Air (or Have Not Have)

by Geoff Ryman

  Someone shouted at her, 'Don't bother with all of that. Why has the government accepted an outmoded Format for Air?' Mae looked around to see a scrawny middle-aged man.

  The Talent's smile did not falter. 'The UN Format is the agreed international standard. Karzistan is not in a position to choose a different Format than everyone else.'

  There was a groan of protest mingled with raucous laughter.

  A scrawny man who was all white city teeth grinned. 'Not in Tokyo.'

  'This is not Tokyo,' said the Talent with icy forbearance.

  'In Tokyo they use both!'

  'Just don't make it practically illegal!' shouted the Army Boot Woman.

  'Please,' said the Talent, holding up her hands. 'This meeting can do nothing about the UN Format!'

  'They are running the Gates Format at the same time, in New York!' another Head shouted.

  'Look. This meeting is to review local efforts here in the Happy Province.'

  'What efforts?' the fat man yelled, still eating. He was enjoying the atmosphere.

  'This, among them-' began the Talent.

  'This is supposed to be a discussion, give us Focus!'

  'Focus!' someone else yelled.

  The Talent turned and snapped her fingers. Mae found herself admiring her. The Talent's voice was suddenly louder. 'Okay, we each have the Focus in turn, but please stand up and say who you are. You first, sir.'

  The fat pink-haired man stood up. 'Ali Bey Turkoman. I ask again, what efforts? There is only one Taking Wing officer for all of the Red Mountain area. Is there a single e-mail address for all those villages yet? Is this a concerted government effort?'

  He wants to sell us things, thought Mae.

  'It is precisely the lack of e-mail that Air and related technologies are meant to address. Next question!'

  The Talent, tense, pointed to someone else. A scholarly looking man, bow-backed, spectacles, unfolded upwards from his chair. 'Professor Li Ho, Department of Medical-Computer Interface.'

  He took out a written statement, and there was another squawk of laughter.

  He droned. Mae wanted to understand. It was the first time she had heard a professor talk, and she expected wisdom, and it was no surprise to her that she could not follow what was said.

  But she did begin to find it difficult to breathe.

  There was something called Juh-ee Em. Another English word. Was all the world English? GM was something about very small things. It was about growing things. It was also, somehow, about making people smarter. The professor wanted to change things in people.

  He started talking about children who could read after six months, who were doing advanced mathematical work at thirteen. That, she could understand. That, she could picture. He was saying that people were stupid, but they could be cured.

  He was having to raise his voice. 'GM is one area in which Karzistan could push ahead, becoming a new centre of advancement for the world.'

  'More like a playground for crooks!' someone shouted.

  'Karzistan is not a garbage pail for the rest of the world!'

  The professor was shouted down.

  'We're here to talk about Air. Go play with your own Juh Nee Sus!'

  An Airhead got overexcited. He leapt up, like a dancer, and he didn't need the Focus. He yelled, voice breaking, 'Air can do anything GM could do! In New York, they merge minds for a hobby to make new music! We are still talking about it as if it were television! We still use the word "screens"!'

  'The blind could see!' roared the Army Boot Woman next to Mae.

  'School's out. No more need for Teachers!'

  'Or Talents! That's her real problem.'

  Is this a war? Mae wondered. The shouting was so unlike the Karzistani way. It was ugly, showed lack of control, lack of harmony, even lack of Islamic discipline. Lack of everything. Who were these… these… children? In their goggles and crazy clothes?

  And were people so very stupid that they all were to be erased, made better?

  The Shark stood up. He smiled slightly and flicked a finger toward the Talent. The air around him seemed to brighten.

  'Hikmet Tunch, Green Valley Systems.' His voice, typically Karz, was gravelly, but surprisingly high, almost like a woman's. He said nothing else, but immediately the noise in the hall reduced.

  'Professor Li Ho is correct, of course. GM is a technology with immense potential and one that Karzistan must not ignore. At Green Valley Systems we are looking at all aspects of Medical Interface. We have a programme to see how the Gates Format could be used in our cultural setting, perhaps alongside the UN Format. One of the applications we are looking at is the use of Air to artificially augment intelligence, which does avoid some of the ethical issues surrounding GM.'

  There was an admiring murmur and a scattering of applause.

  The next question was respectful, from a colourless young man in a loose grey shirt and not a trace of Airhead finery. 'I would like to ask Mr Tunch-sir what is he finding out about the Gates Format and the ways it differs from the UN Format.'

  That, thought Mae, is someone who was told to ask him that question. Sharks have little fish that follow them for scraps.

  For some reason people chuckled. The Army Boot Woman gave a kung fu kick of joy.

  'The Gates Format is very… confusing,' began Mr Tunch-sir, and there was a fresh wave of comment as if there had been some kind of admission. The Talent gave the same embarrassed grimace as Mr Oz.

  Mr Tunch seemed very aware of the effect he was having. His face became hooded, hazy somehow, smiling like a mask, his eyes screened. 'Once you are beyond the Gates, everything merges, with no neat divisions. It is a little bit slower than the UN Format, but once the Gates are open, it becomes very intuitive. For all of those reasons we hope that augmented functions will be able to merge invisibly with the user's own functions.' He smiled again and Mae saw teeth.

  Mae felt vertigo. She understood none of it, not the words, not the disputes, not what people wore, or even how they moved. Her future had seemed settled and in order. It had felt like a staircase up to a door that was clearly labelled: Air. You only had to make that climb once.

  Instead the future was a pit. It went down in layers, each layer stranger than the next. And there was no bottom to it.

  The Talent intervened, smiling, embarrassed, heightened in the Focus. 'I am sure that we are very interested in Mr Tunch's insights into the Gates Format. Which, of course, he has never entered himself, as the creation of second imprints is illegal.'

  A murmur of laughter and collusion. Panic gripped Mae. Here, a scant thirty miles from Red Mountain, people were talking a new language, about things she had never heard of, dreamed of. All of them were lazily familiar with it. It was a whole Way of which she knew nothing. Nothing except that it was death to her village. Death not only to her village, but to all human beings, as they once had been. Blood seemed to drain from Mae's head.

  Did none of them love being human? Did they all so badly want to become machines, to be measured? Mae's fingers and knees buzzed.

  'Why do you want us all to die?'

  Mae was suddenly aware that she had spoken aloud. She had spoken aloud without willing it. She tried to say, to Sunni, I did not say that. I shouted but it was not me.

  And she couldn't. She, Mae, couldn't speak.

  She sat frozen in her chair, unable to move, everything numbed except her mouth. Her mouth seemed to snap by itself, like a turtle's. She heard herself shout.

  'We built you! We built this City, we put in the drains, we nurtured you. And now you want us to die? You want us to put ourselves to the knife? Fade back into the earth, to be despised by you… you automobiles. You, you, streetlamps. You, you radios, you parrot radios!'

  'It's happening again,' Sunni said quickly.

  'It's never been anything like this,' said Sezen, sitting up in alarm. 'Look, she's fighting it. She's trying to stop it. Mae, Mae, it's not you talking, is it?'

  Mae managed to ma
ke her body nod once: Yes.

  Mr Oz looked appalled, embarrassed. Mr Wing crouched around out of his chair and knelt in front of Mae and looked deep into her eyes.

  'We will not go without a fight! Humankind will not go without a fight!'

  'Stop it, Mae!' pleaded Sunni.

  Mae's wide eyes tried to say, mutely, I can't!'

  And Sezen suddenly stood up, jaw thrust out, and signalled the Talent. The Talent saw they were peasants, saw it was an emergency, and yearned for order. The Talent acquiesced and passed the Focus.

  'All you city people,' said Sezen.

  Mae kept shouting. 'In the olden days, ancestors were worshipped!'

  'You talk as if most of your own people do not exist. I am a peasant. I live on the top of Red Mountain. My mother keeps a goat in the living room and we sit on the corncobs we eat for furniture!'

  'I want to go home! I want my home!'

  Fighting made it worse. Fighting made the thing resist. Mae decided to try to calm it. Sssh, Mrs Tung, dear Old Mrs Tung. Quiet, my love. I am sorry you are dead, but all things die. How many times has our village died, one people after another? You said that yourself.

  Something was halted and grew confused. 'Where is this? What is this?' it asked in miserable confusion. The hall itself had fallen silent.

  Sezen had turned to the room and was pointing at Mae. 'That woman, my boss, was in your Air, when you tried your Test. And another woman died in her arms because of your Test. And the other woman's mind still lives in her! Are you happy! Are you proud of Juh-ee Em now?!'

  The Talent grew concerned in a professional voice: 'How… How was this not reported?'

  Sezen answered. 'We live thirty miles up a mountain! There is no one to report to!' There was an unreadable noise of reaction in the hall. Sezen kept shouting:

  'We here are the party of progress in our village. Ah? But there is another party. It goes around destroying the TV sets. My brave boss Mrs Chung Mae tries to teach our children, our women, our men, how to use Air when it comes, she teaches us on the TV. And the Schoolteacher prevents her! The Schoolteacher actually tries to stop us learning. He breaks the TV! That is what we face! While all of you are going to the moon!'

  Sezen stood enraged, quivering, and there was not a sound in the hall. None of them had any answer to that at all.

  Helpless in her own body, Mae felt back deep inside herself with her mind. Once more she reached back to some heavy, mighty, implacable thing in which she was rooted. And she felt herself there, felt this root, and it was gnarled, twisted, confounded. Two of us, she realized. There are two of us there, entwined like a ginger root. Mae was nearly at the point of understanding. Then she was called back.

  'Mae?' It was Mr Wing. 'Mae? Someone is here. He wants to help you.'

  The Shark in the suit, the man with the gravelly voice, was kneeling over her. His pinched face and his coiffeured hair seemed to shift inside Mae's eyes as if a membrane had descended over them. His face seemed to turn green and twist into a sardonic grimace. She saw him suddenly as the Devil.

  Or someone did. And that person roused herself and rose up to her feet and saw in him everything that was destroying her world.

  Mae felt her own body seized from her. She felt herself pushed away and then drift upwards like a boat no longer moored. Mae floated free of herself. Everything went dim and still and calm, and she had no fear or anger. It was suddenly clear that none of this really meant anything. She viewed it all with the detachment with which she would one day view her own death.

  Mae saw her body strike the predator in the face, a tiny dogged woman hitting a City operator. She could even smile at it. It amused her. The smile was metaphoric, because she was no longer in touch with her body.

  Mr Wing held her by the arms and was pulling her back. The body started to sing. It bellowed an old war song, loud and defiant, a song of war against the Communists. Sezen and Sunni stood between her and the man, who held his bruised face. They stroked Mae's hair. Distracted, wild-eyed, the face continued to sing, the old songs, the dead songs, the songs her beloved warrior had taught her fifty years before.

  Old Mrs Tung was fighting to live. The only life she had was Mae's.

  CHAPTER 14

  Mae woke up in a strange bed.

  The walls were pale blue with white cornices. Sitting patiently at the foot of her bed was a man. His face was familiar.

  It was Mr Tunch. The name meant 'Bronze.' He seemed to be made of something burnished. He was wearing a different suit, zigzag black on beige. Like the other one, it was shiny.

  'Good morning,' he said pleasantly.

  Mae sat up. The hotel room had flowers, a TV and a chest of drawers made of polished red wood.

  'Where are my friends?' asked Mae.

  'They have gone home. You have been somewhere else for many days.'

  'What do you mean, "somewhere else?" '

  'Ah.' He shrugged. 'Mrs Tung has been here instead.'

  'For what? Days? Days?

  Mr Tunch nodded. He tried to look sorry, but instead looked rather excited.

  Mae was prickled with terror. 'How did I come back?' It was the most urgent thing to know.

  'She wandered off,' said Mr Tunch. 'Or rather, she simply could not understand what she was doing here. She couldn't remember where she was, so she kept trying to leave. And finally she did.'

  He chuckled. 'She got very frustrated.'

  Mae murmured, 'They do.'

  After Mae's father was killed, her family moved, along with the bloodstained diwan cushions, to the house of the Iron Aunt, Wang Cro. At first Mae did not understand what was wrong or why the adults whispered. The Iron Aunt was nearly eighty and strong enough to move oil jars, but she always thought it was Thursday, cooked dinner at nine in the morning, and could not remember that Mae was not her mother. The children could tease her into a fury.

  Mr Tunch explained: 'Your friends thought it was best if we did what we could here.'

  'Yes. Yes, I can see that,' murmured Mae. Yes, I can see you now, in your Bronze suit playing the big man. You even soothed Sezen into leaving me.

  'Can you do anything?' Mae demanded.

  Mr Tunch leaned towards her and put a hand on her shoulder and made a slight gesture of helplessness. 'We need to know more.'

  'You can't help.' In some ways, Mae was relieved.

  Mr Tunch smiled. 'Not yet.'

  'In that case,' said Mae, 'I want to go home. I have business to do.'

  'What business?' chuckled Mr Tunch, with something too much like scorn. 'Look. There is nowhere else in Karzistan that has as much knowledge about the Air Formats as my company. We are experts in Human-Computer Interface Medicine. Do you know what that is?'

  With a sudden chill, Mae knew. 'You put cameras in Airheads' eyes.'

  Tunch blinked. Gotcha, thought Mae. I don't like you.

  He recovered. 'Right now we are far more concerned about the damage the Test did. We are very concerned about the Format that was used in that Test, and we are horrified at what happened to you. Mrs Chung, we all have business interests, but your health is more important. Forgive me, but you did not do much business these last three days.'

  You oil your words like Dr Bauschu, thought Mae. You do everything for reasons of your own. But perhaps, just perhaps, I need you.

  Mae was driven to Yeshiboz Sistemlar along a new empty road.

  Suddenly there was a wire mesh fence, with what looked like a white airport hangar beyond. Mae noted that it was built just outside the jurisdiction of the city.

  Gates were raised and lowered. Bright young people, the brightest Mae had yet seen in Yeshibozkent, looked as scrubbed as the painted metal walls of the hangar and somehow just as cheap. They performed the function of people without the solidity or the beauty. They would age badly.

  Mr Bronze was king. Inside the front lobby, girls smiled and, modern as they were, dipped their heads in traditional respect.

  'This is Madam Chung Mae. Our p
atient,' he said to a woman at the first desk, with a quick grin.

  No covered heads here. No broad straw hats with the rims white from dried sweat. The people looked as though they had come from Florida. Disney World, thought Mae. I bet the offices at Disney World look just like this.

  'You'll excuse me, Mrs Chung. Like you, I have business to attend to. But Madam Akurgal will take excellent care of you.'

  Madam Akurgal was not yet thirty and dressed like a nurse with a rubber tube around her neck. She kept calling Mae by her first name, as if she were a servant.

  'Just come through here, Mae. We need to disinfect you,' she said, with a winning smile and a TV-Talent accent that came from nowhere specific. She led Mae into a corridor and there was a blast of air, and a sound like vacuum cleaners, and purple lights that made the white nurse's uniform glow white.

  She sat Mae in a chair and told her to relax and lowered a kind of metal hat on her head. Mae waited for a sensation. None came. They sucked blood from her arm. Like at the hairdresser's, Mae was given a magazine to read.

  Doctors looked at paper being printed and shook their heads and called each other over to look. They ignored both Mae and the nurse. Finally one of them tore off a sheet of the paper and showed it to Mae.

  He was a Chinese gentleman, one of her own, probably a Buddhist, and she hoped for understanding. 'We have found nothing,' he said, beaming, pointing.

  The paper was printed with jagged lines.

  'So Mrs Tung is not here.' He jabbed a finger at the paper. 'Everything is working as usual. Except see, here, this line covers activity in the area of the cortex we think corresponds to communication with Air. We think you are constantly checking for Airmail.'

  He was rather pleased. 'This is very encouraging. It means we speedily learn to use Air even without realizing it.'

  'What does it mean for me?'

  He shrugged. 'It means that things are basically okay in your physical brain. It confirms what we had all thought, that the problem is with your imprint in Air. Somehow yours is linked with another imprint.'