Air (or Have Not Have)

by Geoff Ryman

  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 touched 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 grey 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. It 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 UN 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 practised 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 UN 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 UN 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.'

  '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 jewellery. 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.'r />
  '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 brought 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…