Air

by Geoff Ryman

  “I am trying to be your friend,” he said softly.

  “Ah,” said Mae, looking at the floor. “Do you know how terrifying that idea is?”

  He smiled one last smile before leaving her. But he also pointed a warning finger.

  Mae found that she knew his story. She could see it.

  Fate and his father’s seed, his mother’s egg, conspired to give birth to someone very smart indeed.

  Hikmet Tunch would have been a clever clownish farm boy, wickedly sharp and sometimes brutal. She could see him scowling with thought as he forked chickpeas into the mill, or kicked geese away from the grain.

  This is for fools, he would have thought, seeing the hard work that produced only pennies a day. He saw the daredevil thugs in their shiny track suits and heavy jewelry. He joined them. Volunteering, asking for the most dangerous jobs. He carried the stuff across borders. He did this so he could see how the rest of the world worked.

  Hikmet Tunch at seventeen would have looked like a truck driver, stumpy, hard, unshaven, smiling ingratiatingly to the guards at the borders. All the time he spoke to them, his merry eyes would be innocent, even though he knew the gas tank was half full of white paste.

  Hikmet would have seen Berlin, Prague, and St. Petersburg. He would have studied the world by screwing its women, to discover from them their languages, how they thought, what they valued.

  He would have come back and hated the way the buildings in Karzistan did not sit straight, the way the dust gathered in the road. He would have hated the peasant clothes, and the paintings on the trucks, and the old wooden houses.

  Wise Gangster would have built up friends, loyal men from his village—big, hefty, criminal men nowhere near as bright, but who followed him and threatened others.

  He would have killed people. Not often. But you do not take over the drug trade from a position of mere carrier without knowing when to strike, and to strike so hard that the enemy can never recover.

  Wisdom Bronze was a man who would have burned fields, whole villages, killed male heirs who were only five years old.

  And yet, thought Mae, underneath it all, our aim is the same. To help the people.

  What Wise Gangster knew was that Info was the new drug.

  Fatimah came into Mae’s room, looking only slightly shifty.

  “Have you thought about the pregnancy?” Fatimah began. She was genuinely concerned, but she had been told, Mae could see, to get the same information as Mr. Real Man.

  I have become an Unexpected Poppy to be milked for juice.

  “Could this have happened to you before?”

  Mae decided to lie. They want answers, so I’ll fuck them up by giving wrong ones. “Oh. Yes. Of course. We all suck in my village.”

  That meant Fatimah could say she had done her job. To her credit, the thing that most concerned her was Mae’s plight.

  “I have something that will resolve the problem for you,” she murmured.

  Do you really think I would do anything here, in your clutches, to be entered into your records?

  “What is it?” Mae asked. If it was a pill, she could pocket it.

  But Fatimah took out a needle. “Very quick. One injection, then it is gone, with no chemical traces, a natural dropping. Especially given where the pregnancy is.”

  “No,” said Mae.

  “Look, Mae,” said Fatimah, “the earlier, the better—the easier. In all ways: physically, emotionally.”

  Mae looked at Fatimah and found she knew her, too. A pretty woman, very smart. She had a rich father. Good education, but where could she use her skills in Karzistan? Where else but here? Where Shytan himself rules. A kind woman, too, as rich women often are. But small. Being rich inflates smallness like a balloon. Being rich stretches it thinner.

  “Don’t you believe in love?” Mae asked her.

  “I … I…” Fatimah fluttered.

  That brought you up smartly, city woman.

  “You don’t think love is of no concern in medicine, do you?”

  “No,” said Fatimah, hurt. “No, no, of course not.” She prided herself on her care, her concern, and her sensitivity.

  “Then why are you so blind and deaf to the simple fact that a mother might love a late and unexpected flower?”

  Mae waited, and then added, “Especially when the father is the only man she has ever loved.”

  Mae knew somehow that Fatimah had never been loved, and part of Mae wanted to hurt her.

  Fatimah seemed to wilt. “I … I did not understand the situation.”

  “Perhaps you would care to help me, instead.”

  Fatimah looked thoroughly chastised. Her eyes were downcast. “If you’ll let me. I have to know what you feel, to help.”

  “So,” sighed Mae. “Is it the case that I am supposed to let you question-map me, and only then you will care?”

  Fatimah looked chilled to the bone.

  “You want to be a good woman,” said Mae, smiling ruefully. “Perhaps it is not possible to be good here.”

  Fatimah rallied: “Is it possible to be good anywhere?”

  Okay, so we get down to something true. “We all do the best we can,” said Mae. “So. You tell me. How do we save my baby?”

  Fatimah considered. “It might not be possible. If the child is small, some kind of birth might be possible, otherwise it will be surgery.”

  “When would you say it is due?”

  “Its development is strange. Say, May or June. Would you be able to come back here?” Fatimah’s eyes were pained, askance. “I am sure that this place would help you have it. It has the most advanced medical and scientific equipment in Karzistan.”

  “What would they get out of it?”

  “Probably nothing further. They will have gotten enough for them to be generous.”

  “What will they get out of me?”

  Fatimah sighed. “Scientific fame? A high profile in the industry?” She smiled sideways. “Medical-IT Interface.” In Karzistani, the word for interface was “two-face,” which had an implication of betrayal.

  Neither of them needed to comment on the appropriateness of that.

  “You must not do physical work,” said Fatimah. “If you do miscarry—vomit … make yourself vomit all you can. Do not let anything stay in your stomach. And call me. I will do what I can to come to you.”

  There were no windows in the room, and no clocks, but Mae felt it was late. “I would like to go back to my hotel now.”

  It was as she had feared. Fatimah’s face went still with shame.

  “I’m sorry,” Fatimah began. “But given your condition, it is felt best that you spend the night here.”

  “I want to spend it in my hotel.”

  Fatimah’s eyes were sorry indeed. “It is very comfortable for our guests here.”

  “I know too much,” said Mae. “I said too much.”

  Very quietly indeed, Mae had become a prisoner.

  THE ROOMS ARE VERY COMFORTABLE IN THE PALACE OF THE DEVIL, CONSIDERING THERE ARE NO WINDOWS.

  A guard bought Mae her dinner. He was huge, so tall his bulging belly did not look fat. He had hairy hands and eyes like camera lenses. Mae knew him, too. She saw him as big farm boy, playing in the same stubble fields as Wisdom Bronze.

  “Did you know Mr. Tunch when he was a boy?” she asked.

  Nothing in his face moved. He watched her eat and took back the plate and the knives.

  Mae saw the tiny blinking red light that watched her. She waited until all the lights were off and they could not see her. She whispered to herself without even moving her lips. “Mae Mae Mae Mae Mae…”

  She traced the gnarled root of herself back down deep. She felt the settling peace the calm, and the end of fear and terror. As she fell away from it, the white walls of Yeshiboz Sistemlar looked as thin and frail as eggshells.

  Mae settled as gently as an angel into the courtyard. Her clothes seemed to trail after her in ribbons, like silk underwater. The courtyard now looked
more like Kwan’s grand house. Instead of pens, the blue walls were lined with beautiful new businesses all glowing golden with light. They had modern plastic shop-signs that looked like poppies opening and closing. INFO … HELP … THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT …

  Mae entered HELP, and there was Mae herself, dressed as a Talent. Assistant-Mae knew what she wanted. She wanted to see the Gates Format for herself. “I am afraid there is no programming that allows communication between the U.N. and the Gates Formats. You will not be able to find any Gates Format imprints.”

  Mae asked the mask, “Does this system contain any information about the Gates Format?”

  Mae-assistant smiled like a shop sign. “The ‘Help’ function contains information about functions in this Format only.”

  “Is there anything in ‘Info’?”

  I want to know what imprints are and how they work. I want to know what the U.N. Format is and how it translates thoughts. I don’t want to owe Tunch for anything.

  The assistant-Mae replied smoothly: “The ‘Info’ section was developed for the pilot project and contains only examples of proposed kinds of content.”

  Mae regarded her own face. Is my smile so unhelpful when I turn it on my customers? “Why doesn’t Air contain anything?”

  Was the smile more broad? “It is a common failing of IT projects to underestimate the difficulty of providing content and the time scales required.”

  Air was pig-ignorant. Mae was not fooled, either, by her own face. These things—the courtyard, the shop fronts—they are just for show, this is not Air itself, they are the traffic signs towards it.

  So Mae turned without another word and walked into Air. Air, she knew, was eternal. Mae walked, deliberately this time, into the blue of information.

  She merged with the blue walls, as if they were glowing blue fog. She kept on walking. The walls faded into night. She stood in chaos, and kept feeling the gnarled root, deeper and deeper until even the sound of her own thinking was hushed and she felt even herself fade.

  The root seemed to get thicker and thicker, as if it had become the trunk of a tree. It would eventually become Everything. It would become the world; and all the worlds in which the world sat. Mae herself was the thinnest possible little trail back towards the fiction of the world.

  She could no longer remember what she was looking for.

  I don’t want to go on, she managed to think.

  Blindly she felt her way back. The blue light shone, her fingernails glowed as white as her hospital gown as if everything were smiling.

  Mae stepped back into the courtyard. She walked quietly into That’s Entertainment. There were games machines, and radios all along the walls. There was soaring operatic music. In front of a TV set, Old Mrs. Tung sat watching Turandot.

  “Hello, Granny,” said Mae gently.

  Mrs. Tung turned and smiled, eyes twinkling. She could not remember the last time she and Mae met. All she remembered was the love, deeply imprinted.

  There you are, dear. I was just thinking, I hope Mae comes to pay a visit. Isn’t it marvelous, the TV? How I’ve yearned to see Turandot. They say it happens in Karzistan, you know.

  And you have seen it over and over and over, because it is the only thing on TV in Air. But you can’t remember that. Heaven is place where you cannot change and nothing can ever happen, so the things you love are always eternal. Hell is exactly the same.

  The hero Kalaf was singing. “No one’s sleeping. No one’s sleeping.”

  “I just wanted to make sure,” said Mae. “I just wanted to make sure that you were well. I just wanted to make sure that you were as beautiful as I remember.”

  Oh-hoo-hoo. The hooting laugh. Now eternal.

  And Old Mrs. Tung reached across and took Mae’s hand. Mrs. Tung thought she still had a hand. Is the beaning going well this year? I used to so love it. All of us on blankets doing the shelling together.

  “Yes,” said Mae. “It is still going well.”

  Then Mae said, though she knew Mrs. Tung could not understand: “I know it is not you who does these things to me. It is the error they made, whatever mistake it was. I just wanted to make sure of that.”

  And Old Mrs. Tung hooted again, as if she knew what Mae was talking about.

  And Mae began to repeat her own name over and over. Her and Mrs. Tung’s metaphorical hands disentangled like roots.

  IN THE MORNING, THE GUARD SERVED MAE BREAKFAST ON A TRAY.

  The food iridesced like a rainbow, and the flavors veered between pork and jam and all the flavors of breakfast at once. It was delicious. She threw it up into the wastebasket. It continued to shift colors in the bin.

  Mae covered her eyes and wept, and then cast off the water from her cheeks. She was led out through all the Disney World people, all spanking new and polished. Do you know they keep prisoners here? she asked their pristine smiles. She was led to the desk. Time, she told herself, to learn.

  The desk began by showing her the inside of an eye. Early efforts at interface had beamed coded light signals onto the retina and recorded differences in pathways. Residual patterns of neural activity appeared that were nothing to do with the light. Other information appeared to be passed.

  The brain was responding to low levels of electrical charges from outside the body.

  Animals were given sudden peak charges that stimulated all areas of their brain. Every neural pathway was stimulated at once. The mystery was that, once stimulated, the charge continued. The brain entered a new state, always charged, always open. The charge continued to exist without any further source of energy.

  How could this be? There could be no perpetual motion, no undying source of unreplenished energy.

  Unless the brain existed in a realm with no time. Once imprinted, it stayed charged. It was like a radio switched on forever, but not in our world.

  There was another world, of seven other dimensions beyond time, and Air existed in those. Air had no spatial dimension. In Air, one mind occupied the same space as another. Stimulation of one imprinted brain correlated to increased activity in another.

  But attempts at shared thinking resulted in disorder and discomfort. One brain works in a way very different from another.

  What was needed to make Air work was a uniform Format for information.

  In theory at least, this Format would simply be information, too. It could be added to the imprints, providing a shared mechanism for making messages compatible and so able to be shared.

  The first Formats were crude mathematical formulae that made only the simplest kinds of neural impulses to be communicated.

  The first successfully shared Air message was “2 plus 2 equals 4.” It took the form of nervous jolts: two jolts, two jolts, and then four in succession.

  If Air were to be used for any commercial purpose, it would have to do more than that.

  Synesthesia was a phenomenon long known and little understood. Some people saw sound, tasted color, felt words in their fingertips. The brain, so delicate, so responsive, was responding to minute charge differences caused by other phenomena. Infants experienced them—then learned how to block them.

  From synesthesia, a means of stimulating images, sounds, and even tastes was developed. A means of translating this system into first protocols, and then encoding for those protocols, was some years in development.

  End of lesson.

  Lunch came. Again it was the silent guard who brought it. And Mae knew then, that despite all his smiles, Hikmet Tunch was frightened of her.

  Lunch moved. It was delicious new organisms that could talk.

  Bits of lunch piped up, in merry little voices: “We are designed to provide full vitamin and other protein content undiminished by death or cooking. Think of us as the perfect form of happy nutrition.”

  Then they sang a happy little song waiting to be eaten. They looked like limbless prawns without shells, with little carbon crystals perched on top like jewels.

  “Take that foulness away. Tell M
r. Tunch that I will starve myself rather than eat anything other than normal food.”

  The silent giant nodded once and left the room, with the lunch still pointedly on the table, still singing like little intelligent bells. He came back with a bowl of ordinary soup. He sat and watched Mae eat it, as if making sure she did. He looked at his watch.

  It was only after several mouthfuls that Mae realized the soup had an aftertaste. “Is there something in this?” she asked. The giant left.

  Colors began to sharpen. Mae felt her unease with a new razor-sharpness.

  The door opened, and Mr. Pakan came in with a dog.

  The dog’s head was shaved, and a neat little metal cap was bolted to its skull. The cap had a speaker in it.

  “Mae, hello, Mae,” the dog slobbered in affection. “I have a job. People trust me with a job. They have made me much smarter, and taught me how to talk. There may be a future for dogs, if we can tell jokes and love our masters.”

  It came toward Mae, backing her into a corner.

  “Please let me lick your hand. I only want to lick your hand.”

  Mae’s head was beginning to buzz, and there was a kind of gathering tension, as if a bubble had swollen and was about to burst.

  “You bastards,” she managed to say. They were doing this deliberately, to bring Mrs. Tung back.

  “Don’t you like me? Please like me,” the dog was pleading, wanting to whimper, but the whimper was given a voice. “Who will feed me if I am not loved?”

  Where are we, dear?

  Mae heard oxygen rustle in her ear, and she understood so clearly everything that Mrs. Tung was feeling. The floor was shifting underfoot, the room was melting.

  Let’s go home. Do you know the way?

  Mae settled onto the floor. Mr. Pakan nipped forward and began to wrap Velcro around Mae’s arm.

  The last thing Mae saw before losing her body was the dog, eating the singing food. “Gosh, this is good,” said the dog.

  Mae was buzzed all the way to the back of her body.

  Mrs. Tung stood up and sat in a chair, and asked Mr. Pakan, “Would you be good enough to find a blanket for me, dear?”

  Who is that man? Mae tried to ask her. You don’t know who he is, do you?