the fairies, and the occasional shrieks as disputes break out amongst them.

  ‘Look,’ Mrs Powell says, ‘there goes one of the fliers.’

  They watch it soar across the face of the setting moon into the night.

  ‘I can die happily now,’ Mrs Powell says, ‘although I’m sorry that I can’t stay here a little longer.’

  ‘That will go when you’re cured. I can have Ray do it right now.’

  Mrs Powell says. ‘Oh no, Mr Sharkey. That wouldn’t be right. I want to live all of it, the wonder of it, and the sadness of it too.’

  ‘You amaze me, Mrs Powell.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just an ordinary woman, Mr Sharkey,’ Mrs Powell says. ‘I’ve had my adventures, it’s true, but who hasn’t, in these troubled times?’

  ‘Most people of your age have settled for their arcology efficiencies, their multimedia links. For safety and a long life.’

  ‘They,’ Mrs Powell says, ‘are already dead, and don’t know it. Besides, they are only a small part of humanity. I was in Africa, remember, and although there are arcologies in South Africa and Egypt, most people have yet to be touched by the nanotechnology revolution. There are still a few wild places on the Earth.’

  Todd Hart hears their voices and comes over and sits beside them. He has been working with his editor. All the reports he filed at the hotel in Tirana were siphoned into the simulacrum of the news agency’s offices in the Library of Dreams, and he has had to make them all over again. The first segment has just gone out, a small snippet about the sudden end of the Children’s Crusade added to most of the world’s cycling news channels. Larger segments, about Glass’s and Antoinette’s apotheoses, and the defence of Leskoviku, are still to be edited for the specialty newsgroups.

  ‘The conspiracy theorists will have a fine old time,’ Alex tells Todd, thinking of Max.

  Todd takes a hit from Mrs Powell’s joint. ‘The UN are waiting for the Crusaders at the border of the neutral zone. I saw this one officer when I was kidnapped, and now I get to thinking that maybe they were in on it too. There are levels and levels to something like this, in a place like this. You never get to the bottom of it. Was it all down to Antoinette? I seriously doubt it.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I think she worked most of it out a long time ago. We’re just loose ends she needn’t be bothered with. Luckily for the feys, or she would have destroyed them. She was manipulating the Web cowboys and the mercenaries through the Twins. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘I have contacts in the Web administration,’ Todd says, ‘but they haven’t noticed any disturbance. Maybe she just went and died after all.’

  ‘You’d like to think it didn’t happen, because you don’t like to feel that you’ve been manipulated. I can understand that, who better? But I don’t think she’s gone away. That’s the odd thing. She’s simply distributed herself into the world.’

  Todd takes another hit off the joint and passes it back to Mrs Powell. He blows out a huge volume of smoke and says, ‘Would you do it? If you could?’

  Alex thinks of the white room. He shakes his head.

  ‘Most definitely not,’ Mrs Powell says.

  ‘Come on, even if you were dying? I think most people would.’

  ‘I think most people of my generation are already halfway there,’ Mrs Powell says, ‘but that isn’t a good reason to join them.’

  Todd says, ‘I thought the Children’s Crusade was something, but this…You should let me interview you, Alex. Really. The world should know.’

  Alex says, ‘I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t told you.’

  Todd says, ‘It’s a big story. You owe it to the world to tell it. I can negotiate a really good fee for you, or you can get an agent, get him to talk with me. You’re coming out of this with nothing, right?’

  ‘I’m very tired.’

  ‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ Todd Hart says. ‘We do need to talk.’

  Alex turns over, and after a while the journalist goes away.

  Mrs Powell says, ‘Goodnight, Mr Sharkey. Sweet dreams.’

  Ray watches the humans sleep. Big animals tossing and turning. Muttering and snorting. Eyeballs jerking under lids. His dreams are simple. Dreams of things, of places. Static, unpopulated, untroubled. He wakes and understands those things a little better. Humans always want to make connections. They spin webs of thought, and they are trapped in those fragile webs. But Ray can undo the knots of his memory. If something troubles him that’s what he does. He starts over.

  Many of the feys want to do just that. Some of them want to kill the humans, and so Ray stands watch over the humans. He has an attachment to Alex, and more especially to Katrina. He likes Katrina. He would never say so, but he does. He will never undo her knot. He fingers it as he watches her sleep, her lined face buried in the crook of her elbow.

  Ray whispers to her as she sleeps. He walks through her dreams, sharing with her the voices in his blood.

  And later, when it’s day and they’re about to leave, Ray runs up to Katrina and says with an urgency he knows she can’t refuse, ‘Give me your hands, to show we’re friends.’

  She grips him, fierce and strong, makes as if to pull him off his feet. Alarmed, Ray turns this into a dance, there in the stony field, amongst the smudged, cold ashes of the campfires.

  The Crusade has already left for the UN relief teams that wait just over the border—no longer the Crusade, just men and women walking back into their lives, dazed as if they’ve slept for years. As, in a way, they have.

  ‘All will be mended,’ Ray says to Katrina, and then he swarms up her and kisses her and runs off.

  ‘Silly little fucker,’ Katrina says to Alex Sharkey, who watched this with an amused knowing smile. But she is smiling, too.

  Fairies run ahead and on either side of them, silent and swift, their blue bodies half-glimpsed amongst the trees that crowd the edges of the old road. It’s easy to believe there’s nothing there but shadows. Soon, no one bothers to look for them, not even Mrs Powell.

  All will be mended. In the night, the assemblers in Ray’s blood edited the code extracted from Crusade fembots. A new meme plague will spread through the humans, and they will forget. The fairies will become no more than legends and stories, classified in the caches of the Web along with Bigfoot and other apparitions. They will become an unsolved mystery, glimpsed sidelong in dreams, never in life.

  It is Ray’s gift. It’s all he has to give to his friends. As for himself, he brought a doll here, all the way from Paris. He took it from a fast-food outlet in the early hours of the morning after the fall of the Magic Kingdom.

  Ray has learnt more from the humans than they can know. He doesn’t need control chips or cocktails of hormones to make over a doll. No more chimeras constructed from slaves, forever indebted to human interference. As the humans retreat into their dreams, brave new creatures will claim the world.

  Ray has the d
oll stashed in a ruined, roofless farmhouse the forest claimed long ago, and as he scampers through the forest he hopes it hasn’t wandered off, or been taken by a warewolf. But he told it to hide, and it’s dumb enough to be good at hiding. He’ll call out, and let it taste his own wise blood. A myriad microscopic workers will spin a neural net through its cortex, construct hormone-secreting islands in its liver, and quicken its loins.

  It will be the first of his children.

  A biologist by training, Paul J. McAuley is now a full time writer of stunning hard SF and alternate reality novels. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, while Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. ‘The Temptation of Dr Stein,’ won the British Fantasy Award. Pasquale’s Angel won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

  He lives and works in London.