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?
I had no idea. At the very least, before I decided anything, I needed a while here, just to start getting the feel of the place. This process was due to start tomorrow, with a visit to the apparently fearsomely weird Queen Mother, in her own palace, further up the valley.
Legend had it she hadn't left her bed for the last twenty-six years. I curled up under the weight of bedclothes and cupped my still cold hands, rubbing them and blowing into them and wondering why staying in bed for as long as humanly possible was considered even remotely weird in Thulahn.
CHAPTER EIGHT
You rise with the sun in Thulahn. The same as any place where artificial light is still a novelty, I suppose. I woke to find a little fat quilted lady bustling around my room, slamming open the window shutters to let in some eye-wateringly bright light, talking away either to herself or possibly to me and pointing at the washstand, where a large, gently steaming pitcher now stood beside the inset bowl. I was still rubbing my eyes and trying to think of something rude to say, like, When were your people thinking of inventing the Door Lock, or even the Knock? when she just bustled straight out again and left me alone and grumpy.
I washed with the warm water in the bowl. There was a bathroom down the end of the hall with a large fireplace in one corner and a rather grand scroll-topped bath on a platform in the middle of the room, but it took a lot of water-pitchers to fill it and the palace servants clearly required advance notice to organise both the fire and the water.
Technically my room was en suite, if a cubicle the size of a telephone box with the end of a pipe sticking up between two shoe-shaped tiles counts as en suite. There was real toilet paper, but it was miniaturised and unhelpfully shiny. I flushed with the water out of the washing bowl.