Air (or Have Not Have)

'The government has found our Eloi site,' said Kwan.

Mr Haseem looked unmoved. That was their problem, raising stuff like that. Sunni looked alert, and watchful.

Mae spoke: 'I need to copy my business site onto your machine.'

'Tuh!' said Haseem. 'After all that has passed between us?' His heavy face assumed its most natural expression of scorn.

And Sunni? Her eyes met Mae's and something passed between them. Sunni turned to her husband and shrugged. 'It will cost us nothing. And Mae told us about the wire charges and saved us much money. It is a simple favour to return.'

'I don't want trouble with the government,' grunted Haseem.

'Have you seen Mae's screens? She has a link to one government office, and another government office, and there is a part on it in which Mae sings gratitude to the government. Having such a site on our machine will be protection against the government.'

Mae and Sunni exchanged a long look: Now you are repaid, Sunni seemed to say.

Mae pressed her advantage. 'Your server is running, but my machine needs permission to download.'

Sunni nodded once. 'Who sent you the message?'

'Someone who masters privacy. Either Mr Oz or my friend Mr Tunch.'

'We better move, Mr Haseem, Sunni-ma'am,' said Mr Wing.

Mr Haseem's leaden face looked up at him, appraising, challenging, but not triumphing. 'What will happen to you?' he asked Wing. Haseem regarded himself as a man, and men were serious. The villagers were seriously against the government, as they were against blight on crops.

Wing's eyes brows flickered and he gave a brief, buccaneer's smile. 'Inshallah,' he said. Men were also brave.

'Many thanks, Sunni-ma'am,' said Mae.

Kwan spoke: 'We'd better leave. We have enemies who might say they saw us conspiring.'

Later, Kwan's TV spoke: 'Permission extended. Uploading begins.'

They waited, listening to the very faint sounds of moving heads inside the machine. The wind and the future whispered in shadow.

Kwan was calm. 'I could move into the hills. Go visit Suloi's relatives until all this is past.' She turned to Mr Wing and smiled. 'You could say I became a wild woman and left you.'

Mr Wing shrugged. 'You are allowed three books in prison,' he said. 'The Koran, the Buddhist texts, and the Mathnawi of the Mevlana. I have been saving myself for them. I will do a comparison of all three and learn thereby the truth.'

'They are long enough for a life sentence,' said Kwan, with grim humour.

'Then I hope my life will be long enough,' said Wing. 'I would prefer a life sentence to death.'

'Swear,' said Mae, suddenly swept up in superstition. 'Swear now that if you are not sent to prison, you will begin to read them now anyway.'

'I would swear to do that, Mae,' chuckled Wing, 'if I thought it would do any good.'

Mae felt a gathering in her mind as if a tree had sent down roots into it, and then bloomed. She had an idea.

She asked the television, 'Can you do the same thing as that message? Arrive and then disappear?'

There was a whisper inside. 'Huh?' the TV replied. A technical term, meaning it did not understand the request.

Mr Wing shook his head. 'They would be able to see through such doctoring, Mae.'

'What I want to do is send the whole site to Bugsy and get her to host it. That way it stays up, but off your machine. So we can wipe it, yes?'

'Thank you,' said Kwan. 'But Bugsy does business with you. That will get you into trouble. And Mae, you do not have the encryption code, so that is that.'

Mae kept on: 'Look, at least wipe the site! Maybe it will be enough for them if you take the site down.'

Mr Wing started to rub her back. 'Mae, Mae.'

'I would only put it back up, after they left,' said Kwan. 'The world has to know about the Eloi.'

'So, you've had the site up and now the world does know!'

'Not enough of them.'

Mr Wing was smiling with quiet pride. 'Mae, Kwan will never give up fighting. She will never rest until justice is done.

'Why must it be you who fights?'

Wing's smile extended slightly. 'Because we cannot let the goons who run this country stop us telling the truth. What are we supposed to do? Run and hide and say, 'Oh, wondrous masters, we owe you so much for letting us live and battle the land for grain which you take from us as tax'?'

Mae had never heard such talk. She recognized the constriction around her chest for what it was: fear. This was genuinely dangerous talk.

'They are destroying an entire people, only because their own ancestors failed to conquer them. The Eloi show it is a lie to say that this country can be called Karzistan, that it is a Muslim country of Turkic peoples. So they try to make the Eloi disappear.'

Mae felt a little bit sick. She thought she was brave, but she did not have that kind of courage. To face the men who controlled the torturers, the lists, the surveillance, and say: I am going to do the very thing you say I must not do.

And yet they were right. How were things to get better if no one fought?

She looked at Mr Wing and thought: this man could become a terrorist. If there were more of him, my son Lung might be sent to fight him. They might kill each other through a screen of dust and smoke.

And Mae felt a dull buzz inside the core of her head. The echoing. All this had triggered another attack. 'It's coming on again,' said Mae.

'The old lady feels the same way?' he said, still looking amused.

'She has strong memories of the war…'

Mae took a grip.

She began to chant to herself things Mrs Tung would never believe: Thank heavens for the machines, they give us an ear of the world and then save us from our masters…

Something in her head opened up, a bit like a flower, a bit like a radio tuning.

If this is starting up again, you must hide! If you fight them directly, they send in their soldiers!

And Mae told it: The government will change itself; its very soul will be blown by the Air…

They come and cart you off in the middle of the night, or pay the neighbours to turn on you!

We will be a world of people beyond governing…

Both sides end up eating their dead.

The rice wine when it came was as transparent as water, but it burned. They sipped in silence. Mae could think of nothing to say.

From the television came a sound like a rooster, faint and faraway.

'Mae,' said Kwan. 'Something's coming up on the screen.'

Words on the screen read, EMAIL/VIDEOMAIL: NO SENDER.

There was an Egyptian dance of hieroglyphs which suddenly resolved into letters and words and sideways V signs.

'That's computer code,' said Kwan.

Mae sat forward. She knew what it was. Someone had sent her the encryption code. She told the machine to save it, use it, and kept talking to send a message.

'Audio file to bugsy@nouvelles. Bugsy, sorry to arrive in this way, but this is no laughing matter. Clipped to this message is an entire site. It is very political, very dangerous, about the Eloi people. The world must know what is