The Business

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 a

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 di

Only it still wasn't.  In all my billions of neurons and synaptic co

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 pla

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 co

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 cha

Then there was the stuff the Business intended just for itself: a whole network of tu

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 studies 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 bo