Europa

An extract from Fairyland.

Europe in the early years of the Third Millennium is not an easy place to find a preternaturally intelligent little girl who has deliberately gone to ground. Alex Sharkey makes a long journey of it, across France and Germany and through the little kingdoms and republics of Eastern Europe. He searches for twelve years. Although the products of Milena's imagination are all around him, in all that time he only once comes close to finding her.

Dolls are no longer the novelty toys of the rich. They are used as cheap, versatile computer-controlled labour in industries where working conditions are traditionally hazardous -- chemical refineries, deep coal mines, intensive horticulture, nuclear fission power stations. Gradually, they replace human workers in the emergent nanotechnology industries: driven by plug-in chips and fembot-grown neural nets, dolls can work for twenty hours a day accurately electron-etching primary fembot templates no bigger than bacteria. Killing Fields franchises are built in Rotterdam, Hamburg, Budapest and Moscow. Every day, more than a thousand dolls are hunted down and killed for sport in arenas across the European Union. There are women-only arenas, arenas for senior citizens, arenas where the clinically disturbed therapeutically discharge the murderous fantasies of their superegos.

It is an age of excess.

In the Europe of the First World, most people enjoy a universal unearned wage and unlimited leisure in booming economies driven by new technologies that are making techniques of mass production, hardly changed since the days of Henry Ford, finally obsolete. They live at the edge of the old conurbations in ribbon arcologies, vast conglomerations of apartment complexes, leisure parks and shopping centres that are part built, part grown. More than fifty per cent of the population of First World Europe is over eighty, the baby boomer generation of the last century come into a postmillennial paradise. Nanotechnology and gene therapy promises that at least half of them will live into their second century.

But there's also the Europe of the Fourth World, the Europe of the dispossessed, the people of the fringe. Half the population of the old Communist Bloc countries have been displaced by civil wars, and their numbers are swollen by refugees from the economic and ecological disasters in Africa, migrants who flock through Italy into the heart of Europe like swallows. They are uncountable, although tag and recapture methods used by UN relief teams estimate that refugees are roughly equal in number to the official population of Europe. Sometimes, especially in summer, it seems that all of Europe is on the move, a giantess tossing restlessly but never quite waking, displacing and distorting the maps which cover her.

After five years of travelling, Alex settles for a while in the café‚ and beer hall culture of the demi-monde of Prague, where two generations of American exiles have established an easy-going bohemia. There are fairies here -- there are fairies everywhere, now, if you know how to recognise their enigmatic traces -- but they are fey, wild and elusive, and still heavily outnumbered by their human creators and collaborators.

Alex falls in with an aging punk who calls herself Darlajane B., her stage name from the 1980's, when she was lead singer in an East German thrash metal group, The Thalidomide Babies. After four years of playing the semi-legal clubs of East Berlin, half the band was thrown in prison by the Stasi, the East German secret police. A year later, they were let out in time to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Darlajane B. has a fuzzy recording of herself dancing by searchlight on top of the wall in T-shirt and lycra cycle shorts, soaked by the play of firehoses.

For a year, Darlajane B. made a good deal of money selling pieces of the wall to gullible American and Japanese dealers ("So much we sold, a wall they could have built from Stockholm to Beijing."), along with Stasi torture equipment, Soviet military uniforms and badges, and even weapons. She gave that up after someone with a high velocity rifle took a shot at her as she was crossing a St. Petersburg bridge minutes after leaving a hotel room where a couple of Ukrainians had offered her two kilos of weapons grade plutonium. With finely tuned empathy for the zeitgeist of the end of the twentieth century, Darlajane B. migrated to Prague shortly after Czechoslovakia split into two. She set up the city's first coin-operated launderette and lost the profits from that in a venture in exporting beer, started over as bartender in a folk-rock café, and is now part-owner of an ambient club, Zone Zone, deep in the maze of alleys and passageways of the Stare Mesto.

She also grows chips that can make over dolls into fairies.

For six months, Alex lives in two rooms above Zone Zone's arena. Of necessity, he sleeps by day, but he doesn't mind that. He's having fun, and beginning to hope that Milena's glamour has eased its pull. He grows psychoactive viruses for the clubbers and brews batches of doll-specific thyrotropic hormone for the liberationists, but he doesn't quickly discover who Darlajane B.'s associates are, nor where she's learned her skills or obtained the fembot templates.

"Such things," Darlajane B. declares when he asks her, "you don't need to know."

But Alex persists in asking. Eventually, Darlajane B. lets him know that she has contacts with a cell of a radical Muslim group that is held to be responsible for sabotaging doll-associated enterprises all over Eastern Europe, including the firebombing of a hatchery in Budapest that killed the plant supervisor and four technicians as well as thousands of new born and unborn dolls. This association makes Alex more than uneasy. There are dozens of liberationist groups, from political pressure groups to underground organisations with names like Daughters of Morlock or Blue Star Liner when they have names at all. But the Muslims aren't interested in freeing dolls and making them over into fairies; instead, they want to destroy every trace of these blue-skinned devils.

Darlajane B. doesn't share Alex's concern. She says she will talk to anyone. Information should be free: it is not information that destroys, but people who use it. She does spend just about half her waking life on the Web, it's true. She's almost evangelical about it.

At last, Alex gets to meet with two of the Muslim group. One is a Moroccan student with a ferocious knowledge of molecular biology, the other a tall loose-limbed drummer in his fifties. Alex gets very high with them on harsh strong mountain hashish from Tunisia, smoked in a hookah over peppermint oil, and he learns that as a teenager the drummer once played with the Rolling Stones, and that the student's grandfather was working in the Hotel Minzah in Tangier when Brian Jones stayed there.

"Connections everywhere," Darlajane B. says. "It's a very wiggly world."

They all laugh -- they are so stoned that everything seems funny. When the student says that one day they will cleanse all palaces of sin, including Zone Zone, they all laugh at that, too.

"By then I will be so old I will want it destroyed," Darlajane B. says.

"The older you get, the more neurone connections you grow," the student says. He is wearing an expensive one-piece suit and is immaculately groomed -- he is the first man Alex has met who has manicured fingernails. "Civilisation is very old, too. Many many connections. You are proof, Darlajane B., because you know many people."

Darlajane B. passes the pipe and says, "I knew twice as many when I was in Berlin, but half of them were Stasi informers. Now I choose more carefully who I talk to."

Later, when the Muslims have gone, Darlajane B. suddenly doesn't seem stoned at all.

"They're assholes," she tells Alex, "and their community disowns what they do, but they're our assholes. They want to destroy the hatcheries, and every living doll, it's true, but they have access to raw materials I need to grow my chips. Besides, I like to use dolls which haven't yet been chipped, and so I want access to the hatcheries, too. Unchipped dolls are the best kind to turn into fairies, as routines are not worn into their brains. Routines are binding in everyone, little Alex."

"I have routines, you mean."

"You are a nesting type, Alex, but because of what you want, never can you live easy in one place. That I learned to give up long ago. I am not attached to these things."

Darlajane B. gestures around her. Her room is low and windowless, a bunker with walls painted matt black. Dusty astroturf on the concrete floor. There are bubbling tanks with brightly coloured fish schooling through violet light, and a bank of television screens, some showing various views of the club, others flipping through the thousand plus available TV channels, and one showing the night sky transmitted from the twenty centimetre reflector telescope on the roof.

Darlajane B. is reclining in a nest of cushions, a little old lady in black leather, with a five centimetre crest of glue-stiffened hair spikes running from front to back of her otherwise shaven skull, eyes kholed, fingers knobby with rings. She is playing Tarot patience, setting down the big, bright cards with decisive snaps.

She says, "One day all this I will leave behind, and move on. If the bourgeois can live until two hundred years old in their hermetic cells, then so can I."

"Are you saying I should move on too?"

"For two years you have been here. Have you forgotten your dark lady?"

Alex told Darlajane B. about Milena, and his own role in creating the first fairy, soon after he came to live above Zone Zone, although he's never sure how much she believes. He says, "Perhaps she'll come to me."

"Wish on a star." Darlajane B. laughs her cracked, husky laugh. She had throat cancer two years ago, and although hunter-killer fembots destroyed every last trace, it scarred her vocal chords; she sounds like Marianne Faithfull after half a bottle of bourbon. She says, "You are still wet behind the ears. The world you need to know if you are to survive on the fringe."

"I don't intend staying here forever. I check out the Web every day. Sooner or later Milena will show herself."

"Bah. You might as well look for portents in the belly of a dove."

Alex says, earnestly, out of tender love for this cantankerous old woman, "Teach me stuff, Darlajane. Show me this world. Share it with me. How long to I have to work for the liberationists before you trust me enough to let me know them?"

"Who says I work with anyone? I have contacts, it is true. But work with others? Pah. Besides, if you wanted to, you could find them yourself. They are everywhere. If they were just old punks like me, how easy it would be for the Peace Police to find us all. No, they dress like housewives, like students. . . ." Darlajane B. laughs. "Really, you do not get it, do you? Such a child of your times, you are. Very literal, very linear, self sufficient to the point of autism. That is the disease of this new millennium. Obsession with self-image, obsession with estranging technologies. Happier you'd be to have a one room efficiency in a ribbon arcology outside Munich or Paris."

"What's in my future?"

Darlajane B. fans the remaining cards in her hands, and Alex chooses one:

A man, dressed in the parti-coloured tights, jerkin and cap and bells of a court jester of the Middle Ages, is about to step over the edge of a cliff into bright blue sunlit air. He holds a rose up to the sun, rests his other hand on one end of a stout staff which is balanced on his shoulder. At the other end of the staff is a leather satchel, its flap engraved with the eye and pyramid of the gnostics. A dog attacks the fringes of the man's floppy boots, but the man seems unaware of this, and instead is intent on a sulfur yellow butterfly that hangs before his face. Darlajane B. tilts the card and the figures in the laminated surface seem to move. The dog shakes its head to and fro; the butterfly flaps its wings, revealing human eyes on their undersides; the man smiles and starts to complete his last step, the beginning of his fall.

Darlajane B. tells Alex that he is this figure, the wise Fool, the vagabond who lives on the edge of society, despised, believed mad, yet the genius who carries the spark that will change that society. He is the pure impulse that is neither evil nor good, open to all the wonders of the world and heedless of its dangers; but he is also the Joker, who continually seeks extravagant amusements, heedless of the chaos his search causes because he is lost in the joy of the moment.

Alex says that it sounds more like Darlajane B. than himself. He isn't much taken with this reduction of the spectrum of human behaviour to a handful of Jungian archetypes, although he also feels, with a needle of unease, that there's some truth in what she tells him. After all, he did help Milena bring the first fairy into the world. He insisted on it, and now look.

Darlajane B. says that in a way he is right, that's why she tolerates him.

"But I am at the end of my journey, and you are at the beginning. The meaning is very different." "What does it mean to you?"

"For me the card is reversed. Problems rising from impulsive, reckless actions it foretells. For you, it suggests an unexpected influence that will force an important change."

Later, when all is lost and he is homeless again, Alex will think she's wrong. Everything seems clearer in hindsight because you only remember what's important: the brain always finds patterns, and even if they're untrue, they're all that's left of the past.

Perhaps he remembers that conversation because of the microscopic intensity of the hash, or perhaps because, two weeks later, the Peace Police raid the club and arrest him. The doll dormitories of a chemical refinery in the east of the Czech Republic has been firebombed; the Muslim Jihad has claimed responsibility; Darlajane B. has disappeared.

Alex has been down this road before. Now he knows why Darlajane B. was reluctant to tell him anything, and also why she let him meet the two Muslims. He knows almost nothing about the plot, but he can give them up to the Peace Police. After six weeks he's released at the border, his visa cancelled. He's happy to leave the Czech Republic; he's pretty sure that what's left of the Jihad will be looking for him.

Alex doesn't see Darlajane B. again, although seven years later he comes close to finding her. Ironically, his arrest gives him cachet amongst the liberationists. He spends five years moving from group to group through France and Spain, making batches of thyrotropic hormone, learning all there is to learn about making dolls over into fairies. In Barcelona, he falls briefly in love with a young, brilliant neurologist who is flirting with the radical fringe. Alex learns much from her, but she soon grows impatient with him. She wants to change the world, and he is beginning to think that he has done enough of that.

In all this time, he finds no clue, no trace, of Milena.

After Alex breaks up with his lover, he breaks with the liberationists, too, although it's hard to escape them entirely. He has gained a certain notoriety which is transmuted to near legendary status once he gives up regular contact. He takes up with a grey market biolab, but when he's in Albania, field-testing psychotrophic viruses designed to disorientate troops, his driver makes a wrong turning. He spends two months as prisoner of war in Macedonia, in a little village in a valley high in the mountains.

Summer, the brown grasses noisy with insects, the smell of thyme drugging the blue and gold days. His captors are shepherds whose families have lived there for three thousand years, wiry old men with deeply wrinkled faces, quick to laugh, quick to anger, as slow to forgive as glaciers. There are no young people in the village: the men are away fighting or are dead; the children and young women, targets for ransom or rape or revenge killings, are hiding in the hills and won't come down until winter's forced truce.

Alex, fitted with a cuff which lets him roam no more than a hundred metres beyond the tumbledown, closely-built stone houses, has plenty of time to think about the course of his life. When he is finally ransomed, for a ridiculously small sum, he works out his contract with the biolab and drifts to Amsterdam, where he finds Dr. Dieter Luther running a sex arcade which exclusively features surgically modified dolls, with a lucrative and absolutely legal sideline in snuff sex.

Dr. Luther pretends not to recognise Alex at first, but it turns out that he has been looking for Milena, too, and with no more success. Alex learns about what happened to Dr. Luther's last assistant, a zek who fell under fairy glamour. There's a new kind of fairy community, and what it is doing has Milena's stamp.

Then Alex hears that Darlajane B. has been working in a zek hostel just down the coast at Scheveningen. Although she's gone by the time he gets there, he stumbles onto the beginning of Milena's new plan to change the world. A rumour of a changeling boy who for a few weeks ruled the auditing of a virtuality club, the Permanent Floating Wave, that's almost next door to Darlajane B.'s zek hostel; rumours of a new kind of fembot that love bombs people into permanent rapture.

Alex thinks that he has found Milena at last, but barely escapes with his life when he tries to confront her fairy helpers. And then he hears about something new just outside Paris, a place where, for the first time, Fairyland has come into the light, no longer off the map, but rising into it, rising into history.

A decade after it went into receivership for the third time and final time, the Magic Kingdom has come alive again.

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