Air (or Have Not Have)

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 Air-casting on this thing. That knob on top is a 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 counselling on making money.