Air (or Have Not Have)

by Geoff Ryman

  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 UN 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 UN 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 marvellous, 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 the 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 flavours veered between pork and jam and all the flavours of breakfast at once. It was delicious. She threw it up into the wastebasket. It continued to shift colours 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.

  Synaesthesia was a phenomenon long known and little understood. Some people saw sound, tasted colour, 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 synaesthesia, 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 Mr 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.

  Colours 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?

  The colours chuckled and Mae fell silent.

  But oh, Mrs Tung thought, it's so good to have joints free from pain! And to see so clearly! My books! I shall be able to read my books again. Mrs Tung hooted with pleasure.

  Now, she thought, if only Mae were here.

  Mae awoke feeling limp, as if every bone were broken.

  She was in bed in a room that was like a hospital, but it was a room for one. sick bay rules, said a notice on a bulletin board. She was still being held.

  A kind of ringing went off.

  A young male nurse put his head through the door. His eyes skittered over machines.

  'How do you feel?' he asked in a high, quiet voice. He might have been Hikmet Tunch's brother.

  How do you think I feel? Mae thought. 'Not too good,' she replied. 'Do I still have my baby?'

  He paused for a beat. 'I think so.' He wasn't sure. 'Someone will see you soon.' He turned and left.

  Somewhere music was playing. The buzzing strings, the slight wheedling flatness of the flute, marked it as Karzistani. The melody was in a European scale, sad and measured. With its wavering Muerain singing and electronic sounds, the music was perched exactly between Asia and Europe, the old and the new. Like us, thought Mae. How like us it is. It was yet another song of lost love.

  I am missing the harvest, thought Mae. The valley floor will be cleared and Mr Wing will hire the green machines and the rice will be separated from the stalks. The rice will be piled high in mounds. Someone's car will be running with the radio on to make music. This song perhaps. Mae saw them in her mind, the yellow-blue-green of the old ladies' aprons over their blue trousers, all faded with washing, age, and dust.

  Fatimah was back in the room.

  'You did this to me,' Mae said. She knew. They had deliberately provoked Old Mrs Tung to return.

  Fatimah blinked. 'I'm sorry.'

  'Do I still have my baby? Have you taken my baby?

  Fatimah was getting weary of this. 'No, we haven't.' she said quietly.

  'Did you learn what you had to?'

  Fatimah sat on the bed. 'We now know what happens when the other imprinted personality takes over. It requires emotional synergy, when both personalities feel the same thing. For example, when you both feel fear…'

  Tell me something new, thought Mae.

  Something in the way Mae shifted on the bed made Fatimah stop.

  'We have given you a drug that will help you keep the… other personality under control.' Fatimah was holding a foil in her hand. Her eyes said, See? We are trying to help. She was amused by something at the same time. 'These pills are so new, the paste is still drying.'

  'What does the drug do?' Mae asked.

  'It reduces emotional synergy.' Fatimah shrugged. The only words she had were big ones. Either she didn't want to or couldn't say clearly what it did.

  But Mae knew. She could feel it. 'It scatters me like leaves,' she said.

  Fatimah sighed and breathed out once, hard: That's it. 'It might have side effects like that.'

  I would not be part of the harvest anyway. The village would shut me out. I have no rice to harvest; it is all Joe's rice. So I would hang around outside the threshing field. Like a ghost.

  If I try to tell people what I have seen here, the drug will make me vague. Or Mrs Tung and I will rise up together, in front of them, mad.

  Then I will give birth out of my mouth. And be a monster.

  'You rest,' said Fatimah, and patted her arm.

  Part of Mae wanted to weep and say: I want to go home. But she was blocked from that. Strong emotion or clear thought melted away.

  At some point Fatimah had gone, and Mae was alone.

  Where is my good dress? she wondered. I took my good dress to the city and my Talent jacket. She looked around the room and saw nothing that was hers.

  The good dress and the Talent jacket faded in importance. Mae swung her feet out from the bed. She stood in a surgical shift.

  There was nothing in Mae's mind as clear as a decision to escape. She simply left. She did not consciously say: Leave the drugs; better the war, the pain, and the clarity. The foil of pills remained on the table by the bed.

  Mae opened the door and walked out into the corridor, and the dog was there.

  'Go,' growled the dog, ears alert, teeth bared, rising up. 'Back.'

  Mae assumed that for all practical purposes she was talking to Mr Tunch. 'We've completed our bargain,' she said, in a faded, weepy voice. It wasn't fair, she'd done what she said. 'Fair trade.'

  'You are supposed to stay there.' His voice was even, mechanical, with strange jumps of tone and texture.

  'Why?' Mae asked.

  The dog cocked his head to one side. 'Because you are sick.'

  'Now I'm well.'

  The dog loped forward and snuffled her, and licked her hand.

  'Sorry I bit you,' he said. He looked up at her, needing direction.

  Mae touched the box on his head, too scattered to feel disgust. The drugs made her feel wonder. She thought of her Kru. It is like this for the dog. They imprinted him and plugged him into the skill of language. Or maybe the skills of a whole person. Maybe it was Tunch. 'You can understand things now. Do you remember what it was like before?'

  'A little bit,' said the dog. 'There were only smells. I remember smells. Now I remember other things.'

  'You can choose,' said Mae. 'You can decide things.'

  She thought of getting back. The world swam around her; the task of leaving the building, walking across the town, finding her way back up the mountainside – it was all impossible without help.

  'You can help me get back home.'

  The dog cocked his head. His tail wagged suddenly, twice.

  'What he's doing,' said Mae, to no one in particular, 'is things that would not be allowed in any other country. That's why they're paying him. So he can do things for them, and find things out.'

  'Like me,' said the dog.

  'He had to make you as smart as he could. There would only ever be one.'

  The dog stepped forward, head lowered, tail still wagging.
r />   'You can't get out that way,' the dog said. 'They will see you. This is the way.'

  He put his nose to the floor and snuffled. He was following a scent.

  All Mae was aware of was that it was pleasant to have a companion. When she was a child, her Iron Aunt had had a big rangy dog called Mo, who was a bit crazy.

  Mo peed everywhere. He would come up and join Mae. and walk with her for a time, but only at his own choice. It felt like that now.

  They turned down corridors. The dog's ears pricked up. and he spun around once and tried to bark. 'Who?' the mechanical voice said.

  A man in white came up, chuckling, and scratched the dog's ears. Not Mr Pakan. 'Hello, Ling,' he said. 'Where are you going, boy?'

  Mae still swam on tides of herself, and it was in both innocence and a bit of cunning that she replied: 'Ling is taking me where I am supposed to be going.'

  'Oh, Very good. Wonderful isn't it? Have you talked to him about smells? It is like entering another world.'

  'I have, a bit,' said Mae. 'And it is wonderful.'

  'How are you feeling?'

  'The drugs have taken very powerful effect,' said Mae.

  His smile went a bit steely. Perhaps it was the drug, but his teeth seemed to glint. 'That's good,' he said. He bowed and left.

  'We did not tell the truth,' said Ling. The mechanical voice could convey no emotion.

  'We're learning,' said Mae.

  There was a booming and a bashing ahead of them. Mae thought of thunder, then drums. Ling stopped and waited and inclined his head in a universal, cross-species sign: Scratch my ears. Mae unconsciously obeyed.

  The sound came from huge metal barrels. Men in blue overalls rolled them past Mae. Ling growled, establishing he was a loyal guard dog.

  'Good boy,' chuckled the deliverymen, gazing in blank lust, even at a middle-aged woman in a shift. 'Rather you than me, Ling,' they said, deciding Mae's lack of erotic charm made her an object of scorn.

  Ling sat panting patiently. He lifted up his nose, tasting the air, lapped Mae's hand, and walked on, his claws clicking, slipping on the polished floor.