Air

by Geoff Ryman

“Yes,” he said fiercely, proudly thinking: See how businesslike I am? Her heart sank for him.

  “So. I ask again. What is the interest rate?”

  “Two percent,” he said, with a diagonal jerk of the head that seemed to say: See how unfounded were your fears?

  “A month?” she asked.

  He blinked at her. Poor Joe.

  “That means that in a year’s time, we not only have to pay him back the hundred, but also find a further twenty-four riels.” A quarter of a year’s income. “And that is only if he does not compound it monthly.”

  She let the roll of notes fall like leaves onto the table. “There is your money, Joe. I suggest that you do not spend one riel of it. It will be hard enough for us to find the extra twenty-four.”

  She turned and began to cook supper: the blackened pot, the single electric ring. She looked at him, and he was looking at the money. “Make no mistake, Joe. I will not work for Mr. Haseem.” Her voice was cool with promise. She cooked. Joe drank.

  Come, darkness; come, three A.M., she prayed.

  IN THE COURTYARD OF THE WING’S GREAT HOUSE, KWAN HAD AN AIR OF SOMEONE CLEANING UP AFTER THE PARTY, COLLECTING CIGARETTE BUTTS.

  “Kung fu?” Mae asked ruefully.

  “Oh!” sighed Kwan.

  “You begin to regret your generosity?” said Mae.

  “I begin to regret that people do not get bored!” said Kwan, and slumped on a chair.

  “I know. I know,” said Mae, her eyes going hard like boiled eggs in agreement. “I am bored.”

  Kwan looked around, questioning.

  “Is there anything on that thing other than fashion and kung fu? Junk for women, junk for men?”

  “Ask it,” said Kwan

  “But ask it for what?”

  “Ah,” said Kwan, “that is the question. When you are an ignorant peasant, you do not even know what to ask.”

  Mae’s mind danced in the Format like a moth around an electric light.

  “Search,” she told the television.

  The TV replied. “Please tell me which word or keywords.”

  “Eloi,” Mae said. The name of Kwan’s national minority. Kwan sat up, with a sharp intake of breath.

  “Ah. That does not bore you.” Tonight, thought Mae, I am as sharp as a knife.

  The TV asked, “What aspect of the Eloi interests you?”

  Kwan intervened. “History. Politics.”

  The TV whirred to itself.

  The TV said, “We have found sixteen listings whose main subject is the history or politics of the Eloi minority.”

  Kwan’s face softened. “I thought there would be nothing.”

  “Fourteen of these listings are held in our professional or academic files. If you are a professional or academic subscriber, say ‘Yes.’ Say ‘No’ if you are not a subscriber.”

  To get the good listings you had to pay. To pay you had to have something called a Clever Card which established that you were Believable.

  Kwan said that she was a director of Swallow Communications.

  “We’re sorry. Your account covers a range of popular entertainment and documentary options, but full text searches must be paid for by corporate subscription. Please say ‘Yes’ if you want to subscribe, and have your Clever Card ready.…”

  Mae asked, “What’s a Clever Card?”

  Kwan looked worn. “You have to go to the bank. You have to have a passport. You have to have money. More than we have.”

  “But you pay! The government pays.”

  Kwan sighed. “Not enough for that. We’ll have the two free listings.”

  The first offering was the official Karzistani government files. It gave a picture of a happy, modern people. A model spun around in traditional garb.

  “Fashion!” exclaimed Mae, and began to laugh.

  The model was a Balshang beauty, all Beijing-styled angular elegance, face composted with layers of paint and powder. Mae suddenly thought she had never seen anything as funny.

  “Traditional … Eloi … woman!” Mae gasped for breath. “Fresh from mucking out stable and making shitcakes for the fire.”

  Kwan stood still and icy.

  There was a government video of a modern-day Eloi, relocated to Balshang apartments. The woman was plainly of Eloi stock, but was drab in a loose white shirt, blue trousers, and an awkward headscarf to appease the city’s Muslims. She proudly showed her new toilet, her new icebox.

  Mae could not help but laugh again. The boldness of it! Not one mountain, not one pony, not one terraced field, not one dirty hungry child. Not one destroyed Buddhist temple. Oh, everything was modern about the Eloi.

  “Hmm,” said Mae. “They call it ‘information.’ That does not make it true.”

  Kwan paused for a moment, then suddenly looked around. “Do you have a lover?” she asked.

  Mae’s heart stopped. “How do you mean?”

  “When a woman gets bold and heedless, as if she had gone through a door, when she gets harder, cynical, and brighter … well…”

  And Mae knew something, too: “Do you have a lover, then?” Mae thought of the beautiful Kwan and her older husband.

  “Long ago,” said Kwan, and tapped the screen to select the next article.

  “Who?” asked Mae, edging forward.

  Kwan looked back. “Who is yours?” she asked.

  “Yours was long ago and does not matter. The past is dead.”

  The next free offering was in German, from a museum. It was about some show or exhibition in Berlin that was long since closed. Kwan scrolled down a menu, hoping to find something else. “He was an Eloi shepherd, high in the hills,” she said.

  Mae was fascinated. “Oh! Was he beautiful?”

  Eloi men could be beautiful, like their women. Some of them had tattoos like stockings on their bare smooth legs, and bracelets, and wild stallion-manes of hair.

  “He was to me,” said Kwan. She looked old under the harsh yellow light; old, but in a good way—handsome, lined, smiling with endurance. “He was blind in one eye.”

  “What happened?”

  “The usual things,” said Kwan, amused, with a bit of a swagger.

  “No. I mean, the end.”

  Kwan’s endurance was even more rocklike. “He said I was too Chinese.” She shrugged. “He was right. I stayed with Wing.” She sighed with concern. “Be careful, Mae.”

  “Oh, I have been careful all my life! Do not tell me to be careful.”

  “It’s not Sunni’s-man is it?”

  “Ah!” squawked Mae, and pretended to spit.

  “I had to ask, chasing a man with knives. It could mean…”

  “It meant I really wanted to kill him! That bastard! He wants to take everything.”

  “Everyone laughed,” said Kwan.

  “Did they? It was not funny at the time, I tell you—old Sunni’s-man knew I was mad, and he went running.”

  Kwan started talking like a Talent. “Our fashion expert, all delicate femininity, the sweetness of flowers, the wistfulness of morning mist, the gentleness of the butterfly.” Kwan shook her head. “Chasing the headman with cleavers!”

  Mae suddenly understood. It was funny. “This year, all village fashion experts will wear an adornment of knives. We see Kizuldah beauty Mrs. Chung in a necklace of real murder weapons used on friends of drunken husband. Note the subtle arrangement of cleavers about the shoulders.”

  Kwan smirked in mild amusement and then said, “So who is he?”

  “Mine is not yet in the past,” said Mae.

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Kwan. She thought she had guessed who it was.

  Mae gave her a slap on the back of the arm. “You be careful. You know nothing.”

  “I am saying nothing,” replied Kwan.

  The voice droned on in a language they could not speak. The advertisement showed rare photographs of the Eloi. They looked as if they had been taken one hundred years before. They were as alien to modern-day Eloi as the propaganda video had been.
Alien faces stained with dirt, with tense lines of muscle around the chin and cheeks. They wore headdresses and boots that were wrappings of animal hides. These worn people stared accusingly out of the screen, from the past.

  “Oh, Allah be praised,” said Mae shaking her head, feeling disappointment for Kwan’s sake.

  “There is nothing in between,” said Kwan, her head shaking quickly from side to side. “We are either like angels descending at the end of an old pageant, all costume, or we are refrigerators for the Karz.”

  Their choices came to an end. That was it. Kwan was hard-faced.

  “Save,” she said. “Print.”

  The TV buzzed as if it were sewing something. A tongue of paper began to emerge. Mae saw letters stick out, and then the top of an Eloi head.

  “It prints?” she said, almost in despair.

  Kwan nodded. “In the West, children make screens for this thing. They do all their business on it. You can even make movies for Aircasting on this thing. That knob on top is camera. In America, children make Air music out of their own heads and then share it. They call it ‘Ko-lab Oh.’”

  “We are so far behind,” said Mae.

  “We live in a different world,” said Kwan. “Sometimes I think we can never catch up. Now, with Air, they will be ready, and we will not be. We will be like children wandering around, lost.”

  Kwan pulled out her sheet of paper. It was all laid out with information about her people that she had not written. Suddenly, she snapped to. “I’m going to bed,” she announced. “You be good.”

  Finally Mae was left alone with the screen.

  “Money,” she asked it.

  There were offerings of books she could buy or courses she could pay to take. There was a course in “How to Have a Bank Account,” offered by the Balshang Older Citizen’s Institute. Someone in a place called Mi Wok Ee was offering loans. The text came up and the TV read it for her, but much of it made no sense.

  Suddenly there was an avalanche: loans, courses, “HOW TO GET RICH QUICK!” Many windows all at once on the screen, all babbling. One window on top of another, cutting off the other voice before it had finished.

  “Stop.” said Mae. Nothing happened.

  Say yes if you want to ring this telephone number to have personal, on-TV counseling on making money. Please have your Clever Card or Believability Card ready. Calls cost two dollars a minute. Buy this book; join this bank. Just say yes.

  “No, no, no, no,” Mae kept saying.

  They crowded round like wasps on shit. One little window sliding on top of another one, a little babbling voice talking over the last.

  “Stop!”

  “Temporarily overloaded,” replied the TV, and suddenly went dark.

  One little voice spoke from the darkness. “Thank you for using our Helpful Librarian tool. From time to time searches on this free service will result in paid-for responses arriving according to your interest.”

  In the silence Mae felt her heart thumping. That was it? That was the great online world, the Net that Mr. Wing had talked so long and hard about, that he had yearned for, fought for?

  No wonder. No wonder they wanted to replace it.

  Mae’s eyes swelled with disappointment and anger. What use was it to them, this thing? It was just a way to sell them things, to take money from poor people. What use was it if you had no money, no banks, no way to get Clever Cards or Believability?

  Maybe Shen was right. All it did was show us worlds we could never join. We just sit and watch and get soft and fat and bored and talk about Singapore fashion as if we could ever take part. We push our noses against the window and watch other people eat.

  “Off,” said Mae. And the TV went as still and ominous as black thunderclouds.

  So what was she to do now? Mae plunged her fingers into her hair. Her hair was greasy and needed washing. She had missed a fashion season; she had to find an extra twenty-four riels for the loan.

  So what did she have? Make a list, Mae. She listed “house,” “three rice terraces.” No orders for dresses?

  She had Mrs. Tung’s memories.

  She had sickness, debts, and an idle husband. His hardworking brother. His aging father. She had her own interfering brother, and her overwhelmed mother. If she went to them for help, they would try to take over.

  She had Kwan’s offer. Would it be so bad, owing Kwan money?

  She had Air. She had been inside Air deeper than anyone else. So, what was in Air?

  All right. She closed her eyes and tried to find her way back in. “Air,” she said. Nothing happened. She tried to think her way back to the courtyard. She remembered it, but could not see it.

  She did begin to discern something, dimly—an extra weight in her head like a load to be carried. She felt it and tried to describe it to herself. Unlike a headache, it didn’t disappear when described. Instead it focused.

  If anything Air felt like a turnip. In the rice sometimes a tuber grew. You would pull on what you thought was a weed, but it wouldn’t budge, so you would reach deep down into the mud, and follow the root to pull it free. And there, numb, dumb, but salvageable, there would be something you could use.

  You just had to haul it out.

  Mae seemed to trace this root with her mind, deeper and deeper, but it was held fast, mired. It would not move. It was as if it were rooted by an entire planet rather than its blanket of earth.

  And then Mae remembered something. She had an address, and the address was her name.

  “Mae, Mae, Mae, Mae, Mae, Mae…”

  She felt a gentle settling. It was as if she were dust or feathers, in the air during cleaning day. She seemed to swirl in the sunlight like stars, and then to fall gently down.

  She settled gently, slowly into place. It was rather calming. She felt a wide smile spread across her face. The loan, the money, the house, her husband, Mr. Haseem—all seemed to fall back, up, away into a world that was full of light and dust and settling.

  It was as if she were finally, finally going to her bed after a long day in the fields, when your shoulders are sore and knees are full of needles. You settle not so much onto the bed as into yourself.

  More and more of Mae fell into place. Gradually, enough of her came together to look up and around.

  Mae seemed to stand in the courtyard.

  “Welcome,” a voice said. “You don’t have any Airmail messages.”

  The stones were blue as if in moonlight. They were made of dust, too. Mae could waft up to and then through them. They were just pictures as on a screen. Did the TV make images out of dust?

  She asked for “Info.”

  Air spoke to her, in the voice and accent of her people. “Right now we have nothing new. We just have some things to show how Air works. You can have a look at some of those.”

  The voice was like her own. This is me talking.

  “Okay. I want to find out about making money.”

  “Okay, but this is the first time you’ve done this. A lot of things we have here are like movies. They are very familiar because they are made to work like movies. This won’t be like that. This will be like you grew someone else in your head. This will be like you become someone different. If you don’t like it, just say your address.”

  “Okay,” said Mae. “Oh. No. Wait. Does this need my address to work?”

  “Airmail and all services but Air movies need your address to work.”

  “Am I the only one in the village with an address?”

  There was a buzzing. For the first time Mae felt that her brain was made of something. She could feel the ends of it sparkle and fizz, like it was the edge of a tapestry before the ends were tied.

  Air said, “Old Mrs. Tung is the only other person with an address. Do you still feel like accessing our Money Expert?”

  Somewhere else, where she was huge like the moon, Mae nodded her head—yes. That was enough for Air.

  This courtyard, Mae thought. It is my own courtyard.

  Somet
hing she could not turn into a voice came at her. It was dim, like talking on her mobile when there was a bad connection. There were no words but she somehow understood. That understanding suddenly ballooned out.

  Yes, they want to help poor people and they want to demonstrate this thing, so they needed me.

  It was as if she had another Mrs. Tung.

  It was not quite a whole person. It rattled too quickly and seemed to go a bit in circles. It was a part of person, an attitude to something. It was a thousand things that person knew, matted together like a rug.

  So of course I said yes. Money—what do you want to know?

  Mae could almost see it, a tiny little overcoming spirit so sure of itself, so amused, and so in love with money and business and investments and trust funds. Trust funds? Suddenly sure, secure, and certain, Mae had knowledge of trust funds. It was not book-learning. It was knowledge like riding a bicycle or how to walk across the spring floodplain by stepping on the tufts of reed.

  The banks hold your money and pay you so that they can use it …

  Stop! Stop! I want to sell people something new.

  Well, then, you better find out what they want. One way is to do a “Koeh so tong ah.” A Question Map.

  Mae saw one, all lines of writing on paper, in English. Someone else’s memories.

  You find people who are like the people you want to know about. Normally that’s so tough you need scientists to help you, but in this case you can actually ask all the people. That’s a one hundred percent sample. Just make sure you really have got them all.

  May saw a series of black balls in a column. This was a list, a way of remembering, called “Dos and Don’ts.” She saw a name, too, and knew it was the name of the person in her head, and she caught a word.

  This was Kru. Kru in her own language meant “a great teacher.” This was a Kru word for something she couldn’t pronounce but which got turned into “Mat Unrolling” in Karzistani. “Mat Unrolling” is what a trader did in the square; they unrolled a mat, laid out their radishes. Mae liked that. It sounded real.

  Don’t ask leading questions, and that means, a question that puts an idea into people’s heads that they might not have had. Don’t ask questions that can be answered yes or no. Ask the same question two or three times in different ways to see if you get the same answers …