Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

'I don't… It's of no importance!'

'When international fundraising efforts failed, the major Company offered to pay for both Formats, promising to keep both workstreams entirely independent.'

On the screen, important people shook hands, and half the UN General Assembly rose to its feet applauding. Others notably stayed seated.

'See this desk? The whole thing is a screen, yes? See the people applauding?'

'Yes, of course!'

'So, who in Kizuldah has such a thing?'

Mrs Tung fought to keep her equilibrium as had the Iron Aunt, by disguise and improvisation. 'Kwan? Kwan. We are in Kwan's house! Everyone says she has made her house very modern!'

'You see the desk?'

'Yes, of course I see the desk!'

'How? You are blind!'

'I… I my eyes have got better.'

'How long have they been better?'

'Since yesterday! Since yesterday!'

'Oh! There was a miracle yesterday! What else happened yesterday?' Mae was shouting.

'The Consortium proved to be short-lived. Amid technical disagreements and charges that the Company was rigging Air structures that would only work with its other solutions.'

Old Mrs Tung faltered. 'I… I… You came to see me?'

'Who? Who came to see you? Who are you talking to?'

She chuckled, embarrassed. 'It's so silly… I can't…'

'There's no one here! Where are you?'

'I don't know!' Mrs Tung wailed aloud.

Mae bellowed: 'I just told you! Why can't you remember?'

Old Mrs Tung broke down into desperate tears. 'I can't… I can't…' She shook Mae's head.

Revulsion flooded through Mae's body like a case of food poisoning. Something was sickeningly out of place, wrong. I am like a ghost, I am invisible, I have no body.

'I can't move!' wailed Old Mrs Tung.

Mae began to weep for her, for the neat dead system of responses on the other side of the screen of the world. Mae felt the terror and the sadness and the horror of being dead.

And so the thing gained strength. It spoke as if Mae and she were one. 'We'll lose everything! This is a terrible place. We must get away!'

Mae struggled back, her voice more feeble: 'What place is this?'

'I don't know. Don't start that again.'

'Where are you? What day?'

'Stop pestering me! Who are you to come at me with impertinent questions?'

'Work began on the new Format. From the beginning, some engineers felt the schedule was too ambitious.'

Mrs Tung barked, 'What is that thing talking about?'

'I told you. The UN Format. But you can't remember. Shall I explain it again to you?'

'No, I don't want to hear about it!'

'Of course you don't, because you're scared of it and you're scared of it because you know you wouldn't be able to remember it. You can remember nothing! Where are we? Can't remember? I just told you where we are but you can't remember, can you? Can you? You can't remember what day it is or where you are or even who you are!'

The thing howled and stood up and Mae stood up with it. The thing was in a rage. Mae felt it thrash inside her with frustration. If the thing had carried an old walking stick, she would have beaten Mae with it. The thing spun in confusion and anger and disgust and terror around and around the desk, and it threw Mae against the imprisoning walls. Mae felt a buzzing in her brain and her body, as if there was a great numb abscess in all of her being.

Suddenly Mae's hand reached up and slapped her own face.

Mae clenched and fought, her hand shook in midair, wavered as if pulled by magnets.

Mae shouted, 'Whose face did you slap? You slapped and you felt it yourself! How could you slap someone's face and feel it yourself?'

'I don't know! Let me go! Let me go!'

'Excuse me, I am hearing sounds of distress. Do wish me to call for help?'

The hand slapped Mae again, even harder.

Mae fought with words. 'You slapped a body. Whose body?'

The thing howled in terror and struck Mae's face again and again. Left hand, right hand, left hand, beating her about the face.

Mae pushed: 'You're sick, you're old, you're mad, you're crazy!'

The thing stumbled, wounded and disorientated. 'I don't know! I don't know-ho!-ho!' The thing wailed in complete despair

'You can't remember, you're senile, you're dead! You're dead and senile and sick; you have no hands; you have no eyes; you are nowhere; you do not exist!'

'Let me go!' The thing heaved with sobs. It could no longer speak, for grief and despair and horror. Its voice rose to a despairing shriek, and it picked Mae up and flung her across the desk.

And like the passing of a tornado, suddenly everything was still.

Mae was left panting, alone in Mr Tunch's office.

'Do you need me to call for help?' the desk asked.

'No,' Mae was able to croak. Her throat was raw from shouting. She had been speaking for both of them.

Tears and spit were smeared all over her face and splattered over the desktop. The cheeks and the palms of her hands stung. She sat up and looked at her own reflection in the glass-topped desk. A fresh bruise was coming up on her cheek.

Suspicion made Mae look up, and she saw a camera in the corner of the room. Tunch will have seen all that, she thought. He'll have been spying.

Well, if he's seen all that, then that's all he's going to get from me.

Mae pulled in deep, shuddering breaths. She stood up and wiped her face and tried to straighten her hair.

I've seen her off. I know how to see her off and I don't need Mr Tunch.

Time, she thought, to get down to work.

'Continue with lecture,' she told the desk.

Mr Tunch joined her for lunch.

'I thought you might like to try the new food,' he said.

Because of her lecture, Mae knew what that meant. New proteins, new tastes, grown from new organisms.

'They are designed to be delicious,' he said.

The soup was bracing and solid, like lentils laced with lemon, and made hearty with something like tomatoes and pork. It was sour and sweet, with a bitter undertow like coffee.

'You see?' he said, chuckling. 'Good, isn't it?'

'Yes,' Mae had to admit. 'Yes. I wonder if I will be happy to go back to cold rice?'

He laughed again, and said. 'Maybe you won't have to.'

I am, in part, a Question Map for his future.

'You are experimenting on me,' she told Tunch, coldly.

'The food is specially formulated for expectant mothers,' he told her. 'Its nutrients pass within seconds into the bloodstream through any tissue layer. In effect, it is being digested the moment it enters the mouth.'

'Does that mean it's shit by the time I've swallowed it?'.

Mr Tunch only chuckled. He touched Mae's bruised face. 'Mae. We're trying to help you.'

For a moment, she almost believed him.

In the afternoon Fatimah led Mae to what looked like a flying saucer. Mae lay down in it, and again, there was no physical pain. Fatimah clucked once with her tongue. She turned the scan off, helped Mae down.

'What, what?' Mae said.

'The child,' said Fatimah, dazed. 'The pregnancy is in your stomach.'

Mae blinked. In Karz, the words belly or womb and stomach could be confused.

'Your food belly,' said Fatimah.

How? Mae knew what she knew. That was not possible. 'Your machine is wrong,' she said.

'No chance,' said Fatimah. 'Here.'

She replayed the file of the sounding. The screen showed a shifting mass of what looked like translucent grey porridge. Shapes seemed to bubble out of it.

Pumping and alive, something sighed and shrugged inside her. Fleetingly Mae even saw something like a head.

'That's the child. It has grown the usual protective sac, and appears to be healthy for now.' Fatimah turned back and looked at her. The downward slope of her head crumpled her chin and neck and made her look older, sad-fleshed, like Mae. 'It is in your stomach.'