The Business

by Iain Banks

  'I thought this was specialist.'

  'Yes, as I said. But this is for specialist telephonic applications.'

  'Such as?'

  Allan replaced his glasses, asquint, on his nose. He rocked back in the chair and looked thoughtful. 'Actually, the place you'd most likely see something like this would be in the stock exchange, or a futures market, somewhere like that. They use high capacity dedicated land lines. So I understand.'

  I sat back in the ancient peeling plywood and black tubing seat, an idea forming in my mind. I pulled the Polaroid of a desk out of my pocket. 'See this?'

  Allan sat forward and peered. 'It's a desk,' he said helpfully.

  I flipped the photograph round and looked at it myself. 'Well, my copy of Jane's Book of Fighting Desks is not to hand. But now you mention it…'

  He took the photo from my hand and studied it. 'Yes. Lots of holes for cabling. And that extra level, that raised shelf. It does look a little like the sort of desk that might belong to a commodities trader, or someone of a similar nature, doesn't it?'

  'Yes. Yes, it does, doesn't it?'

  'Kate, I'm in a fucking meeting. What the hell is so important you have to get me called out of it?'

  'I'm at your dentist's, Mike. Mr Adatai is quite rightly concerned. I need you to tell him to let me see your file.'

  'You what? You pull rank on me for that?'

  'Look, don't blame me; I thought you were supposed to be here in London. I didn't know you were going to go jetting off to Frankfurt.'

  'Yes, to meet some very important — oh, for Christ's sake. What is all this about? Quickly, Kate, please, I need to get back in there.'

  'It's very important I see your dental-records file, Michael. I'm going to hand you over to Mr Adatai now. Please authorise him to let me see it, then you can get back to your meeting.'

  'Okay, okay; put him on.'

  The standard human mouth contains thirty-two teeth. Mike Daniels must have had good, conscientious parents who got him to brush his teeth thoroughly after each meal and snack and in the evening before retiring, because he had had a full set — with just a couple of fillings in lower bicuspid molars — when he'd been drugged in a London club a month earlier, had about half of his teeth removed and then been left in his own bed in his flat in Chelsea.

  I sat in Mr Adatai's warm and luxurious waiting room with a bunch of recent Vogues (well, this was Chelsea), National Geographics (of course) and Country Lifes (I thought of the dowager Queen in her giant bed in the old palace, and — sitting in that warmth — shivered).

  I looked at the diagram of Mike Daniels' teeth. I took a note of those that had been taken and those that had been left. I closed the file, stared at a potted palm across the room and did some mental arithmetic.

  In base ten, a ten-figure number. Two point one billion and some change. No need to use your fingers at all.

  My mouth went dry.

  From the start that morning I'd considered staying in London overnight, and had brought a few bits and pieces in a travelling bag, but in the end, after leaving Mr Adatai's — in fact, on the kerb while the taxi was pulling up — I decided to head back to Yorkshire. I rang Miss H to tell her I'd be staying at Blysecrag that night.

  We had dinner on the train, my lap-top and I, looking through a load of files I'd downloaded about the Pejantan Island deal and the Shimani Aerospace Corporation. This was the deal that Mike Daniels had been flying out to Tokyo to sign when he'd been dentally assaulted — hence the anguished call to me that night in Glasgow.

  Pejantan Island is a piece of guano-covered rock in the middle of the southern part of the South China Sea, between Borneo and Sumatra. It is, to put it politely, undistinguished, except for one thing: it is almost bang on the equator. Shift the place three kilometres south and the zero degrees line would go straight over it. It's less than an hour's flight from Singapore, just big enough for our purposes — or, rather, the purposes of the Shimani Aerospace Corporation, for we were merely investors — and it was uninhabited. The idea was to build a spaceport there.

  Now, this is high-horse territory for me — though I do know what I'm talking about, and it is my job — but space, and anything associated with getting into it, is going to be so fucking big, and soon, it's frightening. Space is already very big business indeed and it's going to get a lot bigger in the near future. The US through NASA, Europe through ESA, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese and various other minor players are all desperate to grab as much of the launch market as possible, and private enterprise is determined to catch up.

  I've seen detailed plans of about a dozen different ways of getting into space — even leaving out the exotic far-future stuff like giant elevators, rail guns and giant lasers — using craft with helicopter-like rotors with rockets in the tips or — well, never mind; the point is not that, if we're lucky, one of them might just work, it's that all of them might work.

  Whatever method you use, the best place to launch stuff into orbit is from the equator, or as close to it as you can get (which is why NASA chose southern Florida for its spaceport and the SU had to settle for the delights of Kazakhstan). The Earth, just through rotating, gives you a free energy boost to help lob your payload above the atmosphere, and that means you can lob more, or use less fuel, than you could if you launched from further up or down the curve towards the poles.

  One space-launch concern — in which I am delighted to say we have some investment — is taking advantage of this by using two huge ships, a command-and-control vessel and the rocket-carrying ship itself to send payloads up from the oceans on the equator. The time before last that I was in Scotland I got to clamber over the launch ship while it was in dry dock in Greenock, on the Clyde. It was just techy heaven. These are real ships, built for an entirely pragmatic, unromantic, unsentimental, return-hungry consortium, but they are just such a fabulous, Thunderbirds-style idea I'd have been seriously tempted to recommend investing in them just for the sheer mad beauty of the project. Happily, it looks like a good business deal, too.

  But you never know. The ships will only be able to handle stuff up to a certain size. To be on the safe side, we're also the major investor in the Shimani Aerospace Corporation's Pejantan Island project, which — if all goes according to plan — by 2004 will be sending state-of-the-art rockets roaring into space with their valuable satellite cargoes.

  This was heavy engineering, cutting-edge technology and serious science. The budget was jaw-dropping. So were the returns if we'd all got our sums right, but the point was that the bigger the project and the bigger the budget the easier it is to hide things in both of them.

  Like this little item here: a tracking station in Fenua Ua.

  Now, why Fenua Ua? I looked up a map of the Pacific. Why not Nauru, or Kiribati, or even the fucking Galapagos?

  Sipping my coffee somewhere around Grantham, I used the mobile and the lap-top's modem to do some more long-range Web searching. Eventually, as the train sped through the night, picking up speed after Doncaster, deep in some otherwise entirely ignorable PR nonsense (which just goes to show you never know where something useful will turn up), I found a little video clip of Kirita Shinizagi, chief executive officer of the Shimani Aerospace Corporation, visiting Fenua Ua earlier this year and inspecting the site for the new tracking station.

  Next stop York, the guard's voice said over the speakers, while my head was somewhere between London, Tokyo, Fenua Ua and Pejantan Island.

  I disconnected the mobile from the computer. The phone rang. Hazleton's number came up on the display. I hesitated two, three rings before answering.

  'Hello?'

  'Kathryn?'

  'Mr Hazleton.'

  'Kathryn, I was so sorry to hear about Freddy.'

  'Thank you. Will you be able to make the funeral, Mr Hazleton?'

  'Sadly, no. Kathryn, are you able to think straight? Or are you too distraught? If this is a bad time to talk about things, I can always wait.'

  'I
think I can still string two thoughts together, Mr Hazleton. What was it you wanted to talk about?'

  'I wondered how you felt you'd got on in Thulahn. I was going to ask before, but of course we were rather overtaken by events when you realised that Freddy was in hospital. We never did finish that conversation.'

  'No, we didn't. I recall that at the time I was about to ask you if you'd had any hand in suggesting to the Prince that he ask me to marry him.'

  'You were? I don't understand, Kathryn. Why would I want to interfere in your private life?'

  'That's all right, Mr Hazleton. I've had more time to think since then. The question no longer applies.'

  'I see. I confess I wasn't entirely sure I'd heard you right when you told me that at the time. However, I've spoken to Suvinder since, and yes, he was, and is, very serious about it. I understand you turned him down. That's very sad. Of course it's entirely your decision and you must do as you see fit, but the Prince did sound very dejected.'

  'He's a better man than I thought he was at first, Mr Hazleton. I've come to like him. But I don't love him.'

  'Ah, well. There we are, then. This has, as you can imagine, all become rather more complicated because of that development. Are you still thinking of the proposition Jebbet and Tommy put to you?'

  'Yes.'

  'Good. The amount of power invested in whoever takes up the post there would be very considerable. You might have decided not to become Queen of Thulahn, Kathryn, but you could still be something like the President. What do you think? Have you had any thoughts? Or would it now be too awkward with Suvinder there?'

  'Oh, I've had thoughts, Mr Hazleton.'

  'You're being very cryptic, Kathryn. Is there somebody there with you? Can't you talk?'

  'There's nobody here. I can talk. I'm still thinking very seriously about taking up the post in Thulahn.'

  'But you haven't come to a decision yet.'

  'Not yet.'

  'You couldn't give us a balance-of-probabilities assessment, even? Which way you're leaning, as it were?'

  'There are very strong reasons for going, and very strong ones for staying where I am. It's too delicately balanced, so, no, I'm afraid I can't. But once I've made my decision, I'll stick with it.'

  'And when do you think that will be, Kathryn?'

  'I think another few days should do the trick.'

  'Well, we shall just have to be patient, shan't we, Kathryn?'

  'Yes. Sorry about that.'

  'Of course, there is the other matter, isn't there? I don't want to have to push you on that, too, but it has been a couple of weeks now…'

  'You mean that B-movie you provided me with?'

  'Yes. I was wondering if you'd come to any decision on that, too.'

  'Yes. I have.'

  Stephen. We need to talk. Call when you can. Voice or this.

  Uncle Freddy had a Viking's funeral. His coffin was placed in an old motorboat, one of those polished wooden things with two tandem separate seating compartments and a stern deck that slopes in a curve all the way down to the water. It had been filled with various flammable stuff and moored out in the centre of the lake where we'd fished a few weeks earlier. A crowd of us — a big crowd, too, given that Freddy hadn't had many relatives — looked on.

  One of his drinking cronies from the pub in Blysecrag village was an archer; he had one of those elaborate modern bows that looks much more complicated than any gun, with balancing weights sticking out apparently at random and all sorts of other bits and pieces. He loaded up an arrow with a big, bulging head made of bound rags soaked in petrol, another drinking chum lit it, and then he shot it out towards the motorboat. The arrow made a noise I will never forget as it curved up through the clear, cool air. Uncle Freddy's pal was obviously very good or he'd done this before, because that one shot was all he needed. The arrow slammed dramatically into the woodwork, the flames caught and spread and the boat was soon ablaze from end to end.

  I stood watching it burn, thinking that there were probably all sorts of terribly British and very sensible rules and regulations about the proper disposal of bodies that were being flouted here. Well, fuck them if they can't take a joke. Freddy: the man who put the fun in funeral.

  Uncle F left me a small landscape painting I'd once admired. Not by anybody famous, and not valuable, just nice, and something to remember him by. What do you give the girl who has everything? Your undivided attention, of course. So, having not bequeathed me the entire house and estate of Blysecrag, Freddy did the next best thing and left me something I would be able to pack in a bag and take away with me.

  The Charm Monsters — the Business' Conjurations and Interludans division — had been kept at bay by the terms of Uncle Freddy's will. I think Miss Heggies was grateful for that, though there wasn't much she could do about the presence of Maeve Watkins. Still, they seemed to get along politely enough, Miss H serving Mrs W tea in the drawing room with a civility that was one notch up from frosty, and Mrs W seeming slightly embarrassed and modestly grateful.

  The company was represented by Madame Tchassot, the other Level One apart from Hazleton who'd been at the weekend party at Blysecrag three weeks earlier. I asked to have a word with her alone. We sat in Blysecrag's toweringly impressive library; she settled her small elegant frame into a seat, carefully smoothing her black skirt under her bony legs.

  'What is it that concerns you, Kathryn?' She looked around, then pulled a small container like a powder compact from her handbag. 'Oh. Do you think it is permitted to smoke in here?'

  'I don't know.'

  'You don't mind if I do?' Her accent was confusing, half-way between French and German.

  'No, I don't.'

  She offered me a cigarette, which I refused. She lit up. The little container was a closable ashtray; she placed it on the table at her side. 'I understand you might be moving to Thulahn,' she said, tapping the end of the Dunhill gently against the edge of the little ashtray, though the ash wasn't ready to come off yet.

  I watched this, trying to judge how much to say, trying to think back to what I knew of Madame Tchassot. How close was she to Hazleton? The fact that she was supposed to have a thing going with Adrian Poudenhaut didn't mean much by itself. If it did mean anything beyond the purely personal, it might even mean that Hazleton was using Poudenhaut to keep an eye on her. Though it might mean something else, too.

  'Possibly.'

  She blinked behind her small glasses. 'The rumour I have heard is that Prince Suvinder has proposed to you.' She smiled. 'That is very interesting.'

  'Yes, it is, isn't it? I wondered at one stage if that had somehow been set up.'

  'Set up? How do you mean?'

  'I mean that somebody, or some people, at the highest level of the Business, decided that having an agreement with the Prince, legal or otherwise, wasn't good enough to guarantee that Thulahn was really ours, and that having one of our own high-level execs married to the ruler would be a far more satisfactory way of cementing the relationship between us and Thulahn.'

  'Ah, yes, I see. But it would be something of a long shot, yes?'

  'Not that long, perhaps. The people concerned already knew that the Prince was…keen on me. And I was sounded out, first by Mr Dessous and then by Mr Cholongai. I misinterpreted, at the time: I thought they were really trying to find out how suited I would be to becoming a sort of ambassador to Thulahn, which is the pretext that was used to get me to go there. I thought they were worried that I was insufficiently committed, not so much to the company as to the idea of personal monetary success and, I suppose, laissez-faire capitalism itself. What they were really worried about, I think, is that I was too committed to those things.'

  She blinked. 'Can one be?'

  'I think so, if you are hoping that the person concerned might find something in a poor, underdeveloped Third World country that she can't find in her very comfortable existence in one of the richest parts of the richest state in the richest country in the world.'


  'I have heard that Thulahn is enchanting,' Madame Tchassot said, persuading some ash to drop from her cigarette. 'I have never been there.' She looked over her glasses at me. 'Would you recommend a visit?'

  'In a personal or a business capacity?'

  She looked surprised. 'I think one may only savour enchantment in a personal capacity, no?'

  'Of course. Madame Tchassot, may I ask if what I'm talking about here is all new to you, or did you already know of anything like this before?'

  'But, Kathryn, if all that you are speculating about had been spoken about at my level, you would be asking me now to reveal what the Board has discussed. You must know that I cannot do that.' She smiled, and put one hand to her tightly gathered hair. 'However, there are less formal occasions when such subjects arise between Board members, and in that context I can tell you that there was some talk of you being just the right person to represent us in Thulahn, and the point was made that the Prince's high regard for you would be to the good in this respect. I do not think that any of us thought for one moment he would make you a proposal of marriage. For my part, and I mean no disrespect, I would have imagined that he would want to marry, or would be obliged to marry, someone of a certain social class.'

  'That's what I thought. Apparently not.'

  'Hmm. That is also interesting.' She looked thoughtful. 'Have you made a decision yet, Kathryn?'

  'I told the Prince no.'

  'Oh. The rumour I heard was that you were undecided. Well, that might be unfortunate, or fortunate. Would you still consider the post in Thulahn?'

  'I am still considering it.'

  'Good. I hope you did not turn the Prince down only because you thought that we had manoeuvred you into the position of being asked.'

  'No. I turned him down because I don't love him.'

  She seemed to think about this. 'We are so lucky, aren't we,' she said, 'to be able to marry for love?'