Iain Banks The Business

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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
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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
refresh-ment 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.'
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'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.
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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
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consequence at all.
I invited Pete Wells back to my place. He's a research analyst and an old
pal/lover, still a good-time guy and up for the occasional friendly fuck,
though he is engaged to some lucky lass in Marin and so not for much longer.
We made hazy, stoned, well-tempered love to Glen Gould playing J. S. Bach,
listening to the man humming and singing along.
I slept well, apart from a weird dream about Mike Daniels searching my garden
for his missing teeth.
The next morning, with Pete already gone and me both a little bleary and not
particularly well rested, I
repacked my bags with DKNY, mostly and took the Buick back to meet its
buddies at San
Francisco International's Alamo, then it was a JAL 747-400 to Tokyo via Hawaii
(twenty minutes late leaving due to two tardy suits; I joined in the Mean
Group Stare when they finally stumbled into First trying not to look sheepish
and studiously avoiding everybody's eyes. Sushi very good. Played both
Gar-bage albums, separated by Madonna's
Ray of Light
. Slept well). Cathay Pacific Airbus 400 from
Tokyo to Karachi (shown how to play with game console in seat by Japanese kid;
very good sleep later
worry that I may be turning into woman in a song I heard once who only slept
on planes. Bumpy landing).
I had a feeling that whatever passport I chose for Karachi it would be the
wrong one, but I decided on the
British one and was pleasantly surprised: whisked through. The place was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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