Fairyland Read online

  Also by Paul J. McAuley

  Eternal Light

  Secret Harmonies

  Child of the River

  Ancients of Days

  Invisible Country

  Red Dust

  Shrine of Stars

  Pasquale’s Angel

  The Quiet War

  Cowboy Angels

  Copyright © Paul J. McAuley 1995

  All rights reserved

  The right of Paul J. McAuley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2007

  by Gollancz

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978 0 57508 110 9

  Typeset at the Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed and bound at Mackays of Chatham plc,

  Chatham, Kent

  The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  ‘…the Goddess starts her endgame in Britain,

  where nobody’s looking…’

  Frazer Clark, August, 1994

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE – Edge Gliding

  King’s Cross

  Home Run

  Billy Rock

  Dealing

  Deep Hacking Mode

  Alfred Russel Wallace’s Dream

  Hyperconnectivity

  Typhon Coming In

  Artificial Life

  Leroy

  Dr Luther

  Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise

  Who By Fire

  Delbert

  The Killing Fields

  Born to Run

  The White Room

  No Big Deal

  PART TWO – Love Bombing

  Europa

  The Last Chance Saloon

  Lost Children

  The Nest

  Aftermath, and After

  The Fat Man

  The Beginning of a Great Adventure

  The Poor Knight

  Conspiracy Theories

  The Human Agent

  First Rays of the New Rising Sun

  The Wild Hunt

  Information Flow

  The Interface

  Surfacing

  The Magic Kingdom

  The Fairy Queen

  Saved

  PART THREE – The Library of Dreams

  The Burning Man

  Cheap Holidays in Other People’s Misery

  The Brides of Frankenstein

  Trouble in Tirana

  Across the Border

  In Trouble Again

  The Angry Ones

  Welcome to the Pleasure Dome

  The Wild Hunt

  Antoinette

  Fever

  For Your Own Safety

  Not a Rescue

  In Another Part of the Forest

  Milena’s Last Gift

  Leskoviku

  The Horned Man

  Wise Blood

  Fairyland

  PART ONE

  Edge Gliding

  1 – King’s Cross

  The room is full of ghosts.

  Transparent as jellyfish, dressed in full Edwardian rig, they drift singly or in pairs around and around the newly restored Ladies’ Smoking Room of the Grand Midland Hotel at St Pancras, adroitly avoiding passengers waiting to board the 1600 hours Trans-Europe Express. Alex Sharkey is the only person in the room who pays the ghosts any attention; to pass the time, he has been trying to derive the algorithm which controls their seemingly random promenade. He arrived twenty minutes early, and now, according to the watch he bought on his way here, it is twelve minutes past three, and his client is late.

  Alex is edgy and uncomfortable, sweating into his brand-new drawstring shirt of unbleached Afghan cotton. The raw cotton is flecked with nubbles of chaff that scratch his skin. The jacket of his suit is tight across his shoulders; although the salesman assured him that its green tweed check complemented his red hair, Alex thinks it makes him look a little like Oscar Wilde, who wouldn’t be out of place in the lovingly restored heritage décor of the Ladies’ Smoking Room, with its salmon pink and cream walls, marble pillars and plush red upholstered easy chairs, its potted palms and flitting population of Edwardian ghosts.

  Alex is wedged into a low, overstuffed armchair, chain-smoking and feeling the buzz from his second cup of espresso. One thing he’s learned today is they make wonderful espresso here, oily and bitter and served scalding hot in decently thick thimble-sized cups, with a twist of lemon in the bowl of the dainty silver spoon, and a bitter mint chocolate and a glass of flash-filtered water served on the side.

  Caffeine is such a simple, elegant, necessary drug—Alex remembers one of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, goofy lions sprawled around a tree and off in the distance a rhino pouring a cup of coffee for its mate, who’s saying, ‘Whoa, that’s plenty.’ The title was African Dawn, and Alex smiles now, remembering the way he laughed out loud the first time he saw it. Which was when? One Christmas back before the end of the twentieth century, he must have been five or six. It would have been in the damp, ant-infested, twelfth floor council flat on the Isle of Dogs, looking out over the Thames. Lexis always got him a book for Christmas, somehow or other. To improve him.

  And now here he is, surrounded by hologram ghosts and waiting for his man, trying to blend in with the suits and the rich tourists waiting for the express train out of this shitty country. Most of them are chattering in French, the lingua franca of the élite of the increasingly isolationist European Union. The women are defiantly tanned, in flimsy blouses and very short shorts, or miniskirts with artfully tattered hems. A few, this is the very latest in BodiCon fashion, are enveloped in chadors made of layers of translucent chiffon woven with graphic film that flashes odd images and shifting patterns, revealing and concealing breasts, the curve of a hip, smooth tanned skin hollowed over a collar bone. The men wear chunky suits in earth colours, a lot of gold on their wrists, and discreet makeup. Earrings flash when they speak or glance at themselves in the tall gilt mirrors behind the bar. Unnervingly, the mirrors do not reflect the ghosts. At the bar’s mahogany counter, half a dozen Ukrainians in shiny black suits make a lot of noise, toasting each other with rounds of malt whisky.

  One woman has a pet doll. It sits quietly beside its mistress, dressed in a pink and purple uniform edged with gold braid. A chain leash is clipped to the studded dog collar around its neck. Its prognathous blue-skinned face is impassive. Only its eyes move. Dark, liquid, sad-looking eyes, as if it knows that something’s wrong deep down in every cell of its body, knows the burden of sin that’s been laid on it.

  Alex feels sorry for it—it’s displaced from Nature, dazed by the violence done to its genome. It’s a crufty creature, he thinks, the epitome of his belief that there’s no point gengineering anything more advanced than yeast, because the more complex the organism, the more unpredictable the side-effects.

  Alex lights another cigarette and checks the time again. He has an edgy sliding feeling that things have gone wrong. He has always hated waiting around, having to be on time. For this one occasion, when he had to be punctual, he
bought a watch, and all it does is make him more nervous. It is a piece of recyclable Polish street shit that cost less than a single espresso, graphic film on a hexagon of varnished fibreboard, a bright orange cloth strap. It runs on the faint myoelectric field generated by Alex’s wrist muscles—it’s a time-binding parasite. There’s a black eagle impressed on the watch-face, and the eagle raises its wings and breathes fire when Alex tilts his wrist to look at it. The hands are black slivers generated by the same chip that runs the eagle. The graphic film is already wrinkling: the eagle has a broken wing; the hour hand is kinked. It is eighteen minutes past three.

  Alex once had a genuine antique stainless steel oyster Rolex; it came with a certificate proving it was manufactured in Switzerland, in 1967. It was given to him by the Wizard—the Wizard was always giving him stuff like that, in the days when Alex was the brightest and best of the Wizard’s apprentices. But Alex lost the Rolex when he was banged up with the Wizard and the rest of his crew. Either the cops or one of Lexis’s asshole toy boys swiped it. Alex lost a lot, then, which is one reason why he’s in a hole with Billy Rock, and making risky, desperate deals with junior grade Indonesian diplomats.

  Twenty-eight minutes past. Shit. Alex signals to the waiter and orders another espresso, speaking slowly and carefully because the tall, silver-haired man is an Albanian refugee who has only a glancing relationship with the English language.

  It’s twenty to four, and the boarding announcement for the Trans-Europe Express has been made, and the passengers are beginning to leave, when the waiter brings Alex his espresso. Alex pays with a credit card which doesn’t have his name on it, knocks back the coffee and walks over to the woman with the leashed doll. He stands there, looking at her. It’s silly and he knows it won’t really make him feel better, but he has to do it.

  When she finally looks up, a tanned woman of about forty with that tightness around her jaw that indicates a facelift, Alex says, ‘I only just figured out that the animal at the end of the lead is the one getting smashed on Campari,’ and walks out of there, straight through two ghostly women in small-waisted day dresses who break apart around him in spangles of diffracted laser light.

  Gilbert Scott’s great curving stair takes Alex down to the busy lobby. He shakes out his black, wide-brimmed hat (yeah, Oscar Wilde) and claps it on to his head, trying to look nonchalant despite the ball of acid cramping his stomach. A doorman in plum uniform and top hat opens a polished plate glass door and Alex walks out into bronze sunlight and the roar of traffic shuddering along Euston Road.

  To the north, black rainclouds are boiling up, bunching and streaming as if on fast forward. There’s a charge in the air; everyone is walking quickly, despite the heavy heat. Every other person carries an umbrella. It’s monsoon weather.

  Alex takes the pedestrian underpass to King’s Cross Station. There’s a row of phone kiosks at the edge of the pavement, tended by a crone in a kind of wraparound cape made of black plastic refuse bags. Alex tips her and, cramped in a booth that stinks equally of piss and industrial deodorant, its walls scaled with the calling cards of the face workers of the sex industry, dials his contact number. The Wizard taught him never to ring clients from a mobile phone—the locations of switched-on mobile phones are constantly updated on lookup tables, microwave junctions are tapped, with AIs patiently listening in for keywords, and anyone within fifteen kilometres can eavesdrop using an over-the-counter scanner.

  The screen of the phone is cracked, and someone has spilled a bottle of black nail varnish over its lower quadrant. There’s a blood-tinged hypo barrel on the floor. Alex kicks it around while the phone rings out, then leaves with a curious sense of exhilaration, a floating rush like being in free fall. He is well and truly fucked. Sooner or later this will catch up with him, but right now it’s as if he has escaped something.

  Just as he starts towards the Underground, the rain comes down.

  It comes down with a black fury, rebounding a metre in the air. Alex dodges into the station entrance, half-drenched. The brim of his hat sheds water down his back. The rain is so intense you could drown in it. The temperature drops ten degrees in an instant. The weather has been doing weird things lately. It’s in a hurry. It wants to get some deep change over with.

  Black taxis suddenly all have orange occupied signs. Trucks plough up bow waves in the flooded road, swamping the pastel bubbles of microcars. Alex sees blue flickers far up Pentonville Road, and tenses. No, it could be just an accident.

  Wind gusts turn umbrellas and parasols inside out, snatch hats from heads. There is a refugee encampment on the traffic island at the road junction of King’s Cross. Lashed by crisscrossing ropes to railings and the posts of traffic signs, the tarpaulin and plastic sheeting of the benders and bivouacs belly and crack in the wind. A sheet of black plastic suddenly winnows out in the pouring rain, goes sailing off above the traffic like a bat, then drops on to the windscreen of a truck. The truck slews to a halt in the flooded road, belching vast clouds of black smoke that smells like boiling year-old cooking oil and blocking both eastbound lanes. Horns, angry flickers of brake lights: red stabs in dark teeming air.

  Distant blue lights revolve in the rain. Sirens start up, are cut short in frustration. Alex sees someone run into the stalled traffic, a small guy pursued by two big beefy men in suits who grab his arms, pull him back. One of the men waves a bit of laminated plastic at a taxi which blows its horn.

  Oh Jesus, there goes his contact. Alex is suddenly certain that it’s Perse. Perse has found out and fucked him over.

  Two police cruisers are caught in the jam of vehicles behind the jackknifed truck. The doors of one of the cruisers slam open and policemen in yellow slickers scramble out.

  Suddenly, Alex is intensely aware of the security cameras everywhere. He pulls his wet hat lower and walks into the crowded station concourse. A vagrant in a filthy full-length overcoat belted with string grins at him. The vagrant’s forehead is cratered with a purple and yellow crusted wound. He sees he’s got Alex’s attention and says, ‘This bloke gave me some bleach this morning and I triaged myself. Poured it right on to my forehead and didn’t even get a drop in my eye. What do you think of that?’

  Alex pulls the case from the inside pocket of his jacket—the striations of its black plastic cover seem to flex as it scans his prints—and thrusts it at the man. He says, ‘Fifteen minutes ago I was going to be rich. Never trust a copper.’

  The vagrant stares at what looks like a matt black CD jewel box and says, ‘Do you think I want to dance?’

  But he takes it anyway, and that’s that. Contact with unrecognized fingerprints activates the suicide sequence, and in seconds the case will cook its contents.

  Alex is already hurrying away. The sound of rain on the high glass roof echoes above him like God’s impatient fingers, drumming, drumming. He pushes through a line of passengers waiting to board one of the new radiation-proofed trains to Scotland, and takes the stairs down to the Underground station. He doesn’t even bother to try and make a deal with one of the sellers of secondhand zone passes, but feeds a machine with a five pound coin, grabs his ticket and runs down escalators and along tiled corridors. Ozone-laden wind sandpapers his throat as he runs, a fat young man in a suit of vivid green check one size too small for him, his face as pink as a skinned seal’s, clutching a broad black hat to his head, in a hurry to get somewhere else.

  2 – Home Run

  Straphanging on the rattly old Metropolitan Line, Alex Sharkey just breathes for a while. Sweat soaks his shirt: he can feel its nubbly material stick and unstick to his back as the train smashes through the dark. The carriage is crowded, and Alex is squashed by one of the doors. A safety notice above his head has been detourned to read Obstruct the doors cause delay and be dangerous. Alex can almost believe it’s a message directed at him.

  Alex changes on to the East London Line at Whitechapel for the short jog over to Shadwell, where he climbs the stairs and waits a long while on the wet,
windy platform for one of the little Docklands trains. After the Radical Monarchist League blew up the Jubilee extension, travel between the centre of London and the East End has once again become terrifically inconvenient.

  A middle-aged man in a suit, probably a journalist, hunches over a Bookman at the front of the carriage; weary East End women sit with their shopping between their feet; a black kid, the hood of his poncho pulled up and the top half of his face masked by an iridescent visor, talks into a portable phone. Every now and then the kid leans his arm across the back of his seat and turns towards Alex, who wonders if maybe the kid thinks he looks like a copper.

  He starts to laugh, a little constricted giggle that makes him shake all over. Because, Jesus, he really is in deep shit now. He doesn’t even know if it’s safe to go home, but where else can he go? Leroy won’t thank him if he drags his trouble into the shebeen, and there’s no way he’s going to put his mother through it again. When the police moved against the Wizard, an armed team punched out the door of Lexis’s flat with a pneumatic jackhammer.

  Alex gets off at Westferry. It’s stopped raining. Raw sunlight heats the air. Steam boils up from the road. There’s a smell like fresh baked bread. Everywhere, light is shattered by water films. Mosquitoes whine, and even though he’s had shots against yellow fever and malaria and blackwater fever, Alex pulls down the veil of his big black hat.