A young person was crowded close to her with concern. Mae did not know who she was at first. 'Are you all right?' Sezen asked, an arm on hers.
'Hmm,' said Mae, not quite saying yes. 'I was sleeping.'
'You were singing,' corrected Sunni, her eyes hidden in the sunglasses. 'In another language.'
They roared down into Green Valley City.
Yeshibozkent was flung like a soiled handkerchief onto the lie of the land. There was much new building now on the outskirts. Raw concrete in irregular frames held panels of barely mortared brick. They would fall in the next earthquake. The air was blue and grey. They were lowered into it, and heat enveloped them like a blanket, smelling of old automobiles.
Dust and fumes and Toyota jeeps that would not stay in their lanes, and old women that walked right out onto the road.
Mr Oz did not slow down, but beeped frantically, continually, forcing people to jump back, or taxis to veer out of his way. Mr Wing chuckled at his driving courage. 'I always wondered how you people got through so fast,' he said.
The city people in sharp clothes walked unconcerned as the van seared the air, passing them by inches. A light turned red and the van lurched to a halt. Pedestrians poured across the intersection.
Sezen laughed, suddenly raucous, and pointed. 'What is that?'
A young man walked in front of the windscreen. He wore soiled, fruit-bowl colours and long braided hair, died blond streaks amid his natural black. Some sort of glasses marred his face, like an eye test or camera lenses. He turned almost blind and looked inside the van. Light flicked, inside the lenses, inside his eyes. His skinny, starveling face bared fangs at them. His teeth were bright yellow like a row of embers.
Sezen rolled down the window. She leaned out and yelled at him, 'What are you?'
Sunni seemed to melt with shame beside Mae.
He yelled back, answering another agenda: 'I just took your photograph.' He staggered slightly, for no reason. 'Dih zee toh el.'
Mr Oz spoke: 'He's an Ay oh het.'
Mr Wing jerked with a superior grin. 'Or he thinks he is.'
The man still yelled at them. 'It is a photograph of peasants!' The smile was nasty. 'You are all dead!'
'It means Airhead,' continued Mr Oz. 'He can't be an Airhead – the Air has not come here yet – but he has read about it in some magazine.'
'You are a fool,' Sezen shouted back, laughing at him. 'The Air is not here yet.'
'My eyes are cameras!' he shouted, as the van pulled away.
Sezen was agog with both scorn and excitement. 'Did you see what he was wearing! What did he have on his eyes?'
'A computer,' said Mr Oz. 'Part of it is embedded in his head.'
The two older women hissed in pain.
'No wonder he was such a mess,' said Sunni, shaking her head.
'Yah, but imagine if it was someone handsome and clever and not a fool,' said Sezen.
'Imagine clean streets,' said Mae. The town was richer, but that just generated drifts of crushed tin and old papers in the gutters.
'Yeshibozkent? Clean?' Sezen was scornful. 'We still think garbage rots. We will never be clean.'
'We are a very clean people,' said Sunni, in outrage. 'There are only two dirty families in our village!' One of them was Sezen's.
Sezen just laughed. 'To someone from the West, we all look like pigs.'
The van beeped furiously. A donkey had suddenly swerved from the side of the road into its path. The van screeched and slid helplessly, shifting sideways as the wheels locked. The van slammed into the animal.
Mae could feel the donkey's ribs, its fur, the knobby knees, all communicated through the front of the truck.
'Oh!'
Mr Wing jumped out. The animal, dazed, kicked itself back up onto its feet and blinked.
'Who owns this animal?' Mr Wing demanded of the street. Plump ladies in shiny purple pantsuits looked mildly surprised.
Sezen was helpless with laughter. 'Does it have cameras for eyes, too? Airhead donkey?'
Mae was not sure why Sezen found it so funny.
No one answered. No one claimed the donkey. It twitched its ears and wandered off as if nothing were wrong. Perhaps, like them, it was dead and didn't know.
The main market square no longer had a public-address system.
The familiar sound of town-coming had been silenced. The smells were the same; vegetables in sunlight laced with city drains. The gabble of trading seemed strangely muted and the square curiously spacious.
'There aren't the people,' said Sunni, mystified.
Mae looked around. 'It is a Saturday. Where are they all?'
'At the hypermarket,' said Sezen, sniffing, collecting her volumes of lime-yellow cloth.
'What's that?'
'The big new store, outside town. "Just-in-Time Rescue.'''
The name alone made Sunni and Mae chuckle as they stepped out of the van, braving public view and the eyes that dismissed them as peasants.
'It sounds like a newspaper headline…'
'A cheap romance…'
Sezen was not to have her modernity fazed. She shrugged and managed to step down from the van like a princess.
Sezen belonged.
'They call it that because they know everything that is bought, and can predict exactly what is needed. They sell out every day.
'So does a good trader here,' sniffed Sunni.
Perhaps no longer. There were grannies, some middle-aged women, some potbellied men come to sit on folding deck-chairs and chat with friends who stayed by their unrolled mats. There were few customers to distract them from their open tins of beers. Mae felt disappointment. She had always loved stepping out into the market, the heart of the town.
No fires or spangled trucks, no drunken Cossacks dancing.
Around the square a forest of bright new plastic signs danced, opening and closing like flowers.
Akai. Sony. Yeshiboz Sistemlar…
A far cry from the dingy restaurants, the boys running with trays bearing glasses of tea.
You are dead, the Airhead said.
'Right, what is the plan?' Sunni asked.
'Mr Oz and I will go to the bank…' began Mae.
'Me too,' said Sezen, and the hunger in her eyes said: I want to learn about money.
Sunni adjusted her sunglasses. 'I have some errands.' Fashion work she did not want Mae to know about.
Fair enough, thought Mae.
Mae suggested, 'Shall we meet by the van at, oh, two hours from now? For lunch?'
'That will be lovely!' exclaimed Sunni. 'We can go to the temple gardens.'
'Ugh,' said Sezen.
Mr Oz intervened. 'We don't have time, if we are to get to the congress. I'll just order lunch now.'
He keyed in the address of Just-in-Time Rescue.
The Central Man escorted Mae to the bank.
They were welcomed with great politesse. Mae had expected to feel uncomfortable, but found herself immune to feeling inferior. She found that money made her as good as anyone else.
They sipped tea in the Director's office, and he was friendly and polite in white shirt and tie. He was full-blooded Karz, big, with hairy arms and a moustache like a trimmed broom and he had a full-blooded Karz name: Mr Saatchi Saatchi.
I am here, thought Mae. I am where I always wanted to be. I am a businesswoman, modern, respected. Sezen sat clenched like a fist with admiration. Mae felt her eyes swell. Don't cry, she warned herself.
'Madam Chung will need a cellular account. She will be doing business with you always through mobile services.'
'We have had such facilities for over ten years, so it is good to see them in more general use,' the Director said, determined the government should know how advanced they were. Mr Oz had enough wisdom to nod approval.
'Under the terms, you will notice that Madam Chung has the full backing of the TW Initiative, with extendable credit. If she verifies any overdrafts are for the Initiative-sponsored business, then the government will made good any losses.' Mr Oz paused. 'The credit is therefore to be extended when she asks.'