Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

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 metal 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.