Air

by Geoff Ryman

  The rest of the day did not go well. Mae felt tired, distracted. She made a terrible mistake and, with nothing else to do, accidentally took Kwan to the place where she bought her lipsticks.

  “Oh! It is a treasure trove!” exclaimed Kwan.

  Idiot, thought Mae to herself. Kwan was good-natured and would not take advantage. But, if she talked…! There would be clients who would not take such a good-natured attitude, not to have been shown this themselves.

  “I do not take everyone here,” whispered Mae, “hmm? This is for special friends only.”

  Kwan was good-natured, but very far from stupid. Mae remembered, in school Kwan had always been best at letters, best at maths. Kwan was pasting on false eyelashes in a mirror and said, very simply and quickly, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

  And that was far too simple and direct. As if Kwan were saying: Fashion expert, we all know you. She even looked around and smiled at Mae, and batted her now-huge eyes, as if mocking fashion itself.

  “Not for you,” said Mae. “The false eyelashes. You don’t need them.”

  The dealer wanted a sale. “Why listen to her?” she asked Kwan.

  Because, thought Mae, I buy fifty riels’ worth of cosmetics from you a year.

  “My friend is right,” said Kwan, to the dealer. The sad fact was that Kwan was almost magazine-beautiful anyway, except for her teeth and gums. “Thank you for showing me this,” said Kwan, and touched Mae’s arm. “Thank you,” she said to the dealer, having bought one lowly lipstick.

  Mae and the dealer glared at each other, briefly. I’ll go somewhere else next time, Mae promised herself.

  The worst came last. Kwan’s ramrod husband was not a man for drinking. He was in the promised cafe at the promised time, sipping tea, having had a haircut and a professional shave.

  A young man called Sloop, a tribesman, was with him. Sloop was a telephone engineer and thus a member of the aristocracy as far as Mae was concerned. He was going to wire up their new TV. Sloop said, with a woman’s voice, “It will work like your mobile phone, no cable. We can’t lay cable in our mountains. But before MMN, there was not enough space on the line for the TV.” He might as well have been talking English, for all Mae understood him.

  Mr. Wing maintained his cheerfulness. “Come,” he said to the ladies, “I will show you what this is all about.”

  He went to the communal TV and turned it on with an expert’s flourish. Up came not a movie or the local news, but a screenful of other buttons.

  “You see? You can choose what you want. You can choose anything.” And he touched the screen.

  Up came the local Talent, still baring her perfect teeth. She piped in a high, enthusiastic voice that was meant to appeal to men and Bright Young Things:

  “Hello. Welcome to the Airnet Information Service. For too long the world has been divided into information haves and have-nots.” She held up one hand towards the heavens of information and the other out towards the citizens of the Green Valley, inviting them to consider themselves as have-nots.

  “Those in the developed world can use their TVs to find any information they need at any time. They do this through the Net.”

  Incomprehension followed. There were circles and squares linked by wires in diagrams. Then they jumped up into the sky, into the air—only the air was full of arcing lines. “The field,” they called it, but it was nothing like a field. In Karzistani, it was called the Lightning-Flow, Compass-Point Yearning Field. “Everywhere in the world.” Then the lightning flow was shown striking people’s heads. “There have been many medical tests to show this is safe.”

  “Hitting people with lightning?” Kwan asked in crooked amusement. “That does sound so safe, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s only the Formatting that uses the Yearning Field,” said Sloop. “That happens only once. It makes a complete map of minds, and that’s what exists in Air, and Air happens in other dimensions.”

  What?

  “There are eleven dimensions,” he began, and began to see the hopelessness of it. “They were left over after the Big Bang.”

  “I know what will interest you ladies,” said her husband. And with another flourish, he touched the screen. “You’ll be able to have this in your heads, whenever you want.”

  Suddenly the screen was full of cream color.

  One of the capital’s ladies spun on her high heel. She was wearing the best of the nation’s fashion design. She was one of the ladies in Mae’s secret treasure book.

  “Oh!” Kwan breathed out. “Oh, Mae, look, isn’t she lovely!”

  “This channel shows nothing but fashion,” said her husband.

  “All the time?” Kwan exclaimed, and looked back at Mae in wonder. For a moment, she stared up at the screen, her own face reflected over those of the models. Then, thankfully, she became Kwan again. “Doesn’t that get boring?”

  Her husband chuckled. “You can choose something else. Anything else.”

  It was happening very quickly and Mae’s guts churned faster than her brain to certain knowledge: Kwan and her husband would be fine with all this.

  “Look,” he said, “This is what two-way does. You can buy the dress.”

  Kwan shook her head in amazement. Then a voice said the price and Kwan gasped again. “Oh, yes, all I have to do is sell one of our four farms, and I can have a dress like that.”

  “I saw all that two years ago,” said Mae. “It is too plain for the likes of us. We want people to see everything.”

  Kwan’s face went sad. “That is because we are poor, back in the hills.” It was the common yearning, the common forlorn knowledge.

  Sometimes it had to cease, all the business-making, you had to draw a breath, because after all, you had known your people for as long as you had lived.

  Mae said, “None of them are as beautiful as you are, Kwan.” It was true, except for her teeth.

  “Flattery-talk from a fashion expert,” Kwan said lightly. But she took Mae’s hand. Her eyes yearned up at the screen, as secret after secret was spilled like blood.

  “With all this in our heads,” Kwan said to her husband, “we won’t need your TV.”

  IT WAS A BUSY WEEK.

  It was not only the six dresses. For some reason, there was much extra business.

  On Wednesday, Mae had a discreet morning call to make on Tsang Muhammed. Mae liked Tsang. She looked like a peach that was overripe, round and soft to the touch and very slightly wrinkled. Everything about her was off-kilter. She was Chinese with a religious Karz husband, who was ten years her senior. He was a Muslim who allowed—or perhaps could not prevent—his Chinese wife keeping a pig.

  The family pig was in the front room being fattened: half the room was full of old shucks. The beast looked lordly and pleased with itself. Tsang’s four-year-old son sat tamely beside it, feeding it the greener leaves, as if the animal could not find them for itself.

  “Is it all right to talk?” Mae whispered, her eyes going sideways towards the boy.

  “Who is it?” Mae mouthed.

  Tsang simply waggled a finger.

  So it was someone they knew. Mae suspected it was Kwan’s oldest boy, Luk. Luk was sixteen, but he was kept in pressed white shirt and shorts like a baby. The shorts only showed he had hair on his football-player calves. His face was still round and soft and baby like but lately had been full of a new and different confusion.

  “Tsang. Oh!” Mae gasped.

  “Sssh,” giggled Tsang, who was red as a radish. As if either of them could be certain what the other one meant. “I need a repair job!” So it was someone younger.

  Almost certainly Kwan’s handsome son.

  “Well, they have to be taught by someone,” whispered Mae.

  Tsang simply dissolved into giggles. She could hardly stop laughing.

  “I can do nothing for you. You certainly don’t need redder cheeks,” said Mae.

  Tsang uttered a squawk of laughter.

  “There is nothing
like it for a woman’s complexion.” Mae pretended to put away the tools of her trade. “No, I can effect no improvement. Certainly I cannot compete with the effects of a certain young man.”

  “Nothing … Nothing…” gasped Tsang. “Nothing like a good prick!”

  Mae howled in mock outrage and Tsang squealed, and both squealed and pressed down their cheeks, and shushed each other. Mae noted exactly which part of the cheeks were blushing so she would know where the color should go later.

  As Mae painted, Tsang explained how she escaped her husband’s view. “I tell him that I have to get fresh garbage for the pig,” whispered Tsang. “So I go out with the empty bucket…”

  “And come back with a full bucket,” Mae said airily.

  “Oh!” Tsang pretended to hit her. “You are as bad as me!”

  “What do you think I get up to in the City?” asked Mae, who arched an eyebrow, lying.

  Love, she realized later, walking back down the track and clutching her cloth bag of secrets, love is not mine. She thought of the boy’s naked calves.

  On Thursday, Kwan wanted her teeth to be flossed. This was new. Kwan had never been vain before. This touched Mae, because it meant her friend was getting older. Or was it because she had seen the TV models with their impossible teeth? How were real people supposed to have teeth like that?

  Kwan’s handsome son ducked as he entered, wearing his shorts, showing smooth, full thighs, and a secret swelling about his groin. He ducked as he went out again. Guilty, Mae thought. For certain it is him.

  She lay Kwan’s head back over a pillow with a towel under her.

  Should she not warn her friend to keep watch on her son? Which friend should she betray? To herself, she shook her head; there was no possibility of choosing between them. She could only keep silent. “Just say if I hit a nerve,” Mae said.

  Kwan had teeth like an old horse, worn, brown, black. Her gums were scarred from a childhood disease, and her teeth felt loose as Mae rubbed the floss between them. She had a neat little bag into which she flipped each strand after it was used.

  It was Mae’s job to talk: Kwan could not. Mae said she did not know how she would finish the dresses in time. The girl’s mothers were never satisfied, each wanted her daughter to have the best. Well, the richest would have the best in the end because they bought the best cloth. Oh! Some of them had asked to pay for the fabric later! As if Mae could afford to buy cloth for six dresses without being paid!

  “They all think their fashion expert is a woman of wealth.” Mae sometimes found the whole pretense funny. Kwan’s eyes crinkled into a smile; but they were also moist from pain. It was hurting.

  “You should have told me your teeth were sore,” said Mae, and inspected the gums. In the back, they were raw.

  If you were rich, Kwan, you would have good teeth; rich people keep their teeth, and somehow keep them white, not brown. Mae pulled stray hair out of Kwan’s face.

  “I will have to pull some of them,” Mae said quietly. “Not today, but soon.”

  Kwan closed her mouth and swallowed. “I will be an old lady,” she said, and managed a smile.

  “A granny with a thumping stick.”

  “Who always hides her mouth when she laughs.”

  Both of them chuckled. “And thick glasses that make your eyes look like a fish.”

  Kwan rested her hand on her friend’s arm. “Do you remember, years ago? We would all get together and make little boats, out of paper or shells. And we would put candles in them, and send them out on the ditches.”

  “Yes!” Mae sat forward. “We don’t do that anymore.”

  “We don’t wear pillows and a cummerbund anymore, either.”

  There had once been a festival of wishes every year, and the canals would be full of little glowing candles, that floated for a while and then sank with a hiss. “We would always wish for love,” said Mae, remembering.

  Next morning, Mae mentioned the wish boats to her neighbor, Old Mrs. Tung. Mae visited her nearly every day. Mrs. Tung had been her teacher during the flurry of what had passed for Mae’s schooling. She was ninety years old, and spent her days turned towards the tiny loft window that looked out over the valley. She was blind, her eyes pale and unfocused. She could see nothing through the window. Perhaps she breathed in the smell of the fields.

  When Mae reminded her about the boats of wishes, Mrs. Tung said, “And we would roast pumpkin seeds. And the ones we didn’t eat, we would turn into jewelry. Do you remember that?”

  Mrs. Tung was still beautiful, at least in Mae’s eyes. Mrs. Tung’s face had grown even more delicate in extreme old age, like the skeleton of a cat, small and fine. She gave an impression of great merriment, by continually laughing at not very much. She repeated herself.

  “I remember the day you first came to me,” she said. Before Shen’s village school, Mrs. Tung had kept a nursery, there in their courtyard. “I thought: ‘Is that the girl whose father has been killed? She is so pretty.’ I remember you looking at all my dresses hanging on the line.”

  “And you asked me which one I liked best.”

  Mrs. Tung giggled. “Oh yes, and you said the butterflies.” Blindness meant that she could only see the past. “We had tennis courts, you know. Here in Kizuldah.”

  “Did we?” Mae pretended she had not heard that before.

  “Oh yes, oh yes. When the Chinese were here, just before the Communists came. Part of the Chinese army was here, and they built them. We all played tennis, in our school uniforms.”

  The Chinese officers had supplied the tennis rackets. The traces of the courts were broken and grassy, where Mr. Pin now ran his car-repair business.

  “Oh! They were all so handsome, all the village girls were so in love.” Mrs. Tung chuckled. “I remember, I couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and one of them adopted me, because he said I looked like his daughter. He sent me a teddy bear after the war.” She chuckled and shook her head. “I was too old for teddy bears by then. But I told everyone it meant we were getting married. Oh!” Mrs. Tung shook her head at her foolishness. “I wish I had married him,” she confided, feeling naughty. She always said that.

  Mrs. Tung, even now, had the power to make Mae feel calm and protected. Mrs. Tung had come from a family of educated people and once had had a house full of books. The books had all been lost in a flood many years ago, but Mrs. Tung could still recite to Mae the poems of the Turks, the Karz, or the Chinese. She had sat the child Mae on her lap and rocked her. She could still recite now, the same poems.

  “Listen to the reed flute,” she began now, “How it tells a tale!” Her old blind face, swayed with the words, the beginning of The Mathnawi. “‘This noise of the reed is fire, it is not the wind.’”

  Mae yearned. “Oh, I wish I remembered all those poems!” When she saw Mrs. Tung, she could visit the best of her childhood.

  MAE THEN VISITED THE OZDEMIRS FOR A FITTING.

  The mother was called Hatijah, and her daughter was Sezen. Hatijah was a shy, slow little thing, terrified of being overcharged by Mae, and of being underserved. Hatijah’s low, old stone house was tangy with the smells of burning charcoal, sweat, dung, and the constantly stewing tea. From behind the house came a continual, agonized bleating from the family goat. It needed milking. The poor animal’s voice was going raw and harsh. Hatijah seemed not to hear it. Hatijah had four children, and a skinny shiftless husband who probably had worms. Half of the main room was heaped up with corncobs. The youngest of her babes wore only shirts and sat with their dirty naked bottoms on the corn.

  Oh, this was a filthy house. Perhaps Hatijah was a bit simple. She offered Mae roasted corn. Not with your child’s wet shit on it, thought Mae, but managed to be polite.

  The daughter, Sezen, stomped in barefoot for her fitting, wearing the dress. It was a shade of lemon yellow that seared the eyes. Sezen was a tough, raunchy brute of girl and kept rolling her eyes at everything: at her nervous mother, at Mae’s efforts to make the ye
llow dress hang properly, at anything either one of the adults said.

  “Does … will … tomorrow…” Sezen’s mother tried to begin.

  Yes, thought Mae with some bitterness, tomorrow Sezen will finally have to wash. Sezen’s bare feet were slashed with infected cuts.

  “What my mother means is,” Sezen said, “will you make up my face?” Sezen blinked, her unkempt hair making her eyes itch.

  “Yes, of course,” said Mae, curtly to a younger person who was so forward.

  “What, with all those other girls on the same day? For someone as lowly as us?”

  The girl’s eyes were angry. Mae pulled in a breath.

  “No one can make you feel inferior without you agreeing with them first,” said Mae. It was something Old Mrs. Tung had once told Mae when she herself was poor and famished for magic.

  “Take off the dress,” Mae said. “I’ll have to take it back for finishing.”

  Sezen stepped out of it, right there, naked on the dirt floor. Hatijah did not chastise her, but offered Mae tea. Because she had refused the corn, Mae had to accept the tea. At least that would be boiled.

  Hatijah scuttled off to the black kettle and her daughter leaned back in full insolence, her supposedly virgin pubes plucked as bare as the baby’s bottom.

  Mae fussed with the dress, folding it, so she would have somewhere else to look. The daughter just stared. Mae could take no more. “Do you want people to see you? Go put something on!”

  “I don’t have anything else,” said Sezen.

  Her other sisters had gone shopping in the town for graduation gifts. They would have taken all the family’s good dresses.

  “You mean you have nothing else you will deign to put on.” Mae glanced at Hatijah: she really should not be having to do this woman’s work for her. “You have other clothes, old clothes—put them on.”

  The girl stared at her with even greater insolence.

  Mae lost her temper. “I do not work for pigs. You have paid nothing so far for this dress. If you stand there like that, I will leave, now, and the dress will not be yours. Wear what you like to the graduation. Come to it naked like a whore, for all I care.”