My jaw tightened. Suddenly all my smoldering anger felt justified. “Because I deal with pre-evs?” I couldn’t say “Newt,” but I did my best to turn the other term into a slur—since that was what the word felt like to me sometimes.
Sussman’s eager-beaver grin vanished. Even more gratifying, he stared intently at the road ahead. I wondered if he was blushing or doing whatever his kind did.
I sank back in the unit’s passenger seat and watched the half-decayed, half-rebuilt street scape unfold ahead of us.
We arrived, and I saw it. Stretching across the Bay where it connected to the gelatinous Pacific, a great creaking monster, a remnant, eaten away by the excoriating wind: the bridge.
I left Sussmann in the cruiser behind the row of empty weather-stripped toll booths on the bridge, stepped through one of the gaps in the chain-link fence, and walked out onto the span.
The wind churned, pulling swaths of toxic cotton candy across the sky. Steel groaned. Cables had snapped over the years, and those left twanged in the gusts. Patches of kaleidoscopic fungal-glowing weeds had taken root, and the deserted roadbed shifted under my feet. The concrete was turning to powder. Ahead, the two towers of the Golden Gate soared, both rusted monoliths.
I couldn’t move with speed, and every step brought new pain... I labored along, uncomfortably aware that my age and deteriorating physique would have had me huffing and sweating even if the environment still suited a pre-ev. I stared at my hands, worried that the brutal sunlight was causing the cloaking-salve to bubble on my knuckles. My eyes stung. I swallowed and grimaced, an ugly aftertaste in my mouth.
The woman leaned on a guardrail in the middle of the bridge. I paused, stared at her, then looked back down, focusing on my footing. There were holes big enough for me to fall through.
She was masked, of course, and wore a long gray coat. She stood near the westward rail, up on what was the pedestrian walkway when the bridge still operated. No one ever looks out at the sea on occasions like this; they all face toward the Bay and the city. It’s always been that way.
She was watching me like she’d been expecting me--waiting on me, even. There were two categories jumpers fell into. But everyone who does something like this thinks they’ve got a unique reason. They don’t.
I halted, holding out my badge. Unlike Sussman, I don’t wear a uniform.
Her eyes narrowed behind her mask’s lenses. Creases stretched toward her temples.
“Look at you.” She gestured toward me, voice even, tight, carrying over the wind and the groaning metal of the structure.
“Look at me.” I smiled, but she would only see it in my eyes. I didn’t talk in that androidic cop-speak, like the Newt. I just spoke to people these days.
“You’re not a fucking Lizard.”
“No, I’m not.” Now I knew which of those groups she belonged to. The other one was the ruers, those who lamented the past sins against the biosphere, reliving each poisoned detail of humankind’s destruction of its habitat. Those ones are a real drag. This woman was angry. That gave her a little juice.
She lifted a knobby chin, half-hidden by the dangling filters. Her posture was regal. Then her gaze went past me, intent, and I glanced, wondering if she was playing a game. She wasn’t. Suddenly Sussman wasn’t in the back of my mind anymore. He was literally behind me, hanging back several dozen yards but close enough that the woman could see who—and what—he was.
“I told him to stay in the car,” I said, letting irritation into my voice, holding back a deeper anger. I didn’t need his interference. But maybe more than that, I felt that I and this woman deserved a kind of species-exclusive privacy. No Newts invited.
I turned back to her, afraid that his presence would tip whatever balance this perilous situation held.
She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “I didn’t know there were any human cops left.”
I put away the badge “Just me.”
“Just you.” She offered a nod that suggested a bow, which added to her regal bearing. The railing had fallen away where she was standing. She was two strides from the drop.
“That must be fun. Cheek to jowl--or whatever--with the Lizards all day.” A tiny shudder moved her shoulders.
“I can take it or leave it.”
“You were sent because I’m a human.” Her tone suggested scorn, contempt.
“I handle these types of calls.”
“These types...?” she said, like I’d affronted her.
“Any nonviolent incidents that involve pre-evs.” I didn’t make it any kind of apology.
Having her angry was better than despondent. I maintained my outward calm, almost a casualness, but of course I was heavily invested in this. A wiry desperateness quivered in me, making me want to flex my hands repeatedly. I held back, aware of Sussman’s scrutiny.
The gusts caught the tails of her coat every few seconds. Beyond the drop-off the Bay swirled sluggishly with recombined algal forms, virtually a brand new primordial ooze out of which Christ knew what was going to eventually emerge. But it was still effectively water, and hitting it from this height would have the time-honored effect.
“How about telling me your name?” I shrugged, to make the question casual.
“Shouldn’t you be telling me yours?”
“You want to know?” Every extra sentence I could get out of her was good.
“I’m Johanna. Johanna Hibbs. You’ll need that for your report or whatever.”
“There doesn’t have to be a report. Nothing drastic at least. Trespassing. Big deal. Not even a fine.” I didn’t point out that this was a lot of hassle on my part for “no big deal.” She knew that. I leaned a little forward, like I might take an accidental step her way, but her eyes lit up behind the lenses and I stayed put.
“None of this should be fenced off anyway.” She gestured, her arm long and sweeping, taking in the whole span. Her gesture and eyes stopped over my shoulder.
For a few seconds my awareness had slipped. Now I turned, not just to glance. I glared at Lizard boy, still back there. I’d have to shout an order, and didn’t want to raise my voice. It was okay if she was angry, but I needed to project calm. Still, I made a sharp wave. Sussman didn’t move. Maybe he thought he was doing something essential, backing me up.
“You can’t make him go away,” she said. I heard the deeper meaning in her statement.
I needed to get her off the topic.
“The bridge isn’t safe.”
“Safe? What actually is?” She didn’t gesture this time, just looked out over the city. Nothing was safe in this world, not for a pre-ev.
She turned back. “This Bridge. My great-grandfather worked on it. The fucking Lizards should be restoring it, like they’re rebuilding everything else.” This last sentence she aimed past me, addressing Sussman, who was probably too far off to hear it.
The Newts wouldn’t repair the bridge, I knew. They would take it down and put up something new, made of the resistant alloys and other materials compatible with the current environment. I glanced north, at the bleached burnt hills of Marin. They would reconnect the Bay Area. And, eventually-the whole world.
That thought, the idea of a general rebuilding, softened something in me. It didn’t cancel my anger—justified or not-toward all the Newts, but at least I wasn’t so annoyed anymore at Sussman’s presence at the scene.
“You still haven’t told me your name,” she said.
“It’s Ziggy Lubrano.”
“Are you widowed?” She lowered her head, but it wasn’t a regal bow this time. Now she just looked too tired to hold her head up.
“Everybody’s widowed. Everybody’s lost somebody, lots of somebodies.” I didn’t waste time wondering who hers were and wasn’t about to start talking about my own. With 653 pre-evs left in the city there were no biographies free of tragedy.
“I wish you could take that mask off. I bet you’re handsome.” She had moved nearer to the rail-less edge, somehow without seeming to ha
ve taken a step in that direction.
I laughed. “I’m not. I’m a fat old man. But I can take you to my office and show you what I look like. I’ve got great air there. I also have a bottle of whiskey. None of that chlorophyll-mash stuff either. Honest to Jesus whiskey.” I had no such bottle, but we could cross that bridge when we got to it. So to speak.
She drew herself up to her full imperial height. Her long hair trailed out behind her like the train on a gown of state. I would have liked to have seen her face too, right at that moment.
“The Lizards can have it all! Goddamn them…” She said the first part of that to Sussman, and made it loud and furious. The last bit was for me, because I would understand it. She spoke those words softly.
Our conversation had ended.
She turned, and she moved. She glared at me, at Sussman, and then at neither of us.
I lurched forward, reached the edge in time to see the green thick foamy splash.
I stood. I had the image of her. It was almost palpable. I felt I could reach out, caress her face, and that face wore no mask. It was a pre-ev face, a human—as I still understood the word—face. My anger came back. But it was mostly directed at myself. I thought about the bridge, like I was grabbing desperate hold of it as an idea. The bridge was a monument to the effort of the pre-evs of long ago, of humanity, when the sky and sea were blue, and sunshine wasn’t the enemy of human flesh. Or, perhaps it was just an expanse of steel and concrete, a stretch of junked metal, an artifact of no lasting value.
I was too old to still be doing this, but retirement would have taken away my only, my final function. Who else would make the effort? Johanna Hibbs had been expecting a Lizard in a police uniform, and she would have only said a variation on her last words, then jumped anyway. I had given her the chance for a closing dialogue, a final instance of human to human contact.
My eyes hurt. My lungs were throbbing. I had a long walk back to the car, and I started in on it, ignoring Sussman as I passed him. He followed a moment later. I’ll give him credit; he didn’t try to talk to me.
I took the passenger seat, logged on to the unit’s dashboard. Johanna Hibbs lived at the North Beach Habitat.
When Sussman got in, I said in a cold commanding voice, “We’re stopping at North Beach on the way back to the Embarcadero. I know the director there.”
Johanna wouldn’t have family, but there would be people who deserved to hear the news in person.
Her picture on the screen was as uncomplimentary as ID photos always have been.
Carcinogens, mutagens, industrial contaminants, hydrogen cyanide, clapped-out ozone, CO2 overkill, methane. I hadn’t lied to Johanna. Everyone was widowed. The masks and filters and scrubbers and air-locked habitats do so much-just so much.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t talk her out of it.” Sussman had been sitting silently. Now he looked at me with a strange light in those human eyes.
I let out a breath that rattled around inside my mask. “Yeah, well. It’s hard to give them a reason not to.” I glanced out at the derelict toll plaza, at the photonegative sky, at the air so dense I could actually see it moving past the vehicle.
“Did you help her, Lubrano?”
Johanna Hibbs’ image was still on the screen. With fingers shiny with cloaking-salve I shut off the dashboard with a sharp snap.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” He had seen what had happened.
“I mean,” he said with a gentle, placating movement of his hand, “did you…help her?”
He cared. I saw it on his face, even as alien as its configurations were to me. It was, I realized, an empathetic light in his eyes. I was speechless.
But the Newt had asked his question.
Quietly I said, “It was a better death than it would’ve been otherwise. Yeah, I guess I helped.”
“I’m glad.”
He reached out and turned the dash back on. “She jumped from about here, wouldn’t you say?” he asked, just as sensitively, indicating the map he’d called up.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps we can recover her body.”
I looked at the map, nonplussed. “How? The department doesn’t have any boats.”
“I’ll contact the trawlers. They know the currents. They might know where to look. Before she washes up.”
I looked over at him, levelly now. Johanna hated them. Of course she did. It was easy to, for us. They were a constant shock to our cultural system. The world had changed drastically, terribly. That was one thing. But to see ourselves, our species being altered...
Sussmann made a fast series of direct radio calls. Afterward, he went to start the car, but I held up a hand. This silence belonged to me, and it was a while before I said, “Running into you outside my office today — that was no coincidence, was it?”
He looked away. Again I wondered if he was blushing. “No.”
“You really are curious about my kind.” I could have given that statement an ugly accusatory edge, but I didn’t.
“Yes. But it’s more than that. I…respect your seniority.”
This wasn’t just a young officer, I realized. Sussman was a rookie, eager but unsure, looking for any way to become a better cop. That was admirable.
He finally activated the unit’s electric motor. “So, North Beach Habitat.”
“Right.” I reached for my seat belt.
“After,” Sussmann said, “after work, I mean--you want to go get a drink? Someplace you’d like to go, I mean. I can be the one to wear the mask, is what I’m saying.”
He wasn’t looking at me; instead, staring fixedly ahead as the cruiser idled. One thumb tapped the steering wheel nervously.
“Let’s go finish up this job first.”
© 2013 Eric Del Carlo
Eric Del Carlo’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Redstone Science Fiction, Shimmer and many other venues. He has authored a number of novels, including the Wartorn fantasy series with Robert Asprin. Most recently, White Cat Publishing has accepted a heartfelt urban fantasy novel which he co-wrote with his father, Vic Del Carlo. It is entitled The Golden Gate Is Empty. For more information or contact check out ericdelcarlo.com or find the author’s Facebook page.
How did you come up with “The Air That I Breath.” What stages did you go through in the process of getting the idea down?
First I have to admit to the genesis of the title, which I lifted from the classic song by The Hollies. I was this close to calling it “All I Need Is the Air That I Breathe” but thankfully caught myself. Environmental degradation, which figures heavily into this story, is a go-to theme for me. Like many others, I believe we, as inhabitants of this planet, are at or past the tipping point when our biosphere is going to strike back at us. I got chased out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, which when placed in historical context will probably be viewed as the beginning of Earth’s violent climate change. For this story I simply took a basic premise and gave it a twist: what if we didn’t try to alter or save our environment, but were instead forced to change ourselves as a species simply to survive. Everything followed from there. I saw that the best way to give that premise its richest poignancy was to tell the tale from the viewpoint of the last generation of unaltered humans. So I conjured up the only human cop in a ravaged San Francisco and sent him off into the story. By then the story was moving under its own power.
The themes in the story are quite bold. How did you handle the perceived sense of the other, and do you feel that Sussman and Lubrano can find some way to empathize more strongly in the future?
Again this was a matter of turning the familiar on its head, something that is maybe more common in fantasy literature than SF. Humans in this world would be the grotesque ones. They would seem clumsy and vulnerable, and worst of all, they would bear the blame of what had been done to the planet. The new altered generation of humans, referred to in the story as “Newts” (that’s a simplification of “New Terrans,” which I
honestly didn’t come up with until after I’d coined the term Newt; also the beings look reptilian), seem to regard the original humans not so much as monsters, but as anomalies, ones that will soon die out. They’re more pitied and ignored than hated. The “pre-ev” human cop Lubrano certainly seems more horrified by the Newt rookie officer Sussman than vice versa. I think age also figures into that: the young being more open and receptive, the older closed off and embittered. That added to the tension between the two characters. Yet Lubrano grudgingly comes around to some sort of accord with Sussman by the story’s end. Will that seriously change anything? Probably not. The pre-evs are, after all, doomed. But it provides a warm, genuinely human moment between the two characters. I always write for an emotional effect. I like to tell the big story from a small intimate viewpoint. Lubrano and Sussman’s interspecies interactions gave me that opportunity.