Air

by Geoff Ryman

  The thing tried to stand up. It tried to look about. Mae could feel a twitching in the nerves of her legs and neck and eyes. She needs my body to live, Mae thought. She wants it.

  “So,” Mae asked airily. “Do you like being in Yeshiboz Sistemlar?”

  “Excuse me, was that an instruction?”

  “No!” Mae told the desk. “Please continue lesson.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Mrs. Tung demanded in triumph.

  “An intelligent desk. They make them these days. It’s giving me a lesson in the U.N. Format.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Of course you don’t; you can’t remember anything from one minute to the next. You are here in Karzistan’s most important medical-computer complex. Where did you think you were?”

  “I don’t … It’s of no importance!”

  “When international fundraising efforts failed, the major Company offered to pay for both Formats, promising to keep both workstreams entirely independent.”

  On the screen, important people shook hands, and half the U.N. General Assembly rose to its feet applauding. Others notably stayed seated.

  “See this desk? The whole thing is a screen, yes? See the people applauding?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “So, who in Kizuldah has such a thing?”

  Mrs. Tung fought to keep her equilibrium as had the Iron Aunt, by disguise and improvisation. “Kwan? Kwan. We are in Kwan’s house! Everyone says she has made her house very modern!”

  “You see the desk?”

  “Yes, of course I see the desk!”

  “How? You are blind!”

  “I … I my eyes have gotten better.”

  “How long have they been better?”

  “Since yesterday! Since yesterday!”

  “Oh! There was a miracle yesterday! What else happened yesterday?” Mae was shouting.

  “The Consortium proved to be short-lived. Amid technical disagreements and charges that the Company was rigging Air structures that would only work with its other solutions.”

  Old Mrs. Tung faltered. “I … I … You came to see me?”

  “Who? Who came to see you? Who are you talking to?”

  She chuckled, embarrassed. “It’s so silly … I can’t…”

  “There’s no one here! Where are you?”

  “I don’t know!” Mrs. Tung wailed aloud.

  Mae bellowed: “I just told you! Why can’t you remember?”

  Old Mrs. Tung broke down into desperate tears. “I can’t … I can’t…” She shook Mae’s head.

  Revulsion flooded through Mae’s body like a case of food poisoning. Something was sickeningly out of place, wrong. I am like a ghost, I am invisible, I have no body.

  “I can’t move!” wailed Old Mrs. Tung.

  Mae began to weep for her, for the neat dead system of responses on other side of the screen of the world. Mae felt the terror and the sadness and the horror of being dead.

  And so the thing gained strength. It spoke as if Mae and she were one. “We’ll lose everything! This is a terrible place. We must get away!”

  Mae struggled back, her voice more feeble: “What place is this?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t start that again.”

  “Where are you? What day?”

  “Stop pestering me! Who are you to come at me with impertinent questions?”

  “Work began on the new Format. From the beginning, some engineers felt the schedule was too ambitious.”

  Mrs. Tung barked, “What is that thing talking about?”

  “I told you. The U.N. Format. But you can’t remember. Shall I explain it again to you?”

  “No, I don’t want to hear about it!”

  “Of course you don’t, because you’re scared of it and you’re scared of it because you know you wouldn’t be able to remember it. You can remember nothing! Where are we? Can’t remember? I just told you where we are but you can’t remember, can you? Can you? You can’t remember what day it is or where you are or even who you are!”

  The thing howled and stood up and Mae stood up with it. The thing was in a rage. Mae felt it thrash inside her with frustration. If the thing had carried an old walking stick, she would have beaten Mae with it. The thing spun in confusion and anger and disgust and terror around and around the desk, and it threw Mae against the imprisoning walls. Mae felt a buzzing in her brain and her body, as if there was a great numb abscess in all of her being.

  Suddenly Mae’s hand reached up and slapped her own face.

  Mae clenched and fought, her hand shook in midair, wavered as if pulled by magnets.

  Mae shouted, “Whose face did you slap? You slapped and you felt it yourself! How could you slap someone’s face and feel it yourself?”

  “I don’t know! Let me go! Let me go!”

  “Excuse me, I am hearing sounds of distress. Do wish me to call for help?”

  The hand slapped Mae again, even harder.

  Mae fought with words. “You slapped a body. Whose body?”

  The thing howled in terror and struck Mae’s face again and again. Left hand, right hand, left hand, beating her about the face.

  Mae pushed: “You’re sick, you’re old, you’re mad, you’re crazy!”

  The thing stumbled, wounded and disorientated. “I don’t know! I don’t know-ho!-ho!” The thing wailed in complete despair

  “You can’t remember, you’re senile, you’re dead! You’re dead and senile and sick; you have no hands; you have no eyes; you are nowhere; you do not exist!”

  “Let me go!” The thing heaved with sobs. It could not longer speak, for grief and despair and horror. Its voice rose to a despairing shriek, and it picked Mae up and flung her across the desk.

  And like the passing of a tornado, suddenly everything was still.

  Mae was left panting, alone in Mr. Tunch’s office.

  “Do you need me to call for help?” the desk asked.

  “No,” Mae was able to croak. Her throat was raw from shouting. She had been speaking for both of them.

  Tears and spit were smeared all over her face and splattered over the desktop. The cheeks and the palms of her hands stung. She sat up and looked at her own reflection in the glass-topped desk. A fresh bruise was coming up on her cheek.

  Suspicion made Mae look up, and she saw a camera in the corner of the room. Tunch will have seen all that, she thought. He’ll have been spying.

  Well, if he’s seen all that, then that’s all he’s going to get from me.

  Mae pulled in deep, shuddering breaths. She stood up and wiped her face and tried to straighten her hair.

  I’ve seen her off. I know how to see her off and I don’t need Mr. Tunch.

  Time, she thought, to get down to work.

  “Continue with lecture,” she told the desk.

  MR. TUNCH JOINED HER FOR LUNCH.

  “I thought you might like to try the new food,” he said.

  Because of her lecture, Mae knew what that meant. New proteins, new tastes, grown from new organisms.

  “They are designed to be delicious,” he said.

  The soup was bracing and solid, like lentils laced with lemon, and made hearty with something like tomatoes and pork. It was sour and sweet, with a bitter undertow like coffee.

  “You see?” he said, chuckling. “Good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Mae had to admit. “Yes. I wonder if I will be happy to go back to cold rice?”

  He laughed again, and said. “Maybe you won’t have to.”

  I am, in part, a Question Map for his future.

  “You are experimenting on me,” she told Tunch, coldly.

  “The food is specially formulated for expectant mothers,” he told her. “Its nutrients pass within seconds into the bloodstream through any tissue layer. In effect, it is being digested the moment it enters the mouth.”

  “Does that mean it’s shit by the time I’ve swallowed it?”

  Mr. Tunch only chuckled. He t
ouched Mae’s bruised face. “Mae. We’re trying to help you.”

  For a moment, she almost believed him.

  In the afternoon Fatimah led Mae to what looked like a flying saucer. Mae lay down in it, and again, there was no physical pain. Fatimah clucked once with her tongue. She turned the scan off, helped Mae down.

  “What, what?” Mae said.

  “The child,” said Fatimah, dazed. “The pregnancy is in your stomach.”

  Mae blinked. In Karz, the words belly or womb and stomach could be confused.

  “Your food belly,” said Fatimah.

  How? Mae knew what she knew. That was not possible. “Your machine is wrong,” she said.

  “No chance.” said Fatimah. “Here.”

  She replayed the file of the sounding. The screen showed a shifting mass of what looked like translucent gray porridge. Shapes seemed to bubble out of it.

  Pumping and alive, something sighed and shrugged inside her. Fleetingly Mae even saw something like a head.

  “That’s the child. Its has grown the usual protective sac, and appears to be healthy for now.” Fatimah turned back and looked at her. The downward slope of her head crumpled her chin and neck and made her look older, sad-fleshed, like Mae. “It is in your stomach.”

  “So how could it happen?” Mae’s voice was raised.

  Fatimah’s deep-brown eyes kept staring down into hers, as if to offer her a stable place. “Pregnancies can take root anywhere in the body, once the egg has been kissed. The question is, how would an egg and the male part meet in your stomach?”

  And Mae knew how. “Ilahe Illallah,” she gasped, though nominally a Buddhist, and covered her mouth. She had swallowed Ken; she had swallowed her own menstrual blood. She felt like a flurry of scarves, all fears and horrors. She was stripped and bare, her sexuality exposed, her private secret bedroom found to have one wall missing. The whole village could look in. Scientists peered over Mr. Ken’s shoulder, prying into her strange habits.

  “Has this ever happened before?” Mae whispered.

  Fatimah shrugged. “If it has, it would miscarry by now.”

  “What will happen?” Mae was following the consequences of this monstrosity. Birth through the throat? Surgery?

  “The child cannot be healthy,” said Fatimah. “As for birth, it should be by surgery, but I cannot recommend that. We … We can help you quietly, telling no one…” Her voice trailed away, a warm hand on Mae’s chilled arm.

  In the raw villages of Karzistan, unwanted winter babies were left to crystallize in the snows. Third daughters were whisked away and dispatched before the mother could see them and love them.

  Fatimah seemed alarmed by something. Her voice was still low. “There can be no question of your keeping it.”

  Mae felt as though she were clutching a cloth over herself to hide naked breasts.

  If the village knew this, what would they do? She was already a monster for simply falling out of marriage. A woman who talked too much and then gave birth to a monster through her mouth? They might drive her away with stones.

  “You must understand. The stomach is full of strong acid. To dissolve food? We don’t know what that will do to the child.”

  Mae was seeing Mr. Ken’s face. Her young man … Young? Either one of them?

  Yes, at heart they were young. At heart and in memory, they would always be in school together, longing and shy. They would always be the lovers who found each other late in life.

  That heart and memory would only be as real as long as they lived. But if there were a child, that meant that love would outlive both of them.

  And that was what love was for, all the waste and the pain and the inconvenience and the awkwardness and the ugliness. It was to draw together and build an island of love, in which children could grow, and love can be passed on.

  “Mae? Mae you cannot be thinking…”

  Mae was thinking of redemption. In Karz the phrase for it was “Unexpected Flower.” It was seen as late Indian summer, surprising the world with roses. My Unexpected Flower, she called the child. The machines were silent and blue around them.

  “I need to think,” was all that Mae could say.

  “You won’t be given much of a chance for that,” said Fatimah.

  The rest of the afternoon session consisted of qualitative research. Mae was introduced to a bald, eager stranger with spectacles. This is Mr. Pakansir, he will ask you questions. Hello, Mrs. Chung-ma’am. Please answer the questions quickly, no need for deep consideration.

  The name Pakan meant “Real Man.” Mae sat, legs crossed, arms crossed trying to find cover. The questions began easily enough: occupation … marriage … was she a happy woman? How did things change after Formatting? After the Test, how did things change?

  “Would you say that your sexual habits changed after Formatting?”

  “No,” said Mae.

  “But … uh … you are pregnant. In an unusual way.”

  “No one knows how such a thing is possible,” replied Mae.

  “We understand, however, that your marriage broke down.”

  Mae sat silent.

  “Is that true? You have just said that you were happily married. How did it become unhappy?”

  Mae smiled silently.

  Mr. Real Man’s grin went a bit fierce. “Mr. Tunch has said to remind you, perhaps, of your bargain. That you will help us understand, in return for training. Your mind was interfered with by the U.N. Format. We are trying to understand what happened. To help others.”

  Mr. Real Man went back to his sheet of papers. They were printed, but not entirely square on the paper. “Did you find yourself performing sexual acts that were not part of your previous repertoire?”

  Silence.

  “Please, Mrs. Chung. These are medical questions.”

  Poor man. You do not know who you are dealing with, thought Mae.

  “Had you ever heard of or known about oral sex before the Formatting?”

  Mae couldn’t help but answer, “How on earth do you think peasant women avoid being pregnant all the time?”

  He looked disappointed. “Oh. So you knew about sex with the mouth before the Formatting. There is no chance that the Formatting planted the idea?”

  Mae did not answer. Her heart was growing as tight as her masklike little smile.

  “Was it something that you practiced frequently?”

  Mr. Pakan slouched forward, groin thrust out. Unconsciously he began to rock back and forth as if having sex with the tip of his long tie. Mae stood up, thinking of Mr. Haseem, and kicked Mr. Real Man between the legs.

  He groaned and doubled over. She struck him in the face. His glasses slipped lopsided, and he slumped forward on his knees. He crawled out of the room. Mae kicked him on the bottom and sent him sprawling over the polished padded floor outside the room and then she slammed the door behind him.

  She waited, her breath quivering as though it were fire.

  She was not an ignorant peasant or some farm animal made to reproduce as they wished. They were going to have to learn to treat her as a person of consequence.

  Mr. Tunch came early. He looked amused. “You are confirming important data for us.”

  “Am I really?” said Mae. She felt as though her teeth had been filed into a saw.

  “You were not violent before the Formatting, were you?”

  Mae paused. “I never met such bastards until the Formatting.”

  Mr. Tunch was still smiling. He was amused. “I wish I could have seen it—poor old Mr. Real Man. Asking his neat little machine questions, and meeting Real Life by mistake.”

  Mae was unmoved, unfooled. “He was doing your bidding.”

  “Are you going to hit me?” Tunch asked in mock alarm.

  Mae considered. “I might kill you if you go too far.”

  Even Mr. Tunch blinked. “Oh,” he said, darkening.

  “I am a direct person. Are you going to blame that on the U.N. as well?” Mae batted her eyelashes at
him.

  It was his turn to grin, masklike.

  Mae sat back, feeling hearty, like she was surrounded by friends and picking on an enemy. “That’s why you do this, Mr. Tunch. You want to sell the Gates Format. You have to say the U.N. Format is bad. It is bad because it gives away too much to people like me. Is the Gates Format paying you?”

  Mr. Tunch closed his eyes and his smile went gentler, amused, and rueful. He looked at her in something like affection and said, “Unexpected Flower.”

  Mae felt a chill. Just how much had Mr. Wisdom Bronze penetrated, with his machines and Question Maps?

  He sighed. “Whenever I despair for our people and think there is no hope, with the ignorance, the poverty, the deep divisions, the lack of resources, someone like you surprises me, and I know, I know Karzistan could take on the world.”

  The two looked at each other, both surprised.

  “You are very damaged, you know,” he added.

  You want to rifle through the pages of my life, hold my underwear in the sun to show stains.

  Mae gathered herself up and asked brightly, “Did you make the money for all of this from drugs?”

  His face hung suspended.

  She shrugged. “Look, you can’t shock me. A wise man makes money where he can. You are not from Yeshibozkent. I can tell that from your accent. You are from far down the valley, where soil, sun, everything is hard. The poppies grow there.”

  He was staring at her, almost wary.

  “Am I still your Unexpected Flower?” she asked.

  His face had recovered, but at least he no longer looked amused by her. “Even more so,” he said.

  “You see, I know you. You are Wise Gangster. Godfather.” Mae mimed a rat-a-tat-tat. “So: Yes. I am afraid of you. I know what you could do to me.”

  “I do what I have to do,” he said, then he added hastily. “That was not a threat to you. I meant: I do what I have to do to help our people.”

  Mae was considering.

  Wisdom Bronze said, “How else was I to build this?”

  She believed him. “How else. And you hate the foreigners even more than you hate us.”

  He looked uncertain.

  “After all, we are ignorant, poor, deeply divided.” Mae sighed. “So many of us must get in your way.”