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 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 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?