Air

by Geoff Ryman

The colors 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 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.

  “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 m
etal 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.

  He led her to a blue door. He nudged the long metal handle with his nose.

  Mae was numbly grateful. “Thank you.”

  She pushed the door and stepped out into a full parking lot in blazing sunlight, full of burnished company buses and three limousines.

  Ling followed.

  There was a fence. It was high and made of crisscrossed metal, and was crowned all along the top with barbed wire.

  Mae was dim and detached. She felt her root into Air. It was easier to do on drugs, for she was as a calm as if she were in Air.

  “This is all a joke,” she said, and suddenly smiled.

  It was true. The world was a joke. It was a story, twisted by gravity out of nothing. It was an accidental by-product of Air, of the eternity where Air was.

  She could feel this eternity. She could take the story into her hands. She could feel the metal fence. The fence was mere fiction.

  So she tore it.

  Reaching into Air, Mae seized reality, as she herself had been seized, and very simply, very easily, Mae’s mind ripped the metal of the fence apart. She giggled at how funny it was that everyone should take the fence so seriously. She tore the mesh like a strip of cloth.

  “This season,” she said, “Air-aware young ladies will wear the fences they have torn down as sign of their strength.”

  The torn edges of the fence danced, as if in wind.

  “Sing,” she told the fence, and started to chuckle. “Why not?”

  And the snapped, sharp edges of the torn wire began to tinkle, just as lunch had done. Anything was possible.

  Wind blew the dust, the fence danced and sang, and Mae stepped out, into the desert, followed by a talking dog.

  Beyond the fence was hot valley scrubland, full of bracken and thorns grown to Mae’s height. The thorns and bracken parted and bowed before her. She walked barefoot through them. They rose up again behind her to shield her. She heard Ling’s feet behind her in the dust. Overhead was sky, unchanging, clouds as they had been in the time of the Buddha.

  “You’re coming with me,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Ling. “It is my job to stay with you.”

  “How will we get home?”

  “I will follow you there.”

  A lizard scuttled across their path into shadow and froze, watchful, its throat pumping.

  “What do you see?” Mae asked him.

  “Many corridors,” said the dog. “No ceiling.”

  “That is called the sky,” said Mae.

  The dog paused and then was pumped with Info. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I see it is the sky now.”

  They walked. Overhead hawks circled looking for desert mice.

  “I want to hunt,” said Ling.

  “No. Not yet. Later. You have a job,” said Mae.

  Ahead of them were the mountains, soft and rounded in the nearer layers, then rising up, one after another, back into the hills, back to the sharply folded crags, the snow. Mae had a vague plan, to walk through the undeveloped plain around the town.

  Already they were pushing their way through a hedge, into a dust track leading to the outskirts of a village. A handsome green mosque rose up above mud huts, and there was a smell of billy goat. Two women were making dungcakes. They turned leathery desert-plain faces to her, not quite believing what they saw.

  A naked Chinese woman, they would later say, with a dog wearing a metal hat.

  Mae pushed her way through another hedge, and walked across a field of straw.

  “When do we eat?” Ling asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Mae. Something seemed to go pop in her head. Her thinking was clearing.

  “Ling feels unloved if he is not fed,” warned the computer on his head. “He becomes anxious and unreliable.”

  “There is a big juicy steak at home and a bowl of water,” promised Mae.

  Water dripped from Ling’s panting tongue. “That sounds good,” he said. “I can see the steak,” he said. “I can smell it.” The computer was feeding him.

  “Good dog. Good boy,” said Mae, feeling sorry for him—for being fooled, for being possessed. It made her feel they had things in common.

  The city had spread beyond its old boundaries. Mae paused at the edge of a road. There was nothing for it but for Mae to keep walking. The streets were bright, broken. Traffic idled past her, heads turned. A woman shouted something about covering herself up, drunken woman.

  The dog turned and growled, baring teeth in black jaws.

  Why are they all so worried? wondered Mae. My shift is as long as my knees, and some of us are still so poor we wander barefoot. A teenage boy, all in sleeping-bag clothes stepped out, then stepped back into a small bookshop and called to his friends. A man helpless in a barber’s chair stared at her as she passed, his face going slack and open.

  “The world is so big,” said Ling. A man in old, stiff clothes and a peasant’s cap dropped a bag of tools.

  “These are all houses for people,” said Mae.

  “Where does the world stop?” asked Ling.

  The man began to follow.

  “It never stops,” said Mae.

  “Your … Your dog is talking,” said the man.

  Ling thought he was being praised and turned back to sniff the man. He was a hard Karz villager with a face that looked as though someone had smashed it with a plank of wood, stubble-black chin merging with huge mustache. He backed away in alarm.

  “They do it in the Air,” said Mae, explaining, wanting him to know it was nothing extraordinary. “It is like a radio in his head and in his throat.”

  The man began to shake his head over and over. He wiped away the world with his hand. ‘(I fix cars,” he said. He turned back. “The dog understands?”

  “I want to,” said Ling.

  The man gazed into the dog’s soft black eyes, as if he could fall into them and disappear. “Tuh,” was all he said, the sound of his world changing, suddenly, for real. He picked up his bag of tools. Ling sniffed them experimentally. Dazed, the man scratched his head and turned away.

  The boys from the bookshop stared.

  Mae gave them a little wave and walked on.

  The streets began to climb steeply.

  “How far to the steak?” Ling asked.

  “Oh, perfect boy, lovely fellow,” said Mae. “It is a long way but we will talk.”

  “What is the world like to you?” Ling asked her.

  “Right now, I am drugged. So everything is very strange. Like it is for you.”

  A woman came up to her and wordlessly pressed into Mae’s hands a pair of plastic sandals. The plastic was clear and full of silvery flakes that reflected and caught the sunlight. The woman’s eyes were ringed with mascara, full of outrage and pity. She wore a purple jacket and Western-woman working boots.

  “May I suggest a light mauve scarf with a such a strongly colored jacket?” said Mae.

  Mae, she told herself, your mind. Your mind is not working properly yet.

  The woman’s face did not change, but she walked away quickly.

  Mae walked on in her silver shoes to where the road turned off, towards the sign for home, and she looked back over the city with its trees and light. Shadows were slightly longer, sunlight and shadow were balanced in the foul blue air. It looked cooler, golden, mauve. Rising up out of the light was the Great Saudi mosque, made of frosted crystal, dancing quotes from the Koran catching the sunlight to be illuminated from within.

  A long bronze-reflecting limousine coasted to a halt beside her
. A window slid open like the protective lens of a lizard’s eye, and Mr. Tunch leaned out.

  Mae felt terror, only the terror could not fight its way to the surface of her face, her limbs, or down into the pit of her stomach.

  I’m caught, she thought blandly.

  “Hello, Mae,” said Wisdom Bronze. They both waited. He pushed open the door on the other side of the car. “Let me drive you home.”

  Mae could not move. Part of her wanted to cry. Her eyes tried to cry, but the drugs prevented it.

  Ling looked back and forth, back and forth.

  “Mae?” he pleaded for direction.

  “Get in,” she said, in a voice so soft only a dog could hear.

  “He said we’re going home,” said the dog. He climbed into the backseat, next to Mae’s old best dress.

  Mr. Tunch was doing his own driving. “I meant what I said, Mae.” His eyes were blanked out by glasses. “There’s something I want to explain.”

  Something seemed to pop in Mae’s head again. Something told her the walking had been good, it had made the drugs worse, but they’d be over with sooner. The thought meant she had not yet got into the car.

  “Don’t be silly, Mae, you are not important enough to me to hurt you.”

  She got in the front seat.

  “Me,” whimpered Ling, and, claws clattering, climbed onto Mae’s lap. His feet dug in for something to grab.

  “Ouch,” said Mae.

  “Hold me,” said Ling, and she realized he was afraid. He ached for the window, where there were smells, the world he truly believed in.

  Mae hoisted him around so that he sat on her lap comfortably.

  “All in?” asked Tunch, like they were a family on an outing.

  The car went in the right direction.

  “What will happen to you back home?” Tunch asked.

  Mae considered. “I will be an outcast. It will make helping the village very difficult, for they will not listen to me.” Pop, went her head, clearing again. She began to be aware of the light breeze of fear blowing through her.

  “You won’t take the drugs?” he asked.

  Mae shook her head.

  He had to change gears, glancing in the mirror at the future behind them. “That is probably wise. It will leave you with a clearer head. But when you and Mrs. Tung feel the same thing, she will emerge.”