Air (or Have Not Have)

CHAPTER 14

Mae woke up in a strange bed.

The walls were pale blue with white cornices. Sitting patiently at the foot of her bed was a man. His face was familiar.

It was Mr Tunch. The name meant 'Bronze.' He seemed to be made of something burnished. He was wearing a different suit, zigzag black on beige. Like the other one, it was shiny.

'Good morning,' he said pleasantly.

Mae sat up. The hotel room had flowers, a TV and a chest of drawers made of polished red wood.

'Where are my friends?' asked Mae.

'They have gone home. You have been somewhere else for many days.'

'What do you mean, "somewhere else?" '

'Ah.' He shrugged. 'Mrs Tung has been here instead.'

'For what? Days? Days?

Mr Tunch nodded. He tried to look sorry, but instead looked rather excited.

Mae was prickled with terror. 'How did I come back?' It was the most urgent thing to know.

'She wandered off,' said Mr Tunch. 'Or rather, she simply could not understand what she was doing here. She couldn't remember where she was, so she kept trying to leave. And finally she did.'

He chuckled. 'She got very frustrated.'

Mae murmured, 'They do.'

After Mae's father was killed, her family moved, along with the bloodstained diwan cushions, to the house of the Iron Aunt, Wang Cro. At first Mae did not understand what was wrong or why the adults whispered. The Iron Aunt was nearly eighty and strong enough to move oil jars, but she always thought it was Thursday, cooked dinner at nine in the morning, and could not remember that Mae was not her mother. The children could tease her into a fury.

Mr Tunch explained: 'Your friends thought it was best if we did what we could here.'

'Yes. Yes, I can see that,' murmured Mae. Yes, I can see you now, in your Bronze suit playing the big man. You even soothed Sezen into leaving me.

'Can you do anything?' Mae demanded.

Mr Tunch leaned towards her and put a hand on her shoulder and made a slight gesture of helplessness. 'We need to know more.'

'You can't help.' In some ways, Mae was relieved.

Mr Tunch smiled. 'Not yet.'

'In that case,' said Mae, 'I want to go home. I have business to do.'

'What business?' chuckled Mr Tunch, with something too much like scorn. 'Look. There is nowhere else in Karzistan that has as much knowledge about the Air Formats as my company. We are experts in Human-Computer Interface Medicine. Do you know what that is?'

With a sudden chill, Mae knew. 'You put cameras in Airheads' eyes.'

Tunch blinked. Gotcha, thought Mae. I don't like you.

He recovered. 'Right now we are far more concerned about the damage the Test did. We are very concerned about the Format that was used in that Test, and we are horrified at what happened to you. Mrs Chung, we all have business interests, but your health is more important. Forgive me, but you did not do much business these last three days.'

You oil your words like Dr Bauschu, thought Mae. You do everything for reasons of your own. But perhaps, just perhaps, I need you.

Mae was driven to Yeshiboz Sistemlar along a new empty road.

Suddenly there was a wire mesh fence, with what looked like a white airport hangar beyond. Mae noted that it was built just outside the jurisdiction of the city.

Gates were raised and lowered. Bright young people, the brightest Mae had yet seen in Yeshibozkent, looked as scrubbed as the painted metal walls of the hangar and somehow just as cheap. They performed the function of people without the solidity or the beauty. They would age badly.

Mr Bronze was king. Inside the front lobby, girls smiled and, modern as they were, dipped their heads in traditional respect.

'This is Madam Chung Mae. Our patient,' he said to a woman at the first desk, with a quick grin.

No covered heads here. No broad straw hats with the rims white from dried sweat. The people looked as though they had come from Florida. Disney World, thought Mae. I bet the offices at Disney World look just like this.

'You'll excuse me, Mrs Chung. Like you, I have business to attend to. But Madam Akurgal will take excellent care of you.'

Madam Akurgal was not yet thirty and dressed like a nurse with a rubber tube around her neck. She kept calling Mae by her first name, as if she were a servant.

'Just come through here, Mae. We need to disinfect you,' she said, with a winning smile and a TV-Talent accent that came from nowhere specific. She led Mae into a corridor and there was a blast of air, and a sound like vacuum cleaners, and purple lights that made the white nurse's uniform glow white.

She sat Mae in a chair and told her to relax and lowered a kind of metal hat on her head. Mae waited for a sensation. None came. They sucked blood from her arm. Like at the hairdresser's, Mae was given a magazine to read.

Doctors looked at paper being printed and shook their heads and called each other over to look. They ignored both Mae and the nurse. Finally one of them tore off a sheet of the paper and showed it to Mae.

He was a Chinese gentleman, one of her own, probably a Buddhist, and she hoped for understanding. 'We have found nothing,' he said, beaming, pointing.

The paper was printed with jagged lines.

'So Mrs Tung is not here.' He jabbed a finger at the paper. 'Everything is working as usual. Except see, here, this line covers activity in the area of the cortex we think corresponds to communication with Air. We think you are constantly checking for Airmail.'

He was rather pleased. 'This is very encouraging. It means we speedily learn to use Air even without realizing it.'

'What does it mean for me?'

He shrugged. 'It means that things are basically okay in your physical brain. It confirms what we had all thought, that the problem is with your imprint in Air. Somehow yours is linked with another imprint.'

'Well, okay then, just wipe out those imprints in Air.'

'Ah,' he said, delighted with the beauty of the thing. 'Everything in Air is permanent.'

Another doctor entered, and the first greeted him effusively, waving the paper. Then he turned back, nodding politely.

'Oh, and one thing to cheer you up. Your blood test shows that you are expecting a joyful event. It will be a son. Good day.'

Madam Akurgal shook her head. 'Stupid men,' she hissed, and looked, stricken, into Mae's eyes.

'What does he mean, I'm pregnant? I can't be pregnant.'

The woman looked serious. 'Oh, yes you can.'

'I've had my period.' Mae was whispering frantically but even so, the male doctors turned. 'Do you understand? I had a normal period!'

The woman shook her head. 'Then there must be real problems. Is the bleeding just today, recently?'

'I have not miscarried! It was just a period and now it's over!'

The woman stroked her forehead. 'Then there may be something really wrong. We can have you tested.'

'I don't want to be tested again, I have had too many tests!'

'Just give yourself time to think. My name is Fatimah. Fatimah Akurgal. I will always be nearby.'

'What does it mean that they found nothing wrong with my head?'

Fatimah sagged under the weight of so much evidence of things gone awry. 'It means that you are the first of a kind. There is little that we know.'

'I don't want her taking over!' Mae was nearly in tears. 'She is trying to take over!'

'We will be looking at the Format to see if there is a way we can control it, even stop its communicating with you.' Fatimah paused. 'I am so sorry. I wish I had better news.'

Mae did begin to weep then. She hid her eyes. The doctors kept talking about her.

Mae spent the rest of the morning having magazines passed to her. She could not read them. She thought about what these people had said, and the way they had said it.

Fatimah took her to the bright noisy canteen and bought her a lunch of spicy red leaves that Mae had never seen before. 'We'll see about getting a car to drive you back to the hotel,' Fatimah said.

'Be sure to tell Mr Tunch for me,' Mae said, 'that I will be going straight back home to Kizuldah.'

Fatimah protested.

'Just ask Mr Tunch to talk to me,' said Mae.

Mr Tunch drove Mae back to the hotel himself.

The car was bronze-coloured and inside it smelled like a toilet, all false pine.

'You are going to have to give me something else to keep me,' said Mae.

'I beg your pardon!' coughed Mr Tunch.

'You can't cure me, why should I stay?'

'Why should I want you to stay?' Mr Tunch's eyes twinkled. It was cool in the car, air-conditioned. People outside squinted against the sun, walking on empty, baking streets.

'You want information from me. And information is like sugar, it is to be sold.'

'How very wise,' replied Mr Tunch, sounding very pleased, as if she were a clever pupil.

'You always sound surprised when I am not stupid. That's insulting.'

He dipped his head in respect. 'I'm sorry. But I would have thought that a possibility of a cure was reason enough for you to stay.'

'Possibility of a cure. That's not a lot. What do you get?'

'I get to understand your unusual situation. That will tell me a lot about how Air works.'

'Then,' she sighed, 'I am afraid this is not a fair trade. I do not want to spend time here being explored by you, only to find that there is no cure. I have work to do.'

'What else do you want?' he asked blandly.

'To learn everything you know,' she said. 'About what is coming.'

He chuckled. 'My dear woman, why would you want to know that?'

'So I can prepare my people.' Mae paused. 'Not your people. My people. There is a difference.'

His face did not lose a mote of its benevolence. 'You could not possibly learn all the things I know.'

'I want to know about this "Juh-ee" stuff. And what these Gates are. And what will really happen inside people's heads. What the great powers are using Air for, what they are going to get out of it.'

Mr Tunch smiled. 'Is that all?' he said, his irony losing its airy touch.

'One other thing. What is your full name?'

She almost saw his tongue flick. 'Surely a modern woman such as yourself does not believe in the Wisdom of Names?'

You do, Mae realized. That's why you don't want to give it to me.

'I am just a peasant,' she said. 'It is not good to do business without knowing your client's name.'

He shook his head slightly. 'I am your client, am I? In your professional hands?' He relented. 'My full name is Mr Hikmet Tunch.'

Mr Wisdom Bronze. A wise criminal has no need to soil his hands and so stays shiny. People mistake the polished bronze for gold. A wise criminal can sometimes even help his people, but always for a price.

Mae, you are flying with hawks. Watch out for their talons.

'So. Okay. The deal is this. I stay here one week. Not one day longer. We spend three hours a day finding out what you want, and three hours a day finding out what I want. Okay?'

'Agreed,' he said after a moment.

'I have the mornings,' she said.

Doors bleeped and blew and said hello to Mr Tunch.

'Sorry about all this, but we try to get rid of all the dust,' he said.

His office walls were covered in wood, and it was cool, without windows, and the electric lights were phony, made of bronze to look old-fashioned.

The surface of his desk was covered in glass. Mr Tunch touched it and spoke to it and it came alive with the familiar Interface.

'In order,' he said. ' "Intro background briefing on genetics, cosmology, and Air history." "Resistance to GM and its relevance to the development of Air." "The nature of the UN Format and background history." "The nature of the Gates Format and background history." "Speculative futures." ' He paused. 'Is that what you want to know?

'I will check my list.'

'Good. I will be back here at lunchtime.' He caught her scowl. I did not agree to teach you myself. That machine is far more used to teaching than I am. And much more patient. But please let me know if there is anything it cannot tell you.'

'I don't know how it works.'

'No. But it knows how you work. Good morning, Mrs Chung-ma'am.'

And he was gone, through another jet of air.

The machine began to speak and show pictures.

They had, apparently, unthreaded humanity like a carpet.

Inside the beautiful white semen, nestled inside the warm home of the womb, were threads, one from the male, one from the female. They now knew what made the threads, and the meaning of each stitch, as if it were Eloi embroidery.

They could place each stitch. Or replace it with better ones.

This was miraculous stuff to learn. Mae could imagine the souls of the unborn blossoming in new forms like flowers bred for new colours or perfumes.

They could make people prettier, stronger, and smarter. Mr Tunch's desk repeated the arguments against doing this. Favourable modifications would be available only for the rich. An even greater gap would open up between Haves and Have-nots.

Air, however, would make everyone a Have. So they said.

These Everyone-Haves would have their memory, their knowledge, and their skills increased. Their ability to calculate figures and link previously unrelated information would all be enhanced by using Info through Air.

It all sounded so calm and clear and reasonable, a briefing for the Disney people of Yeshiboz Sistemlar.

Mae knew when she was being sold something. You are trying to scare me with all this talk of rich people buying smarter babies. You want me to buy Air instead.

She sat forward. Already the bland neutral voice was slipping in warnings. Like old village gossips trying to get their way. Unplugged security problems that might mean the UN Format may not be controllable.

Like her Kru. They put him in Air and they can't turn him off, and all that knowledge goes away for free.

No money to be made. What you need me for, Mr Tunch, is to learn how to turn off Mrs Tung and turn off my Kru.

There was a tickle somewhere. The tickle was a way of looking at the world, a narrative. It was impatient.

'The benefits of Air for social inclusion are evident,' said Mr Tunch's desk. 'But questions of safety for users must be paramount. And intellectual property must be protected.'

The tickling grew as insistent as a headache. It was fear. It was hopelessness. It was a dread of the world beyond Kizuldah.

The desk said, 'Liberal economists wanted to open up Air to the competitive marketplace. Others argued that there could only be one Air, and that it would be wrong to grant a monopoly to any purely business interest. With two competing Formats, users could choose.'

They want to own our souls.

You see! You see?

Her. She's here.

The desk said, An international consortium of software houses agreed to set standards. The anti-monopolists soon claimed that the consortium was in fact controlled by the Company.'

It's always the same with these people.

Showdown, thought Mae. It's you or me.

'Tension increased when the Director of the International Air Consortium resigned, charging the Company with bad faith.' The Desk still spoke.

Before there was time for conscious thought to signal what she was doing, Mae said, 'It is so sad about your daughter-in-law's death.'

What? The old one did not like surprises.

'It was then that the director-general of the UN founded a new consortium to continue development of Air.'

'Tui. She died. The same day you did.'

Someone answered Mae aloud: 'What? That's a horrible thing to say!'

Mae replied, 'She threw herself down a well, don't you remember? I know you're dead, but you have been told about it many times. The day of the Air Test – it was months ago. She died. By the way, who are you speaking to?'

The desk said, 'But the new consortium struggled for lack of funds.'

'This is a terrible thing to do, to try to scare an old lady this way!'

'Scare? All I asked was, who are you talking to?'

'I…I… Well, Mae, of course!'

Mae remembered Aunt Wang Cro. She would pretend and pretend that everything was fine. There were no mirrors in the room. 'Mae? Where is Mae? Can you see her in this room?'

Mae leaned back in case the old one could see her reflection in the desk.

The desk stopped teaching. 'Excuse me, was that an instruction? I do not understand.'

Mae pushed again. 'Okay. Who are you?'

'I am…' The thing stopped. For a moment, it had no identity. 'I am… I am Madam Tung Ai-ling!'

'Then who are you talking to?' Mae thrust words like a knife.

'Excuse me, was that an instruction?'

'I don't know! I can't see! I'm blind. This is terrible to do to an old blind lady – make fun of her! Why are you doing this?'

The thing tried to stand up. It tried to look about. Mae could feel a twitching in the nerves of her legs and neck and eyes. She needs my body to live, Mae thought. She wants it.

'So,' Mae asked airily. 'Do you like being in Yeshiboz Sistemlar?'

'Excuse me, was that an instruction?'

'No!' Mae told the desk. 'Please continue lesson.'

'Who are you talking to?' Mrs Tung demanded in triumph.

'An intelligent desk. They make them these days. It's giving me a lesson in the UN Format.'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Of course you don't; you can't remember anything from one minute to the next. You are here in Karzistan's most important medical-computer complex. Where did you think you were?'

'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.'

'So how could it happen?' Mae's voice was raised.

Fatimah's deep-brown eyes kept staring down into hers, as if to offer her a stable place. 'Pregnancies can take root anywhere in the body, once the egg has been kissed. The question is, how would an egg and the male part meet in your stomach?'

And Mae knew how. 'Ilahe Illallah,' she gasped, though nominally a Buddhist, and covered her mouth. She had swallowed Ken; she had swallowed her own menstrual blood. She felt like a flurry of scarves, all fears and horrors. She was stripped and bare, her sexuality exposed, her private secret bedroom found to have one wall missing. The whole village could look in. Scientists peered over Mr Ken's shoulder, prying into her strange habits.

'Has this ever happened before?' Mae whispered.

Fatimah shrugged. 'If it has, it would miscarry by now.'

'What will happen?' Mae was following the consequences of this monstrosity. Birth through the throat? Surgery?

'The child cannot be healthy,' said Fatimah. 'As for birth, it should be by surgery, but I cannot recommend that. We… We can help you quietly, telling no one…' Her voice trailed away, a warm hand on Mae's chilled arm.

In the raw villages of Karzistan, unwanted winter babies were left to crystallize in the snows. Third daughters were whisked away and dispatched before the mother could see them and love them.

Fatimah seemed alarmed by something. Her voice was still low. 'There can be no question of your keeping it.'

Mae felt as though she were clutching a cloth over herself to hide naked breasts.

If the village knew this, what would they do? She was already a monster for simply falling out of marriage. A woman who talked too much and then gave birth to a monster through her mouth? They might drive her away with stones.

'You must understand. The stomach is full of strong acid. To dissolve food? We don't know what that will do to the child.'

Mae was seeing Mr Ken's face. Her young man… Young? Either one of them?

Yes, at heart they were young. At heart and in memory, they would always be in school together, longing and shy. They would always be the lovers who found each other late in life.

That heart and memory would only be as real as long as they lived. But if there were a child, that meant that love would outlive both of them.

And that was what love was for, all the waste and the pain and the inconvenience and the awkwardness and the ugliness. It was to draw together and build an island of love, in which children could grow, and love can be passed on.

'Mae? Mae you cannot be thinking…'

Mae was thinking of redemption. In Karz the phrase for it was 'Unexpected Flower.' It was seen as late Indian summer, surprising the world with roses. My Unexpected Flower, she called the child. The machines were silent and blue around them.

'I need to think,' was all that Mae could say.

'You won't be given much of a chance for that, said Fatimah.

The rest of the afternoon session consisted of qualitative research. Mae was introduced to a bald, eager stranger with spectacles. This is Mr Pakansir, he will ask you questions. Hello, Mrs Chung-ma'am. Please answer the questions quickly, no need for deep consideration.

The name Pakan meant 'Real Man.' Mae sat, legs crossed, arms crossed trying to find cover. The questions began easily enough: occupation… marriage… was she a happy woman? How did things change after Formatting? After the Test, how did things change?

'Would you say that your sexual habits changed after Formatting?'

'No,' said Mae.

'But… uh… you are pregnant. In an unusual way.'

'No one knows how such a thing is possible,' replied Mae.

'We understand, however, that your marriage broke down.'

Mae sat silent.

'Is that true? You have just said that you were happily married. How did it become unhappy?'

Mae smiled silently.

Mr Real Man's grin went a bit fierce. 'Mr Tunch has said to remind you, perhaps, of your bargain. That you will help us understand, in return for training. Your mind was interfered with by the UN Format. We are trying to understand what happened. To help others.'

Mr Real Man went back to his sheet of papers. They were printed, but not entirely square on the paper. 'Did you find yourself performing sexual acts that were not part of your previous repertoire?'

Silence.

'Please, Mrs Chung. These are medical questions.'

Poor man. You do not know who you are dealing with, thought Mae.

'Had you ever heard of or known about oral sex before the Formatting?'

Mae couldn't help but answer, 'How on earth do you think peasant women avoid being pregnant all the time?'

He looked disappointed. 'Oh. So you knew about sex with the mouth before the Formatting. There is no chance that the Formatting planted the idea?'

Mae did not answer. Her heart was growing as tight as her masklike little smile.

'Was it something that you practised frequently?'

Mr Pakan slouched forward, groin thrust out. Unconsciously he began to rock back and forth as if having sex with the tip of his long tie. Mae stood up, thinking of Mr Haseem, and kicked Mr Real Man between the legs.

He groaned and doubled over. She struck him in the face. His glasses slipped lopsided, and he slumped forward on his knees. He crawled out of the room. Mae kicked him on the bottom and sent him sprawling over the polished padded floor outside the room and then she slammed the door behind him.

She waited, her breath quivering as though it were fire.

She was not an ignorant peasant or some farm animal made to reproduce as they wished. They were going to have to learn to treat her as a person of consequence.

Mr Tunch came early. He looked amused. 'You are confirming important data for us.'

'Am I really?' said Mae. She felt as though her teeth had been filed into a saw.

'You were not violent before the Formatting, were you?'

Mae paused. 'I never met such bastards until the Formatting.'

Mr Tunch was still smiling. He was amused. 'I wish I could have seen it – poor old Mr Real Man. Asking his neat little machine questions, and meeting Real Life by mistake.'

Mae was unmoved, unfooled. 'He was doing your bidding.'

'Are you going to hit me?' Tunch asked in mock alarm.

Mae considered. 'I might kill you if you go too far.'

Even Mr Tunch blinked. 'Oh,' he said, darkening.

'I am a direct person. Are you going to blame that on the UN as well?' Mae batted her eyelashes at him.

It was his turn to grin, masklike.

Mae sat back, feeling hearty, like she was surrounded by friends and picking on an enemy. 'That's why you do this, Mr Tunch. You want to sell the Gates Format. You have to say the UN Format is bad. It is bad because it gives away too much to people like me. Is the Gates Format paying you?'

Mr Tunch closed his eyes and his smile went gentler, amused, and rueful. He looked at her in something like affection and said, 'Unexpected Flower.'

Mae felt a chill. Just how much had Mr Wisdom Bronze penetrated, with his machines and Question Maps?

He sighed. 'Whenever I despair for our people and think there is no hope, with the ignorance, the poverty, the deep divisions, the lack of resources, someone like you surprises me, and I know, I know Karzistan could take on the world.'

The two looked at each other, both surprised.

'You are very damaged, you know,' he added.

You want to rifle through the pages of my life, hold my underwear in the sun to show stains.

Mae gathered herself up and asked brightly, 'Did you make the money for all of this from drugs?'

His face hung suspended.

She shrugged. 'Look, you can't shock me. A wise man makes money where he can. You are not from Yeshibozkent. I can tell that from your accent. You are from far down the valley, where soil, sun, everything is hard. The poppies grow there.'

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.

'Did you know Mr Tunch when he was a boy?' she asked.

Nothing in his face moved. He watched her eat and took back the plate and the knives.

Mae saw the tiny blinking red light that watched her. She waited until all the lights were off and they could not see her. She whispered to herself without even moving her lips. 'Mae Mae Mae Mae Mae…'

She traced the gnarled root of herself back down deep. She felt the settling peace, the calm, and the end of fear and terror. As she fell away from it, the white walls of Yeshiboz Sistemlar looked as thin and frail as eggshells.

Mae settled as gently as an angel into the courtyard. Her clothes seemed to trail after her in ribbons, like silk underwater. The courtyard now looked more like Kwan's grand house. Instead of pens, the blue walls were lined with beautiful new businesses all glowing golden with light. They had modern plastic shop-signs that looked like poppies opening and closing, info… help… that's entertainment…

Mae entered help, and there was Mae herself, dressed as a Talent. Assistant-Mae knew what she wanted. She wanted to see the Gates Format for herself. 'I am afraid there is no programming that allows communication between the UN and the Gates Formats. You will not be able to find any Gates Format imprints.'

Mae asked the mask, 'Does this system contain any information about the Gates Format?'

Mae-assistant smiled like a shop sign. 'The "Help" function contains information about functions in this Format only.'

'Is there anything in "Info"?'

I want to know what imprints are and how they work. I want to know what the UN Format is and how it translates thoughts. I don't want to owe Tunch for anything.

The assistant-Mae replied smoothly: 'The "Info" section was developed for the pilot project and contains only examples of proposed kinds of content.'

Mae regarded her own face. Is my smile so unhelpful when I turn it on my customers? 'Why doesn't Air contain anything?'

Was the smile more broad? 'It is a common failing of IT projects to underestimate the difficulty of providing content and the time scales required.'

Air was pig-ignorant. Mae was not fooled, either, by her own face. These things – the courtyard, the shop fronts – they are just for show, this is not Air itself, they are the traffic signs towards it.

So Mae turned without another word and walked into Air. Air, she knew, was eternal. Mae walked, deliberately this time, into the blue of information.

She merged with the blue walls, as if they were glowing blue fog. She kept on walking. The walls faded into night. She stood in chaos, and kept feeling the gnarled root, deeper and deeper until even the sound of her own thinking was hushed and she felt even herself fade.

The root seemed to get thicker and thicker, as if it had become the trunk of a tree. It would eventually become Everything. It would become the world; and all the worlds in which the world sat. Mae herself was the thinnest possible little trail back towards the fiction of the world.

She could no longer remember what she was looking for.

I don't want to go on, she managed to think.

Blindly she felt her way back. The blue light shone, her fingernails glowed as white as her hospital gown as if everything were smiling.

Mae stepped back into the courtyard. She walked quietly into That's Entertainment. There were games machines, and radios all along the walls. There was soaring operatic music. In front of a TV set, Old Mrs Tung sat watching Turandot.

'Hello, Granny,' said Mae gently.

Mrs Tung turned and smiled, eyes twinkling. She could not remember the last time she and Mae met. All she remembered was the love, deeply imprinted.

There you are, dear. I was just thinking, I hope Mae comes to pay a visit. Isn't it marvellous, the TV? How I've yearned to see Turandot. They say it happens in Karzistan, you know.

And you have seen it over and over and over, because it is the only thing on TV in Air. But you can't remember that. Heaven is the place where you cannot change and nothing can ever happen, so the things you love are always eternal. Hell is exactly the same.

The hero Kalaf was singing. 'No one's sleeping. No one's sleeping.'

'I just wanted to make sure,' said Mae. 'I just wanted to make sure that you were well. I just wanted to make sure that you were as beautiful as I remember.'

Oh-hoo-hoo. The hooting laugh. Now eternal.

And Old Mrs Tung reached across and took Mae's hand. Mrs Tung thought she still had a hand. Is the beaning going well this year: I used to so love it. All of us on blankets doing the shelling together.

'Yes,' said Mae. 'It is still going well.'

Then Mae said, though she knew Mrs Tung could not understand: 'I know it is not you who does these things to me. It is the error they made, whatever mistake it was. I just wanted to make sure of that.'

And Old Mrs Tung hooted again, as if she knew what Mae was talking about.

And Mae began to repeat her own name over and over. Her and Mrs Tung's metaphorical hands disentangled like roots.

In the morning, the guard served Mae breakfast on a tray.

The food iridesced like a rainbow, and the flavours veered between pork and jam and all the flavours of breakfast at once. It was delicious. She threw it up into the wastebasket. It continued to shift colours in the bin.

Mae covered her eyes and wept, and then cast off the water from her cheeks. She was led out through all the Disney World people, all spanking new and polished. Do you know they keep prisoners here? she asked their pristine smiles. She was led to the desk. Time, she told herself, to learn.

The desk began by showing her the inside of an eye. Early efforts at interface had beamed coded light signals onto the retina and recorded differences in pathways. Residual patterns of neural activity appeared that were nothing to do with the light. Other information appeared to be passed.

The brain was responding to low levels of electrical charges from outside the body.

Animals were given sudden peak charges that stimulated all areas of their brain. Every neural pathway was stimulated at once. The mystery was that, once stimulated, the charge continued. The brain entered a new state, always charged, always open. The charge continued to exist without any further source of energy.

How could this be? There could be no perpetual motion, no undying source of unreplenished energy.

Unless the brain existed in a realm with no time. Once imprinted, it stayed charged. It was like a radio switched on forever, but not in our world.

There was another world, of seven other dimensions beyond time, and Air existed in those. Air had no spatial dimension. In Air, one mind occupied the same space as another. Stimulation of one imprinted brain correlated to increased activity in another.

But attempts at shared thinking resulted in disorder and discomfort. One brain works in a way very different from another.

What was needed to make Air work was a uniform Format for information.

In theory at least, this Format would simply be information, too. It could be added to the imprints, providing a shared mechanism for making messages compatible and so able to be shared.

The first Formats were crude mathematical formulae that made only the simplest kinds of neural impulses to be communicated.

The first successfully shared Air message was '2 plus 2 equals 4.' It took the form of nervous jolts: two jolts, two jolts, and then four in succession.

If Air were to be used for any commercial purpose, it would have to do more than that.

Synaesthesia was a phenomenon long known and little understood. Some people saw sound, tasted colour, felt words in their fingertips. The brain, so delicate, so responsive, was responding to minute charge differences caused by other phenomena. Infants experienced them – then learned how to block them.

From synaesthesia, a means of stimulating images, sounds, and even tastes was developed. A means of translating this system into first protocols, and then encoding for those protocols, was some years in development.

End of lesson.

Lunch came. Again it was the silent guard who brought it. And Mae knew then, that despite all his smiles, Hikmet Tunch was frightened of her.

Lunch moved. It was delicious new organisms that could talk.

Bits of lunch piped up, in merry little voices: 'We are designed to provide full vitamin and other protein content undiminished by death or cooking. Think of us as the perfect form of happy nutrition.'

Then they sang a happy little song waiting to be eaten. They looked like limbless prawns without shells, with little carbon crystals perched on top like jewels.

'Take that foulness away. Tell Mr Tunch that I will starve myself rather than eat anything other than normal food.'

The silent giant nodded once and left the room, with the lunch still pointedly on the table, still singing like little intelligent bells. He came back with a bowl of ordinary soup. He sat and watched Mae eat it, as if making sure she did. He looked at his watch.

It was only after several mouthfuls that Mae realized the soup had an aftertaste. 'Is there something in this?' she asked. The giant left.

Colours began to sharpen. Mae felt her unease with a new razor-sharpness.

The door opened, and Mr Pakan came in with a dog.

The dog's head was shaved, and a neat little metal cap was bolted to its skull. The cap had a speaker in it.

'Mae, hello, Mae,' the dog slobbered in affection. 'I have a job. People trust me with a job. They have made me much smarter, and taught me how to talk. There may be a future for dogs, if we can tell jokes and love our masters.'

It came toward Mae, backing her into a corner.

'Please let me lick your hand. I only want to lick your hand.'

Mae's head was beginning to buzz, and there was a kind of gathering tension, as if a bubble had swollen and was about to burst.

'You bastards,' she managed to say. They were doing this deliberately, to bring Mrs Tung back.

'Don't you like me? Please like me,' the dog was pleading, wanting to whimper, but the whimper was given a voice. 'Who will feed me if I am not loved?'

Where are we, dear?

Mae heard oxygen rustle in her ear, and she understood so clearly everything that Mrs Tung was feeling. The floor was shifting underfoot, the room was melting.

Let's go home. Do you know the way?

Mae settled onto the floor. Mr Pakan nipped forward and began to wrap Velcro around Mae's arm.

The last thing Mae saw before losing her body was the dog, eating the singing food. 'Gosh, this is good,' said the dog.

Mae was buzzed all the way to the back of her body.

Mrs Tung stood up and sat in a chair, and asked Mr Pakan, 'Would you be good enough to find a blanket for me, dear?'

Who is that man? Mae tried to ask her. You don't know who he is, do you?

The colours 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 a 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 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.

'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 moustache. 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 silver}' 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 coloured 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, as if 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 gear, 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.'

'I can beat her off,' said Mae. 'Except when people interfere.'

'Sorry,' said Tunch.

Mae could have said a lot of things. Do you say 'Sorry' to the wives of men you kill? Or do you just threaten? How do you keep all your separate selves apart? I hope you manage to keep the small-time assassin separate from the man who wants to rule.

Pop.

Tunch went on: 'One of the side effects as the drug wears off will be a period of, uh, greater sensitivity. Someone needs to be with you.'

Pop. 'You know my address in Air. Will you be recording that, too?' Pop. 'And sell the information to the foreigners? Or have they already paid for anything you might find out?'

'It depends,' murmured Tunch, 'on the information.'

'Ling,' said Mae, 'he may try to kill you. Too many people have seen you, boy. And you are not supposed to exist. Do you understand me, boy?'

'Yes,' said the unreadable mechanical voice. Mae buried her face against his furry cheek, and the bare, shaved forehead.

'I'm sorry. I didn't understand. I should have left you in the compound. Watch him, Ling. He has masters, too, like you do. He has to be loyal to them or he does not eat. You and he are the same.

'I understand,' said Ling.

'Good boy, Ling,' said Tunch. 'Just be a good boy.'

'I always am,' said Ling.

Mae said, 'You will turn Karzistan into the garbage pail of the world.'

'Karzistan has to make a living,' he said.

The car drove on, grasses blurring by. What was close was lost in speed.

'You do not understand me, Mae,' said Tunch. I am slightly relying on the drug to help you accept what I will say. What I am about to say, is said using very carefully chosen words, used in a very precise way.'

'I'm ready,' said Mae.

'I am a hero,' said Tunch.

Ling's nose was pushed out of the window. 'This world smells different,' he said.

Mae was unimpressed. 'I am waiting for the precise meaning of the word,' said Mae.

'A hero mediates,' said Tunch. 'He brings together good and evil. He uses the tools of evil, may even be evil, to do something constructive. People need heroes. They yearn for them. That is because people who are not heroes think that heroes are good. And evil is done by people who think they are good. Good people do harm by being gentle and not stopping things. Good people fight wars out of love. They need heroes to break that cycle. To defend them, to build things.'

Black shadows danced inside Mae's eyes, and Mrs Tung tried to gather her thoughts.

'It is terrible, but it is the only way forward. Heroes are not like in stories, where they wear a mask of nobility. All heroes do evil, terrible things. Robin Hood was a thief and murderer. John Kennedy ordered invasions and wars. So did Lawrence, who fought like a wolf for the Arabs. Ataturk destroyed the mosques and killed the clergy. Wonderful, terrible people are both good and evil.'

The drug made it difficult for anyone to gather their thoughts. 'You are trying to tell me why you will never do me harm,' she said, 'now that you have learned from the harm you have already done me.'

'Exactly. You are too valuable. I want you home in your village. You know why?'

'Yes,' Mae said meekly. 'You think I am a hero, too.'

Tunch simply gave a thin, satisfied grin.

'How did you tear the fence?' he asked.

Mae told him. 'Air is real and we are not.'

Wisdom nodded once, something confirmed.

Mae told herself what she did not tell him. What they have done is make an artificial soul. You and your Format want to sell our souls back to us. You are about to find out that we have always had them.

They drove on, into the night.

Ling rode with his head out of the window.

Halfway up the hill the dog asked, 'Why are there stars? They don't smell.'

Tunch replied, 'They smell of heat, so fierce it burns away the ability to smell.'

'Are we getting closer to them?' said Ling, looking around.

'Not yet. Not for a good few many years,' said Tunch.

Mae suddenly understood that Tunch intended to stand on the stars, however many centuries it took.

Tunch asked the dog, 'Do you want to know how the universe began?'

'Oh. That would be good to know,' said the dog, looking around.

'Dreadful pride,' said Mae.

Tunch was very pleased with that, and grinned.

'When there is nothingness,' he said, 'gravity does not attract. It becomes repulsive. Ask what those words mean.'

Obediently the dog consulted Air, sweat dripping off his panting tongue. After a moment Ling said, 'Gravity pulls everything together. It makes us heavy so we stay on the ground. Otherwise we would float off to the stars.'

'Good,' said Tunch.

'So, my nose won't burn out.'

'No.'

The dog seemed to grin, panting.

Tunch continued: 'Before anything existed, gravity had nothing to do – except pull apart. It pulled, and nothingness stretched, like a rubber band, until it broke. When it broke there was a burst of light and heat. So energy was created, and out of energy, things were made.'

'So far so good,' said the dog.

'So with something there instead of nothing, gravity then became an attractive force. It pulled together. As the universe exploded, it also pulled and twisted things into shapes. Clouds of gas, then balls of gas, then stars.'

'Is gravity a hero, too?' asked the dog.

'Yes,' said Tunch, pleased.

'How?' asked Mae.

'We know that, mathematically, there must be eleven dimensions. Like height and width, except these other dimensions were not affected by the explosion at the beginning. They are still the same size, coiled at the heart of the universe. Where nothing really changes. Think of the point right at the centre of a wheel. The wheel turns, but the point does not.'

'What's a wheel?' asked Ling.

'We're riding on wheels. Access the mathematical definition of a point.'

'Okay, boss.'

'In those coiled dimensions, we know that the same equations that describe electromagnetism, describe gravity. In the timeless realms outside our universe, they are one. Now, ask again, what is thought?'

Ling had the answer ready. 'An electromagnetic phenomenon. Differences in charges produced by chemical reactions.'

'Gravity is like thought. It has power over everything in this universe, but it is not in this universe. There is no gravity wave, no gravity particle. It exists outside time. It makes things. It loves things. It tears things apart.'

He let the car speak for a while, the roaring of its wheels on the rough surface, the hum of the engine.

'You know what we're going to do, people like you and me, Mae?' Again the disembodied grin, adrift from the sunglasses, lit from underneath now by the dash panel lights. 'We're going to prove God exists. We'll send it messages.'

Mae thought:

I am trapped in a car with a madman who happens to tell the truth. I am trapped in a car with someone driven so crazy by a big opinion of himself that he thinks he will live forever. He thinks he will shake God's hand by machines. The truly awful thing is that he might just do it.

Mae saw clearly that his system was so greedy it would eat anything. Anything she did or said – kick Mr Pakan, befriend Ling, argue with Tunch, or agree – would be wound into his Bronze madness, feed it.

The only thing she could do that would not help him would be to stay silent. Staying silent would prevent him from wanting to know anything more about her. If he felt there was more Info to be derived, he would imprison her again until he had it.

Mae pretended to go to sleep.

The car crackled to a halt over loose gravel.

Mae blinked around her. 'This is it,' she said. She petted Ling. 'Treat him well,' she told Mr Tunch. 'He has been promised steak.'

Ling looked up into her eyes. 'I want this box taken off my head,' he said. 'I want this voice taken out.'

Mae looked at Tunch. Would he?

'We can do that,' Mr Tunch said, and gave Ling's head a casual scratch.

Mae said curtly, 'Thank you for driving me.'

She got out, stepping out of the smell of luxury, leather, and polish. She smelled drains, the little river, and the mud.

'The future will be wonderful, Mae.' He passed her her best dress, covered in hearts.

She simply smiled and nodded, as enigmatically as possible.

'Work towards it,' he told her. And closed the door. Mae waited as the car turned. Ling's nose was pressed against the gap in the window.

'I will be a dog again,' he said.

The car sighed back down the road and was gone. Mae turned and began to walk and realized that her knees were shaking, weak.

He talks of God. So would the Devil.

Mae was halfway up the slope to Kwan's when she realized that the silver shoes were gone.