The Business

Dessous got me to help him with a recalcitrant binding while everybody else swept off down the heft of icing-sugar white in a blur of multi-coloured shapes.

When we were alone, I said, 'There's nothing wrong with this binding, is there?'

'Nope,' Dessous said.  He looked around.  Our companions had disappeared into the broad valley beneath.  The only moving things we could see were the fast-receding black dots of the helicopters, already too far away to hear. 'You want to sit down?'.  We sat down in the snow, our skis planted, curved tips like plastic talons scratching at the blue.  Dessous pulled out a leather cigar case. 'Smoke?'

I shook my head. 'Only after a drink.  But don't let me stop you.'

'Well, I got a hip flask, too, but that's normally only for medical emergencies.'

'I quite agree.'

He prepared and lit a long cigar with some care, then said, 'How you think you're doing, Telman?'

'I don't know.  What's the context?'

'Well, impressing me, I guess.'

'Then I've really no idea.  Why don't you tell me?'

'Because I want to know how you think you're doing, dammit.'

'All right.  I think you think I'm an opinionated socialist feminist, who's half American, half European, combines what you would regard as the worst aspects of both mentalities, has lucked out with some off-the-wall predictions and doesn't really respect the traditions of the Business the way I ought.'

Dessous laughed, and coughed. 'Too hard on yourself, Telman.'

'Good.  I was hoping so.' This made him chuckle a little too. 'So, what is all this about, Jeb?'

'Not me who's going to tell you.  Sorry.'

'Then who?'

'Maybe nobody, Telman.  Maybe Tommy Cholongai.  Know him?'

Another Level One: a Chinese-Malay shipping-line owner.  I said, 'We've met.'

'Tommy and I have an agreement.  Given there ain't much we ever agree on, this is something of an event in itself.  Involves you, Telman.  If we both agree, then…'

'What?'

He blew out a cloud of blue-grey smoke. 'Then we might ask you to do something.'

'Which would be…?'

'Can't tell you yet.'

'Why not?'

'Can't tell you that, either.'

I sat and looked at him.  He was staring up at the tall summit of the highest mountain.  Cloud Peak, he'd said it was called, on the way up.  Thirteen thousand feet; tallest of the Big Horn range.  Custer's last stand had taken place a hundred klicks due north, in Montana. 'You know,' I said, 'all the secrecy surrounding this thing you can't tell me about might put me off whatever it is in the first place, if I ever do get to find out what the hell it is.'

'Yup.  Know that.  All the same.' He looked at me and gri

'So now I have to go see Mr Cholongai, would that be right?'

''Fraid so.'

I crossed my arms and looked around for a while.  I was waiting for the cold to seep through my glossy red ski-suit and make my backside numb. 'Jeb,' I said, 'I'm junior to both you guys, but I am on sabbatical and, anyway, I thought I'd worked my way up in the company sufficiently not to get…passed around like this.'

'Better passed around than passed over.' Dessous chuckled.

' "Better looked over than overlooked," ' I quoted.  'Mae West, I believe,' I added, when he cocked an eye at me.

'Fine-looking woman.'

'Just so.'

We skied down to meet the others, were taken back up to more virgin powder and repeated the process, if not the conversation.  Soon it was time for lunch, which we took in a Vietnamese restaurant in Sheridan.  Dessous regaled us with his plans to develop the drive-in movie theatre/shooting gallery, which meant having a whole sequence of stacked screens ready to be dropped into place, or even a sort of roller system, like a giant scroll; once you'd shot the blue blazes out of one bit, you'd just haul it up or drop it down until you had a fresh area.

The conversation became even more ridiculous when Dessous talked about another project.  He'd been taken with the sort of wheeze megalomaniac dictators were so fond of, involving a stadium full of compliant, well-drilled subjects and lots of big, coloured boards.  The idea was to use the big, coloured boards to display what looked like a picture of something when seen from far enough away (the other side of the stadium, usually).  I'd seen TV pictures of this sort of thing.  As far as I could see the standard image was a portrait of whatever power-mad shit-for-brains was in control at the time.

Dessous thought this would be a fun thing to do, but he wanted to take it a step further and have moving images displayed.

The head technical guys who'd come skiing started to get excited, discussing how this could be done.  The consensus seemed to be that you'd need a Third World country to get the requisite numbers of people, and that maybe it would be best just to hire an army division or so.  Big cubes of expanded polystyrene with six different colours or hues on them just big enough to twirl round without interfering with a neighbour's would give you some degree of flexibility, though it'd be hard to get any control of saturation unless you could light them from inside, which would make them kinda heavy.  The control system would be a bitch: you'd have to treat every goddamn person as a single pixel and they'd never be able to memorise more than a few changes.  Some sort of individual signalling apparatus would be required.  Serious programming of some sort.

I suggested they might call it a Lumpen Crowd Display, or possibly Large Ego Display; LCD or LED.  This they thought a hoot, and only encouraged them.  What would be their refreshment rate?  Could you use all raster-farians?  Hey, what if they all wanted a screen dump?

While the technical guys got on with this, Dessous was chairing another discussion group, which was trying to work out what images you could show on this widest of wide screens.  Great sporting moments seemed to feature strongly.

I slipped away, stayed longer in the toilets than I really needed to, then stepped into the street outside where no one from the party could see me and checked my phone's signal strength.

'Hi, Kate.  How are you?'

'Oh, sorry, Stephen, I…I didn't mean to call you,' I lied. 'Wrong button.'

'That's okay.  You all right?'

'Yeah, yeah.  You?'

'Fine.'

'Okay, then, sorry.'

'No problem.  Where are you, anyway?'

'Place called Sheridan.  Wyoming, I think.'

'You skiing with Dessous?'

'Yup.  How'd you know?'

'Ah, just masculine intuition.  I've been there myself.'

'Where are you now?'

'Ah, still in DC…And it looks like I've got where I'm supposed to be.' I heard the noise of traffic behind his voice as he said, 'Yeah, okay,' to somebody else, then, 'I've got to go,' to me. 'You take care now, okay?'

'Okay.'

'Don't break anything.'

'Yeah, you too,' I said.

Only my heart, I thought.

The following day I took the same Huey back to Omaha (those big olive-green headphones again — for someone who tried to avoid helicopters I seemed to be spending a lot of time on the damn things), then a United 757 to LAX (stodgy muffin, steward with neat butt, brief snooze) and a Braniff 737 to San Francisco (mercifully quiet but overflowingly obese woman in seat alongside — smelled strongly of French fries).  A hired car took me home to Woodside.

The place was warmer than Nebraska but the house felt cold.

I watered my long-suffering cactuses and made a few calls.  I met with some old friends in Quadrus, a Menlo Park restaurant popular with some of the PARC guys.  I ate too much, drank too much and smoked too much, and babbled happily about nothing of consequence at all.