The Business: A Novel by Iain M. Banks

Author:Iain M. Banks [Banks, Iain M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, Literary, satire, Technological
ISBN: 9780743200158
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-04-15T09:01:43+00:00

'I say, did you know that you can count up to over one thousand just using your fingers?'

'Really?'

'Yes. Can you guess how? I bet you can't.'

'You'd ... use a different base, I suppose, not ten. Ah, of course; binary. Yes. It'd be ... one thousand and twenty-four.'

'One thousand and twenty-three, actually. Zero to one thousand and twenty-three. Gosh, though, well done. That was very quick. I must have bored you with this before. Have I?'

'No, Mr Hazleton.'

'Then I'm impressed. And you know my name, and here I am and I've very rudely forgotten yours, though I'm sure we were introduced earlier. I do hope you'll forgive me.'

'Kathryn Telman, Mr Hazleton.'

'Kathryn, how do you do. I do believe I've heard of you.'

We shook hands. It was November 1989, in Berlin, the week the Wall came down. I'd squeezed myself into a Lufthansa flight from London (jump seat, snooty stewardesses) just that day, determined to be there for a bit of history that had seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier. A whole bunch of the more adventurous Business high-ups had had exactly the same idea -- Tempelhof and Tegel must have been double-parked with executive jets for those few days -- and as a result almost by default there was a sort of impromptu meeting of various Level Twos and Ones set up for that evening. I'd decided to try and gatecrash that as well, and succeeded.

We were sitting down to dinner in a private room in the Kempinski after a chaotic evening in a collection of limos and taxis, touring the various places where people were swarming over the Wall, attacking it, demolishing it, wheeling bits of it away and pocketing it. Everybody was a bit drunk, and, I suppose, infected with the heady, almost revolutionary -- make that counter-revolutionary -- atmosphere of that particular time and place.

I had indeed been introduced to Hazleton at the reception before dinner. He was a Level Two at the time, but marked out for still greater things. He'd looked me over in an automatic, unfocused way. I was twenty-nine, already a Four, thanks to my inspired guesses about computers and IT. I looked pretty good; better than I had at nineteen. Hazleton might have forgotten my name but he hadn't forgotten what I looked like. He'd made straight for the seat at my side. Well, fairly straight: he bumped a couple of gold-painted chairs on the way.

He'd just nodded at me as he'd sat down and then ignored me throughout the first course, as though he'd really chosen this seat at random or had taken it reluctantly, then suddenly he'd come up with this unlikely chat-up line about digital digits. I had become used to this sort of thing from upper-class Englishmen. At least he had used the second person, rather than 'one'.

'And if one used one's toes,' he said, 'one could go up to over a million.' (Oh, so we were using 'one', were we?)

'Impractical, though,' I said.

'Yes, you'd have to take your socks or stockings off.

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