Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

Mr Shen's answer was simply to walk to the TV with his rifle-butt raised to smash it.

The sky ripped open. Guns had always sounded like firecrackers to Mae, a pop, and a snap. She had always been surprised by how small they seemed.

Now, trapped within the courtyard, the sound of a gunblast battered around the enclosed space. Mae jumped, covered her ears. Please, God, no one has been hurt. She looked up. The guns were pointed at the sky. From all around the village, birdcalls billowed up into the air: screeching, shrieking, and cawing.

Everything in the courtyard was frozen. No one moved.

Mae said, 'At least that got the birds off the rice.' It was the first thing she thought.

Mr Doh, Mr Ali, and Mr Mack burst into laughter.

'It's true,' said Mae, confused. Mr Mack nodded – yes it was.

Shen stood trembling, rifle still raised.

Mr Wing warned him: 'Don't be a vandal, Shen. The government man is here to see it, you will end up in court, and it will not be because anyone betrayed you to them. Eh? Don't be foolish.'

Shen was pointing. It was hard to tell if he pointed at Wing or Kwan. 'You… stay… away from my wife!' he demanded.

All the laughter stopped. What?

Wing looked perplexed. 'What madness now, Schoolteacher?'

Silence. From the western reaches of the village came the roaring of a motorcycle.

Kwan stepped out from her diwan, onto the landing. 'He means me,' she said. 'Suloi and I are working together on a project.'

Mae felt a stirring of misgiving. Kwan and Shen's wife? When? What were they doing?

There is something my friend Kwan has chosen not to tell me.

The roar of the motorcycle grew louder. Sezen's boyfriend came through the open gate, on his cycle, Sezen riding behind. Another Bad Boy from the Desiccated Village Kurulmushkoy followed, his machine black with grease. Sezen's boyfriend hopped off, pudgy and carrying a length of pipe.

Sezen's boyfriend said, 'The machine stays.'

Shen was helpless. He looked to the old men of his party. 'You see the elements who will triumph from this thing.' Shen started to weep. 'Look at them! They think this is a Hong Kong movie. Guns and motorcycles! This is how the world will now be. With women running rampant with foolish ideas. Bad children, running wild.'

A division seemed to break inside Mae's head, as if blood had found a fresh way to flow. She suddenly remembered the angry driven child within Teacher Shen. She saw him as a little soul, to be protected. Her eyes blurred over as if milk were inside them, and her throat felt gnarled, rumbly.

'It has always been thus,' Mae heard herself say, as if she were sitting back and listening to someone else.

The voice from inside her spoke. 'There has always been one big change after another. But we always think our first world was permanent. Shen, my little bright boy. Your world came just after the Russians drove out the Chinese. Before you were born, the Eloi were fighting a war against the Chinese. Guerrillas would take over our houses. Our husbands were shot as rebels for sheltering them. We had to give our grain to the Red Guards. Before that it was the village strongman. There is no old way to go back to, Shen. My brightest little boy, are you still too young to see that?'

Shen was looking at a ghost. The tears seemed to have frozen on his face, going creamy with salt in the sunlight.

Mae began to feel giddy, divorced from her own body. Her fingers were numb. 'You cannot bring back the old world. Which old world do you want?'

The Central Man was staring at her. Mack, Doh, they all looked at their shoes.

Mae's forehead was covered in thick sweat. The corner of her vision went dark and gritty. 'I have to sit down,' she said, and fainted.

Mae woke up in Kwan's guest room, lined with cushions.

Grim-faced, Kwan was mopping her brow.

'We saved the TV,' she said.

There was business at hand. Mae responded: 'We had Sunni's people on our side.'

Kwan nodded briskly. 'I fight against my brother, until my cousin attacks him.'

'The Central Man frightened them.'

'Everything frightens them,' said Kwan, with real scorn. 'I never had any respect for Teachers.'

Mae chuckled. 'You hid it well at school.'

Kwan shrugged. 'They held the keys.'

'What are you and Mrs Shen up to?'

Kwan paused, worked her mouth. 'I should have told you,' she said.

Mae was ready. Info Lust. It made people hide things.

Kwan sighed. 'Suloi and I have put screens on the Net.'

Mae didn't know what she meant.

'We put screens about our people. On TV.'

Mae sat up in wonder.

'You did what?'

Kwan stared back at her, a little bleary with guilt, a little obstreperous: What business was it of Mae's? 'You sit up, you're well enough now to see,' she said. She stood up, not waiting for Mae to follow.

Mae walked through the shuttered room, following Kwan out into the porch. The TV had been moved up from the courtyard to the landing. Something had scratched its side. Below on the courtyard stones a dark stain sweltered. Blood? Grease?

Kwan's fingers danced on a keyboard. Words in English rattled on the screen.

'Audio. Karz output, Eloic input,' Kwan ordered. 'Volume down.'

Then she gave orders in the language of her people. Her language flapped and cawed like a raven and seemed to make Kwan into a different person, less considered, more urgent.

Up came a photograph of Eloi embroidery.

The television murmured as if it had a secret. 'The Eloi people are an ancient race, now living in the mountainous region of Karzistan. Karzistan is on the borders of China, Tibet, and Khazakstan. These screens have been created by the Eloi people themselves.'

The screens offered 'Arts.' Under 'Arts,' Suloi and Kwan sang in high straining voices. In video, they told old stories, while English words danced around them. There were screens of tattoo patterns. Kwan's patient voice explained their meaning. Mae recognized the neatness and complexity of the tattoo outlines. Kwan had drawn them. The patterns, like Kwan, were restrained and somehow private.

Next, the meaning of the embroidered Eloi breastplates was explained. These collars were worn by courting men and their betrothed. Note, the television said, that the beads all form straight parallel lines symbolizing two lives in conjunction.

Photographs of the old forts, tales of Eloi heroes against the Cossacks, the Turks, and the Chinese. A history of war.

A section on the 'Heroes,' meaning the men who fought against the Communists.

'Few people in the West even knew of the conflict. It lasted for generations and ended in defeat for the Communists and the creation of a new republic. We thought it would be for all the people, not just the Karzistani majority.'

Behind Kwan's voice, shepherds began to sing. They sang of heroism, about living in the hills and praying to all their various gods, smoking thin cigarettes in freezing winds under clear stars. Heroes rolled rocks down onto the heads of troops, only to find that the crushed bodies were those of their cousins conscripted into the Communist armies.

Photographs, in smeared black-and-white, were shown. Handsome young Eloi dead stared up at the sky, their chins missing. Handsome young Eloi, alive around fires, their eyes burning with this message: I may die, but it will be worth it. We are the people who stopped the Chinese, who stopped the Arabs. The Eloi are the world's great secret force against tyrants.

Where did Kwan get these photos?

Then Mae remembered: Kwan's father, dear Old Mr Kowoloia.

Dear Old Mr Kowoloia must have been a terrorist. Kwan had these photos. She has kept them secret from all of us.

So this is why she wanted the Central Man gone.