Air

by Geoff Ryman

  “Today, we have an Aircast from the National Opera!”

  “Granny Tung!” Mae heard her own voice. But she had not spoken.

  The voice of Air said, “We will see part of the opera Turandot. The opera is a favorite with audiences in the capital.”

  The whisper came again. It was Granny Tung. Mae. Where is the world?

  “I’m trying to find you, Granny!”

  Air said, “Perhaps we like to think that the opera’s hero, Kalaf, is Karzistani.”

  Mae raged. “I don’t want to go to an opera! I need to talk to Granny Tung!”

  Immediately, the sound of the opera dimmed. A new, calmer voice spoke. “To send messages, go the area called Airmail.”

  Mae shot forward. She went through a blue wall, and into it. Mae crashed into metaphor. Information swallowed her. Information was blue and she was lost in it.

  Mae! Mae!

  “Do not attempt to send or receive Airmail until you have configured your personal airmail address. This is like putting your house name on your letterbox.”

  If Mae had had a voice, she would have shouted. “I’ve got no time, this is an emergency!”

  “For an emergency configuration, simply repeat your own name several times.”

  Mae said her own name over and over.

  Mae! Mrs. Tung seemed to cry out

  “Mae, Mae, Mae…”

  Mae!

  Something seemed to go click. It felt like a small electric shock. Something was connected.

  Immediately, Mae was seized, hugged, held in terror as if she were a strong tree in a flood.

  Can you feel it? It’s pulling us back, Mae!

  The voice of Air slowed to a crawl. “Your … mailbox … is configured…” Time was stopping.

  Old Mrs. Tung said one small, forlorn, unexpected word, full of dread.

  Water.

  Time reversed. Everything, the Format, the voices, the whitewashed stone walls, the people in them were sucked back in, down. It all collapsed, and everything was gone.

  THE PAST IS SO VERY DIFFERENT, WE KNOW IT AT ONCE.

  Mae knew she was in the past because of the smells. The wood beams stank of creosote; the house had a stewed odor of bodies and tea and fermenting beanshoots.

  She was in a house at night, with no lights on; the walls were in unexpected places. A stairwell opened up underneath her feet. A woman stumbled, rolled down the steps and landed up to her knees in water.

  My books, someone thought, all my beautiful books!

  The woman stumbled to her feet tried to find a candle. A candle, fool, in this?! She waded across the floor of her main room, water lapping around her shins. How much water is there? Where can it come from? She reached out and touched a leather binding on the shelf and in that moment knew the books were lost.

  She heard a laugh behind her and turned. A woman’s voice said, “What is it worth now, all the money you married?” The voice was rough and silky at the same time; an old woman’s voice.

  “Is it still coming in?” Mrs. Tung screamed, twisting around. Mrs. Tung was young, supple, and strong.

  “It is roaring down every slope.” Hearing that voice, Mrs. Tung’s heart sank with a sense of oppression, overruling, and contempt.

  Mrs. Tung waded her way through the flood. “Are the children upstairs?” she demanded.

  “Oh,” said the dark voice, “so now you remember you have children?” The voice was bitter, triumphant, and full of hatred.

  Mrs. Tung pushed past her, feeling her old, quilted overcoat. The old woman laughed again, a familiar hooting, a slightly hollow laugh.

  Then, from outside the house, from the slopes above, there came a spreading hiss and clatter like applause, as if all the stones of the valley were rising in tribute.

  “Lily! Ahmet!” Mrs. Tung called, in the dark, to her children. A thousand rolling pebbles clattered against the house like rain. There was a boom! and the house shuddered.

  “Mrs. Tung,” Mae tried to say. The words went somewhere else.

  “Lily!” Mrs. Tung shouted again, her voice breaking. The house groaned, and something made a snapping sound.

  Mrs. Tung bashed her head on a doorway, heard a wailing in a corner. She scooped up a child in thick pajamas. Mae could feel the button-up suit made of flannel, smelling of damp dust.

  “Where is your brother?”

  The child could only wail.

  “Lily! Where is Ahmet?”

  The child buried her head and screamed.

  Mae thought: Lily? Ahmet? Mrs. Tung had another family? Another family before the Kens? Who?

  Mrs. Tung turned and begged the quilted coat, “Mrs. Yuksel, please! Have you seen Ahmet? Has he gone down the stairs?”

  “Yes,” said the calm dark voice. “He went out the front door.”

  And the certain, terrible knowledge: Ahmet’s grandmother did not want a half-Chinese grandson.

  “You let him out!”

  The laugh.

  “You let him out to die!”

  Carrying Lily, Mrs. Tung thrust herself past her mother-in-law.

  “Ahmet! Ahmet!” Mrs. Tung wailed a whole broken heart. She plunged down into her front room and into mud up to her waist. The front room was choked with it. The child in her arms kicked and screamed.

  It was all Mrs. Tung could do to shrug herself around, turn, and wrestle her way back towards the stairs. As her foot struck the lowest step, still under mud, she felt a scurrying sensation round her knees. Water was flowing in over the top of the mud. The water was still coming for them, inexhaustible. Bearing Lily, she hauled herself up.

  “Mrs. Tung! Mrs. Tung!” A voice was pleading.

  Her own voice. If this voice was her voice then who was she?

  “Mrs. Tung, this is just a memory. Mrs. Tung…”

  What? What?

  “This is all Air, Mrs. Tung!”

  “Water!” she shouted back, and rose out of the mud. Hatred swelled out of her heart. She felt the wall of the staircase. On the wall was a family sword.

  “So you will not inherit my beautiful room,” said the laugh.

  Mrs. Tung swung the sword. The laugh was cut off. Mrs. Tung turned and ran into the upstairs corridor. The wooden timbers creaked, like a ship. The entire house shuddered, heaved, and moved forward from its foundations. It twisted and began to break apart; she ran towards its end room, the one with the beautiful window, the one that looked back towards home, to Kizuldah.

  She heard a great collapsing behind her, felt timbers separate, fall, rumble like barrels. Somehow she kicked glass from the window. Lily screamed. Reflected in the roaring water was fire, leaping along rooftops. Mrs. Tung jumped, falling many feet, out over the downside of the slope, awash in a wake of water. She fell through warm air down into a snowcold, icy torrent.

  Everything pulled. Lily was pulled from her. She slipped away like a scarf into the current.

  “Mrs. Tung!”

  The water was blue.

  “Mrs. Tung, this is just a memory, this is not really happening!”

  Then why is the air warm? Why is the water cold? Can you feel water in memory?

  Mae held and pulled, resisted the Flood and the backwards pull.

  Somewhere dimly there was singing. Turandot was being performed. Three old men sung about their lost homes. “Kiu … Tsiang … Honan.”

  “There, Mrs. Tung! We need to get back there!”

  From somewhere, Old Mrs Tung said: It was real. It was as real as now and as important. My Lily was real.

  Mae said, “We need to get home!”

  That was home! That is real! It all gets washed away. I can die, that means nothing, but a whole universe dies every day, slowly, slowly, it deserves remembrance, here, see it was beautiful, beautiful!

  “Dear Mrs. Tung. Sssh. See? See?”

  Life like a mountain, huge, cold, fearsome, ice with water wreathed in cloud and air and sunset, too big, too strange.

  Suddenly they were standing in
a courtyard, a courtyard at night.

  Mae said, “Mrs. Tung, that is the Format.”

  Why are there neon signs? Help? Entertainment? I have done with all that, I am too old. In the corner there is a TV set. When did we get a TV?

  It is showing an opera. I have never seen an opera. It is the opera in Balshang, and I have always, always wanted to see that, oh, the red and the gold! And look at the jewels as they sing! I have heard this on radio, and dreamed, there she is, there she is, the Princess, singing of a beautiful woman who died centuries ago.

  In the opera, a woman sang, “Principessa Loo Ling, my ancestress, sweet and serene…”

  “Mrs. Tung? Mrs. Tung? I’m afraid, Mrs. Tung. I have to go.”

  Then go, child.

  “I have to get back.”

  You go on. I will stay here.

  Mae pulled herself away, and felt herself stretching, held by someone else’s thoughts.

  She goes. I always thought Lily would be here to meet me. Instead it is Mae, faithful little Mae, who helps me across.

  Our flesh is earth and fire our desires, and the fire burns through the flesh, the water washes it all away. And what is left is air. And air rises towards heaven.

  THERE WAS A SENSE OF PARTING, LIKE A SPRAIN.

  Mae was separate from Mrs. Tung, and standing in the Format, demanding in terror, “How do I get back?”

  Air answered.

  “Leaving Airmail in the event of an emergency: every message area has it own entry protocol which should prevent access to the full mind.”

  Mae cried, “I’ve got access to the full mind!”

  It was cold inside Mrs. Tung, and the cold seemed to clasp and hold and freeze.

  “Protocols can break down in the event of illness or extremes of emotion. If you find your mind in contact with more than the Airmail area of the person you are contacting, first find your own Airmail address. Concentrate on that area as if in meditation. Repeat your address like a mantra…”

  Her address? Mae remembered. “Mae, Mae, Mae, Mae…”

  Something brushed past her. Darling child, it seemed to say.

  “Mae, Mae, Mae, Mae, Mae.…”

  That was what Mae was saying, over and over when she woke up, lying on the floor, holding Mrs. Tung.

  Mae knew then why the old woman had laughed through the last sixty years of her life. It was not to keep up her spirits. Mrs. Tung had hooted all her life from heartbreak.

  And the dear old creature was dead.

  3

  MAE WAS FINDING EVERYTHING FUNNY.

  She lay in bed, pushing herself into the corner of the alcove, her face stretched into a grin she could not explain. Her family and friends were crowded around. They knew Mae had been inside Mrs. Tung when she died.

  Mae’s mother sat beside the bed in state and that was funny. “Allah!” her mother said, calling on the God of the Prophet with hands raised. Mae’s mother was a Buddhist.

  “A terrible thing,” said Mae’s brother Ju-mei, shaking his head. He had put on his best city suit and long city coat for the occasion. He sweated, steaming for his respectability.

  Kwan passed Mae tea, and that was funny. Someone dies and so you make a cup of tea?

  Kwan intoned, “Many people say that they did not find death so terrible.”

  Mae laughed. It was the soft, hooting sound of heartbreak that was part of her now. “How can they say anything if they’re dead?”

  Kwan said, calmly, “Sometimes the doctors bring them back.”

  “Isn’t science wonderful?” Mae chuckled. “Did they ask the people if they wanted to come back?”

  Mae’s mother cursed the devil. “It is Shy tan, the work of Shytan!”

  “We will take care of you now,” promised Mae’s brother, heavy-faced.

  That made Mae laugh, too. More like you want me to go on taking care of you, she thought.

  Mae remembered Mr. Ken’s wife, lying in the courtyard. “How is Mrs. Ken Tui?” Mae asked.

  Everything went silent. Joe, sitting at the kitchen table, lifted up his baseball cap and scratched his head.

  Kwan answered. “Tui is dead, too.” Mae’s brother leaned forward and took her hand. Kwan hesitated, then spoke. “She ran out of the yard. She was crying that she was going mad. She threw herself down into the well.”

  Mae squawked with laughter. It was terrible, but she did. “You all went to see an opera and meanwhile the rest of us lived one.” She was still chuckling when she asked the next question. “Do they count the Test as a success?”

  Mr. Wing looked grim. “No,” he said.

  Mae found that funny, too, and chuckled again and waved her hand. “It would seem not,” she replied.

  Mr. Wing said, “They said that the process was proved physically safe but there were still many instances of panic and injury.”

  “And no one can drink from their wells, they are so stuffed with the bodies of neighbors.” Mae laughed again, and alarmed herself. She was laughing too much.

  Mr. Wing kept doggedly informing her, to calm her, which only made things funnier. “They will not begin Aircasting for another year.”

  “So, we have a year to live,” Mae said.

  “There is to be an international program of education.”

  Mae imitated the voices, out of pure, hilarious rage. You all now have a pigpen inside your head and we do not know how to clean it up. “The Pig” is called “Terror.” You also have another area marked “Death.” Please do not choose “Death.” You can choose “Terror” and “Panic” whenever you like.

  “There is also,” Kwan said calmly, “a world of the spirit. And you have traveled that.”

  Mae stopped laughing, abruptly.

  THE NEXT MORNING, MAE TRIED TO GO BACK TO WORK.

  She tried once more to boil the clothes. It took all morning. She kept dropping things, distracted. She was aware that as a fashion expert she should look her best. She put on a best dress, but it wouldn’t hang right, as though it were on backwards. She started to apply make up in the mirror and burst into tears.

  The face was alive but alone.

  The brazier was moved outside the kitchen. Mae found herself standing outside in the courtyard, with the long wooden laundry spoon still in her hand, remembering.

  She was remembering all the children who had run in that yard, the girls in dirty flowered trousers, the littlest boys in shorts, the biggest lads in sweatshirts, sports gear. She saw them in waves, coming and going. She found herself remembering children like Woo, who had died, caught in a thresher.

  Before Mae was born.

  Mae was remembering what Old Mrs. Tung had seen.

  She remembered a farming village owned by a landlord who the Communists later killed. She remembered his car, all polished cream metal, too large and fast for local roads. It was pulled by oxen and the landlord waved from its backseat. He was fat, childish. He gave little Miss Hu a bonbon. Hu Ai-Ling had been Mrs. Tung’s name once.

  Mae remembered weaving pots from reed. She remembered women whose faces were almost familiar, whose names she could almost recall, and she heard them agree that it was best to be a middle wife. First wives were supposed to lead, and lived in fear of being usurped. The youngest wife would always be the lowest in the house. “So how can you be a middle wife without being the youngest first?” someone asked.

  Mae remembered how to make cucumber pickles that would survive crisp and free from vinegar taste for three years. She remembered bean harvests, sitting in groups sorting good from bad, shelling, grilling, drying, pickling. The women had worn quilted jackets, no makeup, and they all smoked chervil in their soapstone pipes. They tried to get rid of teeth; teeth just caused trouble and pain.

  Mae remembered the poems.

  ’Tis the fire of Love that is in the reed, it is the fervor of Love that is in the wine

  “Mrs. Chung?” It was Mr. Ken, standing in front of her.

  The reed is the comrade of everyone who has been parte
d from a friend

  His neatly trimmed hair, his round face, all seemed newly widowed and alone. She saw his face as a boy, as a grandmother would see it, the face of the future. Now grown up, now bereft, now without her. The chasm of the future into which we all fall, and decline, and disappear. The hollow that is left in the world by our own missing shape.

  “Oh,” she said, and hugged him.

  She wept into his shoulder.

  “Mrs. Chung,” he said again, and gingerly patted her back.

  “I … have … your grandmother’s memories!” Mae blurted it out all in a rush, fearful, terrified, and she covered her mouth.

  “You had a blue plastic truck, I remember that, and you drove the family crazy making truck noises. You wanted to be a truck driver.” Her face was stained with tears. She was shaken with the mystery and sadness of life. “Why did you never become a truck driver?”

  Ken Kuei’s round and handsome face was slack, unmanned by the sudden intimacy. The question was a good one. His grandmother had never asked it.

  “The farm,” he murmured. The shrug said there was much more to be said. He glanced about the courtyard. Mae was still in her morning robe.

  “Come inside, Mrs. Chung,” he said, and began to lead her. “Do you want me to get Joe?”

  “I don’t know.” She wanted Mr. Ken. She wanted to talk to him about his childhood. She had a terribly strong sense of who he was. She had held him as a baby. She had known that even as a baby he was a reserve of quiet, calm strength. He never wept or wailed. He could fight, but only when he needed to. He had been so good at football.

  Like Ahmet had been.

  All of this made her weep for what had gone, as if Kuei’s childhood was the distant shore of some beautiful retreating land. For Mrs. Tung, taking care of the family’s long-awaited grandson had been the last time she was useful.

  “I was a skeleton for years,” said Mae, confused.

  Mr. Ken’s face was seriously worried for her.

  “Your grandmother loved you,” said Mae. “She was so sad when you went away.”

  He had managed to get her back into her own house. “I did not go away.”

  “You grew up,” she accused him, and started to weep. “We should come out of shells,” she said. “The shells should be the babies, and the babies should be left behind, alive. For the mothers. For the mothers to cradle.”