'We here are the party of progress in our village. Ah? But there is another party. It goes around destroying the TV sets. My brave boss Mrs Chung Mae tries to teach our children, our women, our men, how to use Air when it comes, she teaches us on the TV. And the Schoolteacher prevents her! The Schoolteacher actually tries to stop us learning. He breaks the TV! That is what we face! While all of you are going to the moon!'
Sezen stood enraged, quivering, and there was not a sound in the hall. None of them had any answer to that at all.
Helpless in her own body, Mae felt back deep inside herself with her mind. Once more she reached back to some heavy, mighty, implacable thing in which she was rooted. And she felt herself there, felt this root, and it was gnarled, twisted, confounded. Two of us, she realized. There are two of us there, entwined like a ginger root. Mae was nearly at the point of understanding. Then she was called back.
'Mae?' It was Mr Wing. 'Mae? Someone is here. He wants to help you.'
The Shark in the suit, the man with the gravelly voice, was kneeling over her. His pinched face and his coiffeured hair seemed to shift inside Mae's eyes as if a membrane had descended over them. His face seemed to turn green and twist into a sardonic grimace. She saw him suddenly as the Devil.
Or someone did. And that person roused herself and rose up to her feet and saw in him everything that was destroying her world.
Mae felt her own body seized from her. She felt herself pushed away and then drift upwards like a boat no longer moored. Mae floated free of herself. Everything went dim and still and calm, and she had no fear or anger. It was suddenly clear that none of this really meant anything. She viewed it all with the detachment with which she would one day view her own death.
Mae saw her body strike the predator in the face, a tiny dogged woman hitting a City operator. She could even smile at it. It amused her. The smile was metaphoric, because she was no longer in touch with her body.
Mr Wing held her by the arms and was pulling her back. The body started to sing. It bellowed an old war song, loud and defiant, a song of war against the Communists. Sezen and Sunni stood between her and the man, who held his bruised face. They stroked Mae's hair. Distracted, wild-eyed, the face continued to sing, the old songs, the dead songs, the songs her beloved warrior had taught her fifty years before.
Old Mrs Tung was fighting to live. The only life she had was Mae's.
CHAPTER 14
Mae woke up in a strange bed.
The walls were pale blue with white cornices. Sitting patiently at the foot of her bed was a man. His face was familiar.
It was Mr Tunch. The name meant 'Bronze.' He seemed to be made of something burnished. He was wearing a different suit, zigzag black on beige. Like the other one, it was shiny.
'Good morning,' he said pleasantly.
Mae sat up. The hotel room had flowers, a TV and a chest of drawers made of polished red wood.
'Where are my friends?' asked Mae.
'They have gone home. You have been somewhere else for many days.'
'What do you mean, "somewhere else?" '
'Ah.' He shrugged. 'Mrs Tung has been here instead.'
'For what? Days? Days?
Mr Tunch nodded. He tried to look sorry, but instead looked rather excited.
Mae was prickled with terror. 'How did I come back?' It was the most urgent thing to know.
'She wandered off,' said Mr Tunch. 'Or rather, she simply could not understand what she was doing here. She couldn't remember where she was, so she kept trying to leave. And finally she did.'
He chuckled. 'She got very frustrated.'
Mae murmured, 'They do.'
After Mae's father was killed, her family moved, along with the bloodstained diwan cushions, to the house of the Iron Aunt, Wang Cro. At first Mae did not understand what was wrong or why the adults whispered. The Iron Aunt was nearly eighty and strong enough to move oil jars, but she always thought it was Thursday, cooked dinner at nine in the morning, and could not remember that Mae was not her mother. The children could tease her into a fury.
Mr Tunch explained: 'Your friends thought it was best if we did what we could here.'
'Yes. Yes, I can see that,' murmured Mae. Yes, I can see you now, in your Bronze suit playing the big man. You even soothed Sezen into leaving me.
'Can you do anything?' Mae demanded.
Mr Tunch leaned towards her and put a hand on her shoulder and made a slight gesture of helplessness. 'We need to know more.'
'You can't help.' In some ways, Mae was relieved.
Mr Tunch smiled. 'Not yet.'
'In that case,' said Mae, 'I want to go home. I have business to do.'
'What business?' chuckled Mr Tunch, with something too much like scorn. 'Look. There is nowhere else in Karzistan that has as much knowledge about the Air Formats as my company. We are experts in Human-Computer Interface Medicine. Do you know what that is?'
With a sudden chill, Mae knew. 'You put cameras in Airheads' eyes.'
Tunch blinked. Gotcha, thought Mae. I don't like you.
He recovered. 'Right now we are far more concerned about the damage the Test did. We are very concerned about the Format that was used in that Test, and we are horrified at what happened to you. Mrs Chung, we all have business interests, but your health is more important. Forgive me, but you did not do much business these last three days.'
You oil your words like Dr Bauschu, thought Mae. You do everything for reasons of your own. But perhaps, just perhaps, I need you.
Mae was driven to Yeshiboz Sistemlar along a new empty road.
Suddenly there was a wire mesh fence, with what looked like a white airport hangar beyond. Mae noted that it was built just outside the jurisdiction of the city.
Gates were raised and lowered. Bright young people, the brightest Mae had yet seen in Yeshibozkent, looked as scrubbed as the painted metal walls of the hangar and somehow just as cheap. They performed the function of people without the solidity or the beauty. They would age badly.
Mr Bronze was king. Inside the front lobby, girls smiled and, modern as they were, dipped their heads in traditional respect.
'This is Madam Chung Mae. Our patient,' he said to a woman at the first desk, with a quick grin.
No covered heads here. No broad straw hats with the rims white from dried sweat. The people looked as though they had come from Florida. Disney World, thought Mae. I bet the offices at Disney World look just like this.
'You'll excuse me, Mrs Chung. Like you, I have business to attend to. But Madam Akurgal will take excellent care of you.'
Madam Akurgal was not yet thirty and dressed like a nurse with a rubber tube around her neck. She kept calling Mae by her first name, as if she were a servant.
'Just come through here, Mae. We need to disinfect you,' she said, with a winning smile and a TV-Talent accent that came from nowhere specific. She led Mae into a corridor and there was a blast of air, and a sound like vacuum cleaners, and purple lights that made the white nurse's uniform glow white.
She sat Mae in a chair and told her to relax and lowered a kind of metal hat on her head. Mae waited for a sensation. None came. They sucked blood from her arm. Like at the hairdresser's, Mae was given a magazine to read.
Doctors looked at paper being printed and shook their heads and called each other over to look. They ignored both Mae and the nurse. Finally one of them tore off a sheet of the paper and showed it to Mae.
He was a Chinese gentleman, one of her own, probably a Buddhist, and she hoped for understanding. 'We have found nothing,' he said, beaming, pointing.
The paper was printed with jagged lines.
'So Mrs Tung is not here.' He jabbed a finger at the paper. 'Everything is working as usual. Except see, here, this line covers activity in the area of the cortex we think corresponds to communication with Air. We think you are constantly checking for Airmail.'