The Business

by Iain Banks

  I was too hot. The air outside the bed was still sharply chilly, but underneath the Himalayan pile of bedclothes it had suddenly become sweaty. I pulled off my jumper and thick socks. I kept them in the bed with me, in case I needed to put them on again later.

  What the hell was I going to do?

  Should I tell Stephen about his wife? Shit, it wasn't just the dishonesty or any advantage I might gain, it was safety: Emma and Frank hadn't used any protection that I could see.

  I could phone Stephen right now. I could tell him the truth, that I had the evidence and Hazleton had given it to me. That was the most honest course, the sort of thing you could imagine justifying in court. But if I did? Maybe he would blame me, maybe he'd stick by her, maybe he'd think I was just trying to wreck his marriage. No win.

  Or I could — even more easily, because it would take a single sentence with no angst, no trauma involved — ring Hazleton and say okay, do it. Let it happen. Let Stephen find out the truth and see what he did next, hoping that he'd turn to me, sooner or later. Maybe even arrange to be nearby when he heard the news, and so be the most obvious shoulder for him to cry on; up my chances at some little risk.

  Or do nothing. Maybe he'd find out anyway. Maybe Mrs B would be discovered some other way, or Mrs Erickson would find out and tell Stephen, or Mrs B would grow tired of living a lie and announce she loved somebody else and wanted a divorce — hell, she knew a good lawyer. That was the best outcome: doing nothing and still coming out ahead; a low reading on the guilt-o-meter. But that still left me knowing and not doing anything.

  I tossed and turned in the bed, still too warm despite the chilly air. I slipped off my loose cotton pants and rolled them up. I had my PJs on underneath.

  The Palace of a Thousand Rooms. With sixty-one rooms. Ha: Blysecrag had more than that in one wing.

  That would be the other reason I'd recalled my first proper meeting with Hazleton and the thing about counting to a thousand on your fingers. The Palace of a Thousand Rooms was called that because whoever had first built it had counted in base four, not base ten, so that — if you chose to translate it that way, and they had — their sixteen was our hundred and their sixty-four was our thousand. So the palace had been built with sixty-four rooms. Except that three rooms had dropped off during an earthquake in the nineteen fifties and they hadn't got round to replacing them yet. Different bases. That must be the explanation. That was why I'd had that dream-memory of dinner in Berlin, the week the Wall came down.

  Only it still wasn't. In all my billions of neurons and synaptic connections, it seemed like it only took a few determined troublemakers to distract me from the sort of things I ought to be thinking about, like whether to tell my beloved he was being cuckolded, or whether I should abandon my brilliant career and move to Thulahn (What? Was I mad?).

  Think around the problem. Don't call Stephen. Call his missus. Call Mrs B. Tell her you know.

  No, call her — or have somebody else call her — anonymously and let her know only that somebody knows. Bring things to a head that way. Maybe she'd confess all (yes, and then Stephen — just, gee, a big soft galloot — forgives her and, heck, if their relationship doesn't, like, gather strength from the experience).

  I could see that.

  Or maybe she'd leave him. I could see that, too. Maybe she'd leave him and take the children. Maybe she'd leave him and take the children and leave the poor, gorgeous sap with nobody to turn to… (but wait! Who's that in the background? Yes, her, the attractive thirty-eight-year-old blonde — oh, but looks younger — with the Scottish/Bay Area accent?).

  Well, heck, a girl could dream.

  Shit, none of this was getting me anywhere, and I wasn't even sleepy any more. Tired, yes, but not sleepy.

  I felt for the flashlight again. I switched it on, let the beam travel round the room while I took in where everything was, then switched it off again. I pulled on my socks, trousers and jumper, stuck my head under the covers. The warm air smelled muskily, pleasantly of perfume and me. I took a few deep breaths, then jumped out of bed, putting the covers back.

  I felt my way to the window. I pulled back the thick, quilted drapes, folded the creaking wooden shutters to each side and opened the wooden-framed windows with their bottle-bottom panes.

  No moon. But no clouds either. The town's roofs, the river valley, crumpled foothills and crowding mountains were lit by starlight, with eight and a half thousand feet less atmosphere in the way to filter it than I was used to. I couldn't see any other lights at all. A dog barked faintly somewhere in the distance.

  The breeze flowed into the room like cold water. I stuck my hands into my armpits (and suddenly remembered that when I was a little girl we used to call our armpits our oxters) and leaned forward, sticking my head out into the view. What little of my breath the altitude hadn't already taken was removed by. the sight of that darkly starlit gulf of rock and snow.

  I stayed like that until I started to shiver, then shut everything up with numbed fingers and crawled back into bed, keeping my head under the covers to warm it up again.

  I shivered in the darkness. The capital city, and not a single artificial light.

  Tommy Cholongai had given me an encrypted CD-ROM with details of what the Business was planning for Thulahn. There would be another all-year road to India, a university and a modern, well-equipped hospital in Thuhn and schools and clinics in the regional capitals. We'd build a dam in the mountains behind Thuhn that would provide hydro power and control the waters that washed over the broad, gravelly valley I'd seen from the airstrip, allowing the waters there to be channelled to one side so that a bigger airport could be built, one that would take jets. Big jets.

  During the summer months the hydro plant would produce much more electricity than Thuhn would need; the surplus would be used to power giant pumps, which would force specially salinated water into a huge cavern hollowed out in a mountain high above the dam. The idea was that this water wouldn't freeze, and in the winter, when the main hydro plant was useless, this saline solution would flow down through another set of turbines and into another dam so that Thuhn would have power all year round. All power lines would be underground wherever possible; a minimum of disfiguring poles and wires.

  Also on offer was a network of tarmac roads connecting the capital with the main towns, plus street-lights, a water treatment plant, drains and a sewage works for Thuhn initially, with similar improvements scheduled for the regions later.

  The plan was to skip conventional wire or terrestrial microwave telephony entirely and go straight to satellite phones for every village and every important person. The footprints of various satellites we controlled would be adjusted to take in Thulahn and so provide additional digital Web and TV-based information and entertainment channels for those who wanted them.

  Then there was the stuff the Business intended just for itself: a whole network of tunnels and caverns in Mount Juppala (7,334 metres), a few kilometres north-east of Thuhn in the next valley. That was where, if possible, the PWR would go. Ah, yes, the PWR. At no point in the CD-ROM was that particular acronym explained; even in a CD-ROM that had serious encryption, ran to maybe a dozen copies in the world and was restricted rigidly to those who needed to know, it seemed we didn't want to spell out the words Pressurised Water Reactor. This was the Westinghouse unit we'd bought from the Pakistanis and had mothballed.

  There was some serious engineering involved in all this: basically we'd be turning quite a lot of Mount Juppala into something resembling a Swiss cheese. A hand-picked team of our own engineers and surveyors armed with everything from rock hammers to magnetic and gravitometric arrays had already probed, drilled, sampled, analysed, shaken, mapped and measured the mountain to within a millimetre of its life (only we knew it was three and a half metres higher than the guidebooks and atlases said).

  The CD held several impressive sets of plans drawn up by some of the world's foremost engineering firms, each of whom had carried out feasibility s
tudies on turning this vast lump of rock into a small self-contained city — none of whom, however, had been told where this mountain actually was. It was a big job. We'd be buying a couple of specially modified Antonovs to move all the heavy plant and machinery in. We reckoned we'd built up a fair knowledge-base concerning heavy engineering in extreme cold, thanks to our Antarctic base, but even so the whole Mount Juppala project might take a couple of decades. Just as well we thought long-term.

  Was any of this something I wanted to be part of? Were we doing the right thing in the first place? Was the whole Thulahn venture just a huge act of hubris by billionaires with a bee in their bonnet about having a seat at the UN? Did we have any right to come in here and take over their country?

  In theory we could build our new HQ with almost no impact on Thulahn: there was a contingency plan for building the new airport in the same valley as Mount Juppala; it would mean levelling off a smaller mountain, but it was less than had been done for the new Hong Kong airport, and we could afford it. Doing all we could do, undertaking every improvement we were prepared to offer, would change the entire country, and especially Thuhn, probably for ever, which sounded terrible given how beautiful and unspoiled it was and how happy the people seemed to be. But then you looked at the infant-mortality rate, the life-expectancy figures and the numbers who emigrated.

  If we only offered these changes/improvements, rather than imposed them, how could it be wrong?

  I had no idea. At the very least, before I decided anything, I needed a while here, just to start getting the feel of the place. This process was due to start tomorrow, with a visit to the apparently fearsomely weird Queen Mother, in her own palace, further up the valley.

  Legend had it she hadn't left her bed for the last twenty-six years. I curled up under the weight of bedclothes and cupped my still cold hands, rubbing them and blowing into them and wondering why staying in bed for as long as humanly possible was considered even remotely weird in Thulahn.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  You rise with the sun in Thulahn. The same as any place where artificial light is still a novelty, I suppose. I woke to find a little fat quilted lady bustling around my room, slamming open the window shutters to let in some eye-wateringly bright light, talking away either to herself or possibly to me and pointing at the washstand, where a large, gently steaming pitcher now stood beside the inset bowl. I was still rubbing my eyes and trying to think of something rude to say, like, When were your people thinking of inventing the Door Lock, or even the Knock? when she just bustled straight out again and left me alone and grumpy.

  I washed with the warm water in the bowl. There was a bathroom down the end of the hall with a large fireplace in one corner and a rather grand scroll-topped bath on a platform in the middle of the room, but it took a lot of water-pitchers to fill it and the palace servants clearly required advance notice to organise both the fire and the water.

  Technically my room was en suite, if a cubicle the size of a telephone box with the end of a pipe sticking up between two shoe-shaped tiles counts as en suite. There was real toilet paper, but it was miniaturised and unhelpfully shiny. I flushed with the water out of the washing bowl.

  Breakfast was served in the room by my little fat quilted lady, who arrived talking, talked as she plonked down the plates and jugs and kept talking as she nodded to me and left. I could hear her talking all the way down the hall. Maybe it was a religious thing, I thought; the opposite of a vow of silence.

  Breakfast consisted of stiff fried pancakes and a bowl of watery porridge. I tried a little of each, recalled the variety of mono-taste beige food from the evening before and was reminded that managing my weight, and indeed even losing quite a few pounds in a matter of days, had proved remarkably easy the last time I'd visited Thulahn.

  'Her Royal Highness is looking forward to meeting you.'

  'Is she? That's nice.' I grabbed a strap and hung on.

  Thulahn had cars before it had roads. Somehow, this came as no surprise. Well, it had a car, if not in the plural: a 1919 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith purchased in India by the Prince's great-grandfather when he was King. It had been dismantled and carried across the mountain paths by teams of sherpas and eventually reassembled in Thulahn the following summer.

  There was, however, nowhere to drive it, a point which had perhaps escaped the then King when he'd made the purchase. At the time a main road in Thulahn consisted of a boulder-strewn pathlet wandering along the side of a steep hill with broader bits every now and again where two heavily laden porters or yaks could pass without one knocking the other off the cliff, while a principal street in Thuhn was basically a shallow V between the randomly sized and sited buildings with a stream-cum-sewer in the bottom and lots of little paths strung out along the sides.

  As a result, the Roller sat within the main courtyard of the palace for five years, where it was just about possible to run it in a figure of eight providing the wheel was kept at full lock the whole time and the transition from left to right or vice versa was accomplished without undue delay. Hours of fun for the royal children. Meanwhile a road, of sorts, was constructed, from the floor of the valley where most of the farms were, through Thuhn and on up to the glacier foot, where the old palace and the more important monasteries clung like particularly determined limpets to the cliffs.

  I was in that car, on that road, now. My driver was Langtuhn Hemblu, the man who'd greeted me at the airstrip the day before and given me the rapid guided walking tour of the city and palace before abandoning me to the colourful monks.

  'You mustn't worry,' Langtuhn shouted.

  'About what?'

  'Why, about meeting Her Royal Highness.'

  'Oh, all right, then.' Well, I hadn't been. Langtuhn caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and smiled in what was probably meant to be an encouraging manner.

  As far as I could tell his title was Important Steward. I strongly suspected he'd never taken a driving test. It wasn't even as though there was no other motorised traffic around any more: registered in Thuhn alone there were now at least seventeen other cars, buses, vans and trucks to have collisions with, most brought in during the heady days of Thulahn's motoring Golden Age, between the summer of 1989, when a supposedly permanent road had been completed direct from Thuhn to the outside world, and the spring of 1991, when a series of landslides and floods had swept it away again.

  There were a few more roads within the kingdom nowadays, and except in the depths of winter (when they were blocked by snow), or during the monsoon (when they tended to get washed away) you could drive from Thuhn down the valley through various other, lower towns, then on down the course of the Kamalahn river and into Sikkim where, season permitting, you actually had a choice: turn left for Darjeeling and India, or right for Lhasa and Tibet. There was, still, a track direct from Thuhn back over the mountains that almost encircled the capital and which allowed a very determined driver to bring a four-wheel drive in over the passes from India, but even that meant sliding the vehicle across in a cradle slung under a wire hawser over the river Khunde.

  The Roller bounced and lurched. I clung on. It felt very strange to sit in a car with no seat-belts. Grab-handles and straps didn't give even the illusion of safety.

  I'd dressed in as many layers of the clothes I'd brought with me as I could. Even so, I was glad of the little wood-burning stove in one corner of the car's rear compartment. This looked like an after-market accessory and I doubted the boys at RR would have approved, but it helped stop my breath freezing on the windows. I made a mental note to buy some warmer clothes in the afternoon, assuming I survived that long.

  The road which wound up through the capital consisted of big flat stones laid across one of the main V-shaped streets-cum-streams-cum-sewers. Langtuhn had explained that as there was just the one main road, it had been designed to take in as many important buildings as possible en route, hence the tortuous nature of the course it took, which often involved doubling back on itself and heading dow
nhill again to take in buildings of particular consequence, such as the Foreign Ministry, the important consulates (this seemed to mean the Indian and Pakistani compounds), an especially popular temple or a much-loved tea house.

  Most of the buildings in Thuhn were constructed, for the first one or two storeys at least, from large, dark blocks of rough stone. The walls were almost vertical but not quite, spreading out at the base as though they'd started to melt at some point in the past.

  They generally looked worn but tended, and most had fresh-looking two-tone paint jobs, though a few sported patches and friezes of brightly painted plaster depicting scenes from the Thulahnese version of Hinduism's idea of the spirit world, which — from the gleeful illustrations of people being impaled on giant stakes, eaten by demons, torn to pieces by giant birds, sodomised by leering, prodigiously endowed yak-minotaurs and skinned alive by grinning dragons wielding giant adzes — looked like the sort of place the Marquis de Sade would have felt thoroughly at home in.

  The top storeys were made of wood, pierced by small windows, painted in bright primary colours and strewn with long prayer flags twisting sinuously in the wind.

  We skidded round a corner and the Wraith's engine laboured to propel us up the steep slope. People ambled or jumped out of the way — depending on how soon they heard us coming — as we rumbled and bounced across the uneven flagstones.

  'Oh, I have your book!' Langtuhn said. 'Please. Here.'

  'What book?' I reached out to the opening in the glass partition and accepted a small dog-eared paperback with a two-colour cover.

  'The book you left on your last visit.'

  'Oh, yes.' A Guide To Thulahn, the cover said. I'd picked it up in Dacca airport four years earlier and vaguely recalled leaving it in my room in the Grand Imperial Tea Room and Resting House — a sort of de-glorified youth hostel — which had been my base the last time I'd been here. I remembered thinking at the time that I had never encountered a book with so many misprints, mistakes and misspellings. As quickly as I could without taking my gloves off I flicked to the work's notoriously unreliable 'Top Tips and Handey Phrases' section and looked up the Thulahnese for Thank you. 'Khumtal,' I said.