Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

He was staring at her, almost wary.

'Am I still your Unexpected Flower?' she asked.

His face had recovered, but at least he no longer looked amused by her. 'Even more so,' he said.

'You see, I know you. You are Wise Gangster. Godfather.' Mae mimed a rat-a-tat-tat. 'So. Yes. I am afraid of you. I know what you could do to me.'

'I do what I have to do,' he said, then he added hastily, 'That was not a threat to you. I meant: I do what I have to do to help our people.'

Mae was considering.

Wisdom Bronze said, 'How else was I to build this?'

She believed him. 'How else. And you hate the foreigners even more than you hate us.'

He looked uncertain.

'After all, we are ignorant, poor, deeply divided.' Mae sighed. 'So many of us must get in your way.'

'I am trying to be your friend,' he said softly.

'Ah,' said Mae, looking at the floor. 'Do you know how terrifying that idea is?'

He smiled one last smile before leaving her. But he also pointed a warning finger.

Mae found that she knew his story. She could see it.

Fate and his father's seed, his mother's egg, conspired to give birth to someone very smart indeed.

Hikmet Tunch would have been a clever clownish farm boy, wickedly sharp and sometimes brutal. She could see him scowling with thought as he forked chickpeas into the mill, or kicked geese away from the grain.

This is for fools, he would have thought, seeing the hard work that produced only pennies a day. He saw the daredevil thugs in their shiny track suits and heavy jewellery. He joined them. Volunteering, asking for the most dangerous jobs. He carried the stuff across borders. He did this so he could see how the rest of the world worked.

Hikmet Tunch at seventeen would have looked like a truck driver, stumpy, hard, unshaven, smiling ingratiatingly to the guards at the borders. All the time he spoke to them, his merry eyes would be innocent, even though he knew the gas tank was half full of white paste.

Hikmet would have seen Berlin, Prague, and St Petersburg. He would have studied the world by screwing its women, to discover from them their languages, how they thought, what they valued.

He would have come back and hated the way the buildings in Karzistan did not sit straight, the way the dust gathered in the road. He would have hated the peasant clothes, and the paintings on the trucks, and the old wooden houses.

Wise Gangster would have built up friends, loyal men from his village – big, hefty, criminal men nowhere near as bright, but who followed him and threatened others.

He would have killed people. Not often. But you do not take over the drug trade from a position of mere carrier without knowing when to strike, and to strike so hard that the enemy can never recover.

Wisdom Bronze was a man who would have burned fields, whole villages, killed male heirs who were only five years old.

And yet, thought Mae, underneath it all, our aim is the same. To help the people.

What Wise Gangster knew was that Info was the new drug.

Fatimah came into Mae's room, looking only slightly shifty.

'Have you thought about the pregnancy?' Fatimah began. She was genuinely concerned, but she had been told, Mae could see, to get the same information as Mr Real Man.

I have become an Unexpected Poppy to be milked for juice.

'Could this have happened to you before?'

Mae decided to lie. They want answers, so I'll fuck them up by giving wrong ones. 'Oh. Yes. Of course. We all suck in my village.'

That meant Fatimah could say she had done her job. To her credit, the thing that most concerned her was Mae's plight.

'I have something that will resolve the problem for you,' she murmured.

Do you really think I would do anything here, in your clutches, to be entered into your records?

'What is it?' Mae asked. If it was a pill, she could pocket it.

But Fatimah took out a needle. 'Very quick. One injection, then it is gone, with no chemical traces, a natural dropping. Especially given where the pregnancy is.'

'No.' said Mae.

'Look, Mae,' said Fatimah, 'the earlier, the better – the easier. In all ways: physically, emotionally.'

Mae looked at Fatimah and found she knew her, too. A pretty woman, very smart. She had a rich father. Good education, but where could she use her skills in Karzistan? Where else but here? Where Shytan himself rules. A kind woman, too, as rich women often are. But small. Being rich inflates smallness like a balloon. Being rich stretches it thinner.

'Don't you believe in love?' Mae asked her.

'I… I…' Fatimah fluttered.

That brought you up smartly, city woman.

'You don't think love is of no concern in medicine, do you?'

'No,' said Fatimah, hurt. 'No, no, of course not.' She prided herself on her care, her concern, and her sensitivity.

'Then why are you so blind and deaf to the simple fact that a mother might love a late and unexpected flower?'

Mae waited, and then added, 'Especially when the father is the only man she has ever loved.'

Mae knew somehow that Fatimah had never been loved, and part of Mae wanted to hurt her.

Fatimah seemed to wilt. 'I… I did not understand the situation.'

'Perhaps you would care to help me, instead.'

Fatimah looked thoroughly chastised. Her eyes were downcast. 'If you'll let me. I have to know what you feel, to help.'

'So,' sighed Mae. 'Is it the case that I am supposed to let you question-map me, and only then you will care?'

Fatimah looked chilled to the bone.

'You want to be a good woman,' said Mae, smiling ruefully. 'Perhaps it is not possible to be good here.'

Fatimah rallied: 'Is it possible to be good anywhere?'

Okay, so we get down to something true. 'We all do the best we can,' said Mae. 'So. You tell me. How do we save my baby?'

Fatimah considered. 'It might not be possible. If the child is small, some kind of birth might be possible, otherwise it will be surgery.'

'When would you say it is due?'

'Its development is strange. Say, May or June. Would you be able to come back here?' Fatimah's eyes were pained, askance. 'I am sure that this place would help you have it. It has the most advanced medical and scientific equipment in Karzistan.'

'What would they get out of it?'

'Probably nothing further. They will have gotten enough for them to be generous.'

'What will they get out of me?'

Fatimah sighed. 'Scientific fame? A high profile in the industry?' She smiled sideways. 'Medical-IT Interface.' In Karzistani, the word for interface was 'two-face,' which had an implication of betrayal.

Neither of them needed to comment on the appropriateness of that.

'You must not do physical work,' said Fatimah. 'If you do miscarry – vomit… make yourself vomit all you can. Do not let anything stay in your stomach. And call me. I will do what I can to come to you.'

There were no windows in the room, and no clocks, but Mae felt it was late. 'I would like to go back to my hotel now.'

It was as she had feared. Fatimah's face went still with shame.

'I'm sorry,' Fatimah began. 'But given your condition, it is felt best that you spend the night here.'

'I want to spend it in my hotel.'

Fatimah's eyes were sorry indeed. 'It is very comfortable for our guests here.'

'I know too much,' said Mae. 'I said too much.'

Very quietly indeed, Mae had become a prisoner.

The rooms are very comfortable in the palace of the devil, considering there are no windows.

A guard brought Mae her dinner. He was huge, so tall his bulging belly did not look fat. He had hairy hands and eyes like camera lenses. Mae knew him, too. She saw him as big farm boy, playing in the same stubble fields as Wisdom Bronze.