Air (or Have Not Have)

by Geoff Ryman

  So what has happened now is even worse. I think Dad has gone back to you. I went to his room, and he was not there. Mum, Balshang is a mess, the place has roads and pipes for a million people, and no one knows how many have come here, between nine and sixteen million. I had not seen his place before. Mum, there was a lagoon of sewage behind it. All his things were gone. There was no sign of breakfast, just one very old dirty plate with hard food on it. That may mean he has been gone some days. He has no money, so must be hitching. He may think he will be able to get back to you through the snow. He is beside himself with despair. I don't think he even cares about getting through the snow. I think right now he probably wants to die. I thought I should warn you. If he turns up here with me or my sister, I will let you know. Try under the circumstances to have a good New Year.

  What else? thought Mae.

  Her spirits and her body sagged. What else can possibly happen? She turned off her machine. She pulled out the mattress and laid it on the plywood sheet that rested between the slats of her floor. The roof was the thinnest part of the house.

  If the Flood came, she would hear it, and if it did not – thank God. She turned out the light.

  CHAPTER 23

  Sweat woke Mae up.

  She sat up in the dark, suddenly wide-awake and gasping for breath. She had been dreaming of the Flood; she had heard it, the spreading crash of water and stone.

  She listened. Everything was silent and still, but she was soaked with sweat.

  The air! It was hot, hot as summer, as hot as those nights when you have to sleep outside. She heard a rustling in the eaves, like something breathing.

  Erjdha Nefsi.

  Mae threw off the covers and stood up, listening. Very faint under the sound of moving air, was a sound as if the hills were being tickled.

  She switched on the light, and looked at the TV.

  Forty-five degrees Centigrade.

  'Wake up,' Mae told the TV. She threw on old jeans, rubber boots, and a light coat. She strapped on a rucksack filled with blankets and tins of food. She jerked the trapdoor out of its socket and dropped the bag down to the kitchen floor below.

  'Siao!' she called. 'Siao, are you there?'

  There was no answer. If Siao had gone down the hill, and was in a house or a cafe, he might be all right. If he was on the road when it hit… Mae did not have time for imaginings. She spun back around and sent an audio file.

  'Bedri. It's forty-five Celsius, the Erjdha is breathing, and I can hear the meltdown. I don't know if it's Flood or not, but please tell people: if it is at the worst, we will need help. It's four-thirty a.m. now, and I need to store battery power, so I'm sending this off, and leaving. Don't bother replying, I won't be here. If it's bad, I'll be at Kwan's.'

  Mae pushed the machine off, and lowered herself through the trapdoor, badly scraping her forearm. She could hear her breath rattling like gambler's dice. She dropped to the floor, and hauled back the curtains to Siao's alcove.

  Old Mr Chung slept, quietly smiling. He smelled of rice wine. Mae called him, and shook him. 'Mr Chung-sir! Mr Chung!'

  She dragged him blinking out of sleep.

  'It's here, Mr Chung, it's here, the Flood – get up!'

  He had fallen onto the bed fully clothed. Mae knelt and jammed his feet into string shoes. 'Come, Mr Chung, come!'

  She rattled him out of the house, into the courtyard under the stars. The hot wind had blasted the sky clean; everything was hot and clear. She explained to Mr Chung that Siao was still down the hill, he must get to Mr Wing's Big House.

  Then Mae pounded on the door of the Kens.

  'Kuei! Kuei! Old Mrs Ken. Get up! Get up! Erjdha Nefsi!'

  The window overhead was thrown open, wood clunked against the wall. Silhouetted against the whitewash was Mr Ken's mother, hissing.

  'Go away, you madwoman. My son is asleep. Take your fancies and

  go.'

  'Feel the wind! Feel the air! It's hot; it's nearly fire. It… is… here!' Mae thought: I don't have time for this, or for you. 'Mr Ken. Ken Kuei! Wake up!'

  It's come, said a voice. This is what it was like.

  Mae began to feel a kind of panic. 'Ken Kuei! You said you would help!'

  The air is like fire and the water moves the earth.

  Mr Chung suddenly said, 'I'll be back.' The old man trotted away bowlegged towards the barn.

  'Mr Chung, we have to go!'

  Mr Chung's voice had an unexpected edge. 'I can't leave my tools!'

  Oh, no! Mae held her head. She shouted to them all: 'We all have to leave here now! Our court is in a very bad position. Both rocks and water will wash here, nobody must stay here!'

  And suddenly, Old Mrs Tung spoke, calling Mrs Ken by her childhood name: 'Ting! Do as you are told! No more nonsense! Even as a little girl, all you ever wanted to do was stay inside the house. I've told you and told you what happened last time. The Flood is here. Darling daughter, you… will… have to leave this house!'

  At the window, Old Mrs Ken's face fell. Hot wind buffeted the shutters.

  Someone touched Mae's arm, bringing her back. 'I'm here,' said Mr Ken.

  Mae gasped, recalled to herself. 'She's with me. She's using my voice!'

  Mr Ken put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. 'I will get your father-in-law to safety,' he promised.

  'And your mother and the Okans.' Mae swung her bag higher up her shoulder.

  Mr Ken smiled, amused. 'Is there anything else?' They started to walk towards the gate.

  'Yes. Start yelling.'

  ' "Happy New Year"?'

  Mae saw him smiling, moonlight making him look young and merry. Okay, she admitted. I love him.

  Old Mr Chung returned with his bag of tools. He bowed and greeted Mr Ken sweetly. 'Happy New Year.'

  Ken swung open the courtyard gate for her. His smile cracked wider and he started to bellow, as if in a child's game: 'Happy New Year! The Flood is here!'

  Mae joined in. 'This is no joke! The snows are melting!'

  He looked up into her face. 'You know don't you?'

  That he loved her.

  'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, yes I do. Now, let's go!'

  Mae turned left down Lower Street. 'Get everyone up to Mr Wing's!' she shouted again to them both, and began to run.

  The air pulsed as if there was something, huge and hot and alive, breathing down the back of her neck. Mae shouted as she ran: 'Dragon's breath! Wake up. Wake up!'

  Already, down the cobbled slope of Lower Street, water ran in a current. Her feet made plashing sounds and her thick boots clunked on the uneven stones. She tripped and knocked her wrist against the side of Mr Kemal's house.

  Her plan was to get to the mosque, to use the PA to warn everyone. She turned up the slope towards Sezen's.

  ' Inshallah!' gasped Mae.

  In hot starlight she saw: Already the snow from this lower slope was gone.

  Mae ran up the hill, slipping on a glossy surface of mud and moss. The ground creaked with water as if it were an overfull barrel. Where her feet did not shoot backwards out from under her, they sank into mud.

  Mae shuffled sideways to one of the usual runoffs. As she had hoped, it was gravelled, swept clean. It was also ankle-deep in racing water. Mae struggled up the slope against the current.

  'Sezen!' she shouted. 'Sezen. Flood!'

  Ahead of her on the hillside, a light went on. The wet slope reflected electric light like a field of broken mirrors.

  The door opened. 'Madam Chung?' said a hesitant voice. Hatijah leaned out of the doorway, her husband looming behind her.

  Mae stopped and windmilled her arms for balance against the current.

  Hatijah called, 'Sezen has already left. She goes to wake the people of the Marsh.'

  'Oh! She is a good girl,' said Mae.

  'She has become one,' said Hatijah.

  'You! What are you doing? Get to Kwan's! Get moving, now! Those terraces will be full of water, the walls will break!'
<
br />   'We wanted to wait for Sezen.'

  Mae felt a familiar stab of exasperation. She struggled up and out of the ditch. 'Hatijah! Sezen is not your mother, for heaven's sake; you have other children, get them out of here, now, now, now! Sezen has packed your bags, I know, just take them and leave!'

  Hatijah was weeping. 'We can't leave our goat,' she said.

  Inshallah. Mae relented 'Of course you can't, it is all your family's wealth. But Edrem, please tell her, life is more important than money. Let the goat go, perhaps it can save itself.'

  Edrem's silhouette, tall, skinny and slow, murmured to his wife: 'We must go.'

  Mae started to struggle higher up the hill, to the Shens. She shouted as she walked: 'Edrem, I rely on you! You take the children, Hatijah the bags, okay? Okay? And leave your lights on. We will all need light!'

  Mae struggled up the hill, leaning on her hands. The hillside was sheathed in water, a solid rippling sheet that was seasoned with tiny cutting flints. The stones sizzled against her fingers like fat on a stove. My God, the whole hillside is moving!

  All around her, suspended in the air, was a sound like sighing, a rushing sound of water, in a hundred thousand streams. It was a terrible sound, huge and gentle at the same time, vast as a world. As if Mae had heard the world for the first time.

  That's it, that's the sound.

  Unexpectedly, the ground flattened and Mae stumbled forward. She was at the schoolhouse. Already the dusty playground was a polished lake, reflecting the children's swings. Water poured out from one corner of the school as if from the spout of a pitcher.

  Mae waded to the door and pounded. 'Teacher Shen! Teacher Shen!'

  The door seemed to bounce open.

  Mae felt another hot breath, but not the Dragon's. Moist, weepy, there was Suloi, her face sticky with tears. 'He won't come, Mae,' she said, and shook herself into sobs.

  Mae hugged her sister from the Circle. 'What do you mean?'

  A voice out of the darkness, like the darkness, growled, 'There will be no Flood. It is foolishness.'

  'Oh, Shen, don't believe me, but believe the water, look at the ground! Shen, please come!'

  Something wavered in the darkness, as if it were coiled, legless.

  'There will be no Flood.'

  Suloi backed away. 'He will not leave.'

  Mae pleaded: 'Shen! Come outside! You can hear it. The snows are melting!'

  'And the snows will run off, as they have for two thousand years. Do you think those machines of yours can change the world?'

  'Do you think you can hold back a Flood? How? By teaching it arithmetic?!' Mae's voice broke with fury.

  The darkness, the despair finally uncoiled and stood up. It cocked a rifle. The gun clicked in the darkness.

  'I will not have scandalous filth such as you telling my family what to do,' said Despair, who once had been called Happiness.

  'Go, Mae,' whispered Suloi, and gave Mae an invisible, loving push.

  Shen growled, 'We stay here where we belong.'

  Mae pulled Suloi to her, hugged her, whispered in her ear, 'Run in the dark.' Then she pulled back and ran and called over her shoulder, 'Live!'

  The hills were laughing.

  There was a giggling sound, thousands of chuckles as the water shook itself over rocks, down gullies. It slapped its way across the rock faces of the terraces.

  Mae skittered down the slope to the square box of the mosque that had the public-address system mounted on its gable. She came to the door. She rattled it. The sound beyond was hollow. It was locked.

  Who locks a mosque? It's never been locked! Mae had calculated, she knew it would take three hours to rouse each house in turn. Mae was near tears. She had planned and planned, but she had never planned that the mosque would be locked.

  She would have to run to Mr Shenyalar, the Muerain. He would have the keys.

  At least it was downhill. She turned and let the water and gravity carry her.

  Mae staggered and slid down the hill. She skittered through the space between the Alis' and the Dohs'. She got tangled in old rusting bedding that someone had discarded. The springs made a merry sproing sound as she pulled her feet free. She half fell onto the cobbles of Upper Street, and spun herself into the concave frontage of the house of the Doh family.

  Mae shouted up at the shuttered windows, 'Old Mrs Doh, all Dohs, wake up, wake up, there is a Flood, there is a Flood!' She had danced with them only hours before. 'Please wake up!' New Year, and everyone will be asleep, drunk, exhausted, happy.

  Mae spun away onto the bridge. The little river roared, enveloping the arch in mist that stroked Mae's face and danced happily into her lungs. Over the stone balustrade, moonlit rapids shot white and hot and fierce down the gully. Mae remembered the ducks, the geese. Already they were a memory, already washed away. Below, the village square looked like an ocean, all glinting waves.

  On the other side of the bridge, there was a huge puddle. Even here on Upper Street, a pocket of the road was flooded. Mae plunged down from the bridge and water poured in over the tops of her boots. Even now, the village was still asleep, still dark.

  'Flood! Flood!' she shouted. Suddenly a flashlight flared around the corner of the back of the Haj's house.

  'Mae, this way,' said a voice. It was her brother. 'We've got Mother up at the Wings. I've just been down to Lower Street.'

  'Ju-mei! I need to get to the Shenyalars'.'

  'Good, this is the way, down here.'

  Mae waded towards him, the water above her knees. Ju-mei reached forward and grabbed her arm. Together they threshed their way down the rocky gap between the house of the Haj and his neighbours. The alley was like a water garden, all ferns and waterfalls. Mae and Ju-mei fell into Lower Street as if plunging into a river.

  The current nearly swept them away. It poured around the corner of Ju-mei's house, rucking up like bedding, white as sheets.

  Across the street was the Muerain's tall stone house, with its bronze plaque. Clinging to each other, Ju-mei and Mae crossed the torrent. It made them trip downstream as if dancing. They crammed themselves into the porch of the al Gamas' house to brake. Holding on to the rough walls, they pulled themselves upstream, as if up a cliff.

  Something crackled. Mae turned to see the Haj's straw outhouse spin out into the current and down into the square. The square was a lake. The village's one streetlight glowed golden on waves rocking against the front doors of the Kosals' and the Masuds'. The outhouse roof, like a straw hat, swirled away on the current. The surface of the water roiled as if full of serpents.

  Ju-mei pulled Mae into the doorway of the Shenyalars'. He pounded; Mae howled.

  'Muerain! Muerain Shenyalar! Oh please, please open. Please wake up! Oh, Muerain! Muerain!'

  Why, why didn't they move? They were religious Karz, they did not drink, they did not celebrate the New Year, why didn't they hear?

  'There is a Flood, Muerain, please wake up!'

  From somewhere down in the valley came a terrible spreading crash, as if someone had dropped a dresser full of china. The sound of breakage rolled, settled and then shushed to a halt.

  The small terraces below the village were falling, collapsing into the waters.

  The houses of the Pins and the Chus. Where Sezen was?

  Mae was spurred by terror. 'Shenyalar. Wake up! Oh please wake up!'

  A shutter moved.

  'Who is it?'

  'Mrs Shenyalar, it is Chung Mae. Listen, did you hear that noise?'

  'Yes, yes indeed.'

  'The Flood is here! Mrs Shenyalar, can your husband come with me, can he come and open up the mosque, so we can use the public-address?'

  'Wait there, Mrs Chung,' said the wife.

  Ju-mei began to shout at the other houses. 'Mr al Gama! The Haj-sir! Mrs Nan!'

  A light went on at Mrs Nan's.

  'Mrs Nan! Get up, get your things – go!' Mae shouted at the light.

  The door of the Shenyalars' opened.

&nb
sp; 'Oh, Muerain!' Mae cried in relief.

  'Inshallah,' breathed out the Muerain. He had taken time, the foolish man, to dress in his religious robes. He saw the river and its surging current, and the new lake at the foot of the streetlight. He heard the roar. He turned and looked at Mae, and his fine, thin features said mutely: You were right.

  'We have to tell everyone,' she said.

  Unhurried, the Muerain strode back into his house. 'Wife! Get the children, get food, and go at once to Madame Kwan's.'

  His wife called, 'Surely it is too soon to worry?'

  'It is too late to worry. I order you, wife: Out of this house and up to the house of the Wings'!'

  'What are you doing?' his wife asked.

  There was a flurry of footsteps on stairs. 'My duty!'

  At that moment, the entire village was plunged into darkness. The power went.

  'Inshallah!'

  'Husband!'

  'Get to the Wings'. I go!' shouted Mr Shenyalar.

  Mae wrestled with her backpack, and felt the rubberized surface of a waterproof flashlight.

  'I have two,' she said, and passed him one. The light flashed on the wet walls like fairies in a play, dancing ahead of them.

  Mae turned to her brother. She kissed his cheek. 'Thank you,' she said. 'Don't go down. Lower Street is lost. Go up to the Soongs', the Pings', and Mr Atakoloo. Yes?'

  'My place is with you,' said Ju-mei.

  'It has always been with me, brother. But it is also with your wife and neighbours. Please go?'

  Ju-mei paused, and then, very deliberately, gave his sister a long, low bow of respect.

  Then he turned, shouting, 'Go to Wing's, don't go on Lower Street!'

  Mae shouted, for a Muerain could not lose dignity to that extent. 'Everyone up! The Flood is here! Everyone up!'

  Mae and the Muerain fought the current back up the gap between the Haj and the Nan households. Overhead, the stars glinted with merriment, the hills roared, everything was comic. The little people were finally seeing who their master was.

  The current on Upper Street had gained strength. It sounded now like a waterfall; the little lake had reached up into the house of Mr Ping, and its surface rippled as it sluiced its way out between houses.

  The Muerain hoisted up his skirts to show long hairless legs. He reached back for Mae, and ran, holding up his skirts like a dancing showgirl. The stars laughed. Around their feet stones swirled like the shards of broken pots.