'So,' sighed Mae. 'Is it the case that I am supposed to let you question-map me, and only then you will care?'

Fatimah looked chilled to the bone.

'You want to be a good woman,' said Mae, smiling ruefully. 'Perhaps it is not possible to be good here.'

Fatimah rallied: 'Is it possible to be good anywhere?'

Okay, so we get down to something true. 'We all do the best we can,' said Mae. 'So. You tell me. How do we save my baby?'

Fatimah considered. 'It might not be possible. If the child is small, some kind of birth might be possible, otherwise it will be surgery.'

'When would you say it is due?'

'Its development is strange. Say, May or June. Would you be able to come back here?' Fatimah's eyes were pained, askance. 'I am sure that this place would help you have it. It has the most advanced medical and scientific equipment in Karzistan.'

'What would they get out of it?'

'Probably nothing further. They will have gotten enough for them to be generous.'

'What will they get out of me?'

Fatimah sighed. 'Scientific fame? A high profile in the industry?' She smiled sideways. 'Medical-IT Interface.' In Karzistani, the word for interface was 'two-face,' which had an implication of betrayal.

Neither of them needed to comment on the appropriateness of that.

'You must not do physical work,' said Fatimah. 'If you do miscarry – vomit… make yourself vomit all you can. Do not let anything stay in your stomach. And call me. I will do what I can to come to you.'

There were no windows in the room, and no clocks, but Mae felt it was late. 'I would like to go back to my hotel now.'

It was as she had feared. Fatimah's face went still with shame.

'I'm sorry,' Fatimah began. 'But given your condition, it is felt best that you spend the night here.'

'I want to spend it in my hotel.'

Fatimah's eyes were sorry indeed. 'It is very comfortable for our guests here.'

'I know too much,' said Mae. 'I said too much.'

Very quietly indeed, Mae had become a prisoner.

The rooms are very comfortable in the palace of the devil, considering there are no windows.

A guard brought Mae her dinner. He was huge, so tall his bulging belly did not look fat. He had hairy hands and eyes like camera lenses. Mae knew him, too. She saw him as big farm boy, playing in the same stubble fields as Wisdom Bronze.

'Did you know Mr Tunch when he was a boy?' she asked.

Nothing in his face moved. He watched her eat and took back the plate and the knives.

Mae saw the tiny blinking red light that watched her. She waited until all the lights were off and they could not see her. She whispered to herself without even moving her lips. 'Mae Mae Mae Mae Mae…'

She traced the gnarled root of herself back down deep. She felt the settling peace, the calm, and the end of fear and terror. As she fell away from it, the white walls of Yeshiboz Sistemlar looked as thin and frail as eggshells.

Mae settled as gently as an angel into the courtyard. Her clothes seemed to trail after her in ribbons, like silk underwater. The courtyard now looked more like Kwan's grand house. Instead of pens, the blue walls were lined with beautiful new businesses all glowing golden with light. They had modern plastic shop-signs that looked like poppies opening and closing, info… help… that's entertainment…

Mae entered help, and there was Mae herself, dressed as a Talent. Assistant-Mae knew what she wanted. She wanted to see the Gates Format for herself. 'I am afraid there is no programming that allows communication between the UN and the Gates Formats. You will not be able to find any Gates Format imprints.'

Mae asked the mask, 'Does this system contain any information about the Gates Format?'

Mae-assistant smiled like a shop sign. 'The "Help" function contains information about functions in this Format only.'

'Is there anything in "Info"?'

I want to know what imprints are and how they work. I want to know what the UN Format is and how it translates thoughts. I don't want to owe Tunch for anything.

The assistant-Mae replied smoothly: 'The "Info" section was developed for the pilot project and contains only examples of proposed kinds of content.'

Mae regarded her own face. Is my smile so unhelpful when I turn it on my customers? 'Why doesn't Air contain anything?'

Was the smile more broad? 'It is a common failing of IT projects to underestimate the difficulty of providing content and the time scales required.'

Air was pig-ignorant. Mae was not fooled, either, by her own face. These things – the courtyard, the shop fronts – they are just for show, this is not Air itself, they are the traffic signs towards it.

So Mae turned without another word and walked into Air. Air, she knew, was eternal. Mae walked, deliberately this time, into the blue of information.

She merged with the blue walls, as if they were glowing blue fog. She kept on walking. The walls faded into night. She stood in chaos, and kept feeling the gnarled root, deeper and deeper until even the sound of her own thinking was hushed and she felt even herself fade.

The root seemed to get thicker and thicker, as if it had become the trunk of a tree. It would eventually become Everything. It would become the world; and all the worlds in which the world sat. Mae herself was the thinnest possible little trail back towards the fiction of the world.

She could no longer remember what she was looking for.

I don't want to go on, she managed to think.

Blindly she felt her way back. The blue light shone, her fingernails glowed as white as her hospital gown as if everything were smiling.

Mae stepped back into the courtyard. She walked quietly into That's Entertainment. There were games machines, and radios all along the walls. There was soaring operatic music. In front of a TV set, Old Mrs Tung sat watching Turandot.

'Hello, Granny,' said Mae gently.

Mrs Tung turned and smiled, eyes twinkling. She could not remember the last time she and Mae met. All she remembered was the love, deeply imprinted.

There you are, dear. I was just thinking, I hope Mae comes to pay a visit. Isn't it marvellous, the TV? How I've yearned to see Turandot. They say it happens in Karzistan, you know.

And you have seen it over and over and over, because it is the only thing on TV in Air. But you can't remember that. Heaven is the place where you cannot change and nothing can ever happen, so the things you love are always eternal. Hell is exactly the same.

The hero Kalaf was singing. 'No one's sleeping. No one's sleeping.'

'I just wanted to make sure,' said Mae. 'I just wanted to make sure that you were well. I just wanted to make sure that you were as beautiful as I remember.'

Oh-hoo-hoo. The hooting laugh. Now eternal.

And Old Mrs Tung reached across and took Mae's hand. Mrs Tung thought she still had a hand. Is the beaning going well this year: I used to so love it. All of us on blankets doing the shelling together.

'Yes,' said Mae. 'It is still going well.'

Then Mae said, though she knew Mrs Tung could not understand: 'I know it is not you who does these things to me. It is the error they made, whatever mistake it was. I just wanted to make sure of that.'

And Old Mrs Tung hooted again, as if she knew what Mae was talking about.

And Mae began to repeat her own name over and over. Her and Mrs Tung's metaphorical hands disentangled like roots.

In the morning, the guard served Mae breakfast on a tray.

The food iridesced like a rainbow, and the flavours veered between pork and jam and all the flavours of breakfast at once. It was delicious. She threw it up into the wastebasket. It continued to shift colours in the bin.