Air

by Geoff Ryman

  She heard the men and their laughter, the birds in the fields, and the very slight noise of the river that flowed right across the heart of the village. She looked into his dark eyes.

  “I have been doing too much. I know what I want to do. I have to do just that, if I am to do it at all. And I cannot bear to give up.”

  “Info,” he said, almost in scorn.

  “This village,” she answered him. “What your grandmother showed me is that everything dies. It is not good enough just to live. You have to know that death is certain. Not … Not just of the person, but of whole worlds. Ours is going to die. It is dead now. The only thing I can do is help it be reborn, so we can survive.”

  Kuei was picking at something on the windowsill next to her. “Mother to us all,” he said, in some bitterness.

  “If it were a different time…” she said.

  “If we were younger…” he said.

  “If it were as it should be…”

  “If we were as we once were…”

  He shook himself like a dog, shivered. “Urggh,” he said, partly in anger, partly in casting anger off. “Will you go back to Joe?”

  She paused in order to think, but found she did not have to. “No,” she answered. “No, I will concentrate on this.”

  “On what?” Mr. Ken yelped, “You will concentrate on loneliness, Mae? On an empty house? A room in someone else’s house, working like a servant in order to say thank you?”

  Mae sucked in air through her nose, in a thin, focused stream that hissed, but was not a sigh. It was a gathering of strength.

  “On clearing the floor for work.”

  Kuei stared back at her, helpless. “What work?” he asked again. He really didn’t know. She wanted to hug him them, hold him, comfort him, for he was one of the dead. But it would be misinterpreted.

  “Teaching us how to use that thing.” she said. Each word was like a brick that she could barely carry.

  “You can do both!”

  She held up her hands. “No. I can’t. I don’t sleep, I hardly eat, I work in the house, I work in the fields, and then I work on that, and there is almost nothing left of me.” Suddenly she was shouting, “I’m tired!”

  The only thing in his face was sympathy for her.

  “Maybe when all of this is done,” she said, more quietly, relenting.

  “I will be waiting,” Kuei said helplessly. “I waited before.”

  A year from now? Maybe the change would come, and after that a time of calm. After the massacre, stillness?

  Mae nodded yes, but said nothing further, to avoid giving him too much hope. He nodded yes as well, and made no move to kiss her, for both of them had agreed to end, not to begin. He turned and went down the stairs to the kitchen. The diwan seemed full of fine white dust.

  And she ran up the wooden stairs to look out of a high window through bleached-blue sunlight over bleached-blue rooftops. Mae looked down and saw Kuei as if through a mist. He walked tall, straight, holding his jacket against the heat, the back of his T-shirt stained with sweat and nerves, past the men, who ignored him. They turned, grinning, to look at his back.

  There goes my young man, thought Mae.

  You only get one, said someone else’s voice.

  Remember him, remember his broad back, for he is walking into the past, into the Land of the Dead. Even if you meet again, you will both be different again, strangers or friends. Say goodbye now, for you will have no other chance; say goodbye for every moment to come without him. But at least you had him. For once you had him.

  And again, that old question: Granny, Teacher, why is love pain? Why such a sweet sad sick hurt, a dragging-down in the belly, an ache, a yearning?

  Because it always goes away.

  Mr. Ken paused at the gate and looked both ways, left and right, as if considering, though he had no choice. Then he walked on. Mae permitted herself to weep.

  13

  MAE GOT HER MONEY.

  She was working at three A.M., on Kwan’s TV, when it announced that she had mail.

  “I will read it for you,” the machine said. By now it knew that Mae avoided reading herself.

  “The Republic of Karzistan, Ministry of Development, under the terms of the Taking Wing Initiative, is pleased to inform you that it will grant funding in full as requested in your recent application, under the following conditions.…”

  Mae was numb. The government was talking to her. The government knew who she was. They had just given her the money?

  What conditions? Her mind went dark, ready to be hurt.

  First they wanted her to keep records of both sales and replies.

  “The Taking Wing Initiative needs to know how succesSfully you have unrolled your mat. Please save the attached suite of Customer Care software. It will automatically record the data we need.…”

  It was a Question Map. The same information was recorded over and over—any letters she got, any orders she fulfilled, would be analyzed by country, referral, and type of business.

  Mae kept listening for serious conditions. But there were none. No interest? No percentage?

  Mae was enraged. What kind of foolish government was that, to arrange its business so badly? How could it prosper? Were they all children, like Mr. Oz?

  But praise the gods—Luck, Happiness, whatever—for giving them masters who were so naive. She had her money; she had her business back. Oh, could she ride this life like a leaf bobbing up and down on the river in a storm!

  Mae needed to tell someone, but who could she tell at three in the morning? Poor Kwan who had nursed her but was now asleep? The Central Man, yes, but that would mean going back to her old house, to Joe, to Mr. Ken.… Who?

  Mae went to Sezen’s house. She knocked on the door. Then, beyond politesse, Mae pummeled it. This was good news.

  There were hissed voices, shuffling, a child’s cry, a shushing, slippers on the floor.

  Sezen answered. She wore a little girl’s nightdress and the spots on her cheeks had gone blue-black from merciless squeezing.

  Mae seized her hands. “I got the money!” she whispered. “Sezen. It was as you said, the government gave us the cash!”

  “This is a joke. This is madness,” said Sezen.

  “They gave me every last riel of it. I asked for too much!”

  “You mean we are going to do it?”

  “Yes, yes, they loved it!”

  Sezen squealed and hugged her, spun on her heel, and said, “Let’s get drunk. You have any booze?”

  Mae shook her head.

  “Rich woman, you will have whisky. You will have silks.”

  “You will build your mother a new house.”

  “Tuh!” said Sezen. “No. I will buy a motorcycle. Of my own.”

  Mae pronounced her, “Wild girl.”

  “Look who is calling people wild. Eh? You? Adventuress. Madam Death. The man in her family. All these things people call you.”

  Sezen bundled Mae into her own poor house. She threw cushions in abandon into a heap. In the middle of the night at the end of summer, the fleas were at their hungriest. They nipped about Mae’s ankles in a mist.

  Sezen knelt in front of a small keep in the wall. “Here,” she said, pulling out a bottle. “This is disgusting, but strong. Father made it. It is the only thing he does well.” Its creator snored behind the curtain, like a boozehouse accordion.

  Rice wine. Amid the filth of Sezen’s house, Mae sat and drank, and told Sezen everything about the grant application and the answer.

  “Who needs the village?” Mae said. The rice wine was milky and tasted like chalk, but it seemed to creep up her spine, numbing it vertebra by vertebra.

  “Ptoo! to the village,” said Sezen, and pretended to spit. “Only their clothing holds them together.”

  “Are we naked, then?” asked Mae.

  “The naked are brave,” said Sezen, and raised her glass.

  “To the naked!” said Mae, and raised her glass.

  �
�To Mr. Ken,” added Sezen. “Oh! I want to be fucked.”

  Mae was too drunk to be shocked. “Musa,” she managed to say.

  Sezen held out a graphic little finger. “All you Chinese…” she said. “He’s a Muslim, but Chinese father.” She shook her head, and then suddenly laughed, and shook her head again. Still laughing, Sezen put down the glass suddenly, as if were a great weight she could no longer bear.

  “I am a pig and my family are pigs. All the men I meet are pigs and I shall have piggy children.” She picked up the glass and toasted her helplessness, or the house, or her fate.

  The fleas around Mae’s ankles rose and fell like flames. Abstracted by the wine, Mae hazily swatted and scratched. She watched helplessly, as she realized Sezen was no longer laughing.

  “You only come to me because you are fallen,” accused Sezen, grumpy.

  “If you want more people to come, just … clean up,” Mae said.

  Sezen looked back at her bleakly. “This is cleaned up.” She sputtered into laughter. “I have just cleaned up, this is as clean as it gets! Listen, even the fleas are disgusted with this place.” Laughter ached out of her. A string of sticky spittle clung between her lips. “I am such a lady, you see, I get bored cleaning. It is beneath me.” Sezen was not really ashamed.

  In the future, there will be no ladies, thought Mae. All of the old channels we pour down will be blocked. Ladies, peasants, men, women, children, rich, poor, clean, dirty, we will all be churned up together. We will be churning clouds in the air, blown by wind, pierced by swallows.…

  “I’m drunk,” Mae managed to say.

  “Poisoned, more like,” said Sezen, looking at the milky wine. She poured it onto the beaten-dirt floor. “Maybe it will kill the fleas.”

  “Welcome to the Mae-Sezen Fashion Emporium,” said Mae.

  “New York … Paris … Singapore … Tokyo … Kizul-duh.” Hazily, Sezen stood up and did a model’s turn. Her nightrobe was eaten at the hem and knees. “Sezen-ma’am displays the fine cut and design features of her latest creation.” Sezen held up the rotten hem. “Air ventilation for summer wear, illustrates the holes in Miss Ozdemir-ma’am’s head through which Air seeps.” She grinned like a tigerish Talent, and batted her eyes. “This year’s fashion adventure.”

  Mae was chuckling. Calmly, she noticed that she had knocked over her glass.

  “That will burn a hole in your heart,” said Sezen, of her father’s wine.

  “Holes in the heart are this year’s fashion adventure,” said Mae.

  Sezen stopped. “You’re crying,” she accused, suddenly young and letdown.

  Am I? wondered Mae. She felt her cheeks. They were wet. “Just from laughter,” she promised Sezen, who only wanted escape. “Just from laughter,” Mae said again, and reached forward and patted Sezen’s hand.

  “Uh! We need a radio,” said Sezen. “Then we could dance.”

  “When the Air comes,” said Mae. “We will have music whenever we want it. Any kind of music.”

  “When the Air comes!” sighed Sezen, with sudden feeling. “Oh, when Air comes I shall put the music in my head on Air so everyone can hear it.” Sezen sat and closed her eyes, and Mae realized she was seeing something new.

  Sezen was someone who wanted Air. Mae was afraid of it. She regarded it as Flood, Fire, Avalanche, something to be faced up to and controlled. This was different.

  Sezen sat with her eyes closed and whispered. “When the Air comes, we can sing to each other, only we will sound like the biggest band in the world.” She swayed, as if to music.

  Mae joined in: “When the Air comes, we can dress each other in Air clothes.”

  “Light as spiderwebs.…”

  “When the Air comes, we can see all the naked men we want.…”

  Mae expected Sezen to give a wicked, wild-girl chuckle; instead she whispered, “So many beautiful men, that it will grow as normal as birds.”

  “When the Air comes…” Mae began.

  “We will all be birds, we will all be naked, all be brave.”

  Sezen said that?

  Sezen kept speaking, in a trance. “The clothes will drop away, the fleas and the fur, and we’ll jump out of our bodies and fly, and the world will all be dream, and dream will be all of the world.”

  Her voice trailed away. She was asleep. Mae felt a curtain descend behind her forehead, a curtain of sadness and exhaustion. I will sleep here amid the fleas, she thought. Because I have just seen a miracle. A miracle comes when someone speaks, really speaks, because when someone does that, you also hear God.

  Air will be wonderful. I didn’t know that.

  Mae leaned her head down onto the earthen floor. It smelled of spice and corn, not garbage. Sezen was snoring. Mae took her hand and managed to blow out the candle. Anesthetized, Mae fell asleep.

  It was still dark when the smells of the filthy house woke her up—stale vegetation, drying shitcakes, and sour old rice in the bins. The voracious fleas were sticking needles into her. There was slippery, queasy stirring below, in addition to a blinding hangover headache.

  Mae was bleeding, below.

  She felt her breath like a candle flame. Blood means I am not pregnant. I can’t be pregnant. She needed to check, to be sure. She would not risk feeling her female wound with dirty hands. She could not do that here. She could not sleep here now either, sober. The house did stink.

  Forgive me, Sezen, I did keep you company for a while.

  Sezen stirred, murmuring. “Good night,” Mae whispered.

  Mae stumbled out onto the cobbles, and looked up at the mountain sky, a river of stars across it as milky as Sezen’s father’s wine. The air was sweet, it cleared everything. Yes, Sezen was right, the Air was wonderful. She, Mae, was not pregnant. Good things were still to come, good things to do.

  She listened again to her village—to the far dogs, the wind in reeds, and the sounds of their river leaping over stones.

  Pregnant? demanded a voice in her head.

  The nausea came again, in a wave.

  IN THE MORNING, MAE WAS STILL NAUSEOUS, BUT TOLD HERSELF IT WAS THE WINE.

  If she was bleeding, she could not be pregnant. And if she were ill, badly ill, she found, she did not mind.

  All that she asked was that she lived long enough to get the village on Air.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, Kwan was worried. “Where did you go?” Kwan asked her.

  “I went drinking with Sezen,” said Mae, abstracted by hangover.

  Kwan looked horrified.

  “She is very bright, brighter than you would think.”

  “She would have to be. Perhaps you could teach her to wash.”

  Mae felt like a truck on a bad road. There was need of repair. “We all need to improve in some ways,” she said.

  Kwan rumpled her lips, as if to say: Don’t be so mealymouthed and pious.

  “I’m not pregnant,” Mae said.

  Kwan blinked, for a moment. “That at least is a blessing.”

  “In some ways. Who is to say what is a blessing these days?” Mae sat up. “I need to see my government man.”

  Things were still too bad for her to walk in daylight through the village. Certainly not to be seen returning to the home of Mr. Ken.

  Kwan sighed.

  Mae said, “I fear I am proving to be a trouble to you.”

  Kwan gave her head a dismissive twitch. “I will send a child with a message.”

  It was only after Kwan had gone that Mae realized: I did not tell her about the government money. She will think I am hiding it from her. Maybe I was.

  Mae washed. She was still bleeding. The blood smelled of woman. She pushed a clean rag up herself, and went downstairs. She told Kwan about the government money, after giving an apologetic dip at the knees. “I was more relieved at the other news.”

  “Both are good,” said Kwan, blandly.

  The government man came, Mae told him about the grant. He smiled, but he did not look overjoyed. “That quick.”
He shook his head. “That means there have been few applications. They have spare funding; they need to use it.” Mae tried to read the hand across his forehead, the distracted look.

  “You are worried?” she asked.

  “It means no one else is finding anything,” he said. “It’s not working.”

  From down below came the sound of the men and the TV. Do women and children ever get to watch it now? They were watching snooker. Of all the pointless things to waste a morning on.

  “Stay here,” Mr. Oz told her.

  He turned and went down Kwan’s whitewashed steps. Mae listened, hidden behind the doorway. The staircase smiled white in the sunlight.

  Suddenly there were howls from the men, protests.

  “Quiet,” demanded Mr. Oz. “This is more important than sports.”

  A roar of protest from the men.

  Mr. Oz continued: “What do you care about snooker scores in Balshang? Balshang doesn’t care that you burn shit for fuel. Balshang doesn’t even know you exist!”

  Mae blinked. Fighting words from such a frail boy. Who would have thought it? The men suddenly fell silent. The screen made a trumpeting sound, the sound of government. Humbled, silent, made small by the weight of society above them, the village men waited. Mae could feel them wait.

  Then she heard a spreading mumble.

  They know, she realized. They know about the money. He’s shown them on TV.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Mr. Oz.

  Naked but brave. A harlot funded by the government to make herself richer than the men. That’s what they will call me. I will have to have a face of stone, now. I will have to be as enduring as the mountain. Mountains hold up air.

  Oblivious as always, the Central Man bustled back in with paper. Kwan emerged, concerned, curious, wiping her hands. The paper had printed out all the terms and conditions.

  “Right,” he explained. “The funding is in the form of bank credits. Do you know what those are?”

  Mae shook her head. “Believability Card?”

  “Better than that. But I need to go with you to ratify them. That will set up a business account in the bank. We then need to set up a Question Mark account, so that you can use it on the Net. Then … you are in business.”